Walk into almost any corporate boardroom today, and you will encounter an uncomfortable, quiet truth: marketing is losing its standing as a serious commercial discipline.
When quarterly budgets tighten, cost-cutting programs kick off, or restructuring consultancies arrive, the marketing department is almost invariably the first line item on the chopping block. Far too many chief executives view marketing not as a vital growth engine, but as an expensive, dispensable overhead.
Marketers love to complain that executive leadership "just doesn’t get marketing." But is that true? Or have we spent the past decade behaving in ways that practically begged commercial leaders to tune us out?
To fix this crisis of confidence, we have to look past internal vanity, confront the empirical data, and diagnose why marketers get ignored.
The Uncomfortable Data: A Discipline in Freefall
This disconnect isn't anecdotal. It is written plainly in industry benchmarks:
The CEO Trust Deficit: In a benchmark study of over 1,200 CEOs conducted by The Fournaise Marketing Group, 80% of CEOs stated they do not trust or are unimpressed by their CMOs. For comparison, just 10% felt that way about their CFOs or CIOs. Even more damning: 73% of CEOs stated marketing as a discipline lacks commercial credibility.
The Disappearing Enterprise CMO: S&P 500 executive tenure data tracked by Spencer Stuart reveals that 31% of S&P 500 enterprises no longer maintain an enterprise CMO role, folding marketing under Chief Commercial Officers, Chief Growth Officers, or reporting directly to Sales.
The Bottom of Public Trust: The Ipsos Veracity Index and Trust in Professions surveys consistently rank advertising and marketing executives near the absolute bottom of public trust scraping single digits alongside politicians and real estate agents. In Australia, only 16% of the public believe advertisers tell the truth.
The Fractional Exodus: When examining the distribution of fractional leadership in the corporate economy, 30.4% of all fractional executives are in marketing. Compare that to just 8.8% in HR and 7.6% in Finance. While fractional work offers flexibility, the stark reality is that businesses frequently view marketing leadership as an episodic luxury to be rented and discarded, rather than a permanent operational pillar.
The 11 Traps Destroying Marketing's Credibility
Why are commercial leaders tuning out? Across consumer goods, retail, and enterprise business, marketing professionals repeatedly stumble into 11 self-inflicted traps:
1. Speaking "Marketing" Instead of “Business”
Every business has acronyms, but marketing has turned jargon into a barrier. When marketers walk into executive meetings armed with social media slang, impressions, reach, and vague engagement metrics. So while the CEO and CFO are managing cash flow, working capital, gross margin, and EBITDA our credibility evaporates. If you cannot translate your work into commercial mechanics, leadership will assume you don't understand them…
2. The "Colouring-In Department" Syndrome
Far too many marketing teams willingly accept (and sometimes jokingly perpetuate) the derogatory label of the "colouring-in department." When you allow your function to be reduced to downstream PR releases, event brochures, trade show collateral, and social tiles, you abandon strategy. Marketing is not an aesthetic finishing school! Instead it is the strategic steward of the entire marketing mix and the strategic engine of the business.
3. Tactics Masquerading as Strategy
Strategy is about diagnosis, trade-offs, and choosing what not to do. Far too often, marketing teams mistake tactical reactivity for a coherent plan. In FMCG and retail, this looks like blindly chasing viral novelty: slapping pistachio flavouring, strawberry matcha, or dubious functional protein claims onto products where they don't belong simply because it is trending on TikTok. Tactics executed without strategic architecture are just expensive noise…
4. Total Lack of Consumer Centricity
The primary mandate of the marketer is market orientation: bringing the objective voice of the consumer into the business. When marketers stop researching real shopper behaviour and instead project their own personal lifestyles and tastes onto their brands, they fail. Without consumer truth, you cannot signal where demand will originate. And without demand, no economic value exists.
5. The "Dog with a Ball on the Beach" Syndrome
Watch a dog on a beach and it will sprint frantically after every passing seagull or wave. Marketers do the exact same thing in our industry echo chambers. From Facebook to Snapchat, from Clubhouse to NFTs, and now through ungrounded AI gimmicks, teams chase platform novelties that have zero connection to distinctive brand assets, category growth, or commercial fundamentals.
6. Ignoring Category Entry Points (CEPs)
Category Entry Points are the practical, real-world mental cues and buying situations that prompt a consumer to enter a category. If your communication focuses entirely on abstract brand love while ignoring the functional and situational triggers of why, where, and when consumers actually buy, your campaigns will fail to build mental availability at the point of purchase.
7. Having no commercial skin in the game
This one irks me! When a marketer gets up and presents a “huge” success to the boardroom and claims social engagement numbers, impressions or even soft brand metrics (e.g. brand awareness ticking up), it immediately causes the C-Suite to tune out. I’ve seen first-hand how this causes marketing to get bumped from the agenda time and time again. Instead, marketers should come with proper data, a full commercial picture and they should be able to explain how their work will translate into meaningful business outcomes.
8. Ignoring Data & Starving Decisions of Real Insight
Marketing has access to more data than ever, yet remains notoriously weak at converting numbers into objective insights. If a product concept, packaging architecture, or creative campaign is important enough to commit shareholder capital to, it must be validated with real consumers. Accessible testing platforms (whether through tools like Stickybeak or Paper Moose's Moose Review as an example) make commercial testing fast and affordable. Guesswork is not a strategy people.
9. The Self-Serving "Cult of Adland"
The advertising industry has built an insular ecosystem that frequently serves awards, virtue signalling, and industry peer validation at the direct expense of the client's business, shareholders, and paying customers. Marketers are fiduciaries of someone else's capital. Spending company funds to pursue personal agendas or win creative trophies, rather than driving measurable demand, is a breach of professional stewardship. Full stop.
10. Attribution Fiction
Attribution in modern marketing has devolved into creative accounting. Marketers routinely over-claim 100% credit for sales via last-click attribution on direct-to-consumer models when revenue rises, but point fingers at macroeconomics, sales teams, or seasonality when numbers decline. CFOs manage balanced P&Ls; they immediately see through convenient attribution narratives.
11. The "Jazz Hands" Trap & Unprofessional Conduct
Creativity is central to marketing, but that does not make marketing the corporate entertainment department. Arriving at high-stakes commercial discussions playing the "wacky, creative outsider" with novelty flamingo glasses undermines authority. You can be engaging and commercially imaginative while still carrying yourself as a serious, disciplined business leader.
The Make Marketing Better Playbook: How to Reclaim Commercial Authority
Reversing this decline doesn't require reinventing marketing but it does require a return to some fundamental principles:
Commit to Formal Professional Training: If you lead marketing investments, master the science. Invest in rigorous education, whether through Mini MBAs or formal commercial certifications, covering market orientation, category dynamics, and brand measurement.
Reclaim the Holistic 4Ps (Think Like a CEO): Marketing is not a communications silo, it is the integration of Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. When you engage with supply chain feasibility, pricing power, packaging margin profiles, and physical availability across retail gatekeepers, you cease being a decorator and begin operating as an enterprise growth leader.
Be the Unapologetic Voice of the Consumer: Earn respect in the boardroom by being the only executive armed with verified consumer truth. Anchor your points in objective research, pre-tested creative assets, and clear category dynamics.
Enforce Strategy Before Tactics: Adopt a structured brand planning sequence. Start with Diagnosis (market research, category entry points, commercial audits), define the Strategy (clear growth pillars, target segments, distinctive positioning), and only then develop the Tactics (channels, campaigns, content).
The Make Marketing Better Takeaway: The Commercial Credibility Charter
To stop getting ignored, marketing leaders must embrace a simple commercial charter:
Speak the language of the boardroom: Replace vanity clicks with cash flow, enterprise value, and pricing power among others.
Stop confusing activity with progress: A tactical gimmick without a strategic diagnosis is a waste of capital.
Act as a capital steward: Manage your marketing budget with the same fiduciary discipline that the CFO applies to debt and equity.
Respect the discipline: Master the complete 4Ps, validate your assumptions with real consumer data, and hold your work accountable to the P&L.
Marketing only gets better when marketers act like commercial business operators. Reclaim the craft, demand commercial rigor, and build brands that deliver enduring enterprise value.
Written by James Deysel
20 October 2026
James Deysel is the founder of Make Marketing Better, author of Limitless LinkedIn, and an FMCG marketing advisor helping brands bridge the gap between creative strategy and commercial performance.
