Gee RanasinhaKEXINO · Better marketing for B2B businesses | Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing | Adjunct marketing professor | Speaker | Recovering perfectionist

Who's In Charge Of Your Marketing? It's Not Who You Think

23 Oct 2025 · 1 min

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Episode

23 Oct 2025 · 1 min

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In this solo commentary, the speaker critiques the common misconception that a company's marketing manager, director, or CMO truly leads marketing. He explains that, in practice, the person handling marketing operations is often overseen by other executives—typically the COO, head of sales, or most frequently the CEO—who retain decision‑making authority that should belong to marketing. This creates a "marketing‑by‑consensus" process where every stage of a campaign is compromised to keep multiple stakeholders satisfied, resulting in generic, confusing, and forgettable output that fails the customer. While encouraging input and debate is valuable, the speaker argues that ultimate responsibility must be paired with ultimate authority, and that authority should rest with the individual who is truly responsible for marketing.

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Who's in charge of your company's marketing? The marketing manager? The marketing director? The CMO? Many businesses think they have someone in charge of marketing, but in reality what they do is they have someone in charge of marketing operations. The person who's leading marketing is actually being directed by someone else. Sometimes that person is the COO, or maybe the head of sales, but most often it's the CEO who insists on holding on to decisions that should really be under the remit of marketing. The result is invariably marketing by consensus. Every stage of a marketing project is determined by compromise. The problem is that by compromising to keep everybody happy, or at least less unhappy, it sacrifices what's best for the customer. The resulting output is usually generic, confusing, and instantly forgettable. Of course, input should be encouraged and alternative ideas should be debated and discussed, but at the end of the day, there needs to be just one person who has the final say. And that one person should be the person responsible for marketing. Because if they're given the responsibility without the authority, they're actually not in charge of anything at all.