My post last week triggered that comment, and I can't stop thinking about it — because it rang true. Eerily so.
What bothered me even more: It's only half the problem.
Marketing feels like it is the one function in the building expected to explain itself. Constantly. To people whose entire understanding of the discipline seems to come from being on the receiving end of advertising, day in, day out.
Imagine telling the CFO their job needs explaining because you've used a calculator before.
Meanwhile, the same colleagues who roll their eyes at "marketing" expect marketing to fluently understand their world — the product roadmap, the sales pipeline, the ops constraints, the finance model. And fair enough: Marketing should understand all of it. That's part of the job.
My issue? The ASYMMETRY. One-way fluency is NOT a partnership. IMO that just means accommodating ignorance. Willful or not is an entirely different discussion.
The WAY FORWARD cannot be the next marketing-explainer deck that feels more like a justifier.
Instead? Go-To-Market as part of the fabric. Examples:
/ Joint ownership of the funnel. Sales doesn't "receive leads" from marketing — Sales and Marketing co-own pipeline. Same room. Same numbers. Same accountability.
/ Marketing inside product decisions. Not as a courtesy review at the end. As a gate at the beginning. Positioning, pricing, segmentation, and customer insight belong in the product conversation — because that IS the marketing value chain.
/ Customer intelligence as a shared asset. Voice-of-customer, segmentation, win/loss — owned by marketing, but flowing as a standing input into sales enablement, product roadmap, and pricing. Ongoing.
In the most successful companies I've worked with, nobody is "explaining marketing" to anyone. It's already a natural link in the value chain — sitting next to product, sales, and finance, not downstream of them. The question of what marketing is doesn't come up, because the answer is visible in how decisions get made.
Curious to hear about some positive examples — maybe even some before & after?
