Marketing at the board table.

Picture a director on a Friday afternoon, reading a marketing report. Three pages of reach figures. Five pages of campaign results. A table of conversions. He scans it, nods, puts it down.

Monday morning, he’s in a different meeting room. They’re talking about market share, about a new competitor, about a product line that’s growing slower than expected. Marketing isn’t at the table. The director is. Sales is. Product is.

That’s the problem. Marketing in the wrong meeting room.

This isn’t a piece about putting down marketing people or abolishing the marketing department. The opposite. We’re writing this because, in most of the companies we visit, marketing doesn’t have the place it should. And that’s rarely the marketing department’s fault. It’s an agenda problem.

This is about what marketing at the board table is, and what it isn’t. About why the split between strategic and operational marketing has been lost in nearly every company. And why AI is now making that loss painfully visible.

Two kinds of marketing

What we call marketing is actually two different things.

The first is operational. Running campaigns, publishing content, working channels, qualifying leads, keeping the CRM tidy. Important work, but execution by nature. This belongs in a marketing department. A marketing manager with a team that does this well delivers structural value.

The second is strategic. Where we sit in the market. Where we want to sit. What’s changing around us that’s shifting our position. Which segments we prioritise and which we walk away from. What our relative strength is against the competitor that’s making it hard for us. Which direction we choose over the next three years.

This isn’t marketing work in the operational sense. This is board work. It concerns choices that affect the whole organisation, not just the marketing department.

In practice, the two get thrown together. The strategic work gets delegated to someone responsible for execution. The marketing manager has to both run campaigns and decide on position. Like a chef who also has to decide what kind of restaurant it is. One job needs speed and discipline. The other needs distance and judgement. They don’t fit in one role, one calendar, one set of KPIs.

The result is predictable. The marketing manager does what she can, and what she can is operational. That’s her daily work, that’s what her team is set up for, that’s what her dashboard tracks. The strategic work barely happens. Or it does, but in a report the director doesn’t read, because Monday morning he’s busy with other things. We wrote a short observation on why marketing ends up in the wrong meeting room.

How this split was historically lost

Until some point in the eighties, marketing sat at the board table. Coca-Cola had a Chief Marketing Officer on the board. So did Unilever. Procter & Gamble, the company most of the classical marketing discipline still comes from, was built around marketing as the company’s lead function.

Then three things happened at once.

Marketing got more tactical. More channels, more data, more execution. Between 1995 and 2015, a marketing department went from a team of five running one campaign per quarter to a team of twenty publishing daily across ten channels. The role shifted toward production work.

Sales got more autonomous. Its own tooling, targets, budget. Salesforce and equivalents gave sales an independent measurement and steering infrastructure. What used to be a joint commercial function split in two. Marketing delivered leads, sales closed deals. The strategic conversation about the market vanished between the two functions.

Boards got more financially strategic. Private equity, quarterly earnings, exit models, multiples. The director started focusing on what investors measure, and marketing-as-cost was easier to comprehend than marketing-as-value-builder. The long-term conversation about brands and market positions disappeared from the board agenda because short-term considerations consumed the attention.

None of these developments was wrong in isolation. Together they created a vacuum. The marketing manager got a budget and a dashboard. The director got a quarterly number and an investor. Somewhere between them, the question of where the company actually sits in its market, and why, disappeared.

Theodore Levitt wrote in 1960, in his Marketing Myopia essay, that companies that define themselves too narrowly destroy themselves. That observation still holds. But who at the board table is supposed to represent Levitt? Not the marketing manager: she’s too busy with campaigns. Not the director: he’s too busy with quarterly numbers. So Levitt’s question stays unanswered in nearly every European mid-market company we encounter.

How you can tell

A few signals that marketing is in the wrong meeting room.

The director doesn’t know what the marketing strategy is. He knows what the campaigns are, but not what strategic choice sits underneath. Ask a director what his marketing strategy is and you get a list of activities (“we do content marketing and LinkedIn advertising and we’re working on our CRM”). No strategy. No position. No distinguishing choice against the competition.

Sales and marketing disagree about who the customer is. Not practically, but fundamentally. Sales describes the customer in buying behaviour (who signs, who blocks, who pushes). Marketing in segments (industries, company sizes, personas). They aren’t talking about the same thing. And they rarely put the two side by side at the level it matters, because there’s no shared forum to have that conversation at.

Competitors get discussed at operational level. “They’re doing X, we need to do X too.” That’s execution thinking. Strategic thinking is: “They’ve decided on Y, and the market is shifting in a way that affects us.” The difference is significant. The first leads to imitation. The second leads to position choices.

The marketing report is about what happened, not about what needs to be decided. Open any marketing report and most pages describe trends, ratios, percentages. The last page might have a list of recommendations. That’s the definition of a record. No decision. No choice. No thing for the director to act on.

Four signals pointing at the same thing. The strategic marketing conversation isn’t happening at the place where it should, with the people who can decide.

What marketing at the board table actually means

We get asked regularly: so what should happen? Not in the abstract, concretely. Here are five subjects we think belong at the board table, at minimum four times a year, not as a report but as a conversation.

The position choice. Which position do we want to occupy in our market? Not which one we have. Which one we want. What claim do we want to make in the head of potential customers? This is a board decision. It determines what product development needs to deliver, what sales needs to tell, what marketing needs to support. No marketing department can take this decision alone. The marketing manager can translate and execute, but the choice itself belongs at board level.

The boundary: what we stop doing. This is possibly the hardest question. Most companies have, over ten years, added so many propositions, segments and channels that the organisation can no longer decide where its weight sits. A good board has at least one conversation a year on the question: what are we letting go? Which customer group do we accept that we’re going to lose? Which product line gets no more budget? Which geography do we drop? Roger Martin writes in Playing to Win: strategy is a sequence of choices about where you play and where you don’t. Not trying to do everything at once.

The competitor analysis. Who is our most dangerous competitor right now, and why? What are they doing that we aren’t? What shifts are we seeing in our market that we haven’t processed yet in our strategy? This isn’t a marketing analysis. It’s a board analysis, because the outcome almost always affects product development, pricing, and operational setup.

The investment balance between short and long. How much of our marketing budget goes to the short term (leads, conversion, now) and how much to the long term (position, awareness, three years out)? Les Binet and Peter Field have thirty years of research on this, with the headline conclusion that roughly 60 percent should go to the long term and 40 to the short. Most companies we encounter run at 10/90 or worse. This isn’t a marketing decision. It’s a board choice with multi-year consequences.

The marketing report in two sentences. Not forty pages. Two sentences. What changed compared to last month, and what does that mean for our course? If those two sentences can’t be formulated, there isn’t much in those forty pages either. A board that asks for those two sentences every month forces marketing to answer the relevant question instead of sharing the whole dashboard.

These aren’t marketing activities. They’re five subjects that can only be discussed at the board table, with the director or owner-manager as the principal. The marketing manager can prepare the input. The choice sits elsewhere.

What it doesn’t mean

Now the other side. Marketing at the board table doesn’t mean what many people think it means.

It doesn’t mean the CMO role has to come back. For most companies, this doesn’t work. The CMO role of the eighties belonged in large organisations with separate marketing, sales and product departments, each with their own budgets. The European mid-market reality is different. In companies of 20 to 250 employees, there’s usually one marketing manager, sometimes a team of three to five. Adding a CMO on top creates a hierarchical layer that produces more bureaucracy than marketing strategy.

It also doesn’t mean the marketing manager has to come to the board table. You’d think so, but it almost never works. The marketing manager has a daily operational responsibility that doesn’t give her the mental space to think at board level about portfolio choices, M&A considerations, or pricing architecture. What does work: the marketing manager produces the dossier for the board conversation, and is present for one agenda item to answer questions. The strategic conversation, the board has itself.

It doesn’t mean marketing as a department becomes less important. The opposite. A marketing department no longer burdened with strategic choices it can’t make can do its execution work much better. Campaigns get sharper, content gets more focused, channels get more targeted, because the strategic line above is consistent.

It doesn’t mean Excel discipline or MBA jargon at the board table. The opposite. Mark Ritson, former professor at Melbourne Business School and London Business School, founder of the MiniMBA in marketing, has a standing lesson on this: marketing at the board table only works in plain language. No funnels, no frameworks, no TAM-SAM-SOM slides. Yes: what’s going on here, what’s our position, what are we going to do about it. Three questions any director can ask and any marketing leader should be able to answer.

Why AI makes this visible

Until recently, there was a mitigating factor. Marketing required so much execution that the strategic work was always on top, and in practice disappeared. The marketing manager could always say: I don’t have time. And she was right.

AI changes that balance drastically. The operational side of marketing becomes dramatically faster, cheaper, and more scalable. A marketing team of three can now do what a team of twelve did four years ago. Content gets produced faster, variants get generated by AI, distribution gets optimised, segmentation becomes continuous and automated, sales enablement becomes partly machine work.

What’s left is precisely the work AI can’t do: the strategic choices. Which position we choose. Which segments we let go of. Which story we tell and which we don’t. What price we charge and on what grounds. What our relationship is with the competitor working the same market.

That work isn’t department work. That’s board work.

And here the problem becomes visible. Because if operational execution gets smaller and faster, and strategic work gets heavier and more important, and the strategic work still isn’t being conducted at the board table, organisations end up in a strange position. The marketing department produces faster than ever. But without a strategic framework, it produces in all directions at once. AI doesn’t accelerate strategy. AI accelerates execution, and lays bare the absence of strategy.

Competitors who do realise this, and bring strategic marketing to the board table, get three to five years’ lead. Not in marketing output, which will become equally fast for everyone. In strategic clarity. What they produce with their faster AI execution moves in a clear direction. What their competitors produce moves in every direction at once, which is in essence the same as doing nothing.

Who has to organise this

A director who recognises this split, and wants strategic marketing to land at the board table, runs into a practical problem. He doesn’t have time. He doesn’t have an internal sparring partner at his level. And the marketing manager, as we wrote earlier, isn’t the right sparring partner for this conversation.

What we see working is a combination of three things.

One: a fixed rhythm. Four times a year, a strategic marketing session at board level, with agendas that work through the five subjects from this piece. Not instead of the regular board meeting, but as a separate block of two to three hours. Fixed day, fixed participants, fixed format.

Two: an external eye. Not for advice in the classical consultancy sense, but for the role of sparring partner who keeps asking the strategic questions. Someone with no internal interest, no budget to defend, who won’t tell the director what he wants to hear. This is exactly where we at Dogfight sit, with a method we call The Table. Not to replace the marketing manager, but to help the board have the conversation that otherwise doesn’t happen.

Three: reducing the marketing report to two sentences. Not forty pages. Not dashboards that don’t get opened. A short, sharp monthly update that forces the board to choose. What changed, and what does that mean for our course? If those two sentences can’t be formulated, there’s nothing to discuss. If they can, there’s material for a real conversation.

Three ingredients, none new in isolation, rarely combined in practice. This isn’t a revolution. It’s a rhythm shift that brings the strategic marketing conversation back to where it belongs.

The diagnosis

Marketing in the wrong meeting room isn’t a function problem. It’s an agenda problem.

The strategic marketing work has disappeared because it fell between the gaps. The marketing department is too operational for it. The board is too financial. Nobody runs the conversation, and nobody notices as long as the numbers are reasonable.

Until they aren’t. And by then it’s too late to change the position, because the position was never a decision. It grew out of the absence of decisions.

Peter Drucker wrote in 1954, in The Practice of Management, that the two most important functions of a business are marketing and innovation. All others are costs. That isn’t a marketing claim. It’s a board principle. But in most of the organisations we see, marketing isn’t a board function. It’s a cost centre that reports. And innovation is something that sits in product. Drucker’s point has been lost, not because he was wrong, but because the organisational evolution of the last four decades pushed it to the background.

The question isn’t whether the CMO role should come back. The question isn’t whether the marketing manager should report better. The question is which conversation isn’t being had at the board table, and which questions belong on that agenda.

That isn’t a marketing question. It’s a board question. And it’s the question we start most of our conversations with directors on.

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Further reading

Why are we losing this. The three strategic layers underneath every lost deal, and how to investigate them.

AI as the engine under commercial strategy. The difference between AI that speeds up and AI that redesigns.

Three excuses for a lost deal. Why the standard excuses block the learning.

AI as the engine, not the flashing light. The short version of what changes when AI redesigns the work.

Marketing in the wrong meeting room. Why two kinds of marketing belong in different conversations.

Five marketing questions for the board. Five questions a director should ask about marketing, and almost never does.

Mental availability. Why your market share isn’t determined by your product.

Why do AI projects fail?. Three failure patterns in commercial teams.

Reading a marketing report as a director. Six signals that reveal what’s missing, and which questions to ask.

Win/loss analysis: how to make it work. Three common mistakes and how to set it up differently.

The commercial team under AI. Which roles disappear, which get heavier, and what the director has to do.