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

In most board meetings we see, marketing gets ten minutes. One slide of last month's numbers, one of campaigns running, one of budget. The director nods, occasionally a question, occasionally a comment. Next agenda item.

In those ten minutes, the questions that actually matter rarely get asked.

This isn’t a case for giving marketing more board time. It’s a case for asking different questions. Five of them, to be precise. Questions a director should ask about marketing, and which are absent from most agendas.

Anyone who lets these five be answered properly once a quarter gets a different marketing conversation. Not about campaigns, leads, and dashboards. About position, choices, and direction. The kind of conversation board decisions actually come from.

Question 1: Who do we see as our competitor, and why?

Sounds simple. Isn’t.

Most companies answer with a list of businesses that offer the same product. But that’s a product definition, not a market definition. The real competitor is whoever is fighting for the same budget from the same customer at the same moment. That’s often not the companies making the same thing.

An industrial wholesaler sees other wholesalers as competition. But the real competitor might be the manufacturer who sells direct, the ERP system that automates procurement, or a private-label alternative offered through purchasing consortiums. Four different competitors. Four different fights for the same budget. Anyone who only looks at businesses with the same offering misses three quarters of their actual competition.

What this question delivers is a market view, not a product view. And it shows where the strategic threat sits, not the tactical one.

Question 2: What should our customer remember about us in one sentence?

This is the position question in its most practical form.

A customer doesn’t remember a brochure, a pitch, or a demo. They remember, at most, one sentence about who you are and what you stand for. And they use that sentence later to explain your brand to themselves and to others, at the moment they’re buying or in a conversation about your category.

The question to the director is: which sentence do we want them to remember? Is it sharp? Does it distinguish us from competitors? Does it match what we actually deliver?

In most organisations, this sentence doesn’t exist. Or it does, but nobody on the team can reproduce it on the spot. That’s a direct measurement of whether your position exists as shared property, or only as an idea in someone’s head.

Question 3: Which segment are we walking away from, and why is that smart?

Most organisations pile up segments. Every year, a sector gets added, a proposition, a target group. Nobody removes anything. The portfolio expands. The marketing message becomes more generic each year, because it has to fit across everything.

A good board meeting asks, at least once a year: which segment are we walking away from? Which customer group do we accept that we’ll lose? Which geography are we dropping? Which product line gets no more budget?

Roger Martin writes in Playing to Win that strategy is a sequence of choices about where you play and where you don’t. Not trying to do everything at once. Most boards that don’t work with this question don’t actually have a strategy. They have an execution plan for everything at once.

The director who asks this question forces everyone to show priorities. And the marketing department that has to answer it gets a much sharper focus for the year ahead.

Question 4: What’s the hypothesis underneath our current approach?

A marketing report describes what happened. A marketing hypothesis describes what you thought would happen, and why.

In most organisations, the second never gets articulated. Content gets produced, campaigns get launched, budget gets spent. Without anyone explicitly saying: we’re doing this because we think X, and if that’s right we should see Y in six months.

A hypothesis question forces sharpness. Why is our current approach working, or why should it work? Based on what assumption about the market, the customer, the channel? What would happen if that assumption is wrong?

This isn’t an academic exercise. A board that can’t name the hypothesis underneath the marketing approach can’t assess whether the approach is working. The numbers say something, but without a hypothesis it’s unclear what they mean. A rising lead conversion could be a good campaign, or a seasonal effect, or something the competitor is getting wrong. Without a hypothesis, you can’t tell the difference.

Question 5: Which loss didn’t we investigate last month?

Lost deals are one of the most valuable information sources an organisation has. They show what didn’t work in your offer, position, or presence for a specific customer at a specific moment.

And almost nobody investigates them.

Sales has too direct an interest in rationalisation (“too expensive”, “wrong timing”). Marketing doesn’t know what to ask. The board gets the numbers but not the conversation. What’s left is an email with three lines and then nothing.

The director’s monthly question should be: which deal did we lose that we actually want to understand? One deal of significance. Not all of them. Not the small ones. The one that, with a better outcome, would have made a real difference.

With that one deal you can then have three conversations: with the customer about their first list of suppliers, with the customer about how they justified the choice internally, and with your own sales about the terms in which the customer described their need. Three to four hours of work, and you have a diagnosis you couldn’t get anywhere else.

Five questions, one agenda

The five questions don’t fit a standard one-hour board meeting. They need a separate block. What we see working: once a quarter, two to three hours, fixed participants, fixed structure. Walking through the five questions one by one, with the marketing leader present for the final round of each.

What this delivers isn’t a marketing report. It’s choices. Which position to sharpen. Which segment to walk away from. Which hypothesis to test. Which lost deal to investigate.

A marketing department given this framework gets sharper. A board asking these questions gets a grip on something it didn’t have a grip on before. The difference between “marketing as cost centre that reports” and “marketing as board instrument” is precisely this difference.

The questions aren’t complicated. They just rarely get asked.

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Further reading

Want to read more about why this conversation belongs at the board table and how to organise it? Our pillar piece works it out: Marketing at the board table: where it belongs and where it doesn’t.