Executive Summary
The biggest commercial decisions are often made before marketing enters the room.
Most organisations involve marketing after the key commercial decisions have already been made. By then, marketing’s role is limited to communicating decisions rather than influencing them. Sustainable growth is more likely when marketing helps shape strategy from the outset by bringing market understanding, client insight and commercial challenge into the boardroom before investment decisions are finalised.
Marketing starts too late
Ask most CEOs what marketing does and the answers are remarkably consistent.
- Builds the brand.
- Generates leads.
- Supports sales.
- Launches products.
- Improves the website.
- Increases awareness.
These are all important activities, yet none of them explain why so many businesses with talented marketing teams struggle to achieve sustained commercial growth.
The uncomfortable truth is that, in many organisations, marketing begins after the most important commercial decisions have already been made.
By the time the marketing team is engaged, the product has been defined, the target market selected, the pricing agreed, the sales strategy established and the investment committed.
Marketing’s role is then simply to communicate decisions made by others rather than shape those decisions in the first place.
At that point, marketing has become an execution function, not a commercial one.
The cost of arriving too late
This matters because poor commercial outcomes are rarely caused by poor communications. Businesses seldom fail because the brochure wasn’t compelling enough or the website lacked polish.
They fail because fundamental strategic assumptions were never challenged.
Is this solving a problem clients genuinely care about?
Is this the right market?
Is the proposition sufficiently differentiated?
Will clients pay enough to justify the investment?
Can the sales model realistically support the growth ambition?
These are commercial questions, not marketing questions. Yet they are precisely the questions that effective marketing should help answer.
Marketing should provide evidence before decisions are made, not explanations afterwards.
Financial services provides a useful illustration
This challenge is particularly visible in financial services.
Organisations invest millions in new products, platforms and technology before asking how institutional clients actually make decisions.
The assumption is often that a technically superior solution will naturally win market share.
Experience suggests otherwise.
Institutional clients are influenced by regulation, operational risk, procurement processes, incumbent relationships, implementation effort and internal governance. Technical capability is only one part of the buying decision.
Understanding those dynamics is not simply a sales responsibility. It is a strategic responsibility.
The organisations that understand their clients before they build their products consistently outperform those that rely on marketing to explain the product afterwards.
Marketing should influence strategy, not decorate it
The highest-performing marketing leaders spend less time discussing campaigns and more time discussing commercial choices.
They ask difficult questions before significant investment is committed.
They test assumptions.
They challenge consensus.
They bring the client’s perspective into executive discussions before products are finalised. In so doing, marketing becomes part of strategic decision-making rather than simply supporting it.
That shift changes the nature of the function.
Marketing becomes less about communications and more about commercial judgement.
A different role for the modern CMO
Organisations that achieve sustainable growth rarely separate commercial strategy from market understanding.
The most effective marketing leaders are therefore not those who produce the most campaigns or demonstrate smart deployment of martech and AI.
They are the ones who help their organisations make better commercial decisions.
That requires marketing to be present at the beginning of strategy, not the end of execution.
Because once the biggest decisions have already been made, marketing is no longer shaping the future.
It is simply trying to explain it.
Executive Takeaways
- Marketing creates the greatest commercial value before products are launched, not afterwards.
- The most important role of marketing is to improve strategic decision-making, not simply execute communications.
- In complex B2B markets, understanding how clients buy is often more valuable than explaining what has been built.
- Organisations that involve marketing early make better commercial decisions and create stronger long-term growth.
Questions for Executive Teams
- At what stage does marketing become involved in your strategic decisions?
- Which major commercial decisions are made before client insight is considered?
- Is marketing expected to shape strategy or simply communicate it?
- If marketing had been involved six months earlier, would any of your recent strategic decisions have been different?
