CEOs don't undervalue marketing. They undervalue marketing they can't see working.

Marketers love to say CEOs don't get marketing.

Sometimes it's true. More often, the CEO has a point.

They've approved budgets. They've read reports full of impressions, engagement and MQLs. And they still can't tell whether marketing made the company money.

Faced with that, treating marketing as a cost centre isn't ignorance. It's a reasonable conclusion from the evidence they've been given.

How the spiral works

The CEO can't see the return, so the budget gets trimmed and the brief narrows to "just get us leads."

Marketing chases what's easy to measure. Brand work gets cut first, because its payoff takes longest to show.

Results flatten. The CEO looks at the numbers and concludes: see, marketing doesn't work.

Every step is rational. Together, they're a spiral, and it reinforces the belief that started it.

What it costs

Growth that doesn't compound. Binet and Field's research found the most effective marketing balances long-term brand building with short-term activation. Even in B2B, the optimal split is roughly 46% brand to 54% activation. Cut the brand side to zero, and you're living off demand you're no longer creating.

The marketers you most want to keep. Strong marketers want to shape strategy, not take orders. Give them only execution, and they'll take their judgement somewhere else.

Your early warning system. Marketing isn't just messaging. It's market sensing: competitors, positioning, what customers are starting to care about. Sideline it, and you'll see market shifts later than you should.

Breaking it takes both sides

Marketers have to speak revenue, not activity. Not impressions and clicks, but which channels produce customers, what they're worth, and what that means for next quarter.

CEOs have to judge marketing on the right timeframe. Short-term activation can be measured monthly. Brand building shows up over quarters and years. Agree which is which before the budget is set, not after.

And both have to put marketing where decisions are made. Positioning, pricing and product direction are all marketing questions. If marketing only hears about them afterwards, it can only execute.

When the CEO stopped asking for leads

I worked with a CEO who was sceptical of marketing, and honestly, I could see why.

The team was producing plenty of activity. Leads were coming in, campaigns were running and the monthly reports looked busy. But when the CEO asked which of those activities had actually produced customers, the answer wasn't clear. Marketing could explain what had happened. It couldn't reliably explain what it had produced.

So the CEO started treating marketing as a lead-generation function. More leads. Lower cost per lead. Tighter campaigns. Anything that couldn't show a short-term number was questioned.

The turning point was changing the conversation from activity to revenue.

We mapped the journey from lead to qualified opportunity to customer and started looking at channels against what happened further down the funnel. One channel that looked expensive on a CPL (cost per lead) basis was producing much stronger opportunities. Another was generating plenty of cheap leads that rarely progressed.

It was the same pattern I've seen in other teams: the channel that looks best when you stop at the lead often isn't the one doing the most for the business.

Suddenly, the CEO had a different question.

Not "How many leads did marketing generate?" but "Which parts of marketing are actually helping us create customers?"

That changed marketing's role. The team had a stronger case for investment because it could explain the commercial logic behind the work. The CEO also became more involved in positioning, audience and growth decisions rather than simply approving campaigns and reviewing monthly numbers.

Marketing didn't win the argument by asking to be trusted.

It earned more trust by making the connection between its work and the business's goals impossible to ignore.

Two questions

For the CEO: are we treating our marketers like strategic thinkers, or executional assistants?

For marketing: are we giving the CEO a reason to treat us differently?