Everyone's a Marketer (Until It Doesn't Work)

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You've been in this meeting.

The CEO has "a few thoughts" on the homepage. The head of sales wants to "tweak the messaging." The CFO's daughter is "really into TikTok" and thinks you should be posting more. The board member who sold insurance for 30 years has a "branding idea."

Nobody walks into the CTO's office and suggests a different database architecture. Nobody tells the CFO to restructure the balance sheet. Nobody has "a few thoughts" on the general counsel's contract language.

But marketing? Everyone's qualified.

Simple, not easy

There's a reason this happens to marketing and nothing else, and it goes deeper than "everyone's a consumer."

Marketing is the only business function whose output is designed to be understood by everyone. That's the entire point. You spend weeks distilling complex positioning into a headline a fifth-grader could read. You compress strategy into a 30-second spot your grandmother can follow. You turn competitive analysis into a tagline that fits on a billboard.

Engineering output is deliberately opaque. Legal output is deliberately complex. Finance output is deliberately technical. Marketing output is deliberately simple.

And that simplicity gets mistaken for simplicity of creation.

The better your marketing works, the easier it looks. The easier it looks, the more everyone believes they could do it. Your competence creates the illusion that your job is easy. That's the trap. The work is simple. It is not easy. And the people who can't tell the difference are the ones who feel most qualified to weigh in.

Harvard Business Review found that 80% of CEOs distrust their CMOs, and that expectations for the role routinely exceed the authority granted. Not because CMOs lack strategic capability. Because the organization never designed the role to have it. They look at the simple output and assume simple input.

The accountability inversion

Here's the pattern. See if it sounds familiar.

The CEO overrides your positioning. The board insists on a campaign direction. Sales demands you support their quarterly push with "something splashy." You compromise. You accommodate. You build the Frankenstein version that makes everyone feel heard.

Then it underperforms.

And who owns the result? You do.

Everyone has permission to shape the marketing. Nobody shares ownership of the outcome. The CMO absorbs input from the entire organization and absorbs blame from the entire organization.

Average CMO tenure sits at 4.2 years, the shortest in the C-suite. CMOs aren't failing at marketing. They're operating a function the organization structurally undermined before they even started.

Why the CTO never deals with this

Think about what makes a function "opinion-proof."

The CTO's work is invisible. You can't see a Kubernetes cluster. You can't look at a database migration and have feelings about it. The opacity of the work creates a wall that non-experts don't try to climb.

The CMO's work is the opposite. It's on the billboard driving into work. It's in the CEO's inbox. It's on the homepage their spouse looks at over dinner. Visible work invites visible opinions. And because the output is designed to be accessible, people confuse understanding the output with understanding the process that created it.

Nobody confuses being a bank customer with being qualified to run treasury operations. But apparently seeing a Super Bowl ad qualifies you to direct creative strategy.

The CMOs who survive this

The ones who last aren't the ones who fight every battle. They're the ones who draw a line most CMOs never draw: the line between input and authority.

Input is welcome. Authority isn't shared.

The CMOs I've watched handle this well do three things consistently.

They make the criteria explicit. Before presenting creative or strategy, they establish evaluation criteria with stakeholders. Not "do you like it?" but "does this meet the objectives we agreed on?" When feedback becomes about the objectives, the CEO's wife's opinion on the logo becomes irrelevant.

They create cost. Every accommodation has a trade-off. "We can do that, but it means pulling budget from the Q3 pipeline campaign. Which do you want?" When opinions carry consequences, people get more selective about having them.

They show the machine. The CMOs who get overruled are the ones whose work looks easy. The ones who expose the data, the testing framework, the competitive analysis, the customer research behind every decision make it harder for someone to casually override with a gut feeling. Make the simple look appropriately difficult.

None of this guarantees survival. But it shifts the dynamic from "everyone's a marketer" to "marketing is a discipline, and the CMO runs it."

The real test

Next time someone outside your function offers an unsolicited opinion on your strategy, notice how you respond.

If you accommodate reflexively, you've already lost the authority. Not in that moment. Months ago. When you set the precedent that marketing is a group project.

The best marketers in the world work inside organizations that respect marketing as a function. That respect isn't given. It's built. And it starts with the CMO who stops letting the simplicity of the output diminish the complexity of the work.

Everyone's a marketer. Until the numbers are down. Then it's just you.