The Seat Marketer's Should Be Chasing....
The obsession with a seat at the table has distracted marketers from the seat that actually matters.
Mastery.
Mastery that comes from knowing the contours of your discipline so well that others defer to your perspective.
This mastery does not come from attaché titles like revenue driven marketer, growth marketer, ROI driven marketing. Those are survival titles.
You don’t get a seat by contouring a function into pseudo finance or sales.
Neither do you earn it by playing on someone else’s field.
It is earned by understanding the fundamental role of marketing to a business.
Value creation at a profit.
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Every business has one simple goal- To Make money.
And making money starts with delivering something of value to the market at a profit.
Marketing creates the conditions from which value is identified, codified and commercialized.
This is not a derivative function nor a subordinate contribution.
This is a generative force.
Only if marketers recognise it.
In its value creation, marketing has a dual mandate- Grow the present and shape the future.
These mandates are strategic and tactical in nature
Strategic role shapes the future through innovations, compounding brand building, strengthening pricing power and making the business harder to replace.
This is turf of true marketers. Operating in the liminal space where future value is born, before it becomes revenue, before it becomes profit, before it becomes line item on a balance sheet.
Tactical role shapes existing demand, stimulates markets, manages perception, influences choice and drives commercial velocity.
Marketing makes value possible.
Finance makes money visible. Sales makes revenue tangible.
Different languages, same business goal
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Denial: The root of marketing’s issues.
We keep going round in circles with half-baked conversations because marketers are in denial of the nature of the function. And it boils down to a couple of things
1. Insecurity
Marketers rarely say this out loud, but the profession has an inferiority complex masked as ambition. A complex born out of fear of being seen as ‘fluff’
Every marketer knows the feeling: the need to prove value, quantify impact, and earn commercial respect.
Walk into any cross-functional meeting and you’ll see sales speaking numbers- we delivered x no of volumes, we did x no in sales. You’ll also hear finance speak with confidence- we grew bottom line by x, we reduced overhead cost by x%
These functions speak in deterministic language: numbers, metrics, cause-and-effect loops. Their influence visibly baked into the organizations’ P&L
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Marketing, by contrast, deals with probability, emotion, culture, perception, storytelling. It is messier, more abstract, but not less vital.
Rather than embrace this uniqueness, marketers have internalised a dangerous form of inadequacy. The sense that we must earn respect through someone else’s centre of gravity.
This complex does not live in isolation, it is systemic.
Corporate hierarchies are built by finance and operations who value predictability
And, since most marketing does not have that, it must constantly justify its existence
2. Rise of data and numbers worship.
For years, marketing has carried a shame of being a wasteful cost centre. Hence the popular quote ‘half of my ad budget is a waste’
If outcomes can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist…
This perception has made marketers lust over measurements. We overattribute, claim numbers, and sometimes, hallucinate impact. All to stay in the commercial conversation.
I once read an article where the marketer claimed to have impacted the bottom line.
Such bogus commentary reveals not just hunger for validation but a lack of understanding of where marketing contribution sits within an income statement
When marketers abandon the parts of their craft that are hard to quantify, they abandon the parts that make them irreplaceable.
You don’t gain authority by playing in someone's field.
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The Uncomfortable Truth about the table
Not every marketer should be there. And that’s okay.
Not every finance person owns a seat. Not every HR lead owns a seat. Not every supply chain manager owns a seat
The table demands:
If a marketer wants a seat, it must be earned through expanded capability not because marketing needs to be validated, but because general management as a discipline requires it.
Master Your Craft, Not the Chair
Instead of obsessing over a seat at the table, marketers need something older, deeper, and sturdier: A return to the marrow of their function.
A return to the primal intelligence of the craft
The intelligence that built markets before big data existed, that recognised latent desire before it had language, that commercialized culture.
We need to return to that intuition, cultural acuity, strategic imagination, sense-making, consumer truth and commercial thinking that creates value.
That is where marketing’s authority lives. Not in a seat.
Own cost as a strategic tool. Own your initiatives both long and short. Own your results.
Understand the market. Understand the consumer. Understand the numbers. Understand the politics.
Above all, understand your worth.
True power was never the seat. It’s in knowing the table so well, that others must turn to you.
The table has always been yours to command.
