Everyone has an opinion on marketing. That is our fault.

Some years ago I sat in a meeting where the sales director explained to me, at some length, what was wrong with our positioning. He had views on the messaging, on the website, on the choice of the word "platform", and on the colour green. He was not being difficult. He genuinely thought he was helping, and in fairness two of his four points were right.

What struck me afterwards was not that he had opinions. Nobody wanders into the finance team with a view on the deferred revenue policy, and yet it happens to marketing daily. And not one person in that building would have done to the finance director what he had just done to me. Had he tried it, she would have looked at him as though he had wandered in from the street, and everyone would have agreed with her.

She had something I did not. Not more seniority, not more talent. Everyone in that company understood, roughly, what finance was for and what it was answerable for. Almost nobody understood that about marketing, and it had never occurred to me that this was a problem I was supposed to solve.

The gap we talk about, and the bigger one we do not

Mark Ritson's work with Ipsos put a number on something the profession had been muttering about for years. Their research found only around a third of marketers met a foundational knowledge benchmark across ten basic marketing questions.¹ It is a genuinely uncomfortable finding, and it has been chewed over at length since.

I have no argument with it. But I think we have been staring at the smaller of two gaps.

Because if the education gap inside marketing is bad, the one outside marketing is worse, and it does us far more damage day to day. The CEO, the founder, the sales director, the product lead, the board. Almost none of them have been told what marketing is for, where it sits, or what it should be held to. And unlike the internal gap, this one is entirely of our own making.

In thirty-odd years I have never met a business that said it did not need marketing. Not one. What they cannot tell you is what it is answerable for.

That second part is the whole problem. A function nobody can define is a function everybody feels licensed to redesign, and that is exactly what happens. It is why the colour of the logo is a board topic. It is why "we need a video" arrives as a strategy. It is why every downturn produces a conversation about whether the marketing budget is really necessary, and never a conversation about whether the finance team is.

Why they cannot define it, and why that is on us

Ask ten marketers what marketing is and you get ten answers. Growth. Demand generation. Brand. Content. Communications. Product marketing. Revenue marketing. The names rotate every few years, each one claiming a slice and blurring the whole.

Now put yourself in the CFO's chair, watching that from outside. She has asked, in good faith, what marketing does. She has had four different answers from four people in eighteen months, each accompanied by a set of metrics she has never encountered anywhere else in the business. Engagement. Impressions. MQLs. Influenced pipeline.

She is not being obtuse when she treats the budget as discretionary. She is responding rationally to the only evidence she has been given.

We did that. Not finance, not the CEO, not the sales director with opinions about green. Every time we described ourselves in the language of activity, we taught the business to read us as an activity function, and an activity function is something you buy less of when money is tight.

We already had a definition

Here is the part that should be embarrassing. We do not need a new one, and I am not about to offer you mine.

Peter Drucker got there in 1954, and he was sharper about it than anything written since. The purpose of a business, he argued, is to create a customer, and marketing is not a departmental function but the whole business seen from the customer's point of view.² Then he did the thing the profession has spent seventy years forgetting. He separated the purpose from the condition. Creating customers is the job. Profit is not the job, it is the test of whether you are doing the job well enough to continue, what he called the cost of staying in business.³

Read that again, because it is the argument in full and it predates every framework any of us have been sold. Marketing exists to create customers. Doing it unprofitably is not marketing that fell short on a secondary measure. It is marketing that failed its only condition.

Kotler and Armstrong put the same thing in a single line in 1996: identify and satisfy customer needs profitably.⁴ The Chartered Institute of Marketing says it in almost the same words.⁵ Seventy years, two restatements, all in agreement, none withdrawn.

Then look at where the discipline went. The American Marketing Association's current definition, approved in 2017, runs to creating, communicating, delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large.⁶ Every word of that is defensible. Not one of them is profitably.

That is the actual story. The word was not argued away or disproved. It was simply left out, while the discipline busied itself producing replacements: new funnels, new frameworks, new job titles, new ways of describing the same activity. Every few years someone announces a definition for the modern era, and the modern era turns out to need exactly what Drucker described in 1954.

The problem was never that marketing lacked a definition. It is that we stopped using the one we had.

So my position is not a new definition. It is that the old one meant what it said, and that Drucker's distinction is the one worth recovering. Create customers, and treat profitability as the condition rather than the bonus, which means knowing what it costs to win one against what they return. That clause was always in there. We simply stopped treating it as a requirement.

And it has one property every replacement lacks, which is that someone outside marketing can check it. A CFO can look at that sentence, understand what we are claiming, and hold us to it. Try that with "we drive engagement across the funnel".

What changes when they can define you

This is the part I would have found hard to believe when I was younger, and it is the reason the argument matters at all.

Once a function is understood and measured, people stop interfering with it. Not out of politeness, but because there is nothing left to interfere with. The finance director is not spared unsolicited advice on revenue recognition because she is intimidating. She is spared it because everyone knows what she is accountable for, and knows they would be talking nonsense.

I would never wander into her office with a view on her accounting treatment. I would not wander into legal with a view on the contract terms. Not because I am well-mannered, but because the boundary is obvious and the accountability is clear.

Marketing has no such boundary, because we never drew one. So everyone stands inside it.

So, what do we actually do about it?

Three things, and none of them require a rebrand of the profession.

Say what we are for, in one sentence, to people outside marketing. Repeatedly, and using the same sentence each time. If your own CEO would give a different answer from yours, that is the job, not a communications problem.

Report in a currency the business already uses. Not because our own metrics are worthless, they are useful for running the work, but because they are not evidence to anyone who does not do our job. If a number needs explaining before it can persuade, it is not persuading.

Then prove it, once. One number, held to, over a couple of quarters. That does more for marketing's standing than a decade of explaining what a marketing-qualified lead is.

None of this is quick, and I would not claim it is comfortable. It means giving up some ground we have grown fond of. But the alternative is the meeting I started with, repeated for the rest of our careers, where a well-meaning colleague explains our discipline to us and we have no standing to object.

The sales director was not the problem. Nobody had ever told him what my job was, and I had spent fifteen years assuming that was somebody else's fault.