Marketing is often the first to get the blame when things go wrong, and the last to get the credit when things go right.
This is why the average CMO tenure at a Fortune 500 company is only 44 months. It’s as if marketers are expected to play against a loaded deck and still win.
And yet, the back of our minds, we know that what often separates a million dollar and billion dollar companies is the marketing (Hello, Apple! Hello, Virgin!). That what often separates an important mass movement and an obscure political rant is the marketing.
And yet our feelings about marketing are invariably ambiguous. That’s because the human condition IS ambiguous, and that’s what marketing is all about.
The numbers can tell you only so much (and they often do), but eventually it’s just you, God and the human condition remaining. The challenge will clearly never end.
