Dear Board of Directors

The conditions in which your marketing team is failing were approved in this room.

To be clear, this is an observation about board governance, not a complaint about budget cycles or quarterly reviews. Fundamentally, boards are meant to hold functions accountable, to demand performance against strategy, and to course-correct when results disappoint. But accountability is only meaningful when the conditions in which performance is measured are themselves examined. When a Board approves the strategy, controls the budget, appoints the CMO, and then determines the timeline against which results are judged, it is not a neutral observer of marketing performance. It is a primary architect of it.

Paradoxically, the functions boards scrutinise are shaped by decisions that the boards make. Marketing, more than most, is acutely sensitive to those decisions. Three structural conditions, each a routine outcome of standard boardroom governance, are most responsible for marketing underperformance at an organisational level.

The first is chronic under-resourcing dressed as financial discipline. Marketing operates on longer investment curves than most budget processes allow for. Brand equity, category authority, and audience trust are not built in a single financial year, and they do not respond well to the stop-start funding patterns that come about when boards treat marketing as a variable cost rather than a capital allocation. When marketing receives the budget required to produce short-term activations but not the sustained investment required to build long-term commercial advantage, it will reliably deliver the first and fail to deliver the second. That failure is then attributed to the marketing function.

The second is the imposition of short time horizons on long-cycle investments. A CMO hired to reposition a brand or build market share in a new segment is working to a multi-year plan. A board that evaluates their progress at the six-month mark, or resets priorities mid-year in response to an earnings call, is not applying governance pressure. It is disrupting the compounding logic that makes marketing investment work. Research published in the Journal of Marketing found that the presence of even a single board member with marketing experience is associated with a three percentage point increase in total shareholder return, rising to over six points during periods of declining market share. The mechanism is not mysterious: marketing-literate governance leads to better-informed decisions about marketing investment horizons. The problem is that such governance is vanishingly rare. The same body of research found that only 2.6% of board members have any marketing experience, while 100% of boards include at least one finance expert. Boards are structurally well-equipped to evaluate financial performance and structurally ill-equipped to evaluate whether they are creating the right conditions for marketing to generate growth.

The third is mid-cycle strategic disruption. Pivots are sometimes necessary because markets move and strategies must adapt. But the cost of changing strategic direction mid-execution falls disproportionately on marketing functions whose work depends on consistency and cumulative effect. A campaign cancelled after three months, a repositioning reversed after a leadership change, a new market prioritised before the previous one reached maturity: these decisions carry real costs to brand coherence and audience trust, costs that do not appear on a P&L but do appear in long-run commercial outcomes. When they do, marketing is asked why it failed to deliver, rather than the board being asked about the decision to pivot.

This distinction matters significantly. Operational accountability belongs with marketing. Execution quality, agency management, channel selection, creative performance: these are the functions marketing should own. Structural accountability belongs at the board level. The resourcing decisions, the time horizons, the consistency of strategic direction, the degree of functional literacy available to inform those choices: these are governance questions.

If your marketing function is consistently underperforming, the right question is not what went wrong with the team. It is what the Board approved, funded, constrained, and disrupted that created the environment the team is performing in.

The answer is usually somewhere in the minutes.