I’ve rarely heard anyone say the words, “That’s not my job.” But I’ve watched organisations behave as though they were true. Think about your own organisation: marketing owns the campaign; sales owns distribution; finance owns margins; agencies own the brief; research owns insights – basically, everyone owns something. Yet, somehow, none of them seem accountable for the business. And this is becoming one of the biggest blind spots in modern marketing.
Ironically, it isn’t because we lack expertise. It’s because we’ve never had more of it. Brand. Commerce. Retail media. Performance. CRM. AI. Analytics. We’ve become exceptional at building specialists. However, the next competitive advantage won’t come from creating even narrower expertise; it will come from connecting it.
Now think about consumers. They don’t experience organisational functions. They experience one brand, one product, one price and one business. Growth doesn’t happen inside functions. It happens when functions seamlessly integrate as one. I believe it’s time we challenge a few assumptions.
Perhaps it’s time marketers stopped staying in our lane. Specialisation has made marketing stronger.
But somewhere along the way, expertise became a boundary.
Looking back over almost two decades leading brands across markets, I realise that I learnt this early in my career: I recall sitting in a quarterly review where all functional scorecards were green, yet the business was not growing. The issue was not functional challenges; it was trial. Some of the biggest growth breakthroughs didn’t come from marketing or sales working harder; they came from marketing better understanding commercial realities, retailer economics, finance, product and supply chains, and creating integrated plans that worked better as a whole. To me, orchestrators are not people who know every discipline. They are “T-shaped leaders” – people who understand the business and the brand, then bring the right people, capabilities and decisions together to solve one shared business challenge.
Perhaps it’s time we stop outsourcing our understanding of the consumer. We’ve never had more research, dashboards or AI. Yet, I worry we’ve never found it easier to drift away from the people we’re trying to serve. The most common reason is lack of funding or resources.
One habit I’ve deliberately protected is spending time in stores. Watching shoppers. Asking questions. Listening without the corporate title. Behind every dashboard is still a person making a choice, and it is imperative to know that person and their needs and challenges.
Perhaps it’s time we stop treating the brief as the starting point. The best agency partners I’ve worked with didn’t simply answer briefs brilliantly. They challenged them and changed them. Instead of asking, “How do we execute this?”, they first asked, “Is this really the business problem?” Several of them met consumers to validate the brief.
That shift changes the conversation from producing better campaigns to creating better business outcomes that serve the consumer.
Perhaps it’s time we stop confusing functional success with business success. As I shared previously, I’ve sat in reviews where media delivered. Sales delivered. Innovation delivered. Every dashboard was green. Everyone seemed to be winning – except the business.
Functional excellence matters. However, businesses don’t reward functions – they reward growth. And growth comes when every function rallies around one busine…