Saw a LinkedIn post from Moh Baaghil the other day about how marketing is the only department where everyone’s an expert. 200+ comments from marketers all saying the same thing: yeah, this is exactly our problem.
Got me thinking about the 20 years I’ve spent watching this play out. Same pattern everywhere. Thought I’d write it down.
The Numbers Don’t Lie
Here’s what caught my attention: global marketing spend hit $1.3 trillion in 2024. That’s trillion with a T.
Meanwhile, 73% of marketing leaders say their campaigns get watered down by too many decision-makers. So nearly a trillion dollars of budget is getting the “design by committee” treatment.
You don’t see this happening to finance. Nobody walks into accounting and tells them how to recognize revenue. HR doesn’t get ten people debating their benefits structure. But marketing? Open season.
The Meeting That Never Happens (Except in Marketing)
Picture this conversation:
CEO walks into CFO’s office: “I don’t like how you calculated that depreciation schedule. Can we make it… warmer? More blue?”
Never happens, right?
But I’ve sat in meetings where the CEO didn’t like the shade of blue in a campaign. Where the owner’s wife thought the headline was too long. Where the GM saw a competitor post something yellow on Instagram and now we have to pivot everything to yellow. Like… everything. New photoshoot, new assets, two weeks blown.
Sharon Li, who’s a fractional CMO, nailed it: “Everyone interacts with marketing every day — brands, ads, promo emails — so it becomes the talk of the town. And it gets criticized easily.”
The CEO sees 4,000-10,000 ads a day like everyone else (Forbes did the math back in 2017). They’ve got opinions. Strong ones. Based on absolutely zero professional training, but that doesn’t stop anyone.
Why Marketing Is Different
Here’s the uncomfortable truth I’ve learned after two decades: marketing is the only field where consuming the product makes people think they’re qualified to produce it.
You’ve been to restaurants. Do you walk into the kitchen and tell the chef how to cook?
You’ve sat in buildings. Do you grab a hard hat and critique the structural engineer?
But ads? Everyone’s seen thousands. Must be an expert.
Abraham Luyando, who does hospitality marketing, said something that stuck with me: marketing becomes “everyone’s job” when the company never aligned on the basics. No clear positioning, no defined promise, no agreed metrics. Opinions rush in to fill that gap.
Translation: when leadership skips the hard strategic work, marketing becomes a chaos magnet for whatever anyone feels like saying.
What This Actually Costs
This isn’t about hurt feelings. The business impact is real and I’ve watched it happen:
Time. Average campaign goes through 4.2 rounds of revisions when you’ve got 6+ stakeholders. Two-week projects become two-month projects. Competitors launch while you’re still debating the hero image.
Strategy. That bold campaign that might’ve cut through? Watered down to please everyone. Now it’s fine. Safe. Invisible. Which is why only 21% of B2B marketers say their content works well.
Data getting overruled. “I just don’t like it” beats “the A/B test shows a 23% lift” every single time. Even though data-driven companies are 23x more likely to acquire customers.
Good people leave. Marketing has a 35.7% turnover rate, one of the highest in business. When you treat your marketing team like order-takers instead of strategists, they find someone who trusts them. I’ve watched it happen.
Jacki Nelles joked that “we need a marketing therapy session.” She wasn’t really joking.
What This Job Actually Takes
Real marketing — the kind that moves revenue, not just “engagement” — requires:
Pattern recognition from running thousands of campaigns. You don’t get that from scrolling Instagram. You get it from watching what works, what fails, iterating, failing forward. I’ve been at this 20+ years and I still see new patterns every month.
Statistical literacy. Knowing that a 23% conversion lift matters. Understanding why “more engagement” is a vanity metric if it doesn’t drive revenue. Recognizing when your sample size is too small to trust.
Behavioral psychology. People don’t buy features. They buy identity, feeling, alignment with who they think they are. That’s not creative fluff — that’s Psych 101 applied to commerce.
Systems thinking. Your SEO connects to your content calendar connects to your paid ads connects to email connects to sales enablement. Change one thing, everything shifts. This is engineering, just with words and images instead of steel.
Strategic patience. SEO takes 6-12 months to show results. Brand building is 3-5 years. Content compounds over time. Good marketers understand delayed gratification. Bad committees want ROI by Friday.
The Fix (From Someone Who’s Tried Everything)
Not saying marketing should work in a silo. Sales, product, leadership — they need input. They’re closer to customers, operations, money.
But input isn’t a vote. Here’s what actually works:
One decision-maker. One person owns final creative and strategy calls. Everyone else gives input, they don’t vote. Best teams I’ve worked with have this hierarchy locked down.
Preference vs data. “I don’t like blue” is a feeling. “Our target demo shows 40% higher engagement with blue in split testing” is a fact. Only facts drive decisions. If you don’t have data, run the test. If you can’t run the test, trust the expert you hired.
Align before you design. Abraham was right — chaos fills strategic voids. Before anyone touches a pixel, agree on positioning, audience, metrics that tie to revenue (not vanity), brand voice. Document it. When those are locked, opinions have less oxygen.
Trust or fix your hiring. If you paid for expertise, use it. If you don’t trust your marketer’s judgment, that’s not a marketing problem… that’s a hiring problem. I’ve watched companies spend six figures recruiting top talent, then ignore every recommendation. If you’re going to second-guess everything, save money and hire an intern.
Set the goal, get out of the way. Leadership defines the what: “20% revenue increase from organic” or “own commercial real estate thought leadership” or “enter SMB with sub-$1K product.”
Marketing defines the how.
Don’t handcuff the team while they execute. Don’t move the target after they started aiming.
Last Thought
Marketing isn’t art class. It isn’t guesswork in fancy fonts. It’s a craft that takes study, practice, failure, iteration, time.
The good marketers I know didn’t pick this because they “like being creative.” They picked it because they’re obsessed with how people behave. With systems that work. With making complex ideas simple and simple ideas compelling.
They deserve the respect you’d give an engineer. A lawyer. A CFO.
Because here’s the thing: if everyone in the room is a marketer, nobody is.
