There is a question sitting beneath a great deal of boardroom frustration right now, even if it is not always being asked in such direct terms. What should marketing actually be accountable for?
It sounds simple enough on the surface, but it is one of the most consequential questions a business can ask because of everything wrapped up inside it. When leadership teams ask this, they are not just asking about reporting lines or KPIs. They are really asking what marketing is for, how much influence it truly has over commercial performance, where its responsibility begins and ends, and how much certainty any business can reasonably expect from it in a market that feels increasingly difficult to read.
This is prevalent almost everywhere, regardless of company size, and I’ve seen it play out in so many different ways. It almost always begins with the same problem… ambiguity around marketing’s role in the business. And this compounds over time, because marketing inherits process, expectation, c-suite pet projects and whatever the latest buzz words are. Eventually marketing owns all of it, whilst paradoxically having no clear definition of what it owns.
The problem is not that marketing is being asked to be accountable. It should be. The problem is that many businesses still have not properly defined what that accountability is supposed to mean. As a result, marketing often ends up carrying a shapeless and contradictory burden. It is expected to drive growth, prove ROI, support sales, generate leads, strengthen the brand, improve conversion, sharpen positioning, justify spend, adopt new technology, and somehow explain the whole thing in clean, defensible terms to a board that is itself under pressure. That is not a real model of accountability. It is a stack of unresolved expectations.
Once that happens, marketing is pushed into an impossible position. It either starts over-claiming its influence, presenting partial visibility as if it were full certainty, or it becomes the place the business sends its disappointment when growth proves harder than expected. Neither outcome is healthy, and neither helps a company make better decisions. The truth is that marketing should be accountable for commercial contribution, not total commercial control, and that distinction matters far more than most leadership teams realise.
Contribution is not the same as control
Revenue is a business outcome, not a marketing output. Marketing can shape it powerfully, sometimes decisively, but it does not command the whole system. Product matters. Proposition matters. Pricing matters. Sales capability matters. Customer experience matters. Market conditions matter. Competition matters. Existing brand strength matters. In B2B especially, where buying cycles are long, stakeholders are multiple, and the path from first attention to commercial outcome is rarely linear, the idea that marketing can cleanly “own” growth quickly starts to fall apart.
And yet this is precisely where many businesses tie themselves in knots. A board asks for greater accountability from marketing, which is fair enough, but what it often means in practice is, tell us exactly what our money is doing, remove the ambiguity, and give us a level of certainty that allows us to feel in control. That desire is understandable, particularly when markets are tighter and confidence is thinner, but it can also be deeply distorting. The wish for accountability is legitimate. The wish for perfect certainty is something else.
A much more useful question is this… what part of growth should marketing be responsible for creating, influencing, and improving? That is where the conversation becomes more mature, because it accepts that marketing has a serious commercial role without pretending it has sole command over the result.
What belongs to marketing?
At its best, marketing is responsible for improving the conditions under which growth becomes more likely. It makes the business easier to find, easier to understand, easier to trust, easier to choose, and easier to buy from. It sharpens the company’s narrative, increases relevant visibility, strengthens the proposition in the eyes of the market, improves the quality of attention entering the business, and helps convert fragmented activity into something closer to commercial momentum. None of that is trivial work. In many companies, it is absolutely central to whether growth happens at all.
Marketing should also be accountable for the parts of demand generation and demand capture that genuinely sit within its influence. If a business is attracting attention but struggling to turn that attention into meaningful movement, marketing has to own part of that picture. It should be able to say something coherent about channel effectiveness, message resonance, traffic quality, conversion friction, lead quality, and the handoff between marketing activity and sales follow-through. If those things are weak, they deserve scrutiny. If they are improving, that should be visible too.
It should also be said that marketing has a broader strategic responsibility than many companies allow for. A strong marketing function does not just produce activity; it improves the quality of commercial judgement inside the business. It should help leadership understand who the company is really for, why that market should care, what messages are landing, where friction is building, what customer behaviour is changing, where opportunities are emerging, and which channels or bets deserve greater confidence. A lot of businesses do not have an activity problem so much as a clarity problem. They have more channels, more campaigns, more dashboards, and more reporting than ever before, but less shared understanding of what is actually happening and what the company should do next. That is where marketing, at a senior level, becomes part of the decision-making architecture of the business rather than just the communications function sitting downstream from it.
The problem of time horizons
One of the biggest reasons marketing gets judged badly is because it is forced into a single time horizon, usually the shortest one available. Boards want this quarter’s answer. Marketing, in reality, tends to work across several.
Some of its work is immediate. Capturing active demand, supporting pipeline, improving conversion, tightening spend efficiency, and helping sales right now all belong in that category. Some of its work sits further out. Educating the market, increasing familiarity, improving message-market fit, and reducing friction over time rarely pay back all at once, but they matter immensely. Then there is the slower-burning work that businesses often depend on while undervaluing: building trust, strengthening preference, increasing mental availability, supporting pricing power, and creating future demand before that demand is visible in a report.
This is where a great number of companies end up undermining themselves. They demand proof in the immediate term while quietly depending on effects that only emerge over longer periods. They continue to fund the parts of marketing that harvest existing demand, because those are easier to explain and easier to model, while reducing the parts that create future demand because those are harder to tie neatly to this month’s numbers. For a while, that can make the dashboard look cleaner. Underneath, though, the system often gets weaker. The business ends up running hotter and finding that more effort is required to generate the same result.
So yes, marketing should be accountable, but it should be accountable across time horizons, not just to the most convenient metric visible in the present. If leadership insists on judging everything by the shortest possible window, it will end up incentivising behaviour that gradually weakens the whole commercial engine.
Reporting is not the same as accountability
Another confusion creeps in here, and it is one that causes a great deal of damage. Many businesses believe they can solve the accountability problem simply by asking for more reporting. More dashboards. More slices of data. More attribution views. More explanation.
But reporting is not the same as accountability, and in some cases it becomes its opposite. Once a team feels pressured to remove ambiguity at all costs, it often starts manufacturing certainty that does not truly exist. Correlation gets dressed up as causation. Channel credit becomes inflated. Complex buying journeys get flattened into tidy stories that feel reassuring in board packs but distort the reality of how growth actually happens. That does not make the business smarter. It simply makes it more comfortable.
A more serious standard would be to ask marketing to show credible contribution, improving conditions, sound judgement, and evidence of learning. That means measurement still matters, of course it does, but it matters as part of a wider decision-making system rather than as a substitute for thought. Marketing should absolutely be accountable for discipline: for clear priorities, sensible planning, coherent measurement, good use of budget, strong alignment with sales, honest feedback loops, thoughtful experimentation, and the willingness to stop doing things that are not working. But none of that is helped by forcing teams into attribution theatre simply because ambiguity is uncomfortable at board level.
What marketing should not be accountable for
It is equally important to be clear about what falls outside the line. Marketing should not be accountable for rescuing a weak proposition. If the offer is poor, undifferentiated, mispriced, or out of step with what the market actually wants, no amount of campaign cleverness will solve that for long. Marketing should not be expected to compensate endlessly for sales dysfunction either. It can make sales easier. It can improve fit, narrative, demand quality, and timing. But it cannot indefinitely cover for weak follow-up, poor commercial conversations, internal bottlenecks, or a broken handoff between teams.
Nor should marketing be held singularly responsible for every missed target, every contraction in demand, or every macroeconomic shock that affects performance. Businesses sometimes speak as though marketing is the master lever that explains all commercial variance, when in reality it sits inside a much wider system of causes, constraints, and trade-offs. And perhaps most importantly, it should not be expected to provide a fantasy level of precision simply because leadership finds uncertainty difficult to tolerate.
The real issue is often boardroom confusion
This is why I think the accountability debate is often misdiagnosed. The real issue is not always that marketing lacks accountability. More often, it is that leadership is not fully clear on what marketing is there to do. When that happens, marketing gets measured by whatever is easiest to count, easiest to explain, or easiest to defend in a meeting. Usually that means short-term outputs, visible activity, and metrics that travel neatly in slide decks.
Over time, behaviour shifts around those incentives. Teams become more cautious. Demand capture consumes more of the budget. Upstream work gets squeezed out. Strategy gives way to reporting. Creative risk declines. The organisation starts valuing what can be defended cleanly over what may actually matter most. In the end, marketing gets reduced to the parts of itself that are easiest to account for, even if those are not the parts creating the most strategic value.
That is not maturity. It is shrinkage. And it is costly, because the strongest marketing functions do much more than produce activity. They help a business understand its market better, place smarter bets, build stronger preference, improve commercial coherence, and create momentum that compounds over time. That is a serious commercial role, but it only becomes visible when the board understands what it is looking at.
So what should marketing actually be accountable for?
Not everything, but not something small either. It should be accountable for commercial contribution. It should be accountable for improving the conditions for growth, for helping the business become more visible, more relevant, more trusted, and more effective in the way it reaches, influences, converts, and retains the right customers. It should be accountable for increasing clarity, strengthening decision quality, operating with discipline, and showing where value is being created, where friction is building, and where future growth is being strengthened or quietly undermined.
That is meaningful accountability. It is far more useful than the lazy alternative, which is to let marketing “own growth” when things are going well and then use it as the holding pen for wider commercial disappointment when the system comes under strain.
Boards are right to ask hard questions of marketing. But they should ask harder questions of themselves as well. What are we actually expecting marketing to do? What sits within its influence, and what sits elsewhere in the commercial system? What time horizon are we judging it on? Are we asking for honest contribution, or simply demanding false certainty in a more sophisticated format?
Those are very different things. Until more leadership teams understand that, marketing will continue to be measured badly, managed badly, and underused at precisely the moment businesses need it most.
