When Marketing Is Invited Too Late

The best marketing strategy in the world can't always rescue a poorly conceived organizational strategy. And yet we keep asking it to try.

Picture a meeting happening somewhere right now.

A group of smart, well-intentioned leaders has spent months developing a new initiative. They've evaluated the budget, worked through the operational details, navigated internal politics, and finally reached a decision. Everyone is relieved. The hard work is done.

Someone looks around the room and asks, “Should we talk to marketing about this?”

Probably should get them involved. We need a name, a launch plan, maybe a hype video. Something exciting!

And just like that, marketing is invited to the party. The cake has been ordered, the guest list is finalized, and someone has already decided on a theme. Marketing's job is to make sure everyone has a good time.

I've spent more than two decades working in and around marketing organizations, and I've seen versions of this scenario play out across industries. Higher education is particularly good at it, although we certainly don't have a monopoly on it.

The problem isn't that marketing gets invited late to a meeting. It's that marketing gets invited late to the thinking.

And those are two very different problems.

Communicating Strategy Isn't the Same as Shaping It

Somewhere along the way, organizations developed a remarkably convenient understanding of marketing. Leadership makes decisions. Marketing tries to make people understand or even like them.

It's a clean division of labor. It's also an incomplete understanding of what marketing is supposed to do.

Marketing is not simply the discipline of getting people to pay attention. At its best, it's the organizational capability that helps us understand who we're serving, what they value, how they make decisions, what alternatives they have, and whether our organization is positioned to meet their needs.

Novel idea: those questions belong at the beginning of strategy development, not at the end.

Think about a university considering a new academic program. The academic case may be compelling. Faculty expertise may be exceptional. The institution may have the facilities, resources, and genuine enthusiasm to make it happen.

All good things.

But has anyone established whether students actually want the program? Whether employers recognize its value? Whether there will be a market for graduates to get a job? Whether prospective students understand what the degree prepares them to do? Whether competing institutions already offer something similar, perhaps at a lower price?

They're questions about the strategy.

And if the answers aren't particularly encouraging, a clever campaign (or the beloved administrative tagline) isn't going to change the underlying reality.

You can put an impressive creative team behind an initiative with weak market demand. You might even generate attention. But attention and demand are not the same thing, and no amount of attractive design changes that.

Sometimes the problem isn't the message.

The problem is the decision.

What Presidents Told Me About Marketing

This tension was part of what led me to study how university presidents perceive marketing and its role in institutional effectiveness.

For my doctoral research, I surveyed presidents of public four-year universities and conducted in-depth interviews to better understand how they viewed marketing leadership, organizational structure, and strategic performance.

One of the strongest themes from those interviews was strategic alignment.

The presidents I interviewed didn't describe effective marketing exclusively in terms of advertising, communications, or enrollment campaigns. They talked about institutional positioning, organizational integration, differentiation, and the relationship between marketing and broader university goals.

One president described marketing as an overarching philosophy that touches nearly every institutional decision.

That perspective matters.

It suggests that at least some university presidents understand marketing as something much larger than a department producing content. They see it as a function that helps connect an institution's ambitions with the needs and expectations of the people it serves.

My research also found an interesting distinction. Having a chief marketing officer report directly to the president was not associated with a statistically significant difference in presidents' perceptions of marketing effectiveness. Having the CMO serve on the university cabinet, however, was associated with higher perceived effectiveness scores.

That doesn't establish that cabinet membership causes better marketing.

But it raises an important leadership question.

Is it enough to give a marketing leader access to the chief executive, or does the organization also need that leader participating in the conversations where institutional strategy takes shape?

I think we know which arrangement creates more opportunities for meaningful contribution.

Strategic Alignment Has to Work in Both Directions

Organizations love the phrase strategic alignment. It's in nearly every planning document I've ever seen.

Usually, though, the conversation goes something like this: Here's our strategic plan. Marketing, go align your work with it.

Fair enough. Marketing absolutely should support institutional priorities.

But genuine alignment isn't a one-way street.

If marketing is expected to connect organizational strategy to the marketplace, then what we learn from the marketplace should also influence organizational strategy.

That's the part we too often skip.

Market research should inform decisions about programs and services. Audience behavior should help shape how those services are delivered. Brand perception should influence institutional positioning. Competitive intelligence should inform where organizations invest, where they differentiate, and, occasionally, where they should reconsider an idea altogether.

This doesn't mean marketing gets to dictate academic programs or override the expertise of faculty, administrators, and operational leaders. It shouldn't.

Expertise matters. Shared governance matters. An organization's mission matters.

But collaboration means bringing different forms of expertise together while a decision can still be improved.

A marketing leader who understands the marketplace should be able to say, “I see what we're trying to accomplish, but here's something we need to consider before we commit.”

And a healthy leadership team should want to hear it.

Not because marketing is always right. We certainly aren't.

Because the cost of discovering a strategic problem after implementation is usually much greater than the discomfort of discussing it beforehand.

The Invitation Comes With Responsibility

There is another side to this conversation, and marketing leaders need to hear it.

We cannot complain about being treated as a production function while consistently behaving like one.

If we want to participate in strategy, we have to bring something more valuable than an opinion about a logo, a tagline, or a campaign.

We need to understand the organization's finances, operations, priorities, and constraints. We need to know the audiences we serve and the competitive environment we operate in. We need credible research, meaningful data, and enough business judgment to distinguish a genuine strategic concern from a personal preference.

And sometimes we need the courage to tell leadership that the proposed initiative probably isn't going to work.

That's not always a comfortable conversation, particularly when the people advocating for an initiative have invested considerable time and energy in it.

Compassion matters here. Most questionable decisions aren't made by foolish people. They're made by capable people working with incomplete information, competing priorities, and the best intentions.

Our job isn't to embarrass them or win an argument.

It's to make the decision better.

That requires trust. It also requires marketing leaders to understand that being invited into strategic conversations is not a reward for holding a senior title. It's an obligation to contribute something useful.

A seat at the table isn't particularly valuable if all you bring is a request for more budget.

You Can't Communicate Your Way Out of Everything

Marketing can accomplish extraordinary things when the underlying strategy is sound. It can build awareness, establish trust, change perceptions, create demand, and help people recognize value they might otherwise overlook.

But it has limits.

Marketing cannot manufacture sustainable demand for something people don't need. It cannot indefinitely compensate for a poor customer experience. It cannot make an organization's stated values believable when its decisions consistently contradict them.

It can certainly make promises.

The rest of the organization has to keep them.

That's why the relationship between organizational strategy and marketing strategy matters so much. The two should inform each other continuously, not meet for the first time when someone needs a launch announcement.

And this is ultimately a leadership issue.

Leaders determine who participates in decision-making, what information gets considered, and whether dissenting perspectives are welcomed before commitments are made.

The strongest organizations aren't the ones where marketing gets every request completed on time. They're the ones where marketing helps the organization make smarter requests in the first place.

So the next time an exciting new initiative is nearly ready to launch and someone says, “We should probably get marketing involved,” consider asking a different question.

What might we have decided differently if marketing had been involved six months ago?

Because the most valuable contribution marketing can make may happen long before there's anything to promote.

And by the time you're asking us to make it look good, the most important marketing decision may already have been made.