The 8 fouls holding marketing back from winning the growth agenda 🏆
A new report from IAA Singapore examines why marketing remains on the wings of major commercial decisions, and what APAC leaders must do to move into the centre of play.
Every successful football team needs a midfielder who can see the whole pitch. The best midfielders connect defence with attack, understand how the game is developing and create the conditions in which others can perform. They rarely succeed by operating in isolation. Their value comes from linking different parts of the team around a common plan and marketing has the potential to play a similar role within the business.
Only marketing sees across customer behaviour, category movements, competitive threats and cultural change. It can connect these insights to decisions about product, pricing, distribution, customer experience, brand and innovation. Yet in many organisations, marketing remains confined to advertising and communications, receiving a brief after all the most consequential commercial decisions have already been made.
A new report from our friends at IAA Singapore asks what is preventing marketing from taking a more central position.
Marketing as Growth Engine, the second edition of the IAA Insights series, draws on Chatham House Rule conversations with more than 40 senior marketing leaders. It argues that growth takes place across the entire commercial system, while marketing is still too often permitted to operate in only one corner of it.
The report describes this as the “central-midfielder gap”: the distance between marketers’ ambition to connect the organisation and the limited remit many currently hold.
Marketing is playing the wrong position
Business sector, stage of growth and the CEO’s understanding of marketing all influence where the function begins. A marketer in a fast-growing technology company may have opportunities to shape proposition, activation and retention. A leader in a mature organisation may face entrenched silos and a long-standing perception of marketing as the team responsible for “colouring in” decisions made elsewhere.
Regulated industries, brand-led categories and experience-based businesses each create different opportunities and constraints. The report’s argument is that marketers need to understand the pitch they are playing on before deciding how to change their position.
Organisational structure, however, only explains part of the problem. The report also asks marketers to examine the habits and assumptions that may have contributed to their limited influence.
The eight fouls holding marketing back
The report identifies eight “deadly sins” that prevent marketing from becoming a genuine growth function:
Over-identification with advertising
A narrow, bottom-of-funnel communications remit
Weak enterprise metrics and a last-click mindset
No clear C-suite sponsor or mandate
Reputational damage created by mediocre past work
Functional silos that restrict access to important value levers
A language gap with finance and the board
Detachment from the day-to-day reality of the business
Together, these amount to more than a branding problem for the marketing function. They affect the way it plans, measures, communicates and collaborates.
When success is defined primarily through campaign outputs, marketers naturally report impressions, engagement, clicks and conversions. These measures can help teams optimise activity, but they rarely answer the questions occupying the CEO, CFO or board.
How has marketing affected customer acquisition, retention or product uptake? Has it strengthened pricing power? What has it contributed to revenue and profitability? What would happen if investment increased, moved between channels or disappeared altogether?
Marketers who cannot translate their activity into these outcomes may struggle to secure greater influence, regardless of the quality of their creative work.
This is where an independent measurement partner can play an important role. Analytic Partners helps organisations connect marketing activity to the commercial outcomes that matter across the C-suite, creating a single, trusted view of what is driving growth.
By accounting for marketing alongside pricing, distribution, promotions, customer behaviour and wider market conditions, that shared source of truth gives marketing, finance and other business leaders a common foundation for planning, investment and decision-making.
The value extends beyond proving marketing’s contribution. It allows leaders to understand the trade-offs between different choices, test future scenarios and build plans together around the same evidence. Measurement becomes a mechanism for partnership across the organisation.
Earning a place in the starting eleven
The route forward begins with usefulness, supported by evidence the wider organisation trusts.
IAA Singapore’s report recommends moving from channel plans to cross-functional growth plays, from campaign outputs to enterprise outcomes and from communications language to the CFO’s language of value. Marketing leaders should stop waiting to receive briefs and begin participating in the joint business plan.
That means building business cases with finance rather than presenting parallel arguments. It means working with product, sales, operations and customer experience around a small number of shared commercial priorities. It also requires marketers to become more comfortable with pricing, modelling, analytics and the logic behind board-level decisions but the CEO and CFO require different approaches.
The CEO sets the ceiling on marketing’s remit, determining whether the function is understood as communications, customer stewardship or a commercial growth partner. The CFO determines whether marketing earns greater confidence and investment. The report advises marketers to agree their mandate with the CEO, then translate their contribution into measures the CFO already recognises, including pricing power, retention and cost-to-serve.
None of this reduces the importance of creativity or brand. Both remain distinctive capabilities that marketing brings to the business. However, their value becomes easier to recognise when they are anchored in customer behaviour and connected to commercial performance.
Marketing as Growth Engine offers a concise but challenging assessment of the function’s current position. It also provides practical moves, sector-specific observations and 12 habits for marketing leaders who want to shape the growth agenda rather than wait for instructions from the touchline.
Download the full Marketing as Growth Engine report from IAA Singapore to explore all eight deadly sins, the five shifts that earn marketing a seat at the table and the practical habits helping APAC marketers lead growth.
I am confused about something.
Are we saying that "Two identical CMOs in two different companies will have wildly different remits" (and similar language in the "Marketing is playing the wrong position" section) are the problem we're trying to solve? That marketing's scope can be so drastically different from organization to organization?
Or is the problem that marketers need to do a better job of showing their value and increasing their influence, regardless of those drastic scope differences?