When Marketing Becomes Someone Else's Decision

On Wednesdays, we wear blue...said no one. But imagine your boss walked into a meeting tomorrow and announced that blue was being added to your company's brand colors. Not because customer research suggested it. Not because the company was repositioning. Not because there was a strategic reason buried in the brand guidelines.

They just really like blue.

Would you push back? Or would everyone get swept up in the urgency of figuring out how quickly the website, sales deck, social templates, trade show booth and 47 other pieces of collateral could be updated? There's a point where someone else's preference can quietly become marketing's emergency.

When the Suggestion Comes From the Top

Executives should have opinions about marketing. They understand parts of the business marketers may not see. They hear from customers, investors, partners and employees. A CEO noticing something Marketing missed isn't automatically interference. Sometimes it's valuable information.

The problem isn't that someone in the C-suite has an opinion. The problem is what happens when their opinion enters the room with so much authority that everyone stops evaluating whether it's a good idea.

“I think we should use blue.”

Suddenly the conversation isn't Should we use blue?

It's How quickly can we make everything blue?

That's not necessarily consensus. It might just be compliance with a deadline.

Does Marketing Actually Have the Authority to Say No?

This is a question I think anyone interviewing for a VP of Marketing, CMO or other marketing leadership position should be trying to answer: How much authority does this role actually have?

Having responsibility for marketing and having authority over marketing decisions aren't necessarily the same thing. Does the marketing leader have a seat at the executive table where strategy is being discussed? Can they respectfully tell the CEO, “I don't think we should do that, and here's why”? Will they be expected to bring customer research, performance data and professional judgment into the conversation? Or are they primarily responsible for executing decisions that have already been made somewhere else?

Those are very different marketing leadership jobs. A company can hire an experienced VP of Marketing, give them a team and a budget, and still create an environment where the most important marketing decisions ultimately belong to someone else. If every suggestion from the top immediately becomes a priority, the question isn't just whether Marketing has enough courage to push back. It's whether Marketing was ever given the authority to push back in the first place.

And What About Everyone Else?

On Monday, I wrote about Mean Girls and a simple distinction: compliance isn't consensus. There's another side of that conversation that deserves some empathy. It's easy to tell employees they should “speak up.” It's much harder when speaking up could have consequences.

Morning Brew recently published a hiring glossary that included a term I hadn't heard before: job-hugging—essentially staying put in your current role as a reaction to economic uncertainty and a cooler job market following the Great Resignation era. And I get it. If someone is worried about keeping their job, supporting their family or how long it might take to find another position, I'm not going to criticize them for putting their head down and carefully choosing their battles.

That changes the leadership question. Instead of asking: “Why didn't anyone tell me this was a bad idea?”

Maybe ask: “What would have happened to the person who did?”

Employees learn very quickly which kinds of disagreement are welcome and which aren't. You can tell people you value honest feedback. But if the person who challenges an executive gets labeled “negative,” “not a team player” or “difficult to work with,” everyone else just received the real communication policy.

The C-Suite Is Not Your Target Audience

This matters especially in marketing because we're supposed to represent someone who usually isn't sitting in that executive meeting: the customer.

We interview them. Study their behavior. Look at search data. Talk to Sales and Customer Success. Test messages and creative. Dig through analytics looking for clues about what resonates.

Then someone senior says: “I don't like it.”

Um. That's information, but it's not automatically customer research.

Personal preference becomes particularly dangerous when marketing starts optimizing around whoever has the most authority in the approval process. Copy starts sounding like the way executives describe the product internally. Creative reflects what leadership likes. Campaign ideas are judged by whether someone in the boardroom finds them compelling. Eventually, the C-suite accidentally becomes the target audience.

When marketers start optimizing for executive approval instead of customer understanding, we're solving for the wrong person.

Before We Make Everything Blue, Can We Test It?

But there's another possibility we shouldn't ignore: Maybe blue is actually a good idea. Lee Cockerell offers a useful way to think about this in Creating Magic. When considering risk, he distinguishes between reversible and irreversible decisions. If a decision can be reversed, there's often more room to try something, learn from it and change course if it doesn't work.

That distinction belongs in marketing conversations. “Let's try blue on this campaign and see how customers respond” is very different from “Update the brand guidelines, website, sales materials, event signage and every piece of collateral by Friday.”

One is an experiment. The other is a commitment.

Before mobilizing an entire marketing department around an executive suggestion, ask how difficult the decision would be to undo. Can we test the new messaging with one audience? Can we try the creative in one campaign? Can we build a landing page before rebuilding the website? Can we gather evidence before committing the entire organization?

This creates a useful middle ground between automatically rejecting an executive's idea and immediately executing it everywhere. Not every executive idea needs to be rejected or immediately implemented. Sometimes it just needs to become an experiment.

Marketing Doesn't Automatically Win Either

None of this means Marketing gets to respond to every executive suggestion with, “Stay in your lane. We have the data.”

Sometimes the executive is right. Customer research can be incomplete. Data can be interpreted badly. Marketing teams get attached to their ideas too. Someone outside the department may notice something obvious we've missed because we've been staring at the campaign for six weeks.

The goal isn't to protect Marketing from other people's opinions. The goal is to make sure we're still evaluating those opinions as ideas rather than automatically treating them as decisions.

There's a meaningful difference between: We looked at the evidence, heard the objections, considered the alternatives and leadership made the final call.

and:

The boss wanted it, nobody pushed back, so we assumed everyone agreed.

Both may end with a blue logo. Only one tells you the decision survived a real conversation.

The Story Behind the Strategy

A healthy marketing organization needs more than executive support. It needs enough organizational authority to bring the customer's perspective into conversations where the customer isn't present. Sometimes that means saying: “Before we make everything blue, can we talk about why?”

What problem are we solving? What evidence suggests this will help? What would we have to change? What would we give up? Are we doing this because it's right for our audience—or because the most powerful person in the room likes blue?

Those aren't disrespectful questions. They're part of the job. Asking them requires more than a courageous marketer. It requires an organization where asking them is actually allowed.

That's the part leaders have control over. You can't demand candid feedback while punishing the people who provide it. You can't interpret silence as consensus when everyone knows where the power sits. And you can't hire strategic marketing leaders, exclude them from strategic decisions, and then wonder why Marketing behaves like an order-taking department.

So What?

The next time a senior leader says, “I think we should...”, pay attention to what happens next. Does the room evaluate the idea? Or does everyone immediately start assigning tasks?

If nobody pushes back, don't just ask whether everyone agrees. Ask whether the people in that room have the authority, safety and incentive to disagree. If every executive suggestion automatically becomes a marketing priority, you don't really have a marketing strategy.

You have a very expensive suggestion box with one contributor.