Why Leadership Teams Fight About Marketing

Opening

Marketing disagreements inside leadership teams rarely begin as strategic debates. They tend to surface as operational concerns.

Sales is frustrated about pipeline consistency. Finance is watching expense ratios. Operations is wary of demand that outpaces capacity. The CEO is thinking about growth in a competitive or regulated environment. Marketing sits in the middle of all of that pressure.

When conversations intensify, the language usually centers on tactics: More leads. Better branding. Stronger messaging. Different channels. Adjusted spend.

What often goes unexamined is the underlying question each leader believes marketing is meant to answer.

Is marketing primarily responsible for volume? For positioning strength? For protecting margin? For supporting a shift in the client mix?

Without clarity on that foundational role, the same debate resurfaces in slightly different forms each quarter.

Over time, the friction feels personal. In reality, it is structural.

The Air Traffic Control Problem

Air traffic control doesn’t exist because pilots are incompetent. It exists because the airspace is shared.

Every pilot has a destination. Every aircraft has fuel constraints. Weather systems move unpredictably. Runways have capacity limits. Without coordination, even skilled professionals would create risk simply by operating independently.

Leadership teams often resemble crowded airspace.

Each executive is steering toward a legitimate objective. Sales wants altitude in the pipeline. Finance wants stable fuel consumption. Operations is watching runway availability. Marketing is trying to coordinate lift-off and landing patterns across all of it.

When there is no shared sequencing logic, decisions start to overlap. Campaigns launch without capacity alignment. Investment increases without clarity on priority audience. Messaging shifts without agreement on the strategic objective.

No one is reckless. But the proximity creates tension.

Air traffic control provides something subtle but powerful: a shared system that determines who moves when and why. It reduces collision risk not by limiting ambition, but by coordinating it.

Marketing governance plays a similar role.

The Governance Gap

In many mid-sized firms, marketing is treated as a department rather than as part of governance. That distinction shapes how decisions get made.

When marketing is evaluated primarily by campaigns launched, content produced, leads generated, its role narrows to activity management.

When marketing is integrated into governance, it becomes a mechanism for aligning growth priorities across the leadership team. Decisions about audience focus, investment timing, risk tolerance, and capacity are surfaced explicitly rather than indirectly through tactical disagreement.

McKinsey’s 2024 research on commercial transformation found that companies with strong cross-functional alignment around growth priorities outperform peers in revenue stability and margin resilience. Alignment correlates with performance.

Without that alignment, marketing absorbs unresolved strategic ambiguity.

Where the Friction Actually Begins

Most recurring marketing conflict can be traced to a small set of unanswered questions.

• Who is the priority buyer over the next one to two years?
• Where in that buyer’s decision process are we currently weakest?
• How will we evaluate whether marketing investments are strengthening that position?

If those questions are not answered collectively, leaders default to their immediate pressures. The debate that follows sounds tactical, but underneath it sits disagreement about strategic sequencing.

Air traffic control does not argue about whether planes should fly. It coordinates the order and spacing so they can.

Leadership teams that install marketing architecture are doing something similar. They are agreeing on direction and timing before arguing about altitude.

What Changes When Structure Is Clear

Once there is shared clarity around buyer priorities and growth sequencing, marketing conversations become more disciplined.

Proposals are evaluated against defined objectives. Tradeoffs are discussed in terms of timing and capacity. Investment decisions reference the decision dynamics of a specific audience rather than generalized visibility.

Disagreement still exists, as it should in any healthy leadership team. What changes is the reference point. Instead of defending individual preferences, leaders are weighing initiatives against a shared map.

Marketing stops functioning as the arena where larger strategic ambiguity plays out. It becomes the coordinating system that translates ambition into executable sequence.

Leadership teams don’t fight about marketing because marketing is inherently volatile.

They fight because marketing sits at the intersection of ambition, constraint, and uncertainty.

Without coordination, those forces converge in unpredictable ways.

With coordination, the same forces can be sequenced.

And sequencing, over time, produces stability that compounds.