Marketing
Marketing is the function that executives understand the least and second-guess the most, and that misunderstanding is costing companies real growth. Not creative growth. Not brand affinity. Commercial, contracted, on-the-balance-sheet growth. nobody in the leadership team can defend what it returns. The pattern is so common that most executives I speak to have stopped noticing it.
MARKETING AFRICA
Marketing
Kesiya Chitete
The Governance Gap: Rethinking How African Businesses Lead Their Marketing Function
Ihave sat in enough business performance reviews to recognise the moment. The CFO has finished. Operations has answered its questions. Sales has defended its pipeline. The agenda moves toward marketing, and something shifts in the room, a small loss of altitude, a subtle reach for shorter sentences, a chair that glances at the clock. The function that is supposed to shape how the business grows has become the function the room endures before it can adjourn.
Nobody says this. Nobody has to. It is the most consequential silence in African commerce, and it is costing us growth we do not even know we are losing.
I want to say this plainly, because I think it is the most important thing African business leaders are not talking about. Marketing is the function that executives understand the least and second-guess the most, and that misunderstanding is costing companies real growth. Not creative growth. Not brand affinity. Commercial, contracted, on-the-balance-sheet growth.
This is not a complaint from inside the marketing profession. It is a governance observation, and the fix is not louder campaigns or shinier decks. The fix is a change in how leadership teams govern marketing, and how marketers earn the right to be governed seriously.
How we got here?
Marketing in African businesses has been built around output. Branding exercises. Logo refreshes. Activation campaigns.
Trade show stands. Digital pushes. The brief almost always started downstream of the real commercial decisions. Pricing had been set. The product had been built. The market had been chosen. The customer had been assumed. Marketing was handed the task of communicating what had already been decided. In that arrangement, marketing was a service function. It produced things. Leadership did not need to understand it any more than it needed to understand how the print supplier worked. As long as the things got produced on time and on budget, marketing had done its job.
The challenge now is that the environment in which African businesses operate no longer rewards that kind of arrangement. Margins are tighter. Competition is nearer. Customers are quicker to leave, often without warning. Pricing power is becoming harder to build and even harder to protect. Yet the decisions that shape whether a business grows or stands still, which customers to prioritise, what to charge, how to retain loyalty, where to invest in brand equity, and when to enter or exit a market, are exactly the decisions marketing is equipped to guide. In many African companies, however, those decisions are still being made without marketing at the table.
The result is a slow, expensive form of guesswork dressed up as strategy. Pricing decisions made on competitor benchmarks rather than customer value. Market entries justified by addressable-market arithmetic and almost no positioning thesis. Retention treated as a customer-service problem rather than a structural one. Brand investment cut first in tight quarters because
Marketing is the function that executives understand the least and second-guess the most, and that misunderstanding is costing companies real growth. Not creative growth. Not brand affinity. Commercial, contracted, on-the-balance-sheet growth. nobody in the leadership team can defend what it returns. The pattern is so common that most executives I speak to have stopped noticing it.
What leadership actually needs from marketing?
This is not a conversation about campaigns; it is a conversation about capital, risk, and growth. A leadership team exists to allocate capital, manage risk, and deliver growth. Every function that reports into that team should be able to explain how it contributes to at least one of those priorities in a way leadership can question, measure, and act on. Finance does this fluently. Operations does it in its own language. Risk and compliance already have a recognised seat at the table. Sales, even when imperfect, reports in numbers leadership can interpret.
Marketing, still falls short here. It often reports activity instead of commercial impact. Campaigns launched. Impressions delivered. Engagement rates achieved. Awareness improved. Useful indicators, yes, but not enough to tell executives whether marketing spend is generating a return, whether the brand is gaining or losing strength, or whether the customer base is growing in value or quietly declining.
This is not because marketers lack the data. It is because the conversation has rarely been structured to demand commercial answers from marketing. A properly governed marketing function should answer four critical questions for leadership:
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What is happening to the economic value of our customer base?
Where is our brand giving us pricing power, and where is it failing to do so?
What does it cost us to acquire customers compared to retaining them?
What commercial risks are we carrying based on how the market currently sees us?
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