MAL72 26 (N) ISSUE 72 | Page 33

The two-sided fix

It is easy to place the full burden on marketers. To say the profession must mature, learn the language of capital, and stop hiding behind creativity. There is truth in that, and it deserves attention, but the deeper issue is that this is not a one-sided failure. It is also a leadership problem, and that side of the conversation has been ignored for too long.

Executives also need to learn how to ask marketing better questions. That sounds simple, but it is not. Many senior leaders are trained in finance, law, engineering, or operations. They know how to interrogate a balance sheet, challenge a risk register, or review a project plan. Far fewer have been trained to interrogate a marketing function. So when marketing presents, the room often listens politely, accepts the update, and moves on, not because the answers are strong, but because asking deeper questions may expose how little the leadership team understands about the function it is meant to govern.

The leadership fix must be structural. Marketing should be treated with the same discipline as finance. It needs a standing place on the executive agenda, a clear set of metrics the leadership team commits to understanding, and the courage to ask difficult questions about customer value, brand strength, retention, and commercial return until the answers become clear. It also means having at least one senior leader who can hold marketing accountable in commercial language, instead of leaving the CMO to assess their own performance. Most importantly, it requires leaders to stop treating the marketing budget as discretionary spend. Marketing is capital allocated towards building a long-term commercial asset, and it deserves the same governance rigour as any other investment.

The marketing fix is just as demanding. It 31 MAL72 / 26 ISSUE requires marketers to move beyond leading with creative arguments alone. The strongest marketers of the next decade will be those who can sit in a performance review and speak confidently about lifetime value, margin contribution, retention economics, customer growth, and brand-driven pricing power without relying only on a campaign deck. That does not diminish the craft of marketing. It elevates it to the level at which the business actually needs it to operate.

This is why professional accreditation matters more than ever. A Chartered Marketer is not simply a marketer with another certificate. It represents a professional who has been trained, assessed, and held to a standard that includes commercial governance, ethical practice, and strategic accountability. In a market where many marketing functions still report activities instead of outcomes, that standard is what separates a function leadership can trust from one leadership has to work around.

What changes when marketing is governed properly

Three shifts happen, and they happen quickly.

The first is that pricing conversations become marketing conversations. Not pricing as discounting. Pricing as a function of perceived value, brand equity, and positioning, which is to say, pricing as something marketing is actually qualified to inform. Leadership teams that govern marketing well stop treating price as a finance decision with a marketing footnote.

The second is that retention becomes an executive-level metric. Customer attrition stops being a service-desk problem and starts being treated for what it actually is. A slow erosion of the most valuable asset the business owns. When leadership asks marketing to report on cohort retention, contract renewal economics, and the cost of replacing a churned customer with a new one, the entire commercial posture of the business changes. Acquisition stops being the default growth strategy. Retention becomes a discipline.

The third, and the one that takes longest, is that brand investment stops being the first thing cut in a hard quarter. When leadership understands brand as a depreciable asset that compounds with investment and erodes without it, the conversation about marketing spend changes permanently. It becomes a conversation about whether the business is investing enough to defend its future pricing power, not whether it is spending too much on advertising.

I am not arguing that marketers should sit at the executive table because the profession wants recognition. They should not. No function earns influence through entitlement. A seat at that level is earned by speaking the language of leadership, bringing the analysis the business needs, and accepting accountability for the commercial outcomes leadership is expected to deliver.

My argument is that the African businesses that grow fastest over the next decade will be the ones that understand this first. They will be led by executives who know how to ask marketing the right questions, and by marketers who can respond at the level of strategy, capital, risk, and growth. The rest will keep repeating the same quiet pattern. Marketing will remain the budget line defended at the end of the agenda, while growth continues to underperform.

That is not a marketing problem alone. It is a governance failure. And it is fixable, but only when both sides of the table decide to take it seriously. The invitation is clear. African executives must stop treating marketing as a communications function that sits outside the real business conversation. Marketers must stop waiting to be understood and start proving their value in the language of capital, risk, and growth. The businesses that make this shift will build stronger brands, more defensible markets, more valuable customer bases, and more disciplined growth engines. The question is no longer whether marketing deserves a seat at the table. The question is whether African businesses can afford to keep making growth decisions without it.

Kesiya Chitete is a Chartered Marketer, Marketing and Business Development Executive, and Managing Principal Consultant at Kesiya Consult. You can commune with her via email at: Kesiyainc @ gmail. com.