Where Does Marketing Actually Live?

Most organizational charts lie about how marketing works through clean boxes and reporting lines, but they hide the real question of where marketing ends and everything else begins. The answer matters because unclear boundaries create confusion and conflict that masquerade as strategy disagreements:

• Sales complains marketing doesn't deliver leads.
• Marketing complains sales don't follow the narrative.
• Product says marketing overpromises.
• Strategy says marketing doesn't understand the market.

Personality conflicts? Maybe a fraction, but they're symptoms of undefined decision rights and a misunderstanding about marketing being the translation layer between strategic intent and market reality. How so?

1. Strategy decides where to play and how to win, and marketing turns those decisions into customer preference at scale. The interface is iterative, with strategy providing focus, marketing providing market feedback, and together they refine choices as conditions change.

2. Sales operates in the realm of specific opportunities and human relationships, and marketing operates in the realm of systems, including segmentation, positioning, demand creation, and scaled communication. Where the boundary sits depends on your business model. For example, in self-serve products, marketing owns most conversions. In complex B2B, marketing creates credibility and qualified demand, with sales owning the close.

3. Product builds the thing customers use, and marketing translates what it does into language customers understand and want. This boundary is blurring where onboarding is teaching, in-product prompts are persuasion, and usage patterns drive retention. But two failure modes dominate when overpromising creates churn and underselling leaves value on the table.

When the interfaces work, you get a clean chain of logic with links that look like strategy choosing the arena, product building usable value, marketing creating preference, efficient demand, and sales deepening conversion, where humans add leverage. Every organization will implement this differently, but each one should make the responsibilities explicit enough that gaps and overlaps become visible.

Ambiguity feels safe until outcomes suffer, and clarity feels uncomfortable until it produces results. Trade safe for tolerable discomfort and see what happens to you.

PS Everything gets easier when you walk away from the hubris of everyone. Your work is not for everyone. It’s only for those who signed up for the journey.