How CEOs Should Evaluate Marketing—Without Defaulting to More Tactics
When “What Should We Do Next?” Is the Wrong Question
When marketing performance starts to feel shaky, most CEOs move quickly to action.
They ask:
Should we increase spend?
Should we change agencies?
Should we add a new channel?
Should we refresh the brand?
Should we hire someone more senior?
These questions are understandable. They feel decisive. They feel responsible.
They are also premature.
In reality, when marketing is underperforming—or simply underwhelming—the most important work is not deciding what to do next, but understanding what is actually happening now.
Because until marketing is evaluated clearly, any new tactic is just another variable layered onto an already unclear system.
And complexity is rarely the solution to confusion.
Why CEOs Feel Pressure to “Do Something” in Marketing
Marketing occupies an uncomfortable space in growing companies.
It is:
Highly visible
Expensive
Emotionally charged
Closely tied to growth expectations
Unlike operations or finance, marketing performance is rarely binary. It exists in gray areas—momentum, attribution, lagging indicators, and future promise.
This creates pressure.
When results slow, leadership feels compelled to act—even when the underlying issue isn’t obvious.
So organizations default to motion.
More activity.
More output.
More tools.
More campaigns.
But activity is not evaluation. And motion without clarity often makes the real problem harder to see.
The Core Mistake: Treating Marketing Like a Collection of Tactics
One of the most damaging assumptions CEOs make—often unintentionally—is viewing marketing as a set of disconnected efforts rather than a system.
This shows up when leaders evaluate marketing through questions like:
How are paid ads doing?
Is email performing?
Is social media worth it?
Should we try influencer marketing?
These questions are not wrong—but they are incomplete.
They assume marketing performance lives at the channel level.
In reality, marketing performance lives at the system level.
Channels don’t succeed or fail in isolation. They succeed or fail based on:
Strategic intent
Audience clarity
Resource allocation
Measurement discipline
Decision cadence
Without evaluating those elements, channel performance data becomes misleading.
What Real Marketing Evaluation Actually Requires
A proper marketing evaluation does not start with dashboards.
It starts with context.
Specifically:
Business objectives
Growth constraints
Competitive reality
Organizational maturity
Without that context, metrics are just numbers.
Evaluation asks not just what happened, but:
Why did it happen?
Does it matter?
What does it tell us about the system?
What decision should change as a result?
Most organizations never slow down enough to answer those questions.
The CEO’s Role in Marketing Evaluation (And Why It Can’t Be Delegated)
This is where many leaders disengage too early.
They assume evaluation is:
A marketing team responsibility
An agency deliverable
A reporting exercise
It’s not.
Marketing evaluation is a leadership function, because it requires business judgment—not just marketing knowledge.
Only leadership can determine:
Which outcomes matter most right now
What trade-offs are acceptable
Where risk should be taken—or avoided
How marketing supports broader strategy
When CEOs abdicate this role, marketing teams fill the gap with activity.
Not because they’re ineffective—but because no one has defined the system they’re operating within.
A CEO-Level Framework for Evaluating Marketing (Expanded)
Below is the framework I use when evaluating marketing with leadership teams. This is intentionally not a checklist. It’s a way of thinking.
1. Is Marketing Explicitly Anchored to Business Strategy—or Loosely Supporting It?
Most marketing teams believe they are aligned to the business.
Most leadership teams believe marketing understands the strategy.
Both are often wrong.
True alignment means marketing can clearly answer:
What growth problem are we solving right now?
Who is the priority customer for that growth?
What behavior must change for growth to occur?
How does marketing influence that behavior?
If those answers aren’t clear, marketing is operating on assumptions.
And assumptions compound risk.
2. Do We Know What Marketing Is Accountable For—And What It Isn’t?
Ambiguity in accountability creates two problems:
Marketing gets blamed for things it doesn’t control
Marketing avoids ownership where clarity is lacking
Smart evaluation separates:
Revenue influence vs. revenue ownership
Short-term demand vs. long-term brand
Efficiency vs. scale
Without this separation, performance conversations become emotional instead of productive.
3. Are We Measuring to Learn—or Measuring to Justify?
This is a subtle but critical distinction.
Many marketing organizations measure performance defensively.
Metrics are used to:
Prove activity
Defend spend
Justify decisions already made
Evaluation-driven organizations measure to learn.
They expect metrics to:
Challenge assumptions
Reveal trade-offs
Inform reallocation
Shape future strategy
If metrics never lead to decisions changing, they aren’t doing their job.
4. Do We Understand Diminishing Returns?
One of the most common evaluation blind spots is diminishing returns.
Channels rarely fail dramatically. They plateau.
Performance stabilizes.
Costs creep up.
Incremental gains shrink.
Without evaluation discipline, organizations continue investing in “good enough” performance long after it stops driving meaningful growth.
Smart evaluation forces uncomfortable questions:
Is this still the best use of capital?
What opportunity cost are we ignoring?
Are we optimizing—or avoiding change?
5. Can We Clearly Identify What to Stop, Pause, or Reduce?
This is where evaluation becomes real.
Most companies can list:
What they want to try next
What they want to improve
What they want more of
Very few can confidently say:
What they should stop
What no longer fits the strategy
What success would not look like
If evaluation never leads to subtraction, it isn’t honest.
6. Is Marketing Decision-Making Proactive—or Crisis-Driven?
This is one of the clearest indicators of system health.
Ask:
Are decisions made on a regular cadence?
Or only when performance dips?
Reactive decision-making creates volatility:
Constant pivots
Short-term thinking
Team fatigue
Loss of strategic confidence
Evaluation should reduce urgency—not create it.
7. Do Leadership and Marketing Tell the Same Story?
This deserves more emphasis.
Ask leadership and marketing independently:
What is our marketing strategy?
What are we prioritizing?
What are we deprioritizing?
What does success look like in 6–12 months?
If the answers don’t align, no amount of execution will fix the gap.
Why This Level of Evaluation Feels So Hard
This kind of evaluation requires:
Slowing down when pressure says speed up
Admitting uncertainty
Letting go of sunk costs
Challenging legacy decisions
That’s uncomfortable.
It’s also why most organizations avoid it.
Instead, they keep moving—hoping motion will outrun clarity.
It never does.
What Happens When Marketing Is Evaluated Correctly
When CEOs commit to evaluating marketing at the system level, several things change:
Conversations become calmer and more strategic
Marketing teams gain direction and confidence
Resources get allocated more intentionally
Leaders regain trust in marketing as a growth lever
Most importantly, marketing stops feeling chaotic.
It becomes manageable.
Why This Matters Now (More Than Ever)
In today’s environment:
Customer acquisition is more expensive
Loyalty is harder to sustain
Channels are noisier
Margins are tighter
There is less room for inefficiency and guesswork.
Companies that scale over the next decade will not be the ones that “do more marketing.”
They will be the ones that evaluate better.
Closing Thought
The most expensive marketing decision is not choosing the wrong tactic.
It’s failing to evaluate the system before choosing at all.
CEOs who take the time to understand how marketing is actually operating—before demanding more output—build companies that grow with confidence, not chaos.
And that is what sustainable growth looks like.
