The Founder’s Job in Marketing Strategy

There’s a recurring confusion in how marketing strategy gets handled in small and medium businesses, and it’s about whose job it is. The confusion isn’t about who executes, that part is usually clear. It’s about who owns the strategic layer, the part where the choices get made about who the business is for, what it offers them, and what the marketing function exists to accomplish.

In a healthy structure, that ownership lives with someone who has the time, the experience, and the authority to hold it consistently over time. In many small and medium businesses, no one is explicitly responsible for it, which means it ends up either with the founder, who doesn’t have the time to hold it well, or with the execution layer, which doesn’t have the scope to do it from where they sit. The strategic layer drifts, and the symptoms show up downstream.

The founder’s actual job in marketing strategy, if it’s been set up correctly, is to be the source of certain inputs that no one else can provide: what the business is genuinely trying to achieve commercially, what they know about their customers from direct contact that hasn’t been formalized yet, what constraints are real versus negotiable, what the longer-term vision is for the business and how marketing should serve it. These inputs require the founder, they can’t be outsourced.

What the founder shouldn’t be doing, if there’s a senior marketing function in place, is writing the strategy itself, building the briefs, evaluating the day-to-day execution, or making the operational calls. Those belong to someone else, and the founder doing them is a sign that the strategic layer isn’t actually owned by anyone other than them.

This distinction matters because it tells you whether you have a staffing problem or a clarity problem. A founder doing all of this work because there’s no one else to do it has a staffing problem, which means the next move is to fill the role appropriately. A founder doing all of this work despite having someone in the role has a clarity problem, which means the role isn’t being held the way it needs to be, and that’s a different conversation.

Getting clear about what the founder’s job in marketing actually is, and isn’t, makes most of the staffing and structural decisions much easier. It also tends to reveal that the founder has been doing significantly more of this work than they should have been, which is information worth having.

Of the marketing decisions you’re currently making, how many would you be making if there were a senior marketing function in place?