Marketing as a specialised function is a fallacy

In an ideal world, no business would have 'a marketing department'.

Marketing is not a specialisation that should sit as a functional department somewhere within a business. Parting marketing out and putting it somewhere like this might work nicely when it comes to assigning budget to the function, but thinking of marketing in this way is hugely problematic. Coupled to this - isolating sales as a separate function apart from marketing is also baffling. A customer can only be classified as such once they have engaged with you on a commercial basis, so conversion is a critical part of the customer journey over which marketing presides.

For any business survival depends on attracting and keeping customers. Customers are where sales come from, so getting and serving customers is what keeps the proverbial 'air flowing briskly under the wings of the organisation'. If the speed of 'the air flow under these wings slows down, the plane falls out of the sky'. (This BTW isn't just our subjective musing on the matter, there is empirical evidence to back up the statement and if you are not spending money on maintaining your share of voice in the marketplace with constant, impactful and salient brand communication [which as you know is just one part of the vital marketing mix], you are willingly choosing to reduce your market share to competitors. You are conceding customers and sales to the competitive rivalries that your brand faces. These aren't our rules, but everyone needs to be aware of them).

Marketing is what the organisation is and does from the customer's point of view. That's not the responsibility of a single department, it's what the whole organisation does to stay in business. The same can be said for innovation. If you're innovation pipeline is assigned to a silo'ed group within the business, it's almost 100% guaranteed that you're not an innovative business. Without constant innovation a business faces the same fate; a withering of commercial relevance in an ever evolving competitive landscape.

Just like a pilot would do when facing headwinds and challenges ahead, the route out of trouble is to commit even more resources to marketing and innovation not withdraw power from these important areas. This madness however only becomes as possible error in waiting when marketing is classified as a department from which oxygen can be throttled. You wouldn't suffocate yourself to death, would you?

Without an increasing number of customers under your active curation, your business is dead; everything other than marketing and innovation is a 'nice to have'.