Why don't more marketing people get on the board?

Recently I was presenting to the Finance Director of a big public company and he said that he had been very interested in the presentation because, and these are his words, he was “a closet marketing person”. He had started his career as a brand manager and I asked him why he had gone into the closet. He said he had looked at the board directors of his company and seen that none of them were from a marketing background. He was ambitious and figured that if he wanted to get into general management he would have to take a different route, and so he switched to finance. Why, I said, do boards not have more marketing people? He thought for a moment, “I don’t think that they’re taken seriously at board level.”

When I was starting out in the advertising world I was invited to a training course at one of my clients. It was a general management course given to young high-fliers in the company and I was the first outsider that had ever been invited to it. What struck me most forcibly during the time I was there was the contempt shown to the marketing function, my clients, by other people in the company. The most common gibe was that marketing people spent all their time being wined and dined by the agencies and worrying about “pretty pictures”, while everyone else got on with the real, and rather more boring, business of making and selling things.

I am sure this was partly jealousy, but looking back, what is more worrying was the ignorance of what marketing people do and why it matters. I think that this ignorance extends to the boards of most companies, and of course it is to some extent fostered by marketing people themselves. Locked in ivory towers, somewhat removed from the day to day realities of the business, marketing people are free to “do marketing”, but equally not free to take a wider role in the management of the business.

There seems to me to be an almost wilful disregard in most boardrooms of the fact that a high proportion of the value of their company, 40% on average according to recent studies, is made up of intangibles, the very thing with which marketing people are most concerned. Senior company managers are almost exclusively financial engineers, and look where that’s got us. Few companies position themselves to the markets as experts in the management and exploitation of brands, I can think of a few - Diageo, P&G, Unilever, Virgin, LVMH - yet in truth all companies are to a greater or lesser extent in the brand management business.
There is no easy way to get marketing Directors onto the board of big companies, but here are a few thoughts for budding marketing directors:

1. Talk to your board in strategic, even visionary terms, and back this up with thorough analysis of the real business issues.
2. Demonstrate and promote the strategic value of marketing and the link between good marketing and underlying revenue growth and show how marketing innovation is a vital component of success.
3. Once you are on the board bully business schools to stop presenting marketing as simply the “4 Ps”, and start teaching it in more strategic terms. More Porter and less Pooter.

Perhaps if we can all preach the strategic value of marketing then in the future talented marketing people won’t have to go into the closet to get ahead.