This week, I’m sharing a 5-part series that will run all week to talk about why marketing fails. 

The primary reason is that it fails at the top, which was summed up well by Dave Gerhardt when he said, “Life’s too short to work for a CEO who doesn’t get marketing.”

Yesterday, I shared the reason why many CEOs fail to understand the struggles of marketing – because they may not be practicing it themselves.

However, one of the biggest complaints that marketing teams have about their CEO is that they have no patience.

Even if CEOs perceive the need for patience and agree to prioritize it, they often tend to lose it if they don’t really get marketing.

This is often the case when a CEO looks at marketing as sales and expects it to generate revenue within the next month or quarter. 

Soon enough, when revenue and target numbers struggle, the first victim of the squeeze is marketing.

This is not just unfair, but often even stupid, because if you really need to cut expenses you need to trim your expenses, not kill the goose which might be laying the most cost-effective egg to sell more products.

If your CEO has been patient with your marketing efforts, stop reading this post and go and appreciate him/her right away!

If your CEO isn’t patient with your marketing efforts, help align expectations and create backup plans to switch priorities to other marketing activities instead of getting them canceled.