Why Marketing Is Too Important to Leave to the Marketers
- Raffles Jakarta
- Aug 4
- 7 min read
In many businesses, marketing is a room down the hall. It is the team that creates the perfect logo, runs the advertising, manages the social accounts, and is called in near the end of a project to "package" whatever product the team has already decided to build. Everyone else, from finance to operations, engineering, and the corner office, regards marketing as someone else's responsibility, a specialized function to admire from afar but leave alone.
And in many of those same businesses, customers are quietly leaving because marketing is failing to answer the one question it should: what do customers actually need? was never provided the opportunity to influence any significant decisions. The product was designed without it. The price was set without it.
The service model was designed without it. By the time marketing received the finished product to promote, every meaningful decision had already been made by people who thought the customer was someone apart from David Packard, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard who coined the phrase that this piece is titled after and whom people almost always misinterpret. It sounds like a jab at marketers, as if they can't be trusted with their subject. It means the opposite.
Marketing is too important for a single department to handle, because understanding the customer is not a functional specialty. It is the enterprise's orientation, and treating it otherwise is one of the most costly mistakes a company can make.
Marketing was never meant to be a department
The concept that marketing is a company-wide philosophy rather than a functional silo is well-established in management theory. It is as old as modern management itself. The argument is made clearly in the field's foundational text: marketing is not a specialized activity at all, but rather the entire business as seen through the lens of its final result, i.e., from the customer's perspective (Drucker, 1954). Seventy years ago, the field urged managers to abandon the specialized functional notion of marketing and instead view it as the organization's animating purpose.
The same source provides the clearest explanation of why. Because the goal of a business is to acquire customers, an enterprise has only two basic functions: marketing and innovation (Drucker, 1954).
Everything else—finance, operations, and administration—is a cost center that supports these two functions. If marketing is the creation of a customer, it cannot belong to a department in the same way that "making money" can belong solely to the accounting team.
Marketing is not the department that promotes what the company built. It is the discipline of building what the customer will actually want.
Why marketing is too important to belong to one department
What happens when a company forgets this lesson? The consequences have been well documented, and the phenomenon even has a name. In the single most reprinted article in the history of its journal, the failure is precisely diagnosed: companies and entire industries decline not because demand disappears, but because management defines the business too narrowly, focusing on its product rather than its customers' needs.
In the famous example, railroads failed because they believed they were in the railroad business rather than the transportation business, and as a result, they watched customers leave for cars and planes without ever seeing themselves as competitors in the market they were in.
The most important point is that this myopia is not a marketing department error. It is an organizational-wide failure of orientation, a failure at the top, in which the entire company has confused what it produces with the need it serves (Levitt, 1960). And it's not a historical curiosity. The same trap still claims companies today, precisely because the customer-centered perspective is the first thing to go when an organization falls in love with its product (Gallo, 2016).
This phenomenon exemplifies why marketing is far too important to be left to marketers: myopia takes hold in the very functions that believe marketing has no bearing on them.
The evidence: customer focus is a companywide capability.
This evidence is more than just a philosophical or cautionary tale; it is measured. The most influential empirical strand of marketing research defines "market orientation" not as a departmental activity but as an organizational-wide capability: the generation of intelligence about customers and competitors, its dissemination across departments, and the organization's responsiveness to it (Kohli and Jaworski, 1990). The definition is structural.
According to this definition, market orientation excludes marketing intelligence that never leaves the marketing team.
The payoff is real. Researchers studied 140 business units and discovered that market orientation had a significant, positive effect on profitability, with interfunctional coordination—the deliberate involvement of functions apart from marketing— as one of its three core components (Narver & Slater, 1990).
Companies that win with customers are those where everyone cares about them. According to one influential essay, marketing is a way of doing business rather than a function (McKenna, 1991).
A market orientation is not the size of your marketing team. It is how much of the rest of the company thinks about the customer at all.
What happens when marketing stays in its lane
Modern evidence sharpens the same point and assigns numbers to it. According to recent research, companies that pursue genuine customer-led growth outperform their peers significantly, and value is increasingly derived from deepening relationships with existing customers rather than constantly buying new ones.
Crucially, the same work explicitly states that this outcome cannot be achieved through a silo: it necessitates a cross-functional operating model because the customer's actual experience runs directly through product, operations, service, and finance, not just marketing.
Crucially, the same work explicitly states that this outcome cannot be achieved through a silo: it necessitates a cross-functional operating model because the customer's actual experience runs directly through product, operations, service, and finance, not just marketing.
This is the practical heart of the problem. This is the practical heart of the problem. A customer's journey is built from decisions made throughout the organization, such as the ease of the purchasing process, the dependability of delivery, the tone of a support call, and the fairness of a renewal price.
Every one of those is a marketing decision in effect, whatever the org chart calls the person making it. When marketing is quarantined in a department, the journey that crosses every function ends up owned by no one, and the company delivers an experience designed by multiple teams.
Which is why it belongs to every manager, not only marketers
Put the argument together, and the conclusion is unavoidable. A manager in operations who streamlines a process, a manager in finance who sets a pricing rule, and a manager in product who cuts a feature—each is shaping the customer's experience and therefore doing marketing, whether they intend to or not. The only question is whether they are doing it well or badly, with the customer in mind or without.
That is why the capability cannot be delegated: it is distributed across every function by the very nature of the work.
The good news is that the underlying skill—the habit of framing a decision from the customer's perspective and reasoning about the true market you are in—can be learned rather than innate. The analytical and customer-facing capabilities required for this role are among the most important skills ranked by the world's largest employers, and they can be intentionally developed (World Economic Forum, 2025). The manager who acquires them stops treating marketing as a room down the hall and begins to view it as part of their job.
Where managers learn to think like the customer
This environment is where a broad postgraduate business education earns its place, and it is worth being precise about what it offers. It does not turn every manager into a marketer. What it does is give managers from every function the customer lens that the discipline of marketing exists to protect, so that the question of what the market actually needs is present in every room where decisions are made, not just the one with "marketing" on the door.
That breadth is the design of the Raffles Jakarta MBA.
Marketing Management and Strategy is placed next to Strategic Management, Organizational Behavior, and the financial and economic modules so that a manager learns to combine the customer's perspective with the numbers, operations, and strategy instead of treating them as separate worlds.
The result is a graduate who can carry the market orientation into whichever function they lead.
It is a one-year Master of Business Administration program taught entirely in English on Jalan M.H. Thamrin in Central Jakarta, with four intakes a year, in January, April, July, and October, and a choice of studying on campus or in a hybrid format that lets working professionals keep their careers moving while they study.
As part of Raffles Education, founded in Singapore in 1990 and now operating 16 colleges across 14 cities in nine countries, a degree earned here sits inside an international network rather than a single market (Raffles Jakarta, 2026a).
Everyone's job, or no one's
Marketing is too important to be left to marketers or any single team. Companies that treat the customer's needs as a private concern of one department end up with a product built in the dark, a journey owned by no one, and a slow, unexamined descent into the myopia that has claimed so many seemingly unassailable businesses.
Companies that thrive do the opposite. They make the customer everyone's concern, allow market orientation to permeate every function, and expect all of their managers to be fluent enough in marketing to ask the question on which the entire enterprise is built. Learning to see the business through the customer's eyes, from wherever you happen to be, does not limit a manager's responsibilities. It is one of the most obvious ways to think bigger (Raffles Jakarta, 2026b).
Marketing Manager
THINK BIGGER, READ MORE
References
Drucker, P. F. (1954). The practice of management. Harper & Row. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Practice_of_Management.html?id=D2QqCI-eZoIC
Gallo, A. (2016, August 22). A refresher on marketing myopia. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2016/08/a-refresher-on-marketing-myopia
Kohli, A. K., & Jaworski, B. J. (1990). Market orientation: The construct, research propositions, and managerial implications. Journal of Marketing, 54(2), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299005400201
Levitt, T. (1960). Marketing myopia. Harvard Business Review, 38(4), 45–56. https://hbr.org/2004/07/marketing-myopia
McKenna, R. (1991). Marketing is everything. Harvard Business Review, 69(1), 65–79. https://hbr.org/1991/01/marketing-is-everything
McKinsey & Company. (2023). Experience-led growth: A new way to create value. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/experience-led-growth-a-new-way-to-create-value
Narver, J. C., & Slater, S. F. (1990). The effect of a market orientation on business profitability. Journal of Marketing, 54(4), 20–35. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299005400403
World Economic Forum. (2025). The Future of Jobs Report 2025. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/
Raffles Jakarta. (2026a). Master of Business Administration. https://www.raffles-indonesia.com/mba
Raffles Jakarta. (2026b). Think bigger: The Raffles Jakarta MBA 2026. https://www.raffles-indonesia.com/think-bigger-mba-jakarta
