Too many times Marketing is the whipping boy – caught between Engineering who founded the company and Sales who keep it alive. Don’t get me started on your observation that VPMs seem to be losing their seat on the management team!

You are right to focus on the customer. Marketing in our 2.0 world is equal parts consistency and experimentation – and those are hard to balance. Building a brand is all about making promises to customers and then consistently fulfilling them. It grows organically from who you are, what you do well and what your customers perceive as your unique differentiation. But given today’s tectonic shifts in marketing as a practice, it also needs to be about experimentation – trying different stuff and measuring the results in quick hit cycles.

Too many engineering centric or financially ground CEOs strive for “complete & correct” over the organic creativity that is the hallmark of vibrant marketing. What do you expect from an industry enamored of terms such as “Marketing Operations” or “Market Engineering”. Ugh!