Marketing isn’t a cost center anymore

For most of its history, marketing lived on the expense side of the ledger. It was the function that built awareness and made the company look good. Its budget was treated accordingly: nice to have, first to cut, hard to defend in a downturn. But that era is ending. There is growing consensus that marketing’s role has shifted and that its job now is to help drive the business and align more closely with sales and its KPIs. A recent survey of senior B2B marketing leaders we conducted with Harr...