Marketing: Growth Engine or Cost Centre?
Is marketing a cost to be controlled or the engine that drives sustainable growth? It's the question that defines a marketing leader's career and determines the success of most companies.
Ross Hastings and Kieran Antill
Co-Founders, Ne-Lo and Anatomy of Marketing Training
The cost-versus-growth debate isn't really about budgets, ROI or attribution. It is about common language, and how the modern company is organised.
This article is part of The Repositioning Review, Ne-Lo's monthly newsletter on repositioning strategy. Published June 2026.
Few phrases shrink managerial imagination faster than "marketing spend." Once uttered, the conversation slides toward efficiency: reduced headcount, smaller media budget, more dashboards, more leads, and the faint hope that AI might do the rest.
The boardroom mood is drifting against marketing's case. Boathouse's annual CEO study found 60% of US CEOs now classify marketing as a cost centre, up from 35% a year earlier. McKinsey's 2025 CMO's Comeback reports just 70% of CEOs now believe marketing's role is clearly defined at the top table, down from 90%. The CMO tenure is notoriously low, somewhere around four years.
But if marketing is the discipline by which a company understands demand, designs value, prices it, distributes it, makes it easy to choose and easy to remember, and captures that value profitably, then calling it a cost centre is like calling the cardiovascular system a plumbing expense.
Yet the evidence does not support a retreat. HBR has argued that companies putting marketing at the core of growth strategy outperform competitors. McKinsey found that B2C companies prioritising marketing were three times more likely to achieve revenue growth above 5%, while B2B companies doing so were more than twice as likely.
So who's right? The honest answer is that marketers and boards are arguing about different things without realising it. The cost-versus-growth debate isn't really about budgets, ROI or attribution. It is about common language, and beyond that, about how the modern company is organised.
The reductive view: marketing as the colouring-in department
Define marketing narrowly, as the ads, the brochure-ware, the social posts, events, sponsorship, and the case for "cost centre" is strong. Under that definition, marketing is downstream of strategy, product, pricing and distribution. It dresses up decisions other people have already made.
It is a discretionary expense. Something that can be paused without anything obvious breaking for a quarter or two. It gets cut first in a downturn and credited last in a recovery.
A lot of marketing looks expensive because it begins at the end. The business buys the visible artefact: the campaign, the media plan, the website, the rebrand, the launch event. But the value is created upstream. In choices about where to play, how to win, whom to serve, what to charge, how to distribute, and how to build memory and trust over time. The visible work matters, but it is the execution orchestrated by the system of decisions, not the system itself.
Long live the 4Ps. Just stop pretending one department owns them
The discipline of marketing is much older than the department that bears its name. When McCarthy formalised the 4Ps of Product, Price, Place, and Promotion, one team genuinely controlled most of the relevant levers. Sixty years on, that is no longer the case.
Pricing often sits in finance. Product sits in product teams. Place spans channels, retail, marketplaces, partnerships, and ecommerce. Promotion has fragmented into brand, media, CRM, content, social, lifecycle, PR, performance, influencers, and partnerships. The function is now horizontal. The management system is still vertical.
Worse, one of those verticals is still called "marketing," which gives everyone else permission to treat the rest of the mix as somebody else's problem. Marketing has a brand problem. It gets reduced to promotion because the name of the department has trapped the meaning of the function.
So we end up making our org structure the customer's problem. The customer doesn't care that pricing reports to the CFO and the website to digital. They experience one perception of value across every touchpoint, and they decide accordingly.
As Roger Martin has argued, when companies carve a single commercial logic into sub-strategies like go-to-market strategy, growth strategy, and brand strategy, they get partial ownership, vague accountability, and a fine excuse for functions to blame each other when results disappoint.
Marketing teams get held accountable for revenue outcomes that depend on product, price, and distribution decisions they don't control. Each function is locally rational but the outcome is globally incoherent. The modern CMO's job has become, in effect, impossible by design: accountable for enterprise-wide outcomes, but with authority over only a subset of the levers.
No, AI won't rescue you
AI does not fix a broken marketing system. It scales it.
If the strategy is vague, AI helps you produce vague signals faster. If brand understanding is inconsistent, it amplifies that inconsistency. If teams disagree about what marketing is, AI doesn't resolve that, it industrialises the output of that disagreement. More investment in AI doesn't create leverage. It creates faster, more efficient fragmentation.
What AI has done is raise the value of having a clear map for marketing, and raise the cost of not having one.
What good looks like
The diagnosis is systemic and structural. The solutions need to be as well.
Three tempting but rarely successful fixes: centralise everything under one imperial CMO and you get a bigger silo. Democratise everything into endless cross-functional consensus and you get paralysis. Rename roles (Chief Growth Officer, Chief Experience Officer) and you usually move the ambiguity rather than resolve it. These are band-aids on a broken engine.
The more boring, less immediate, and far more useful fixes are these.
Set shared, cross-functional outcomes that outrank departmental KPIs. Start with a small number of growth outcomes that matter most: share of category, customer lifetime value, pricing power, purchase frequency. These are outcomes no single function can deliver alone. If incentives still reward teams for optimising their own area, the customer will continue to experience the disconnect.
Maintain common language inside specialisms and a universal language across them. Specialist teams will always develop their own language. But what works within a function creates friction across functions. Common language enables teams. Universal language enables organisations. Without it, cross-functional collaboration becomes a translation exercise.
Give the enterprise a shared map of the work. Not another framework or acronym, but a map. Something that simplifies complexity without ignoring it, and shows how decisions connect across the system.
This is the gap that prompted us to build the Anatomy of Marketing: a map for marketing that uses human anatomy as a metaphor for company-wide marketing. Company strategy as the brain. Brand strategy as the heart. Brand expression as the musculoskeletal system. Execution as the face. Investment as the bloodflow. Data and insights as the senses. Six interdependent systems working together to take value to market. You don't have to use this specific model. But you do need a shared map. Most organisations don't yet have one.
So, what's the answer?
Marketing is a cost driver if you let it be one. Define it small, structure for it to be small, measure it small, and you'll get a small, expensive, sub-scale function that struggles to justify its line item every year.
Define it the way the evidence insists you should, and organise the company around that definition, and it stops being a growth engine and becomes the growth engine. Not the only contributor to growth but the only function whose entire job is to orchestrate the levers that determine whether a business grows.
Cost or growth was never really a choice between two ways of valuing marketing. It is a choice between two ways of defining it, and then organising for it. Brand, in the end, is not what the marketing department says. It is what the business repeatedly does. The companies pulling away from their competitors have already worked out which conversation they're in.
