This one is not for marketers. It’s for my fellow Non-Executives, and for anyone who sits on a board and suspects the marketing conversation is thinner than it should be, but doesn’t feel equipped to challenge it. Good news: you don’t need marketing expertise to govern marketing well. You need a short list of questions that expose whether it’s working, and the patience to keep asking them. Here is mine.
“If we stopped this activity tomorrow, what would change, and when would we notice?”
This is the single most useful marketing question a board can ask, because it separates activity that earns its keep from activity that merely continues. Some things have a good answer: stop this and pipeline thins within a month. Some have an honest slow answer: stop this and the brand quietly weakens over a year, and here’s how we’d see it. And some have no answer at all, which is itself the answer. You are not asking to be difficult. You are asking the question the budget deserves.
“Where does our revenue actually come from, and does our spend match?”
Ask for the map: which channels, relationships and activities originate the business we actually win, and how the marketing budget distributes against them. In a surprising number of businesses the two barely correlate, spend follows habit and visibility while revenue follows referrals and relationships nobody is investing in. You don’t need to know how any channel works to spot that mismatch. You just need to see both numbers on the same page.
“What does a customer cost us to win, and which way is it moving?”
One number, tracked over time. If the cost of winning a customer is rising, the board needs to know why: market getting harder, marketing getting weaker, or growth outrunning the easy wins. If nobody can produce the number, that tells you where to start. A board that watches this single figure quarterly governs marketing better than one reviewing forty slides of campaign detail.
“Who owns the outcome, and would they say so?”
Not “who does the marketing” but who is accountable for whether it works, by name. In many businesses the honest answer is nobody: activity is owned, outcomes are orphaned. The follow-up matters too: does that person have the seniority and authority to change what isn’t working, or only to report it? Accountability without authority is decoration.
“What have we decided not to do?”
Strategy is choice, and choice shows up as things deliberately not done. If the marketing plan contains everything, every channel, every audience, every idea, then no choices have been made, and a plan without choices is a list. The strongest sign of real marketing strategy I know is a confident answer to this question. The weakest is a pause followed by “well, we try to cover everything.” Budgets – The Hard Choices Behind Strategy explores the same principle from a strategic perspective.
Why these five work
Notice what none of them require: no channel knowledge, no jargon, no opinion on creative. They are governance questions wearing marketing clothes, the same discipline a board applies to any function, applied to the one function that most often escapes it. In my experience the businesses whose boards ask them do not necessarily spend more on marketing. They waste less, demand more, and get a function that behaves like it reports to a board, because it does.
