‘Work out what matters’: Marketing leaders on finding clarity in role
In the latest episode of The Lowdown, Festival of Marketing speakers share their advice for marketers navigating a confidence of clarity in their work.
· Marketing WeekBy Molly Innes 22 Sep 2026 7:00 am
Is marketing in a confidence crisis? It’s something Mark Given, Sainsbury’s chief technology, data and marketing officer urged the industry to address in July as he stepped into the ISBA president role.
However, perhaps the issue is a lack of clarity about marketing’s role.
As Andrew Garrihy, CMO at OLX and career coach, outlined in the latest episode of Marketing Week’s webinar series The Lowdown, ahead of the Festival of Marketing on 14 October, “I think there is a challenge with confidence, but I think it’s misdiagnosed. I think the real problem is a lack of clarity right now.”
He described confidence as a “lagging indicator”, because in marketing, “we have a lot of things that are not clear”.
Businesses are going through a period of a lack of clarity, he argues. “A lot of businesses at the moment are not super clear on what they need from marketing. The world has changed really rapidly,” he added, noting war, economic crisis and technological disruption amongst factors.
Because of these headwinds, there isn’t “real clarity” on what businesses need from marketers.
Garrihy will be offering one-to-one masterclasses at the Festival of Marketing. He was joined on The Lowdown panel by fellow Festival of Marketing speakers, Emma Harris, founder and CEO of Glow London, and Ifeoma Jibunoh, former CMO of Cassava Technologies.
ISBA president Mark Given calls on marketers to address ‘crisis of confidence’
Jibunoh believes the crisis of clarity is compounding with “a crisis of contribution and a crisis of connection”.
“Do we know what we’re trying to achieve? Does the company know what it’s trying to achieve? Are we ensuring that marketing is making the right contribution that has an impact? And are we ensuring that marketing is the connective tissue in the organisation?” are all questions she suggested marketers ask themselves.
Harris argued marketers need to “work out what matters”, however “obvious” that might sound.
“You’ve got to work out what it is you’re doing, and that sounds really obvious. But I think there’s so much swirl going on in the industry at the moment because there’s panic,” she said, noting that marketing has gone down the “funnel of performance” meaning “everything is immediate” rather than long-term.
When faced with a leadership team, Harris’s first questions are: “What is it we’re doing, and who are we?”, she said.
“You’ll get different answers from different leaders,” she said. “So it’s that clarity at the beginning [that’s important].”
Finding clarity
While marketers’ relationships with their C-Suite can clearly be a sticking point for their sense of clarity in their role, what is less clear is how they can practically mend those relationships.
“The disconnect often happens with the CEO and the CMO,” said Jibunoh, who argues that the two are “working to a different time frame”.
“They’re working to a different clock, oftentimes. The CEO has to report in terms of business results in quarters, and the reality is that brands are not built in quarters,” she outlined. “So that disconnect in relation to timing and in relation to deliverables, often causes a degree of tension.”
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She urged marketers to “embrace the time frame that is relevant for your different stakeholders”. This means demonstrating “concrete, bottom line revenue growth” and KPIs that are reported in quarters. “You also have to be able to take your stakeholders on the journey to understand that there is a long-term, value creation journey,” she said.
To manage the disconnect on timelines, she believes delivering to the quarterly schedule while being transparent on the “longer-time frame” needed for marketing, “ensures that you are doing the right things to ensure you unlock that longer-term value creation”.
Another perennial issue in marketing is the tension between marketers and non-marketers regarding input and understanding what the function does.
Garrihy notes that marketers “don’t need” to try and “educate” the wider business on what marketing’s job is.
“Marketing’s our job. Our job is to influence the business, not educate – I think that’s a big thing for marketers,” he said. “We should influence based on our results, based on the commercial impact, but we shouldn’t educate.
It’s something Jibunoh also noted. “A friction that I’ve seen is in relation to organisations not really understanding what marketing is there to do. So yes, it’s not our job to educate, but a lot of times you have C-suite stakeholders who don’t really understand the role of marketing,” she said.
“So there is a degree of evangelising, maybe not educating, but evangelising that is required to demonstrate the connection marketing has to the bottom line.”
She explained her most “successful” relationships with the C-suite happen when others have a commercial background. However, the success of a CMO can’t rely on a “marketing literate CEO”.
Register for The Lowdown via the Marketing Week website, and visit the Festival of Marketing site to buy passes for this year’s event.