Marketing without business understanding is just noise because marketing amplifies whatever is already true. If the offer is strong, the customer is clear and the commercial model works, marketing can accelerate growth. If the offer is weak, the economics do not make sense or the business cannot convert demand, marketing can simply make the problem louder and more expensive.
I have never been very good at looking at a marketing brief and seeing only marketing. If someone tells me they need more leads, I want to know what happens to a lead after it arrives. If they want awareness, I want to know what awareness is supposed to unlock. If they want a rebrand, I want to know what the current brand is preventing the business from doing. Those questions can feel annoyingly commercial when the brief is supposed to be creative. They are also usually where the real strategy starts.
Why does marketing become noise when it does not understand the business?
Because marketing can optimize activity without knowing whether the activity is creating value. A campaign can improve reach, clicks, leads and even sales while still moving the company in the wrong direction if customer quality, margin, retention, capacity or the route to revenue is misunderstood.
McKinsey’s 2025 research on the CMO role describes a widening gap between marketing and business objectives. In its survey, 70% of CEOs said they evaluate marketing using year-over-year revenue growth and margin, while only 35% of CMOs said they track those as top metrics. The same research argues that marketers need a general-manager mindset and a way to translate functional KPIs into business measures such as new customers, revenue or EBITDA. (McKinsey: The CMO’s comeback)
That gap is exactly why a dashboard can look green while the business is worried. Marketing might report lower cost per lead while sales reports that the leads do not convert. Social engagement can climb while the offer loses relevance. Acquisition can grow while the company spends more to acquire a customer than that customer is worth. None of those are “marketing metrics versus business metrics.” They are one system being viewed in pieces.
Marketing is not separate from the business. It is one of the ways the business reaches, persuades and learns from the market.
What does “understanding the business” actually mean?
It does not mean every marketer needs to become a CFO, salesperson, product manager and operations director at the same time. It means knowing enough about the system around marketing to make better choices and to recognize when the brief is describing a symptom instead of the cause.
At Loor Connect, one of the principles we use is simple: the work starts with the business goal, not the deliverable. That means looking beyond what was asked and understanding what actually needs to move. The point is not to make every project bigger. Sometimes understanding the business makes the answer smaller because it removes activity that was never going to change the outcome.
The seven areas I want to understand before the marketing plan
| Area | What marketing needs to know | Why it changes the plan |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Business model | How the company makes money, the main revenue lines, price points and what creates or destroys margin. | Tells you which demand is valuable and which growth can look good while weakening profit. |
| 2. Customer | Who buys, who influences, who uses, what creates trust, what causes hesitation and what customers actually value. | Shapes positioning, audience, message, proof and the moments where marketing can influence a decision. |
| 3. Offer | What is truly differentiated, what is table stakes, where the product is strong, and where the promise can exceed the experience. | Prevents marketing from inventing differentiation that the product cannot support. |
| 4. Growth equation | Is growth expected from acquisition, retention, frequency, price, mix, expansion, new products or new markets? | Changes the job of marketing. “Grow” is not one objective. |
| 5. Route to market | How customers actually buy: ecommerce, retail, sales team, distributor, partner, marketplace or a mix. | Determines where demand should go and what handoffs need to work. |
| 6. Sales and operations | Lead qualification, sales cycle, inventory, capacity, service levels, delivery limits and recurring friction. | Stops marketing from creating demand the business cannot convert or fulfil. |
| 7. Competitive reality | The real alternatives, substitutes, price anchors and reasons customers choose another option or do nothing. | Keeps strategy grounded in the customer’s actual choice, not only the company’s competitor list. |
If I do not understand those seven areas, I can still make a campaign. I just cannot be very confident that I am solving the right problem.
Why customer understanding alone is not enough
Customer insight is essential, but strong marketing also needs to understand the value exchange around that customer. What does the customer gain? What does the business gain? Can the business deliver that value consistently and profitably?
Bain’s Elements of Value work is useful here because it treats value as broader than price or product features. Customers can care about cost reduction and revenue improvement, but also time savings, risk reduction, simplicity, expertise, flexibility and trust. The marketing implication is important: if you do not understand what the business genuinely delivers, you will struggle to communicate value beyond generic claims. (Bain: B2B Elements of Value)
The same issue appears on the other side of the equation. Harvard Business Review described a B2B “value gap” in 2026: companies can create real value for customers while failing to help customers see, measure or defend that value internally. That is not only a sales problem. Marketing needs enough business understanding to turn the real economic and operational value of the offer into proof people can understand. (Harvard Business Review: Do Your B2B Customers See the Value You Deliver?)
What business problems can marketing not fix by itself?
Marketing can influence demand, perception, preference, trust and customer behavior. It can also reveal problems elsewhere in the business. But it cannot permanently compensate for an offer, operating model or commercial system that contradicts the promise.
A weak offer
A stronger campaign can generate more attention for a product people still do not want. Marketing can help reposition, package, research and test the offer, but if the value is genuinely weak, the answer eventually has to reach product, pricing or service design.
Broken sales follow-up
More leads do not solve a slow response time, unclear qualification, inconsistent proposals or a sales team that cannot explain the same value marketing promised. When the conversion break happens after marketing, the fix needs to cross the handoff.
Bad economics
Marketing can lower acquisition cost or improve conversion, but it cannot make unlimited paid acquisition sensible if the customer economics never work. Price, gross margin, retention, cost to serve and repeat behavior matter because “more customers” is not automatically “better business.”
Operational limits
A campaign can create demand faster than inventory, delivery, support or service capacity can handle it. In that situation, marketing success can create a customer-experience problem. The right decision may be to pace demand, change the market or offer, or fix operations before scaling spend.
No real differentiation
If the business has no credible reason to be chosen, creative can make the story more memorable but it cannot create durable differentiation from nothing. Sometimes the marketing job is to help the business discover and express the value. Sometimes the business needs to build more value first.
How do you turn business understanding into better marketing?
Use the business context to decide what marketing is responsible for changing. I use a simple sequence: business outcome, constraint, customer decision, marketing role, execution and evidence. The order matters because it keeps the channel from becoming the strategy.
- Start with the business outcome. Write the change in business language before marketing language. Examples: grow qualified revenue in a segment, increase repeat purchase, improve product mix, enter a market, protect margin, reduce churn or increase utilization of an existing service.
- Find the constraint. Ask what is actually preventing the outcome today. Is it awareness, trust, relevance, distribution, conversion, pricing, product fit, sales follow-up, capacity, retention or something else? Marketing should not volunteer to solve a constraint it cannot influence.
- Define the customer decision that must change. What does someone need to notice, believe, compare, try, choose, repeat or recommend differently for the business outcome to move? This turns a broad business goal into a behavioral marketing problem.
- Choose marketing’s role. Decide whether marketing needs to create demand, capture existing intent, build trust, clarify value, change positioning, support sales, improve the customer journey, strengthen retention or connect several of those jobs.
- Choose the intervention after the role is clear. Now decide on content, paid media, PR, events, partnerships, creators, search, email, website changes, CRM, sales enablement or another tool. The deliverable earns its place because it has a job.
- Agree on the evidence before launch. Define what would prove the idea is working, what would challenge the assumption and what would make you stop or change course. Do not wait until the report to decide what success means.
- Keep the business in the feedback loop. Sales conversations, customer service issues, margin changes, stock problems, partner feedback and operational friction should reach the marketing team while the work is still live. Strategy should stay close to execution because the business keeps teaching you after launch.
This sequence connects directly to three ideas I keep returning to: stop selling deliverables and solve the business problem, keep strategy close to execution, and do not separate marketing from business development. They are all really the same principle from different angles: understand what the business is trying to change, then make the marketing useful to that change.
What numbers should marketers understand?
Not every marketer needs to build the financial model, but the team should understand the numbers that change the meaning of marketing performance. A cheap click is irrelevant if the customer is unprofitable. A high ROAS can still hide cannibalization. Strong revenue can hide a poor product mix or declining margin.
McKinsey’s CMO research makes the disconnect visible: CEOs in its survey were much more likely than CMOs to judge marketing through revenue growth and margin. BCG’s 2025 measurement research similarly found that leading marketers align a small number of “north star” KPIs with business outcomes and connect tactical measures to those strategic KPIs. (BCG: Six Steps to More Effective Marketing Measurement)
A practical measurement ladder
| Level | Question | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Business outcome | What must change for the company? | Revenue, gross margin, retention, market share, profitable acquisition, product mix, pipeline, expansion. |
| Customer behavior | What must people do differently? | Consider, inquire, buy, switch, repeat, upgrade, recommend, return, choose a higher-value product. |
| Leading indicators | What signals show movement before the final outcome? | Qualified demand, conversion by stage, repeat intent, brand consideration, sales acceptance, basket mix. |
| Channel / execution | What helps us diagnose and optimize the work? | Reach, CTR, CPC, engagement, view-through, email response, landing-page behavior, event attendance. |
The ladder works both ways. Business objectives tell marketing what to prioritize. Marketing signals tell the business what is changing in the market. When the only conversation goes upward as a monthly report, both sides lose information.
Google’s measurement guidance also stresses that ROI should not rely on one signal or one attribution view. Its 2025 framework combines first-party data, marketing mix modeling, incrementality testing and attribution because different methods answer different questions. The bigger point is not the tool set. It is that measurement is there to improve decisions, not decorate the report. (Think with Google: Rethink ROI with AI-powered measurement)
How should marketing work with finance, sales, product and operations?
The goal is not to turn every project into a committee. It is to make sure marketing has access to the information that changes a decision and that other functions understand what marketing is trying to influence.
- With finance: Agree on the business outcome, investment logic and the difference between short-term and long-term measures. Marketing should understand the financial constraints; finance should understand the customer and demand logic behind the investment.
- With sales and business development: Share target definitions, objections, lead quality, opportunity feedback, partner intelligence and what happens after interest is generated. This is why I do not like a clean “marketing handoff.”
- With product: Bring customer language, search behavior, feedback and positioning evidence into product decisions. In return, marketing needs an honest view of product strengths, limitations, roadmap and proof.
- With operations and service: Know what can actually be promised, delivered and supported. Customer experience is part of the brand whether marketing owns the process or not.
Deloitte’s 2026 CMO Survey is built around the same pressure: marketers are operating under stronger C-suite expectations and a growing responsibility for revenue growth. That makes business fluency less of a “nice to have” for senior marketers and more of the language required to participate in the decisions that shape growth. (Deloitte: 2026 CMO Survey)
A practical business-before-brief check
Before approving a campaign, content plan, rebrand, event or media budget, I would want the team to be able to answer these questions in plain language. If several answers are missing, the next step is probably diagnosis, not production.
- What is the business trying to grow, protect, fix or learn?
- How does this business make money, and which products, customers or behaviors create the most value?
- What is the current constraint? What evidence says that is the constraint?
- Who is the customer, and what do they actually value, compare and distrust?
- Why should they choose this offer instead of the alternatives they already have?
- What happens after marketing creates interest? Who owns the next step?
- Can the business fulfil the demand we are trying to create?
- Which customer behavior needs to change for the business outcome to move?
- What is marketing responsible for influencing, and what sits outside marketing?
- What will we measure at business, customer, leading-indicator and channel level?
- What result would make us scale, adjust or stop?
- Which assumptions are we making because “this is how we usually market it” rather than because the market supports them?
What changes when marketers understand the business?
The work becomes more selective. The team can say no to channels that do not have a job. It can challenge a brief without sounding theoretical because the challenge is connected to economics, customer behavior or operational reality. Creative gets better because it is solving a sharper problem. Measurement gets better because the team knows what the numbers are supposed to mean.
It also changes marketing’s position inside the company. McKinsey argues that marketing can reclaim its role as an integrator around the customer when the CMO acts more like a general manager and works across finance, sales, product and service. That is the version of marketing I believe in. Not a department that waits for a brief, and not a department that tries to own everything. A function that understands enough of the business to know where customer insight, positioning, demand and communication can create the most value.
And in the AI era, this becomes even more important. Output is getting cheaper and faster. A team can generate more campaigns, more variations, more content and more analysis than before. But AI does not make a weak business problem clearer by itself. It can just help a team execute the wrong assumption at much greater speed. The advantage is not producing more. It is understanding what deserves to be produced.
What to do next
If your marketing team is busy but the connection to growth feels weak, do not start by adding another dashboard or another channel. Start by rebuilding the business context around the work.
- Map the business before the campaign. Spend one working session on the seven areas in this article and document what the team knows, assumes and still needs to learn.
- Rewrite one live brief. Replace the requested deliverable at the top with the business outcome, constraint and customer decision that must change.
- Connect marketing to the money. Pick one priority initiative and trace the path from channel metric to customer behavior to commercial outcome to financial effect.
- Create a real feedback loop. Bring sales, finance, product or operations into the review only where their information can change a decision, and make those signals part of the working process.
- Remove one activity. Find a channel, report, content stream or deliverable that has no clear role in the business outcome and stop doing it. Focus is also a strategy.
- Teach business fluency inside marketing. Make customer value, pricing, margin, route to market, sales process and business-model basics part of how marketers are trained, not knowledge reserved for senior leadership.
Final thoughts
I love marketing. I love the creative side, the speed, the psychology, the channels and the feeling when an idea lands exactly where it should. But the work becomes much more interesting when the brief opens into the business instead of closing marketing inside a department.
A good marketer should be able to ask, “What should we say?” A stronger marketer should also be able to ask, “Why does this business deserve to win, where is growth getting stuck, and what can marketing genuinely change?” Once those answers are clear, the noise usually gets quieter and the work gets better.
See you,
Tai Perez
