Why Marketing Is the Leadership Department

Nov 12, 2026

When crisis hits, marketing becomes the company’s leadership engine. Explore how CEOs and CMOs can unite communications, practice radical transparency, support their communities, and cut waste intelligently. The conversation also covers aggressive moves during downturns, making a category essential, and turning creative marketing ideas into revenue.

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INSIGHT

Marketing Becomes The Company’s Leadership Voice

Crises reveal whether leaders can align the company around a clear voice and direction.
Christopher Lochhead positions the CEO and CMO as inseparable partners, with marketing coordinating every spokesperson.

ADVICE

Use Crisis Resources To Do Real Good

Use difficult periods to help employees, their families, and communities through money, technology, or resources.
Christopher Lochhead specifically highlights hospitals, charities, and nonprofits fighting the virus.

ADVICE

Cut The 20 Percent Of Marketing Waste

Eliminate marketing activities that do not materially affect results instead of protecting habitual spending.
Christopher Lochhead estimates that roughly 20% of most marketing plans is unnecessary and recommends cutting decisively once.

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When times get strange, real leaders stand up. In 2020, the coronavirus has created a heavy human and economic toll, and a downturn looked likely. Pipelines shrank budgets tightened, public companies missed guidance, and private ones found loans and venture money harder to come by. Christopher Lochhead argued that this is exactly the moment when marketing proves its worth. Done well, marketing could set the tone for the whole company, and its impact in tough times is hard to overstate.

We are looking back into one of our earliest episode and reiterate our game plan back then on how to position ourselves in the best possible way despite the ongoing crisis. Let’s see how many of you were successful in following our list, or have developed their own ways to come out on top through Marketing.

Welcome to Lochhead on Marketing. The number one charting marketing podcast for marketers, category designers, and entrepreneurs with a different mind.

Lead Together and Lead With Honesty

If you’re a CEO, think about leading your company and your category through marketing. If you’re a CMO, think of yourself as your CEO’s personal press secretary. In a crisis the two of them should be stapled together, because marketing unifies communications and sets the voice every spokesperson uses.

Radical transparency matters just as much. Skip the legal and HR babble, and skip lines like “we project a slight take down in revenue growth.” Lochhead points to a struggling company whose CEO and board have been strikingly candid with everyone. That honesty builds trust, and people want to help a team that talks straight.

Do Good and Cut Smart

This is a good time to help people. If your company can donate technology, money, or resources, do it, and ask whether you’re doing right by your own employees and their families. Hospitals, charities, and nonprofits fighting the virus could use the support too.

On the budget side, use the moment to drop anything that doesn’t move the needle. Lochhead says most marketing plans carry about 20% of stupid, baked in like government entitlements. Cut once and cut deeper than feels comfortable, so you don’t have to revisit it in two months.

Get Thoughtfully Aggressive

Research from McKinsey, Bain, and HBR suggests that between 9 and 14% of companies beat competitors by at least 10% in sales and profit growth during a downturn. They act fast, make the required cuts, then push hard ahead of the recovery. Aim to be in that group.

Evangelize your category so people see it as a must have, not a nice to have. Your competitors will likely slash big-picture marketing and over-focus on demand generation, which leaves room for you to own the point of view. Still, keep the cash register ringing. Put five sharp marketers and five sharp salespeople in a room for a day, pick the simplest ideas, and go sell more into existing customers.

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We hope you enjoyed this episode of Lochhead on Marketing™! Christopher loves hearing from his listeners. Feel free to email him, connect on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and subscribe on Apple Podcast / Spotify!