A private, provocative dinner where the most senior people in marketing confront the questions seldom heard on public stages.
For most of the last century, marketing held a substantial claim inside an organisation. It was understood, by Drucker and by everyone who came after him, as one of the two functions that create a customer, and a customer is the only thing that makes a business a business. Everything else, in that view, was a cost. Marketing was not a department that supported growth. It was understood to be the growth engine itself.
That claim no longer holds in many organisations. Marketing no longer feels like the engine of anything. It has become a veneer, the shiny object brought out when the company wants to look impressive in front of its stakeholders and put away again the moment money becomes scarce. And consequently, a function assumed to be a decoration in the good years is the first to be compromised in the hard ones.
The Marketing Society has always been the place where the industry’s most senior people come to talk to one another. This forum builds on that and pushes into the territory most events leave alone. It takes the subjects that sit above the craft, in the places where money, power and measurement meet, and puts them on the table where they can be discussed in the open.
The ambition underneath this series is a simple one. Marketing needs its place at the centre of the business back. Not the seat it is given out of courtesy, but the authority it once held as the part of the enterprise that creates demand and builds value over years. That place will not be handed back, and it will not be won with a better brand deck. It will be earned where investment is decided, by the most senior people in the field learning to make the case for long-term value. It will need to be in a language the board is fluent in. Marketing needs to go beyond a rebrand solution to a governance lever.
This forum is where that work begins.
The shift we refer to above is visible in the data, and the direction of travel is consistent across independent sources.
A note on honestyThese are averages, and senior people will know that the headline figures are disputed. Marketing leadership is faring very differently by sector, with near-universal CMO representation in financial services and very little in energy and mining.7 The averages can be argued, but the direction of travel cannot.
The difficulty shows up in many forms, and most senior marketers will recognise more than one of them.
Underneath the symptoms sits a common root. Power tends to follow money, and when a downturn arrives, the investment in marketing is among the first things cut, even though it is the part of the work most likely to create lasting value. None of this happens because the people involved are short-sighted or hostile to marketing. It happens because a marketing leader is asked to make business numbers work on short-term proof alone. That too, in a language the rest of the boardroom is often not literate in.
The forum is built on the premise that marketing needs its stature back. It can only regain that stature when the thought leadership is built around real issues, and led by real marketers. The questions that follow are examples of the topics worth talking about, one evening at a time.
The format is deliberately simple, and it is designed to be repeatable by any host in any market.
Each evening runs to a simple format. A Fellow opens with a setup of around fifteen minutes, framing the question and laying down a series of cues designed to spark an honest and open exchange. What follows is a discussion where every attendee is encouraged to speak rather than listen. The host starts the conversation and then becomes a facilitator of the points of view in the room, rather than a representative of their own.
Prime rule for attendees. Leave the day job at the door. People come not as their title or their company’s position but as marketers, there for the love of the craft and the honesty of the conversation. It is the one rule, beyond the Chatham House Rule, that the evening will thrive upon.
The Society’s 205 Fellows are geographically concentrated. More than half are in the United Kingdom and only a handful in most others. The format is designed keeping this in mind. In markets with fewer Fellows, a single Fellow anchors and curates the evening while the attendees come from the wider senior community: the most influential brand, agency and consultancy leaders, whether or not they carry a Fellowship. In markets with many, Fellows can seed the room together and rotate the hosting across sessions, building a bench of hosts rather than depending on one.
This is the portable asset. A Fellow in any market should be able to run an evening from this page.
Each session starts with one question that the industry usually considers a “discreet” conversation. The inaugural provocation is mine to set. The questions that follow are deliberately offered as strawmen, to be refined and owned by the Fellows who host them, rather than fixed in advance.
The list is intentionally unfinished. Its length signals that the format is sustainable well beyond any single host, and its openness ensures that each future evening belongs to the person who leads it.
The proposal is to prove the format before scaling it, on a footprint we can run well and learn from.
The programme would be convened and curated by Asad ur Rehman, a Fellow of The Marketing Society and a former chair of its Middle East chapter, who has carried regional board accountability for marketing investment across a plethora of markets.
The convening role is deliberately defined as architect and curator of the format as opposed to that of a content leader. The inaugural session is led from the front, and subsequent UAE and London sessions bring other Fellows into the host seat, so that the format proves its portability inside the pilot itself.
The capture model is designed to protect the candour that makes the format valuable, while still generating something the wider community can use.
The discussion itself is not filmed and not recorded. What is produced afterwards is a written, unattributed synthesis of the themes that emerged, drafted with care and shared with Fellows globally, so that the thinking generated in one market becomes a body of work the whole Society can read. Over a series of evenings, these notes accumulate into something more valuable than any single talk: a documented, evolving record of the conversations the industry is having at its most senior level.
The host’s framing provocation, which is attributable by design, may be filmed as a standalone piece.
Willing attendees may offer brief on-the-record reflections after dinner, entirely at their own discretion. The dinner stays private; only those who choose to be on the record ever are.
The following are proposed to launch alongside the first session, so the forum is perceived as a considered programme rather than a one-off dinner.
This forum cannot be judged by the metrics that suit a conference. Its value is in the quality of the conversation and what follows from it, so the measures are deliberately about substance rather than scale.
Taken together, these test the pilot well in terms of its sustainability.
The format is proven in the UAE across two sessions, extended to London for a third, and then judged honestly, together, against the standard set out above. If it earns its place, it travels to the Society’s wider community market by market, with other Fellows taking the lead in their own markets. The aim is not for any one person to carry the format from place to place, but for it to stand on its own and run wherever the Society needs it.
That is the agenda, and this is where it begins.