How Do You Know Your Marketing Strategy Is Working?

In short: Marketers and CEOs often judge whether marketing is working differently, because results are hard to read and marketing is often judged on things it doesn’t control. Glenn Donaldson suggests a simple test: ask the CEO and the head of marketing separately how confident they are, on a scale of 1 to 5, that marketing is working, then compare the answers.

This is the last of the three questions I set out to ask in this series. The first was where your marketing strategy lives. The second was how it actually works. This one is the hardest, and I suspect it’s the one most businesses answer poorly. How do you know your marketing strategy is working?

Ask a head of marketing and you’ll usually get a confident answer, often with a dashboard behind it. Ask the CEO the same question and the answer can sound quite different. Whether that gap is an opportunity or a threat probably depends on who notices it first.

The research points the same way, although I’d be careful about pushing it too far. In Sonar Group’s 2025 benchmark of Australian marketers, 72% said marketing is seen as a value driver in their business rather than a cost centre, up from 64% a year earlier. In Boathouse’s 2026 study of American CEOs, the share who see marketing as a cost centre rose from 35% to 60%, and only 15% gave their marketing leader an A. Boathouse’s own summary put it bluntly, saying CMOs are still more often seen as execution leaders than strategic drivers. They’re different surveys in different countries, so the numbers don’t line up neatly, but if both are roughly right, marketers and CEOs are looking at the same function and seeing different things.

Why would that be?

Marketing results can be genuinely hard to read. If the CEO looks at the outcome and the marketer looks at the activity, both can be honest and still disagree. Time plays a part as well. Results are usually reported by the quarter, while the work of building a brand can take years to show, so a budget judged on one quarter’s results can look less effective than it is.

There’s a measurement problem too. Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) tools are more common than they used to be, but few models claim to capture every factor behind a good or bad result, and the data going into them is a common sticking point. In a Harvard Business Review Analytic Services survey sponsored by Google, data quality was the barrier marketers named most often in acting on their models, cited by 47%. In a 2026 survey of 500 senior US leaders by Haus, only 49% of marketing and finance leaders said they could clearly explain their measurement approach to the board, which may be part of why a CEO reads the results differently.

The business needs internal or contractor capability to understand what the numbers are saying and, importantly, the structures and processes to do something meaningful about any key insights. That second part is where many businesses fall short. In the same survey, 87% of marketers familiar with their organisation’s MMM said using it was important, and only 28% said their organisation was very effective at turning its insights into timely action. There’s also the question of independence. A broader concern must arise if the business contracted to provide the service is associated with the media provider.

Another reason marketers and CEOs see marketing so differently is that it’s often judged on things it doesn’t control. In Marketing Week’s 2026 Career and Salary Survey, only a quarter of marketers said they have a say on pricing, and fewer still on distribution - both down on the year before. If marketing doesn’t set the price or decide where the product is sold, but is held to account for sales, it’s not surprising the conversation about whether it’s working gets tense.

All of which points to a different question. Does anyone know which parts of marketing’s activity are doing the work, and how would they find out? MMM answers media efficiency and effectiveness against results, though most models are better at picking up short-term sales effects than the slower build of a brand. In my experience, knowing whether a strategy is working means checking the inputs as well as the outcomes.

Is the strategy on paper still the one being used?

Are the process, the people and the partners still lined up behind it, which was the point of the last essay?

Is the money going where the strategy says it should?

Is the measurement clear enough for the CEO and the head of marketing to read it the same way?

Those checks help explain the results, especially when they’re mixed. If I could ask a leadership team to do one thing after reading this, it would be a simple test. Ask the CEO and the head of marketing separately, on a scale of one to five, how confident they are that marketing is working, then ask each of them how they think the other would answer. If the numbers are close, that’s a good sign. If they’re far apart, mind the gap. Caught early, it’s a chance to agree what success looks like before it turns up as a budget argument.

Over the next couple of months I’ll be asking that question of CEOs and heads of marketing in Australia, as part of a series of conversations about how marketing really runs. Most of the recent data on how CEOs judge marketing comes from overseas, so I’m curious whether Australian answers look the same. I’ll share what I find here early next year.