Marketing Is the One Thing You Can't Judge for Yourself
Published on
June 23, 2026
Written by
Chris Gorney
Youcan judge nearly everything else by living it.
You can use the product, can deal with your own customer service, watch thelogistics and the operations, walk a retail environment, live the customerjourney yourself and when experiencing runs out, the financial metrics step in helpyou judge the efficiency of your operation.
Marketing is the exception
You cannot experience a brand’smarketing the way a customer does.
How can you reproduce not knowing about the brand, first becoming aware of it, experiencinga category entry point, seeing the brand again, considering that brand andevaluating against others in a real-world scenario?
And because most marketing teams don’t understand how to quantify the financialvalue of marketing and put a credible number on what it’s worth, so the founderfeels blind to what’s going on.
Marketing is the first place that founders can't judge the way they judge everything else
So Marketing either gets judged on the performance marketing numbers, on the CPA becausethat’s easy to judge, right. But that undervalues marketing and creates systemiclimitation on the business’s ability to scale.
Or it gets judged on ‘I don’t like this ad’ or ‘I like what they’re doing’.Taste starts to feel like judgement, but it’s a poor proxy for actual effectiveness.
Neither one tells you how marketing is actually doing and if it’s going in theright direction.
I was brought into a well-known drinksscale-up in the UK and PE-backed Managing Director with the Ops background hadthis exact problem.
He liked the Marketing team, he liked the ads, but CPAs were rising, they werestruggling to scale. The Marketing team weren’t able to explain where it wasn’tworking, what decisions had to be made next.
His experiencing the marketing and seeing the thin financial metrics being usedto judge marketing, didn’t give him what he needed to understand the next moveswith his Marketing team, to unlock scale.
Marketing teams are recruited against the marketing need in the moment, which is the right move for now, but naturally reaches apoint where the next move sits beyond their experience and beyond theircapability.
They are being asked to answer bigger questions than they were hired to answer.
Not a big hire. How do you know what kind of hire?With which capabilities?
What’s needed is someone independent and experienced enough to see what thefounder and leader can’t, whether the marketing is working, where it isn't andwhat the next move, decision or hire should be.
Then the founder and leader can take the right decision in the context of the business,with all the facts available to them.
Founders and leaders often turn to marketing agencies for these answers, butthese agencies are incentivised to give the answer that rewards them, theanswers that pave the way for a long, expensive commitment with them.
They don’t address the strategic and structural elements a founder and leaderneeds to understand.
That's the whole reason a Marketing Director Review exists.
An experienced marketing director, from the outside, giving you a straight readand a verdict on the one part of the business you can't read for yourself.
For the drinks MD, that was the missing piece.
The answer to getting Marketing in shape to scale was not signing off more mediaspend, or making more hires, or bringing on an agency keen to hawk all theirservices, but an independent read that told him where it wasn't working, whereit was and what to do next.
You can judge almost every partof your business by living it.
Marketing is the one you can't.
So when it starts getting harder to read, when you like the team and you likethe ads, but the marketing feels busy without the numbers reflecting what’sneeded, the move isn't to to keep staring at the CPA or hire a new agencywith many shiny services.
It's to get an independent read before the next bigcommitment, before the next big spend or the next big hire.