The Scholarly Kitchen article "Six Things Your Marketing Colleagues Wish You Knew," struck a chord because it articulated what many marketing professionals experience daily: being seen as tactical executors rather than strategic partners, fielding countless opinions without clear feedback channels, and struggling to demonstrate the full scope of their impact on organizational success.
This session brings together contributors from that article to move the conversation forward. Rather than simply cataloging missed opportunities, we'll explore practical frameworks for building more productive relationships between marketing and other functions. How do you involve marketing early enough to shape strategy without creating bottlenecks? What does effective collaboration look like when everyone has opinions about messaging and design? How can organizations better resource and empower marketing teams to deliver strategic value?
Panelists will share concrete examples of what works—from establishing clear feedback processes to defining decision rights, from creating shared success metrics to building content pipelines that don't rely solely on marketing teams. We'll examine how different organizational structures affect marketing effectiveness and discuss what non-marketing colleagues can do to get better results from their marketing partnerships.
Whether you work in marketing or regularly collaborate with marketing teams, you'll leave with actionable strategies for strengthening these critical relationships and maximizing collective impact.
