Who runs marketing? Or when you own the P&L and have no authority

For the last year I have talked to a lot of managers. Top managers, heads of business lines, people who build the commercial organization in companies of different sizes. And I noticed one thing.

Everyone has their own picture of how the commercial organization should look. That picture almost always comes from personal experience. From what the person has seen, built, or worked inside. Someone who has not built an organization themselves, as a rule, does not understand why it is the way it is. What could be different. And that their model may not be the only one.

I have built them. As a rule I rebuilt what was there before me, put my own in place, and the effectiveness went up. That created a feeling: I am doing it right.

Here is the context. My sharp move into the corporate segment started four years ago. Before that, smaller companies, my own projects. In effect I am doing the corporate reality as an external student. The pace, and the results I got in a short time, confirmed me in the thought: I know how it should be done.

Then I started talking to people who had survived in this world longer than I had. People whose results were no worse, and sometimes better. They had a different model. A different structure. A different logic. And more time in the game.

The more I talked, the more points of argument appeared. And the more doubts. I do not like doubts. As McConaughey said in The Gentlemen, they breed chaos. But I am not one of those who treats doubt with excessive self-confidence.

So I decided to dig. The literature, the research, the cases of the largest companies. How does it work for others? What works? What does not? And how right was the direction I chose?

My hypothesis: the person who owns the brand’s P&L (who answers for profit and loss) should control the marketing. Every tool that affects revenue, in one pair of hands. Otherwise it is absurd.

I decided to check whether the literature confirms this. Or refutes it.

What I found: not one model, six

Academic and business writing records at least six stable ways to organize a commercial function. Each with a theoretical basis and real cases.

Model 1. Full autonomy of the brand teams

Marketing, sales, product, and the P&L, all inside the brand. The brand manager acts as a “mini CEO”.

Neil McElroy created the model in a three-page memo at P&G in 1931. Henry Mintzberg, in Structure in Fives: Designing Effective Organizations (a book on organizational design, 1983), classifies this as the divisional form. Coordination happens through the standardization of results.

Upsides: speed of decisions, an entrepreneurial culture, full clarity about who answers for what. The brand manager sees the whole business.

Downsides: duplicated functions, and no way to bring deep specialists into small teams. McKinsey (a report on the transformation of marketing organizations, 2025) says it straight: everyone can do a bit of everything, and nobody can do anything truly deep. Economies of scale are lost.

Where it works: companies with a small number of sharply different brands in different categories. Early P&G, LVMH.

Model 2. A functional structure

Marketing separate, sales separate, the P&L at the level of the business unit. The classic bureaucratic machine.

Apple is the best-known example. Jobs came back in 1997 and fired all the general managers in one day. He created a single P&L at the level of the whole company. Joel Podolny and Morten Hansen, in “How Apple Is Organized for Innovation” (Harvard Business Review, November 2020), described it: the CEO of Apple is the only position where design, engineering, marketing, and sales meet. Experts make the decisions, not the owners of a P&L.

Upsides: the deepest expertise in each function, and the efficiency of scale. Experts lead experts.

Downsides: a gap between responsibility and authority. The owner of the P&L does not control the marketing. A functional marketing director optimizes their own metrics, awareness and reach, not the commercial result of the brand. Slow decisions.

Where it works: a narrow product portfolio, an extraordinary density of leaders. In essence, only Apple.

Model 3. A matrix

Dual reporting. An employee reports both to a functional manager and to a brand manager.

Jay Galbraith, in Designing Matrix Organizations That Actually Work (a guide to matrix structures, 2009), defined several types of matrix. His critical conclusion: “Organizational structures do not fail. Management fails in implementing them.”

Stanley Davis and Paul Lawrence, in “Problems of Matrix Organizations” (Harvard Business Review, 1978), counted 9 pathologies of the matrix: anarchy, power struggles, decision paralysis, excess cost. Christopher Bartlett and Sumantra Ghoshal, in “Matrix Management: Not a Structure, a Frame of Mind” (Harvard Business Review, 1990), concluded that the matrix is a frame of mind, not a structure.

Upsides: a balance between expertise and a business focus, and a way to manage complexity: many products, many geographies, many segments at once.

Downsides: decision paralysis, power struggles, blurred responsibility. Without a simultaneous change in processes, in the reward system, and in people’s competence, the old problems sit in new boxes.

Where it works: large multinationals with a presence in many geographies. IBM, P&G today.

Model 4. A service model (marketing as an internal contractor)

Centralized marketing serves the brands as internal clients, through service-level agreements and internal charging. Strategy&, in the report “Marketing as a Service” (a report by PwC’s consulting arm, 2011), described a four-step transition. Companies that put the model in reached 15–20% growth in efficiency.

Philips consolidated marketing on this model.

Upsides: economies of scale, standardized processes, high efficiency when there are many similar brands.

Downsides: a bureaucratic bottleneck, and a loss of business context. Business-unit managers feel like hostages of an “internal monopoly” (Galbraith’s term).

Where it works: large organizations with a large number of similar brands, where the marketing tasks can be standardized.

Model 5. A hybrid: a center of competence plus embedded marketers

A central “center of competence” sets the standards, builds the expertise, and runs hiring and development. The marketers physically work in the brand teams, and they are assessed by the center’s standards.

This is the helix model, described by Aaron De Smet, Sarah Kleinman, and Kirsten Weerda in “The helix organization” (McKinsey Quarterly, October 2019). Two types of leadership: one answers for developing people and for standards, the other for the business result and the priorities.

The same article describes a telling case. In a large global FMCG company (the name is not disclosed), the marketing director created a central center of competence. Embedded marketers were assessed against colleagues across the whole company. That deepened the expertise and removed unhealthy competition between brand teams.

Upsides: depth of expertise, plus closeness to the brand, plus shared standards. The best model for developing talent.

Downsides: a critical dependence on the leader. In the same McKinsey case, when the pioneering director left, the organization rolled back to the old model. The “brand barons” took control again. A structure without the support of the culture does not survive.

Where it works: mature multi-brand companies with a strong management culture. PepsiCo.

Model 6. A single commercial director

Marketing, sales, customer work, and pricing, under one leader.

A short clarification. In Western companies, over recent years, three similar roles have existed in parallel, and they are easy to mix up. The chief commercial officer (CCO) answers for the whole cycle: marketing, sales, customer service. The chief revenue officer (CRO) is a narrower role, focused on the sales funnel and conversion, more common in B2B and technology companies. In essence, the CRO is the person who answers for leads turning into money. The chief marketing officer (CMO) is the classic role, focused on the brand, communications, and generating demand.

SBI Growth Advisory, in the report “The Rise of the Chief Commercial Officer” (a consulting-company report, 2021), found that commercial directors are appointed 2.2 times more often than revenue directors or marketing directors. Companies increasingly want one point of responsibility for the whole commercial result, not three parallel roles.

Philip Kotler, Neil Rackham, and Suj Krishnaswamy, in “Ending the War Between Sales and Marketing” (Harvard Business Review, 2006), recommended appointing a single person responsible for integrating marketing and sales. Spencer Stuart, in its annual study of how long marketing directors stay in the job (a recruiting-company study, 2025): 31% of companies have no marketing director at all. Only 36% of Fortune 500 companies keep the title. The average time in the seat is 3.3 years. A historical minimum.

Upsides: one point of responsibility for the commercial result, speed of decisions, no conflict between marketing and sales.

Downsides: one person overloaded, and a risk of simplifying complicated tasks. If the commercial director is weak at marketing, marketing sags. And the other way around.

Where it works: companies in transformation, a growing business focused on selling direct to the consumer.

How the large companies are actually set up

The practice of large companies shows a stable pattern: a trend toward simpler structures and clearer responsibility for profit. Below are not textbook examples. They are real transformations of recent years.

P&G is the company that, in a literal sense, invented brand management. In 1931 Neil McElroy proposed giving each brand its own team. Since then P&G has gone through three large transformations: from pure brand autonomy, to category management (1987), and to five sector business units (from 2018), each with its own CEO. Brand managers still “own” the P&L. The company describes the role as “full owner of the business”. But marketing lives inside the unit, not in a separate function. The corporate chief brand officer, Marc Pritchard, is a cross-functional role: standards of brand-building, media transparency. Not the day-to-day running of the marketing of specific brands.

Unilever is an example of radical simplification. Until 2022 the company worked in a classic matrix: brands × geographies × functions. Responsibility for the P&L was blurred so far that it was hard to see who, exactly, answered for the result of a specific brand in a specific country. In 2022 CEO Alan Jope announced a restructuring: five business groups with presidents carrying “crystal-clear responsibility” for strategy, growth, and profit. Marketing sits inside each group. The restructuring cut about 15% of senior managers and about 1,500 positions.

LVMH is the far pole of decentralization. 75+ autonomous houses (Dior, Louis Vuitton, Hennessy, Sephora, and others), each with its own CEO, creative director, marketing, and full control of the product. The corporate center provides financial oversight, talent management, and purchasing synergy, and it does not get into marketing decisions. At revenue of €84.7 billion the model works because, in luxury, the authenticity and creative freedom of each house matter more than operating efficiency. An attempt to centralize the marketing of Dior and Louis Vuitton under one head would have killed what is unique in both.

Amazon took the divisional idea to the limit with “two-pizza teams”, 6 to 10 people. Each team has one leader, one initiative, one key metric. Marketing is built into the team. It does not arrive from a separate department. When a team grows and no longer fits at two tables, it splits in two. This is called “mitosis”, like a cell dividing.

Nestlé in 2025 announced a large reorganization, one of the largest in the company’s history. CEO Laurent Freixe simplified the structure, removing the “zones” (an intermediate regional level) and creating a direct line from the country units to the center. The aim was to speed up decisions and remove the matrix layers that slowed the response to local markets. Marketing stays inside the business units.

The pattern is obvious. Companies of different sizes, from different industries, are moving in one direction: from “it is unclear who answers for what” to “one person, one result”.

Responsibility without authority is not something I made up

I started from an intuition. When a person answers for the P&L and does not run the marketing, the work breaks. The literature confirms it, and with numbers.

A study of more than 500 project managers (a scientific paper, PubMed Central, 2022) showed that a mismatch between responsibility and authority is the second most significant factor in project failure. The first is unclear goals. The second is when you are told “you answer for this” and you are not given the levers. The researchers described “pseudo-managers”: people with loud titles who have to beg colleagues for resources instead of managing them. This is not merely inconvenient. It systematically degrades relationships and slows every initiative.

Clinical research (a medical paper in the same PubMed Central database, 2022) went further and measured the effect on health. Positions with high responsibility and low authority “dramatically increase stress and exhaustion”. This is not a metaphor. It is physiology: cortisol, burnout, turnover.

Tom Fishburne, a former brand manager and now the founder of Marketoonist, describes it from the inside. He formally “owned” the P&L of his brand. But most of the cost lines — trade marketing, production, logistics — were run by other parts of the organization. He had to learn to operate in a matrix of conflicting responsibilities. In essence, to negotiate with people who had their own KPIs and their own priorities.

Gartner, in its annual survey of marketing organizations (an analyst-company report, 2017), found the same picture. 75% of marketing leaders say they “own or share responsibility for the P&L”. The real authority — the right to decide what the budget is spent on, which channels to use, how to set priorities — chronically lags the responsibility that is declared. You get a tidy chart on paper and chaos in reality.

When the split does work

Everything above can leave the impression that splitting the P&L from marketing is always a catastrophe. It is not. There are companies where the split has worked for decades. The conditions under which it works are very specific.

P&G is the classic example. The brand manager does not formally command the marketers, who sit in a functional unit. The system works because, over 90 years, P&G built a very strong culture of internal cooperation. Shared metrics: the brand manager and the marketer are assessed on the same indicators. Regular mechanisms of coordination: weekly joint reviews, where conflicts get resolved fast. And the main thing: a brand manager at P&G has enormous informal influence, even if the org chart does not give them command of the marketer. Everyone knows the brand manager is “the voice of the brand”, and people listen.

Apple is an even more radical example. There is no P&L at the product level at all. One P&L for the whole company. Marketing is centralized under one head and serves every product. How does it work? Decisions are made not by the owners of budgets but by experts, the people who understand the subject most deeply. This is a radically different philosophy: you do what is right for the product, not what optimizes your P&L. But the model requires extraordinary quality of management and a narrow product portfolio. Try to apply it in a company with 50 brands and it will not work.

What do these two examples share? Both work not because of the structure, but because of the culture. Splitting the P&L from marketing does not kill the business only when several hard conditions are met.

Conditions of failure: marketing and the business unit are assessed on different metrics (marketing optimizes awareness, the business optimizes quarterly revenue); unclear rules for decisions, so it is not obvious who has the last word; no mechanism for resolving conflicts quickly, so arguments go upstairs and rot for weeks; the functions do not respect each other, marketing thinks salespeople are primitive, sales thinks marketers are detached from reality; the pressure of quarterly results against marketing’s long horizon, a brand is built over years, and the KPI wants a result in three months.

Conditions of success: shared performance indicators for everyone in the process; a clear split of roles, who decides, who advises, who executes; marketers embedded in the business units, physically sitting with the brand team, not in a separate wing of the office; regular joint reviews of results; and, critically, a CEO who understands the strategic role of marketing and does not allow it to be turned into “the department of pretty pictures”.

Selling direct to the consumer changes the rules

When a company sells direct, through its own site, an app, its own stores, marketing stops being “support for sales”. Marketing becomes sales. Performance advertising generates revenue directly. Managing the customer base keeps buyers. Content builds the brand. To separate these functions from the owner of the P&L is to hand the main lever of growth to a person with no responsibility for the result.

Nike is the key case. In 2020, under CEO John Donahoe, Nike launched a direct-sales strategy: an aggressive cut of wholesale partners, and a rebuild of the organization around its own channels. Revenue through D2C reached $21.3 billion in 2023, 42% of total sales. Impressive growth. By 2024 Nike admitted the strategy “added complexity and inefficiency”. Analysts at Wedbush put the problem precisely: “They focused on WHERE to sell, and lost focus on WHAT to sell.” Under the new CEO, Elliott Hill, Nike returned to a category organization (by sport, instead of by gender) and restored the wholesale relationships.

Warby Parker customers who buy both online and in stores bring 65% more over their lifetime than online-only customers. That is not a marketing slogan. It is the economic case for integrating the channels.

Marketplaces are a separate subject. Amazon, Wildberries, Ozon, Zalando: this is also selling direct to the consumer, only through someone else’s platform. The brand trades direct. It sets the price, it manages the product card, it decides what to promote. And it loses part of the control. The marketplace owns the customer data, dictates the terms of placement, and takes a commission. More than 60% of all online purchases in the world go through marketplaces (Forbes, 2024). That creates an organizational paradox. Marketing on a marketplace is sales, advertising, and assortment management at the same time. Who should run it? A marketer who does not answer for the P&L? Or the owner of the P&L, who does not understand the ranking algorithms?

Mature companies resolve the dilemma simply. Own channels and marketplaces are run by one team inside the brand. One P&L, one person responsible, every channel a tool in their hands. Inside that single P&L, management reporting is still kept by channel, so you can see where the money is made and where it is lost. PVH (Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger) is a good example: the P&L belongs to the brand, and inside it the company sees the split across direct sales, wholesale partners, and regions. Nike Direct is a separate analytical unit inside the Nike brand, but responsibility for the brand as a whole sits with one person. The key principle: the P&L is at the brand level. Channels are tools inside it, not separate businesses with separate people responsible.

Where the industry is moving

Three trends set the direction.

The first is the joining of commercial operations. Marketing, sales, and customer work are increasingly joined under one operating structure. In Western practice this is called Revenue Operations. In essence, one staff that runs the whole funnel, from the first contact to the repeat purchase. Gartner (an analyst-company forecast, 2023) suggests that 75% of fast-growing organizations will move to this model by 2026. The results among those who already have: a 30% reduction in the cost of taking a product to market, and a multiple growth in revenue. Deloitte Digital, in a report on the maturity of commercial operations (a consulting-company report, 2024), confirms it. Companies with the model in place are 1.4 times more likely to beat the revenue plan by 10% or more. The point of the trend is to stop splitting commerce into “marketing over here, sales over there, customer service somewhere else”. It is one process. One person should run it.

The second is the transformation of the marketing director’s role. 31% of companies already work without the position, Spencer Stuart data (a recruiting-company study, 2025). The role splits: part goes to the commercial director, part to a chief growth officer, part to a chief digital officer. The average life of a marketing director in the seat is 3.3 years, a historical minimum (Marketing Week, 2025). That does not mean marketing has become unimportant. The opposite. It has become so important that it is no longer entrusted to one functional head. Marketing is integrated into the business. It does not serve the business from outside.

The third is simpler structures. Unilever (2022), Nestlé (2025), P&G (2018): the largest consumer companies, one after another, are removing matrix layers. McKinsey (a report on the transformation of the consumer sector, 2025): 60% of CEOs in this sector plan an organizational transformation in the coming years. The direction is one. Fewer intermediate levels, more direct responsibility, faster decisions.

What I took from it

I went into the literature with a specific question: “Am I right or not?” The answer was more complicated than I wanted.

My model, the owner of the P&L controls the marketing, is not the only one that can live. There are six. The choice depends on the size of the portfolio, the maturity of the market, the share of direct sales, and the management culture. Apple proved that a functional structure can work. P&G proved that a matrix lives if the culture is strong enough.

At the same time, if you look at the trends, I am more right than not. The industry is moving toward simplification. The role of a separate marketing director is shrinking. Commercial directors are appointed twice as often. Direct sales make the integration of marketing and the P&L more and more critical.

But I live and work in the present. And in the present, different models work. I should not treat mine as the only correct one. I should be glad that, by instinct, I found a direction the industry is only now approaching. And I should widen my own view.

Because the next structure I build will be better. Not because I got smarter. Because I now see further.