I posted a short video on LinkedIn and YouTube two weeks ago about this, and I honestly didn't expect the response I got. The video is 40 seconds long. I made it because I've been asked some version of this question a dozen times over the past year, usually by a marketer a few years into their career who's trying to figure out what the next level looks like: "What separates a good marketing leader from an exceptional one?"
The easy answer is creativity. It's the answer most people expect, and honestly, it's the answer I might have given twenty years ago. Great campaigns, sharp positioning, a killer tagline. But after two decades sitting in rooms where marketing budgets get defended, cut, or doubled, I don't think creativity is what separates the good from the exceptional. I think it's leadership. And leadership, in this context, shows up as three fairly specific, fairly unglamorous habits.
I want to unpack them here, because 40 seconds is not nearly enough time to do the topic justice.
This sounds obvious. Of course, marketers should understand the business. But if you've sat in enough strategy reviews, you know how rarely this happens in practice.
What I mean by "understanding the business" isn't a working knowledge of the product line or a familiarity with the org chart. It's something closer to fluency. It means you can walk into a conversation with the CFO and talk about gross margin, channel mix, and where the P&L is under pressure, without anyone needing to translate for you. It means you know why a category is being deprioritized before marketing gets the memo, because you've been paying attention to where the business is placing its bets.
Early in my career, I remember building what I thought was a genuinely strong campaign concept. Good insight, good creative, tested well. It went nowhere, and not because the work was bad. It went nowhere because I hadn't done the homework on where that particular sub-category sat in the company's broader portfolio strategy. Leadership was quietly consolidating investment elsewhere, and I had built a beautiful plan for a business nobody was trying to grow that year. Nobody told me that outright. I would have known it if I'd been paying closer attention to the business conversations happening around marketing, rather than just the ones happening inside it.
The marketers who go on to run bigger businesses are the ones who treat "understanding the business" as a discipline, not a formality. They read the earnings calls. They sit in on ops reviews even when nobody requires them to. They ask supply chain what's keeping them up at night. Over the years, across CPG, consumer health, and nutrition, I've watched this play out the same way every time: the marketing leaders who get invited into the room where real decisions get made are the ones who showed up understanding the business first and the marketing plan second.
There's a trust element to this too. When you understand the business as well as the people running it, your recommendations stop sounding like marketing asking for budget. They start sounding like a business leader making a case for where to invest. That's a different conversation, and it gets a different reception.
This is the one I probably feel most strongly about, and it's the one I see get people into the most trouble.
Marketing has a long, complicated relationship with vanity metrics. Impressions, reach, engagement rate, share of voice. These aren't meaningless numbers, and I'm not suggesting anyone stop tracking them. But they are activity metrics. They tell you the machine is running. They don't tell you whether the machine is making money.
I've sat across the table from plenty of CFOs and CEOs who have been burned by marketing decks full of activity metrics with no line connecting them to revenue, margin, or market share. And I understand why it happens. Activity metrics are easier to produce, easier to control, and easier to make look good in a quarterly review. Business outcomes are messier. They take longer to show up. They require marketing to own a number, not just influence one.
But here's what I've learned running P&Ls across a few different categories: the marketing leaders who insist on being measured against business outcomes, even when it's uncomfortable, are the ones who earn real seats at the table. It's a harder path in the short term. You can't hide behind a good-looking dashboard. But it's the only path that builds the kind of credibility that survives a leadership change or a budget crunch.
This also changes how you manage agencies. I've spent a lot of my career on the client side of agency relationships, and the difference is stark between agencies that get evaluated on deliverables and agencies that get evaluated on business results. When you hold your partners, internal and external, to outcome-based standards, the whole conversation shifts. You stop measuring whether the campaign launched on time and start asking whether it moved the number it was supposed to move. That's a harder conversation to have. It's also the only one that protects your budget the next time belts get tightened, and they always eventually get tightened.
The third habit is the one that ages best, because it's the one that must keep being true.
I started my career in a marketing world that looked almost nothing like it does now. No social platforms, no programmatic media, no AI-generated content, no direct-to-consumer anything. If I had stopped learning at any point along the way, I would have become irrelevant a long time ago, and I think most marketers over a certain number of years in the business know exactly what I mean.
What strikes me now is how much faster the cycle has gotten. Technology used to shift meaningfully every few years. Now it shifts meaningfully every few months. Consumer behavior is moving just as fast, especially with how people research, discover, and decide what to buy. The channels themselves keep changing shape underneath us. A marketing leader who was exceptional five years ago, running on the same playbook, is probably just good today. Maybe not even that.
The leaders I respect most handle this differently than most people expect. They're not chasing every new platform or tool out of anxiety. They're doing something more deliberate: staying close enough to what's changing that they can tell the difference between a genuine shift and a passing trend and building organizations that can adapt quickly when it matters. That's a very different skill than simply "keeping up." Keeping up is reactive. What I'm describing is closer to staying ahead on purpose, which usually means building in the habit of curiosity long before you need it.
I try to hold myself to this standard too, and I'll be honest, it's not always comfortable. It's much easier to lean on what's worked before. But some of the best strategic thinking I've done in the past few years has come from deliberately putting myself in rooms and conversations where I was the least informed person there. That discomfort is useful. It's a signal you're actually still growing.
Here's the thing I keep coming back to. None of these three habits are about creativity, and that's sort of the point. They're about how a marketing leader operates, what they pay attention to, and what they're willing to be held accountable for.
Creativity still matters enormously. I'd never argue otherwise; a brilliant idea, well executed, can move a business faster than almost anything else. But creativity without business fluency produces beautiful work that misses the moment. Creativity without a real connection to outcomes produces work nobody can defend when the budget gets questioned. And creativity without ongoing learning has a shelf life, whether we want to admit it or not.
The marketing leaders who end up running bigger businesses, sitting on executive teams, and getting real trust from the rest of the C-suite are usually not the ones with the flashiest campaign case study. They're the ones who understood the business well enough to know which campaign was worth building in the first place, who could stand behind a number when it was questioned, and who kept evolving as the ground shifted under them.
That's really the difference between good and exceptional. It's not a talent gap. It's a habits gap, and habits are something anyone can build, regardless of where they are in their career right now.
If any of this resonates, I'd genuinely love to hear what you'd add. What's the habit you've seen separate the good marketing leaders from the exceptional ones in your own experience? I don't think this is a closed list, and I'd rather hear where I'm wrong or missing something than assume I've got it all figured out.
To find our more about Tracy Nunziata and what she is working on, visit her executive bio at About Tracy Nunziata