I think that's a self-preservation tactic for many that often backfires.
Most non-marketing management people want immediate and huge results... which are both hard to quantify and impossible to get without overspending or having an insanely lucky idea that goes viral.
Naturally this leads to asking for a bigger budget and promising bigger results, then KPIs aren't met for X, Y, Z reasons, then they're forced to justify the spend, then they either get more budget or get fired and the cycle repeats. Marketing has too many intangibles, so marketers always feel a need to justify themselves out of fear of being an easy target.
I'd be nervous to work for a company where one of the co-founders isn't a marketer.
Marketing is usually one of the biggest line items for a business.
When your marketing team has little incentive to actually deliver, they're likely to ask for a ton of money only to add impressive things to their resumez, not really to deliver on their promises to the business.
If a founder is in charge of marketing, s/he's got a lot of reasons to deliver: founder's equity.
> I'd be nervous to work for a company where one of the co-founders isn't a marketer.
I'd be nervous if there were a co-founder who is a marketer (unless it's literally a marketing startup).
Take a look at some of the hottest tech companies right now (recent IPO, FAANG, pre-IPO, YC darlings). Would you be really afraid to work for a FAANG, or hot recent IPOed companies like Zoom or PagerDuty, or pre-IPO companies like Stripe or Flexport because of the (co)founders' non-marketing background?
In most industries it takes one to two years for people interested in your product to notice you and start trying out your product. And another one to two years for them to decide incorporate your product into their future business. And another year or two to generate strong profits.
Most non-marketing management people want immediate and huge results... which are both hard to quantify and impossible to get without overspending or having an insanely lucky idea that goes viral.
Naturally this leads to asking for a bigger budget and promising bigger results, then KPIs aren't met for X, Y, Z reasons, then they're forced to justify the spend, then they either get more budget or get fired and the cycle repeats. Marketing has too many intangibles, so marketers always feel a need to justify themselves out of fear of being an easy target.