The problem isn't so much that marketers don't have concrete and measurable KPIs. They do. But at many companies, marketers affect those KPIs only indirectly. For instance, if you work in marketing for a B2B sales-driven company, it's very hard for the marketers to quantify their performance (whereas it's fairly easy for the salespeople to do so, even if some credit deserves to be shared). Similarly, if you're working in marketing for a retailer, the buyers or operations people will be able to measure sales, profit margins, operational efficiency, etc. Marketing may have a huge impact on several of those metrics, but the marketer doesn't have his or her hand on the lever as directly as the buyer does. Etc.
The problem with the discipline of marketing is that it's often a complementary discipline. It's sort of like the Steve Nash or Magic Johnson of company operations: if it's performing well, it's enhancing the performance of everyone else on the team.
In certain industries, by contrast, marketing rules the roost. The consumer packaged goods (CPG) business, for instance, is directed by marketing. A marketer at a CPG firm, known commonly as a Brand Manager, is exactly that: he or she is running almost every aspect of a major brand. Accordingly, the performance of brand managers is (relatively) easy to measure. You've got sales, margins, market share, etc., and all of them tie fairly directly to your business decisions. Brand management is akin to general management, and many brand managers would argue that what they do is full-spectrum marketing; everyone in marketing in other industries is just performing a subset of what the brand manager does.
I think Apple is a classic example of tech marketing done extremely well. The engineers and designers build some truly outstanding products, but the marketers figure out how to sell those products to customers in equally impressive ways. There is real (and undervalued) skill in taking the set of all features a product has, and winnowing that set down to the perfectly curated and articulated list of benefits. And vice versa: there's real skill involved in figuring out the unarticulated needs of the marketplace ("the problems people don't even know they have").
The problem with the discipline of marketing is that it's often a complementary discipline. It's sort of like the Steve Nash or Magic Johnson of company operations: if it's performing well, it's enhancing the performance of everyone else on the team.
In certain industries, by contrast, marketing rules the roost. The consumer packaged goods (CPG) business, for instance, is directed by marketing. A marketer at a CPG firm, known commonly as a Brand Manager, is exactly that: he or she is running almost every aspect of a major brand. Accordingly, the performance of brand managers is (relatively) easy to measure. You've got sales, margins, market share, etc., and all of them tie fairly directly to your business decisions. Brand management is akin to general management, and many brand managers would argue that what they do is full-spectrum marketing; everyone in marketing in other industries is just performing a subset of what the brand manager does.