Marketing Is A Kitchen Counter

Originally published on The Strategic Ampersand Substack · 5/20/26 · Read on Substack

I once sat through a conversation that should’ve taken three minutes. It was 47 minutes longer. The details don’t matter. What stuck with me afterward wasn’t the frustration - it was the realization it pointed to. The person on the other end of the call didn’t really understand what marketing was in their business. Not what it did. What it was. What it meant in helping their business move forward.

That’s a more common gap than most people want to admit. And it’s worth talking about.

Here’s how I think about it: a business is a kitchen. (Yes, Chef.)

HR is the fridge; the thing that keeps everything running, preserved, and at-the-ready. Operations is the oven; it takes raw ingredients and transforms them into something delicious; and when it breaks, everyone notices immediately. Finance is the plumbing; invisible until something goes wrong, at which point it’s all anyone can talk about. Sales is the sink; we notice when it’s clean, full, or clogged.

Marketing is the counter.

It’s the surface everything moves across. The place where elements - branding, presentations, mission and values alignment, and so much more - are prepared and assembled to go out the door to clients. It holds the coffee maker (social media), the cutting board (content strategy), the fruit bowl everyone walks past a hundred times a day (brand presence). It's where we plate what everyone else has been building.

It’s not the biggest or heaviest appliance in the room. It doesn’t generate heat, keep things cold, or clean things. But take it out of the kitchen and suddenly there’s no surface to land.

You don’t realize how much you need - and value - the counter until you’re trying to prep a meal over the sink.

Part of what makes marketing genuinely interesting - and occasionally maddening - is it requires a particular kind of thinking. Marketers have to simultaneously see and plan for a very long game and the immediate play. We see the direction a strategy needs to go over the next year, while figuring out which trend is worth jumping on that day or move forward with queued content - all without taking away from the current campaign focus. We recognize the importance of removing our own platform biases because what we personally like, or dislike, may not serve the brand as a whole.

Is Meta going anywhere soon? No. So it stays in the plan.

Is LinkedIn quietly your business’s most powerful relationship-builder? Possibly. Let’s look at your competitors before deciding.

Should you be on TikTok, Reddit, Threads, or any of the many other platforms? Maybe. It depends on the type of influence you wish to have with your current and potential audiences. Let’s run an audit and review the data before committing the time, budget, and resources.

Can you survive with just two platforms and no paid spend? Sometimes, yes. The counter doesn’t have to hold everything; it just needs to hold the right things for your kitchen. Yet it’s also important to realize and accept, the strategy may evolve over time, and with evolution, it brings changes. If you’re going start making your own bread, investing in a stand-up mixer will save you a lot time.

That’s the work. Not picking the shiniest tool. Not chasing every platform. Figuring out what belongs on your organization’s counter given the size of your kitchen, the meals you’re making, and who you’re cooking - or baking - for.

Where it goes sideways is when people mistake the counter as optional. When marketing gets treated as decoration - something you add when things are going well and remove when the budget gets tight. A nice-to-have gadget rather than a necessary, working surface.

Take out the counter and the fridge is still running. The oven still works. But you’re left holding the mixing bowl instead of setting it down and now things are piling up on stove-top and on the floor. The sink becomes an odd catchall and overflows with items it was never intended to hold. The prep stops. The flow breaks. And slowly, quietly, the kitchen stops functioning efficiently.

Marketing doesn’t save a struggling business on its own - that’s a different conversation in a previous piece. But it’s the surface the rest of the business moves across.

And if you’ve been running your kitchen without a counter, or treating it like it’s purely cosmetic, it’s worth asking: What’s spilling onto the floor?