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Designing and executing effective marketing programs is a tough gig at the best of times. Today’s marketer faces a wide range of emerging strategic and operational challenges. Yet, on top of everything else, many marketers are additionally saddled with having to convince skeptics on the value of marketing in the first place.

Pretty much every small business has (at least) one marketing skeptic. It’s the person who remains unconvinced of the ultimate effectiveness of marketing as a business function. The one who wonders whether all this hippie talk of “feelings” and “brand narrative” isn’t just a thinly-veiled communist plot to overthrow the country.

Marketing skeptics can come from any walk of life, and may be embedded at any corporate hierarchical level – from the CEO down. Marketers inevitably run into creative and budgetary blockades thrown up by such cynics.

What’s worse is the public display of indifference (at