Buckle up and prepare for a bumpy ride. Here are some shocking facts:

1. General Electric is the only top 20 company in the Fortune 500 which had a Chief Marketing Officer in 2003

2. Only five companies in the FTSE 100 have marketing directors at their board tables

These figures have been published in a white paper of Connectus. Isn't it remarkable that marketing, the field responsible for brands and corporate communication, has very little influence on the overall corporate strategy?

Kotler noticed that CEO's "get accountability for their investments in finance, production, information technology, even purchasing, but don’t know what their marketing spending is achieving." Are CMO's becoming irrelevant?

Accountability seems to deliver the key to the board room. Companies that have developed "meaningful, comprehensive measures and metrics for their marketing organizations, substantially outperformed their competition in terms of revenue growth, market share and profitability...and have higher CEO confidence in the marketing function".

You have to get at the board table first to join the poker game. Once you are in the game, remember the basic poker rule: "If you can't spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker"