Corporate leaders increasingly claim they are speaking for the market. In reality, they are often speaking for themselves.

When Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez recently told investors that traditional advertising is essentially dead — and that the company will pivot toward creators and influencers — the reaction ranged from disbelief to ridicule.

It reminded me of former Adidas CEO Kasper Rørsted going on television and declaring that Adidas would move its marketing almost entirely into digital. The company later quietly reversed course after growth slowed.

Both tried to sound cool. Both ignored science and evidence. Fortunately, customers didn’t care.

They do care when CEOs drag their companies into political debates, though.

When Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff suggested deploying the National Guard to address crime in San Francisco, some customers walked out. Elon Musk’s political interventions have repeatedly dragged Tesla into controversies and alienated customer groups (but then, that’s what Musk does).

Marketing is hardly immune.

Over the past decade marketers have repeatedly tried to turn brands into moral actors. Gillette’s ‘The Best Men Can Be’ campaign. Unilever’s multi-year push to give mayonnaise a social purpose. Brands contorting themselves around DEI debates they were never equipped to lead.

Many of these public moves angered parts of the customer base. Most quietly disappeared because they had little impact.

Different industries. Different issues. The same pattern. A leader expresses a personal belief. Suddenly the company finds itself defending a position it never formally chose.

The underlying problem is simple. Leaders — including marketers — too often assume their own views represent the market. They don’t.

Why companies are stepping into controversies

In new research for Harvard Business Review involving more than 1,000 senior executives — including CEOs and CMOs — Kimberly Whitler and I examined who actually pressures leaders to take controversial public positions.

Most people assume the pressure comes from outside: customers, media, activists, investors, or social media outrage. It doesn’t. Strong pressure comes from inside the company — and from leaders themselves.

Most executives will tell you they act because it’s what customers want. In reality, many simply assume that’s what customers want.

Leaders’ own beliefs, colleagues, and internal departments such as DEI and CSR are almost as influential as customers themselves. Customers scored higher. But they were only one voice among many.

This matters because CEOs are not the customer. Marketers are not the customer. Most belong to a remarkably narrow demographic: educated, urban professionals surrounded by colleagues with similar backgrounds, education and political views. Their customers look nothing like that. They are older and younger, richer and poorer — mostly the latter — conservative and progressive, and largely indifferent to the internal debates of the brands they buy from.

The danger is obvious. Executives hear the loudest voices inside the building and mistake those voices for the market.

This is where marketing should step up. Marketing does not exist to echo internal opinion. Marketing exists to drive growth, understand customers, and to represent them inside the organisation.

That means bringing evidence into internal debates. Testing assumptions. Showing how customers actually think rather than accepting how executives assume they think.

Marketers must become better advisers to their CEOs. Because when companies enter public debates, the question should never be: what do we believe? The real question is harder. What do customers actually believe?