Success Quote by David Packard

Packard’s line lands like a polite mutiny: a company founder telling the specialists that their specialty can’t be boxed into a department. The phrasing borrows the cadence of “war is too important to be left to the generals,” and that’s not accidental. It reframes marketing as strategy and survival, not decoration. In Packard’s world (HP’s engineering-first culture, postwar competition, fast-evolving tech markets), the risk wasn’t that people would ignore marketing; it was that they’d outsource responsibility for the customer to a silo that speaks in campaigns rather than consequences.

The intent is managerial and moral at once. Packard is warning against the comfort of delegation: once “marketing” becomes someone else’s job, engineers stop listening to users, sales stops feeding real feedback upstream, finance starts treating customer trust as a line item, and leadership mistakes quarterly noise for demand. His jab at “the marketing department” also carries a quiet critique of performative marketing: glossy messaging that tries to compensate for weak product-market fit. If marketing is everyone’s job, the organization has to earn its story through design choices, service policies, pricing discipline, and the unglamorous work of reliability.

The subtext is power. Packard isn’t dismissing marketers; he’s denying them a monopoly. Marketing, here, means the total interface between company and customer, which implies shared accountability and fewer excuses. It’s a governance statement: a reminder that the customer is not a constituency to be managed by a single team but the central constraint that should shape every decision.