Asit Goel, VP of Marketing at UniFirst, joins Richard Byrd to make the case for marketing as a strategic function — not a cost center. Asit picks the raven as his company's spirit bird: intelligent, adaptive, and working quietly in the background of every industry, from food processing to semiconductors to oil and gas.The conversation digs into the challenge most B2B marketers never say out loud: defining marketing's value and getting the rest of the organization to believe it. Asit and Richard cover why customers use price as a crutch when they don't understand value, why the decision-maker is always a human driven by emotion, and why marketing — not just sales — owns the job of articulating differentiation. Along the way: building in-house teams versus leaning on agencies, where pricing belongs, the limits of attribution, the surprising power of direct mail, and the one piece of advice Asit gives anyone starting out — stay curious, and form hypotheses, not opinions.