The role of the chief marketing officer (CMO) has undergone a significant transformation over the past decade—and it’s continuing to evolve right before our eyes.
At the start of this year, we witnessed a significant shift at Kimberly-Clark, which dissolved its centralized CMO role and recently appointed a chief creative and design officer. This move—intended to serve as a way to “redefine the relevance of creative leadership”—underscores the evolving interpretations and applications of executive marketing roles at Fortune 500 companies.
It’s about more than a change in titles, though. It’s about roles and expectations. Today’s CMOs, and the larger marketing teams they guide, aren’t just storytellers and party throwers.
They’re meaningful business contributors whose positions have been elevated by virtue of their access to customer insights, cutting-edge technologies, and unique market vantage points.
The average tenure of CMOs has lengthened to 4.2 years—more than double what it was just 20 years ago and significantly closer to the overall C-suite average than it once was. That growing stability is testament to CMOs’ ability to create value for their organizations.
However, not all companies have realigned their C-suite duties and expectations around the new reality of this role.
It’s time to reposition CMOs—and marketing executives and their teams in general—within the broader business. Here’s why.
The crux of customer experience
Across verticals, the competitive landscape has never been as crowded as it is today.
Products and services must solve real customer problems and pain points, and companies have to be able to demonstrate and articulate their differentiated value in a way that will resonate with people.
As a result, customer feedback and customer experience have become more central to business success than ever, and this is driving the need for radical business transformation.
For this reason, CMOs need to be in a position to guide the way in which companies translate customer demands into new business models.
Consider, for example, Adobe’s move from a traditional software licensing model to a subscription-based model—a move that required the company to stay closely connected to the needs and experiences of its customers.
With then-CMO Ann Lewnes helping to guide the transition, the pivot proved highly successful, with Adobe’s annual revenue growing from $4.2 billion in 2012 to more than $20 billion by 2022.
A recent Deloitte study found that 73 percent of CMOs are now responsible for customer experience, up from 57 percent in 2019. That’s significant, particularly given how important a strong customer experience is to ensuring sustainable revenue growth.
According to McKinsey, 80 percent of value creation at the most successful growth companies comes from unlocking new revenues from existing customers.
This concept, termed “experience-led growth,” is embodied in the story of a telco that listened to customer complaints and reinvented its service to eliminate contracts, improve its network, and extend new customer offerings to existing customers.
As a result, customer churn dropped 75 percent and revenue doubled over the course of three years.
Nidhi Prakash
Tech adoption that drives growth
Just as CMOs have their fingers on the pulse of customer experience, they’ve also emerged as specialists in another area that’s vital to business stability and growth: technology.
These days, about a quarter of marketing budgets are allocated to marketing technology. The implications of those technology investments increasingly extend beyond the martech stack itself.
For decades, CMOs have driven the adoption of technology and data-driven insights for the purposes of personalizing customer experiences and enhancing creative outputs. At the same time, they’re tasked with ensuring such investments are paying off.
For example, under CMO Marc Pritchard's leadership, P&G cut its digital ad spending by $200 million in 2017 while increasing reach by 10 percent, a bold move that demonstrated the impact of strong data-driven marketing strategies.
More recently, generative AI has arisen as a strong example of why CMOs are particularly well-positioned to lead tech adoption and data-driven initiatives across the broader business.
According to EY research, 98 percent of CEOs are investing in their company’s gen AI capability, but 66 percent remain uncertain of the optimal adoption path for their organization.
Meanwhile, 4 out of 5 CMOs say that gen AI is already improving automation, speed, and productivity for their teams. Notably, 78 percent say “optimism”—not uncertainty—best describes their feelings about the technology.
James Shaw
Aligning CMO duties with broader business goals
One of the reasons the CMO role lends itself to a more deeply embedded position within companies has to do with the nature of marketing itself.
Leadership within marketing teams is characterized by a collaborative mindset, fostering innovation and alignment with broader business strategies.
Similarly, the CMO's ability to understand and communicate brand differentiators, along with a deep knowledge of customer needs, positions them as vital leaders in the corporate hierarchy.
CMOs are masters of the balancing acts that are required across organizational functions. Their ability to balance local executions with centralized expertise ensures that marketing efforts are both locally relevant and globally consistent.
Likewise, they’re tasked with complex budget allocation across the marketing funnel, another nuanced process that must be tailored to the company's stage and goals.
To ensure the unique position and skillset of CMOs are being leveraged for the greatest possible benefit of the business, CEOs and their executive teams should do the following:
Empower the CMO to drive business growth
Because CMOs sit at the intersection of product, sales, customer success, and the actual customer journey and experience, the CMO is poised to spot innovation and opportunities ahead of the curve.
Organizations should expand the CMO’s role to influence growth strategy, new revenue streams, and business model innovation.
By combining customer insights with strategic vision, CMOs can help drive enterprise-wide transformation, including M&A, product innovation, and market expansion.
Position the CMO as a technologist
CMOs’ expertise in emerging technology (e.g., generative AI, behavioral data, and martech), paired with their propensity to bring together key cross-functional stakeholders, can drive company-wide tech adoption in ways other roles can’t.
CMOs and their teams can help scale AI capabilities across business units and foster a culture of technological agility.
Paula Catoira
Adopt a fail-fast, learn-faster culture
Enterprises must embrace mistakes (but fix them quickly) on the path to innovation and growth.
Executive teams should allocate a dedicated budget for high-risk, high-reward experiments in emerging platforms, technologies, and approaches. Treat failures as investments in innovation, and measure success by how quickly lessons are learned and applied to future initiatives.
Designate the CMO as the voice of the future customer
Because understanding the customer is critical to effective marketing and product development, the CMO can be responsible for anticipating customer behaviors and market trends 5-10 years out.
Establish mechanisms (e.g., a customer advocacy program or predictive modeling exercises) to ensure the company stays ahead of customer needs, market shifts, and cultural changes.
Once seen as the mere keepers of a significant cost center, CMOs continue to demonstrate their significant ability to drive revenue and growth. By deepening their cross-function access and responsibilities, leadership teams can unleash the full power of this pivotal executive role.
About the author
Alena Morris is Associate Vice President of Product Marketing at PubMatic, where she leads a high-performing global team specializing in buy-side, publisher growth, and commerce media solutions.
Her team drives innovation across key areas, including supply path optimization (SPO), connected TV (CTV), mobile apps, buyer activation, retail media, and curation—delivering strategic value to partners and customers.
Prior to PubMatic, Alena held key leadership roles at Quantcast, where she led initiatives in identity, privacy, and addressability solutions, and at CBS Interactive, where she oversaw product marketing for multiple tech properties.
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