The Mary Poppins for Marketing Functions | Chief Marketing Officer | GTM Expert | Best Selling Author | CIM Fellow | NED & Board Advisor | Transforming broken marketing. From leadership to strategies, skills to systems.
So Michael Page reckons we've got a talent shortage in marketing? With the greatest respect, they've got this one completely wrong! Let me paint the real picture, and it isn’t a pretty one... I've spent the last 8 years working with CMOs and senior marketers. It's not that we can't find marketing talent. It's that companies are systematically dismantling the marketing function while pretending they're "modernising" it. Here's what's really happening: The traditional CMO role is being carved up like a Christmas turkey. We're seeing "Head of Growth," "Head of Performance," "Head of Brand" – all fancy titles that essentially take the strategic CMO role and turn it into tactical positions that report to... wait for it... a Chief Revenue or Chief Operations Officer. Meanwhile, I'm watching brilliant CMOs with decades of experience – people who understand the full scope of marketing (from research to positioning, to pricing to distribution) – sending out plethora of CVs. These are battle-hardened professionals who've delivered real commercial results. The problem? Companies have convinced themselves that marketing is just the “colouring-in department” who make some noise on social media, run some performance campaigns - job done. Here's what we've forgotten: Marketing isn't just about awareness or demand generation. Great marketers understand markets, segmentation, positioning, pricing strategy, distribution, & yes, P&L! When you fragment the CMO role, you lose the strategic oversight that connects all these elements. The solution? 1. Boards need to understand that marketing isn't a cost centre or a creative service – it's a strategic function that drives business growth. When was the last time your board had a marketing expert as a non-exec director? 2. We need to stop treating marketing like it’s a digital marketing toolkit with brand fluff on top. The best CMOs are mini-CEOs who understand the commercial realities of business AND how to drive growth. 3. We need to start measuring marketing's contribution properly- using proper market-based evidence of how marketing drives performance over the long term. 4. Companies need to stop pretending that splitting the CMO role into 5 different heads of whatever-is-trendy-this-week is "modern." It's not modern – it's myopic. In trying to make marketing more "accountable", by fragmenting it, companies are actually making it less effective, creating silos where we need integration, tactical thinking where we need strategy. To my fellow marketers: hold the line. Don't let your role be diminished into a series of tactical executions. Marketing is a strategic business function, not a service department. To CEOs: if you think you can replace your CMO with a collection of channel specialists, good luck. You're not fixing marketing; you're fixing to fail. Are we witnessing the death of strategic marketing leadership, or is this just a temporary blip? #Marketing #Leadership #Strategy #CMO
A little louder for those at the back! I see all this. But in defence of the earlier stage cash strapped CEO - CMOs vary hugely. Those of us used to working in startups can still thrive in a resource and budget constrained environment by being experiment led and scrappy. But I’ve walked into a number of roles where the predecessor has taken a less analytical approach - embedded zero process for tracking progress - tarnishing marketing’s reputation across the wider team. I can’t blame that CEO for seeking a Head of Growth for his next senior marketing hire.
Pretty much spot on. But let’s not forget to hold a mirror up - marketing leaders have not helped themselves either - allowing themselves to be distracted by shiny things and crucially, as you point out, forgetting about the P&L.
💡 A thought provoking post… When business KPis are struggling you can ALMOST ALWAYS trace it back to a ‘MARKETING PROBLEM’ - is your product offer compelling? - is the price / value equation right to maximise sales and GM% ? - are you available where your customers are shopping? - is your online service proposition competitive and meeting the customers’ needs? - is your marketing investment recruiting new customers? Whilst CMOs don’t ‘own’ all of the 4Ps having a single point at C-suite who owns ‘the whole customer experience’ and critically with the skill set, wisdom and organisational agility to influence across peers and mobilise the whole organisation must be a consideration for any CEO and Board who want to grow faster. Is it time to ‘go back to the future’ ?
Love all your points, Emma. I find small businesses are doing this too as they are copying bigger businesses. But when budgets are smaller, they are then struggling to see the value of their marketing as they are only having a small slice of what is needed to drive a business forward. I spend a lot of my prospecting time educating and defending the need for strategic marketing in all businesses.
Emma this is one of the most insightful and on point things i've ever read on this platform. Honestly. It put into words something that I felt and knew but somehow hadn't articulated or pieced together so succinctly in my mind. I think a big part of this is the shift over the past ten years to 'data driven' marketing and 'growth hacking', which has seen marketing transition into almost a form of engineering. CEO's with lean budgets need quick results and they're too quick to get rid of something if it doesn't work instantaneously. I guess therein lies the problem, that a lot of value add you talk about quite rightly, is less visible in the short term, maybe 1-2 years, but realistically longer. You can growth hack so far but in the long run, this is where I really see the loss of value for brands and organisations cutting out the middle man.
Hell yeah!! Strategic marketing is a scientific discipline that aligns early development to commercialisation. Fragmentation of this approach leads to short term objectives (easier KPIs for leadership?!!) and action plans dressed up as strategy.
A recent Harvard Business Review report found that 80% of CEOs don’t trust their CMO 😔
The focus on achieving short term, highly visible, easily measured ROI from every ad and every campaign does tend to have type of outcome - relegating the marketing function to ‘selling’ instead of ‘marketing’.
Absolutely agree! In my experience working with small and medium businesses, I’ve often seen marketing reduced to a series of quick, tactical actions—social media posts, ad campaigns, or website updates—without a clear strategic foundation. This approach might deliver short-term results but rarely leads to sustainable growth. A true marketing strategy connects everything: understanding the market, customers, positioning, pricing, and long-term growth plans. When businesses skip this step, they miss out on the full potential of marketing to drive real business outcomes. It’s crucial for businesses of all sizes to recognize that marketing isn’t just about execution; it’s about having a clear, strategic vision that guides all those actions and delivers measurable results over time.
CEO & Strategic Advisor | Scaling Wellness, Personal Care & Food &Drink Brands | from Start-up to Scale-Up and Beyond
4dThe shift to digital channels has fragmented marketing's, creating a worrying vacuum in CMO representation at the strategic level. From my experience as a consumer goods CMO in my earlier career, marketing was the engine room of growth - we owned or heavily influenced the 4 Ps and the entire customer journey – as it should be. Today's CMOs are often no more than Communications Directors and are sidelined from critical growth levers. My real concern is seeing CEOs trusting COOs and CROs who mostly lack marketing understanding, especially anything to do with the consumer and the brand and their relevance to profitable growth.