POV

The CMO at 25: Why the Role Is Harder, Broader, and More Strategic Than Ever 

Twenty-five years ago, when I started my career, the Chief Marketing Officer was a rare title. Today, there are more Chief Marketing Officers than at any point in corporate history. And yet, few senior roles attract as much speculation about relevance, authority, and longevity. 

On the other hand, boards and CEOs are placing greater expectations on marketing than ever before, from driving growth to safeguarding reputation and navigating risks. Marketing leadership has never mattered more, yet the role itself is often misunderstood and under-supported.

From brand leadership to enterprise integration

In the early 2000s, the CMO’s mandate was relatively clear: brand stewardship, communications, and demand generation. CMOs who could credibly connect brand investment to financial returns earned influence at the leadership table. Over time, that mandate expanded dramatically for those who were keen and able to lead their organisation through digital transformation, data abundance, and platform economics. 

Today, CMOs are increasingly accountable not just for brand, but for growth additionality, data-informed trend shaping, and end-to-end customer journeys. This shift is reflected in CEO expectations. Research by McKinsey shows that over 70% of CEOs now expect marketing leaders to directly contribute to revenue and growth, not just brand metrics. Marketing has moved decisively from a support function to a core driver of enterprise performance. Yet expectations have grown faster than alignment in marketing teams. Many marketing metrics still struggle to map cleanly to the outcomes boards hold CEOs accountable for: sustainable growth, resilience, and long-term value creation.

The proliferation paradox

Over the past decade, organizations have responded to complexity by creating adjacent C-suite roles — Chief Digital Officer, Chief Data Officer, Chief Growth Officer, Chief Customer Officer.. you name it. The unintended consequence of overlapping mandates has been fragmentation. Responsibility for the customer is now frequently split across multiple leaders, each optimizing part of the system. Data lives in one function, experience in another, growth in a third, brand in a fourth. The result is internal friction, slower decision-making, and diluted accountability.

In my view, this proliferation does not diminish the importance of the CMO. It reinforces the need for an integrative leader — one with the vision, relationship capital, and financial fluency to connect these domains into a coherent whole. The most effective CMOs today are enterprise integrators: aligning data, technology, experiences, and narratives. They enable what I might best describe as profitable and possible growth: generating demand that the organization can deliver end-to-end, without eroding trust or margins.

Now, as if it was not already complicated enough, enter the new expectations around AI and sustainability.

Marketing leadership in the age of AI

Few functions have been as transformed by technology as marketing. Automated media buying, real-time analytics and personalization, and generative AI have fundamentally reshaped how marketing operates. Yet, adoption remains uneven. While most marketing organizations are experimenting with AI, only a minority have integrated it meaningfully across decision-making, operating workflows, and talent structures. At the same time, boards and CEOs, increasingly enthusiastic about AI’s promise, are placing pressure on CMOs to demonstrate clear ROI, productivity gains, and measurable business impact.

This creates a new leadership tension. The CMO now sits at the intersection of cost discipline, innovation and governance. Success is increasingly about judgement: deciding where automation accelerates value, where human insight remains essential, and how to embed technology without hollowing out strategic capability.

Sustainability changes the stakes

Perhaps the most consequential shift affecting the CMO role is the rise of sustainability and stakeholder scrutiny. For many years, sustainability was treated as a communications challenge. In reality, it is a credibility challenge. Research consistently shows that younger consumers and employees expect brands to demonstrate tangible action, not just intent. Claims are now tested by regulators, investors, employees, customers, and civil society. Greenwashing risk, disclosure requirements by regulators, and reputational exposure have sharply increased the stakes.

Trust is earned through consistency between message and behavior. In the context of sustainability, the CMO’s role expands to stewardship of trust — shifting marketing upstream from a downstream cheerleader to a leadership function that listens carefully to what the entire value chain is signaling. This places marketing leadership in a fundamentally new position. It is increasingly responsible for deciding whether a story should be told at all. That requires early involvement in strategy, close collaboration with operations and finance, and discipline around what is promised externally. 

Why the CMO will be even more important  

Customer-centricity defined much of marketing’s evolution over the past two decades. Today, that lens has widened. Modern organizations operate within complex stakeholder ecosystems: customers, employees, investors, regulators, partners, communities, and platforms. Decisions made for one group increasingly affect all others. Marketing leadership now sits at the intersection of these relationships. 

The CMO should be the executive closest to the organization’s external contract with society. This is why boards are paying closer attention to marketing leadership. Reputation, license to operate, and long-term resilience have become governance priorities, not just communications issues. Increasingly, CMOs are appearing on enterprise risk frameworks — not as message managers, but as owners of trust-related risk.

In an environment defined by systemic risk, sustainability transitions, and heightened scrutiny, I will argue that marketing leadership is foundational to enterprise strategy.  

The future CMOs will have an indelible impact on their organization and a distinguished seat in the boardroom, provided they demonstrate a:   

-- Capacity to integrate fragmented functions

-- Discipline to align promise with performance

-- Credibility to engage multiple stakeholders

-- Judgement to balance growth, trust, and long-term value

The CMO Council is critical in shaping this transformation

The CMO Council has remained integral to my continued relevance and growth as a C-suite leader across public and private sectors for the past two decades. The primary reason is that the Council has resisted the temptation to focus on awards or grand events. Instead, it has consistently created space for CMOs to grapple with the hard questions: the marketing–sales divide, CMO–CIO alignment during digital transformation, and now, the far more complex challenges of AI, sustainability, and stakeholder trust.

As the CMO remit continues to expand, and scrutiny from boards intensifies, CMOs will need serious forums that keep them focused not on what is fashionable, but on what will truly keep them relevant at the leadership table. As a peer-powered network, the CMO Council is uniquely positioned to play this role for many years to come: as a place for honest reflection, rigorous debate, and a collective commitment to evolve in step with what enterprises, and society, now demand.