POV

It is a privilege to have been part of the CMO Council’s journey over the past decades and to reflect, with hindsight, on how profoundly the marketing function and the CMO role have evolved.

When I look back to the early 2000s, including my time in telecom and my second phase at BAT, marketing was still largely perceived as a downstream function: brand stewardship, communications, and demand stimulation among adult consumers of the product category. Insight generation existed and excelled at the Group, but decision rights, capital allocation, and enterprise influence were often limited. The CMO’s legitimacy depended heavily on creative output and short-term performance rather than on measurable enterprise value creation.

Over time, this changed materially. The digitalization of consumer engagement, the explosion of data, and the shift from mass marketing to precision, lifecycle-based models moved marketing closer to the core of strategy. In my roles at BAT and later as CEO of Reynolds American, marketing became inseparable from portfolio strategy, innovation economics, pricing, route-to-market design, and long-term growth strategy. The most effective CMOs I worked with were no longer “chief communicators,” but general managers of demand, value perception, and consumer-led growth.

A critical dimension of this evolution, particularly in highly regulated industries, was the growing centrality of responsibility and governance within the marketing function itself. At BAT and at Reynolds, marketing operated under an exceptionally strict internal code of conduct, often going beyond local regulatory requirements, with absolute adherence to the laws, advertising restrictions, and consumer protection frameworks of every country in which we operated. Given the nature of the products, marketing leadership carried a dual obligation: to drive performance while ensuring transparency, compliance, and ethical engagement. This required deep integration with legal, regulatory, scientific, and corporate affairs teams, as well as a culture of self-discipline and accountability. In practice, this reinforced the credibility of marketing at the executive and board levels, positioning it not as a risk-creating function, but as a steward of long-term license to operate and corporate reputation.

That said, the proliferation of adjacent C-suite roles—Chief Growth, Digital, Data, Experience, or Revenue Officers—is both a symptom and a warning sign. It reflects the centrality of marketing-related capabilities, but also exposes unresolved tensions: fragmented accountability, blurred mandates, and, in some cases, a reluctance to fully entrust the CMO with enterprise-level authority. In boards and executive committees, I have seen marketing influence increase in importance, yet paradoxically remain fragile when results are challenged or when CEOs lack deep marketing literacy.

In my view, the viability of the CMO role does not hinge on title preservation, but on scope clarity and capability depth. The CMO of the next decade must be credible across five dimensions: consumer and customer insight; data and analytics; growth and innovation economics; orchestration across silos; and leadership of complex ecosystems, both internal and external. Where CMOs fail, it is often not because marketing is less relevant, but because the role is underpowered relative to its remit, or because organizations distribute accountability without integrating governance.

From a board perspective, marketing has become too important to be treated as a specialist function. In highly regulated, disruptive, or technology-driven environments, sustainable value creation increasingly depends on how well companies understand human behavior, trust, choice architecture, and long-term brand equity. These are areas where marketing thinking is essential. The question for the next 25 years is not whether CMOs matter, but whether companies are willing to design leadership models that match the complexity they have created.

I would be delighted to see the CMO Council continue to play a convening role, not only for marketers, but as a bridge between marketing, general management, and boards. That, to me, is where the next evolution lies.