Modern CMOs are getting the promotion they’ve long wanted: job titles like CGO that reflect their revenue and growth responsibilities. The catch? They’re not getting more power.
That’s a sharp tension at the heart of a new study shared exclusively with CMO Insider by the brand consultancy Lippincott. The study analyzed a survey of 541 global CMOs or equivalents.
“There is more responsibility but less of that autonomy in terms of getting a strong sense of alignment across the organization,” Michael D’Esopo, Lippincott CEO, told me.
Nearly 80% said bureaucracy commonly got in the way of decision-making, while 84% said it was at least “somewhat difficult” to align their management team, senior peers, and other stakeholders around a marketing vision. Fewer than half (44%) said marketing operated with high autonomy.
One unnamed CMO quoted in the report put it this way: “What often happens is that a strong, well-founded idea gets gradually diluted. Someone senior, like a CFO or CCO, adds input that doesn’t align with the evidence, and people hesitate to challenge it.”
Part of the issue is that many CEOs aren’t confident in marketing’s ability to demonstrate a financial impact.
“There is a huge trust problem for marketing in the C-suite,” former Mastercard CMO Raja Rajamannar told me in a recent interview.
Plenty of studies over the years have suggested marketing has a credibility problem in the corner office. A report released in April from the communications firm Boathouse, for example, found only 13% of CEOs were confident in marketing’s ability to demonstrate a financial impact.
Those long-held tensions are being exacerbated by technological shifts, D’Esopo said.
The abundance of AI-powered dashboards and analytics tools has made marketing performance more visible across organizations, D’Esopo said. That can help CMOs appeal to finance leaders by showcasing short-term wins, but it can also reinforce a focus on immediate results at the expense of long-term brand building.
These new tools have also boosted marketing leaders who are steeped in data. Lippincott said 35% of marketing chiefs come from performance- or growth-marketing backgrounds. Around 20% of the senior-most marketing decision-makers don’t even have “marketing” in their job title, reflecting the rise of chief growth, chief revenue, and chief commercial officers, per Lippincott.
That can have both good and bad effects.
The rise of performance-minded leaders may bring more analytical rigor to balance out softer marketing metrics. However, Rajamannar said they can use a brute-force approach, likening it to “running constantly on the treadmill.” It can lead to chasing the next click, lead, or conversion rather than building the underlying consumer demand.
Short-termism is also creeping into new areas, such as AI search visibility. CMOs surveyed said their companies are spending more on AI while cutting investment in websites and content — the very assets AI systems use to understand and surface brands.
So if that’s the diagnosis, what’s the antidote?
Lippincott said in the report that CMOs need to use the language of business growth without losing the fundamentals of long-term brand building, which may require translating marketing’s impact differently for each separate stakeholder, whether that’s the CEO, CFO, or the board. And organizational alignment should be treated as a growth strategy in its own right.
PepsiCo’s Jane Wakely, who has possibly the longest job title in the marketing profession — executive vice president, chief consumer and marketing officer, and chief growth officer for international foods — said CMOs should stay focused on the marketing principles that don’t change. New technologies such as AI and diverse data sources just give marketers more ways to achieve their goals, she added.
“If I’m reaching a billion people every day, to grow I’ve got to reach more than a billion — it’s quite simple,” Wakely said. “That is not going to change.”
