The CMO Position Has Changed. The Job Description Hasn’t.

The CMO position is the most commercially consequential marketing role in any organisation, and also the most frequently misunderstood. At its core, it sits at the intersection of brand, commercial strategy, and organisational leadership, requiring someone who can operate across all three simultaneously without losing credibility in any of them.

What makes the role genuinely difficult is not the breadth of its responsibilities. It is the expectation that the CMO will be fluent in data and instinct, long-term and short-term, creative and commercial, all at once. Most job descriptions for the role describe a superhuman. The best CMOs I have seen are something more useful: commercially grounded generalists with strong opinions and the discipline to act on them.

What Does a CMO Actually Do?

The formal answer is straightforward: the CMO owns the organisation’s marketing strategy, brand positioning, demand generation, and in many businesses, product marketing and customer experience. In practice, the scope varies enormously depending on the organisation, the sector, and how seriously the board takes marketing as a commercial function.

I spent years running agencies that served CMOs across more than 30 industries. What struck me was how differently the role was configured even within the same sector. Some CMOs had full P&L accountability and a seat at the executive table with genuine influence. Others were essentially senior brand managers with a bigger title, reporting to a CEO who viewed marketing as communications rather than strategy. The job description looked similar. The actual authority was worlds apart.

That gap matters enormously when you are considering the role, or when you are an organisation trying to hire for it. A CMO without commercial authority is not really a CMO. They are a marketing director with an inflated title and, eventually, a short tenure.

If you want to think more broadly about how marketing leadership functions at different levels of an organisation, the Career and Leadership in Marketing hub covers the full landscape, from early leadership transitions through to C-suite positioning.

Why CMO Tenure Is Short and What That Actually Tells You

The CMO has one of the shortest average tenures of any C-suite role. That fact gets cited regularly as evidence that the role is under pressure, that CEOs do not understand marketing, or that the pace of change in the industry makes longevity impossible. All of those things contain some truth. But they miss the more structural explanation.

Short CMO tenures are often a symptom of a hiring mismatch rather than a performance failure. The organisation hires for one version of the role and then expects another. A CMO brought in to build brand awareness discovers the board cares only about lead volume. A performance-focused CMO is hired into a business that needs to rebuild its positioning from the ground up. Neither person failed at marketing. They were set up to fail at the specific commercial problem the business actually had.

I saw this pattern repeatedly when I was running an agency. A new CMO would come in, change the agency roster within 12 months, bring in their preferred partners, and then be replaced before the work had time to compound. Their successor would do the same thing. The agency churn that followed was expensive and significant, but it was a downstream consequence of the real problem: the organisation had not been honest with itself about what it needed from the role.

Forrester has written about the widening gap between marketing skills and commercial expectations, and the tension between what organisations say they want from marketing leaders and what they actually measure them on. That tension does not resolve itself at hiring. It surfaces six to eighteen months in, and it usually ends the same way.

The Commercial Skills That Separate Good CMOs from Great Ones

The most effective CMOs I have worked with share a characteristic that has nothing to do with their channel expertise or their agency relationships. They understand the business model. Not in a superficial “we sell products to customers” way, but in a genuine, numbers-literate way. They know the margin structure, the customer acquisition economics, the lifetime value assumptions, and where marketing sits in the causal chain between spend and revenue.

This matters because the CMO’s most important internal relationship is often with the CFO, not the CEO. The CEO sets direction. The CFO controls resource allocation. A CMO who cannot speak the CFO’s language will always be fighting for budget from a position of weakness, making qualitative arguments to someone who thinks in numbers. The best CMOs I observed could translate marketing investment into financial terms without losing the nuance of what marketing actually does. That is a rare skill, and it is not taught in most marketing programmes.

When I was growing an agency from around 20 people to close to 100, one of the things that accelerated our growth was being able to speak to clients in commercial terms rather than marketing terms. We stopped presenting campaign results as impressions and engagement rates and started presenting them as contribution to revenue pipeline. It changed the conversations we had, the budgets we were given, and the longevity of the relationships. The CMOs who responded best to that framing were the ones who had already made that shift internally. They were not interested in vanity metrics. They were managing a commercial function and they needed partners who understood that.

The Brand Versus Performance Debate Is a Distraction

One of the most persistent fault lines in marketing leadership is the tension between brand investment and performance marketing. CMOs get hired with a bias toward one or the other, and that bias shapes everything from team structure to agency selection to how results are measured. The debate itself is not new, but it has intensified as digital attribution has made performance marketing feel more accountable and therefore more defensible.

Earlier in my career I was firmly in the performance camp. I believed that measurable, lower-funnel activity was where marketing earned its keep. It took me years of working across different business types to recognise how much of that belief was confirmation bias. Performance marketing is excellent at capturing demand that already exists. It is much weaker at creating it. When you are optimising toward the people who were already going to buy, you are not growing the business. You are harvesting it.

The CMO who understands this distinction is in a fundamentally different position from the one who does not. They can make the case for brand investment not as a soft, unaccountable expense but as the upstream condition for sustainable growth. They can explain why reaching new audiences matters even when the immediate conversion signal is absent. And they can resist the short-term pressure to cut brand spend in a downturn, which is the single most common and most damaging mistake I have seen organisations make.

The challenge of staying visible to audiences who are not yet in the market is as relevant for B2B CMOs as it is for consumer brands. The mechanics differ, but the underlying logic is the same: if you only market to people who are actively looking, you are competing on the narrowest possible ground.

What the CMO Role Looks Like in Different Organisational Contexts

The CMO in a founder-led growth business is a different role from the CMO in a listed corporation. The CMO in a B2B technology company operates differently from the CMO in a consumer goods business. Treating these as variations of the same job is a mistake that both organisations and candidates make regularly.

In a founder-led business, the CMO is often the first person to bring structure to marketing. They are building systems, establishing measurement frameworks, and professionalising a function that has previously run on instinct and founder relationships. The challenge is doing that without killing the energy that made the business successful in the first place. It requires political intelligence as much as marketing expertise.

In a large corporate, the CMO is more often managing complexity than building from scratch. The challenge is alignment: across geographies, business units, agency partners, and internal stakeholders who all have competing priorities. I worked with several large organisations during the years we were positioning our agency as a European hub, and the CMOs who were most effective in those environments were the ones who had learned to build internal coalitions rather than trying to impose direction from above. Marketing in a complex organisation is as much about influence as it is about strategy.

For global organisations operating across multiple markets, the localisation question adds another layer of complexity. Getting brand consistency and local relevance to coexist is genuinely hard, and it is one of the areas where CMOs most frequently underestimate the operational requirements. The evolution of content localisation as a discipline reflects how seriously organisations now take this challenge.

How to Evaluate Whether a CMO Role Is Worth Taking

If you are a senior marketer considering a CMO role, the questions you ask before accepting it matter more than anything that happens in the first 90 days. Most candidates spend their due diligence time assessing the brand, the team, and the budget. Fewer spend enough time assessing the authority structure and the commercial expectations.

The questions worth asking directly: Does the CMO have a seat on the executive committee? Is marketing measured on revenue contribution or on activity metrics? What was the tenure of the previous CMO, and why did they leave? How is the marketing budget set, and who controls it? What is the CFO’s view of marketing as a function?

These questions will tell you more about whether the role is set up for success than any amount of time spent reviewing the brand guidelines or the agency roster. A CMO role with no executive committee seat, a budget set by the CFO without marketing input, and a predecessor who lasted 18 months is a role that will be difficult regardless of how good you are.

I have seen talented marketers take roles like that and spend two years fighting structural battles that should have been resolved before they joined. The ones who survived did so by being relentlessly clear about what they needed to succeed and by building the internal credibility to ask for it. That is possible, but it is a harder path than it needs to be.

Content quality and audience-building are also increasingly part of the CMO’s remit, particularly in B2B. The difference between content that builds authority and content that simply fills a calendar is a distinction that CMOs need to be able to make and to defend internally.

Building the Team Around the CMO Role

A CMO is only as effective as the team they build. That sounds obvious, but the implications are often underestimated. The CMO’s team structure signals what the organisation actually believes marketing is for. A team built around brand and creative suggests one set of priorities. A team built around data, product marketing, and revenue operations suggests another. Neither is inherently right. Both are consequential.

When I was scaling a team from 20 to close to 100 people, the single most important factor was hiring for work ethic and intellectual capability rather than specific channel expertise. Channel expertise can be developed. The disposition to think commercially and to take accountability for outcomes is much harder to teach. The same principle applies to the CMO’s direct reports. A brilliant SEO specialist who cannot connect their work to commercial outcomes is a liability at the leadership level, regardless of their technical skill.

The CMO also needs to decide how much of the function to build in-house versus to manage through agency and technology partners. This is a more complex question than it was a decade ago. The proliferation of marketing technology has made it possible to build significant capability internally, but it has also created a tendency to over-invest in tools and under-invest in the people who know how to use them. The best CMOs I have worked with are clear-eyed about this trade-off and make deliberate choices rather than defaulting to whatever the industry is currently excited about.

Analytics and measurement infrastructure matters here too. Whether the team is using social analytics platforms or enterprise attribution tools, the CMO needs to be able to distinguish between data that informs decisions and data that justifies decisions already made. Those are different activities, and only one of them is useful.

The CMO in 2025 and Beyond

The scope of the CMO role continues to expand. Customer experience, revenue operations, and in some organisations, product strategy now fall within the CMO’s remit. The integration of AI into marketing workflows is adding another layer of complexity, not because the technology is difficult to adopt but because the strategic implications of widespread AI use are still being worked out. CMOs who treat AI as a productivity tool will get one set of outcomes. CMOs who think about it as a structural shift in how audiences form preferences and make decisions will be operating at a different level.

The fragmentation of media and the emergence of new channels also continues to create pressure on the CMO’s attention. Staying current on where audiences are actually spending time, including the evolution of decentralised social platforms and the shifts in how content is consumed across different formats, is part of the role. But staying current is not the same as chasing every new platform. The CMO’s job is to make judgements about where to invest attention and resource, not to be present everywhere simultaneously.

What has not changed, and will not change, is the fundamental commercial logic of the role. The CMO exists to help the organisation grow by building markets, winning customers, and retaining them. Everything else, the channels, the technology, the organisational structure, is in service of that. CMOs who keep that clarity tend to last longer and deliver more. CMOs who get lost in the operational complexity of modern marketing tend not to.

For more on how marketing leadership operates at different stages of a career, and the frameworks that tend to hold up under commercial pressure, the Career and Leadership in Marketing hub covers the territory in depth, from first leadership roles through to C-suite positioning and the transitions between them.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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