The “Confessions of a CMO” report, compiled by Worldwide Partners, the world’s most collaborative agency network comprised of 95 independent agencies in 50 countries, provides a fascinating snapshot of marketing in an age of corporate pressure and fast-moving, tech-driven change.
Created in partnership with brand experience specialists Monigle, the report asked various chief marketing officers around the world for their anonymous views, as well as sharing their tips for surviving and thriving in a challenging business landscape.
As well as being a key business driver, the CMO now acts as a crucial galvaniser, guardian and guide across an organisation’s internal structures and external operations. Confessions of a CMO anchors around the idea that, with marketing in a state of shape-shifting flux, the acronym “CMO” could just as easily stand for “chief mutant officer”, “chief mood officer” or “chief missing officer” (there’s also a chief momentum officer, a chief meaning officer and a chief mutiny officer).
Talking to a cross-section of C-suite marketers who are familiar with the report, it soon becomes clear just how closely its findings tally with their own experiences. Muriel Lotto, formerly marketing chief at Western Union and now working as a fractional CMO, says that reports of the death of the marketer have been greatly exaggerated and agrees with the report’s central premise, that the role of the marketer is mutating and that, rather than one singular role, we’re now seeing myriad versions: “Rather than one traditional ‘apex predator’ CMO role, we now see multiple adaptive versions emerging depending on the organisation and context.”
So, what description best matches her own experiences? “This was the most interesting part for me,” Lotto confesses. “I am three different mutant CMOs, depending on the audience.”
When dealing with C-suite colleagues, she becomes the chief meaning officer, creating an organisation’s unified narrative and making sure everyone’s on the same page. With her own executive team members, she’s the chief mutiny officer, forcing through change from within, while with her functional team, she’s chief momentum officer, pushing things forward and spotting opportunity where others only see risk.
The days of a marketing role purely being based around promotion and messaging, of what Lotto describes as the “outward expression of the brand” have long gone. Now, the emphasis is as much about interpretation.
Chief dot joiners
“One of the strongest insights that came through in the research for me is the role CMOs quietly play as the organisation’s early sensing system,” she explains. “They are often the first to pick up signals from the outside world – shifts in culture, changes in consumer behavior, new technologies, emerging social movements.
“Marketing sits at the interface between the company and the world around it. I think of CMOs as chief dot joiners, taking multiple data points internally and externally for pattern recognition.”
This ability to spot emerging trends and read the future earlier than others, for good or ill, means that marketers now have to deal with issues way beyond their traditional remit. Such patterns (revealing customer behaviour, cultural shifts, market changes, etc) then feed into plans and strategies, hugely important drivers for business performance.
“The best CMOs aren’t just amplifying the strategy,” says Lotto. “They are often among the first people helping the organisation see where the strategy needs to change.”
Building bridges across the C-suite
Adeel Omer is chief marketing officer at IT services provider TPX. A self-styled chief mutiny officer (“the job is to question everything, have the tough conversations, change up the way things are done in favour of how things ought to be done, take risks and break things for short-term pain but, hopefully, long-term betterment”), he says that CMOs are better equipped to deal with both external and internal pressures alike because marketing is “accountable for peering across the corner to help drive and define the commercial strategy that will prevent us from being stale as the world moves on, and identifying which ones to sunset and move on from.
“The rest of the C-suite is critically important to the ongoing operations of the business, but it’s marketing’s job to drive new insights into the system.”
Olga Kazakova, head of GTM product marketing at collaborative online platform Miro, agrees that marketing is now a cross-functional role, echoing Lotto’s points about sitting at intersections between customer, culture and business performance: “Strong CMOs are constantly working across go-to-marketing, product, customers and internal stakeholders, keeping a pulse on how the brand is being received across all of them. That requires being a strong bridge builder and translator between worlds.
“The report captures this well, describing the most effective marketing leaders as those who ‘unify the organization without formal authority by translating brand into outcomes that matter to colleagues in finance, product, and sales.’ That’s not just a marketing skill, that’s a leadership skill.”
Kazakova, who sees herself as part chief momentum officer (“every move becomes a reversible experiment”), part chief meaning officer (“when a company rallies behind a mission-driven purpose and understands the people it’s marketing to, everything performs better”) and part chief mood officer (“I’d add that humor is one of the most underrated tools in this kit”), believes that marketers often find themselves caught up in tensions between long-term brand investment and short-term demand generation.
“Most C-suite leaders gravitate toward what’s measurable and attributable, and that creates persistent pressure on CMOs to justify brand spend,” she says. “Brand-building creates the emotional connections and recall that drive sustained growth, while sales activation delivers the immediate results that keep the business moving. Both are critical to rising the tide.
“That said, the balance shifts depending on context. Earlier stage companies often need to weigh toward activation first to validate demand and generate cash flow, which I’ve experienced firsthand.”
Lotto suggests a CMO is now much more of a CGO, a chief growth officer, one who operates at the points where marketing, product, data, customer experience and commercial strategy meet: “What I’ve seen is that organisations increasingly need someone who can connect the dots across the entire customer system, from insight to proposition to experience to commercial outcomes.”
Mutating to survive
Looking ahead to a near future that comes with as many opportunities as challenges, she sees greater integration and closer alignment with strategy and commercial results: “Marketing leadership is mutating to survive in more complex environments. And those mutations are often where the most interesting forms of influence are emerging.”
For Kazakova, tech will inevitably have a major impact. “CMOs have to operate broadly across all channels simultaneously, including channels that don’t yet exist or that we’re still figuring out. The old playbooks don’t apply because the game itself is shifting in real time.”
That in turn means a change in organisational structures: “The traditional model of large specialised teams is giving way to something leaner: generalist marketers armed with AI, supported by specialist contractors and agents brought in for specific needs. The future org chart has fewer layers and more orchestration.”
Omer agrees that developments in tech will be vital: “We’ll continue to go full speed ahead with using AI to parse data, assist our humans, but there will be a dozen ‘killer apps’ in the next year that will help marketing speed up prototyping, testing, and time to market. I’m most excited about those tools that’ll speed up our engine.”
Forward-thinking and facing by nature, marketers have always been keenly aware of the need to be versatile and to always be totally in tune with an organisation’s strategising, aspiration and direction. With that in mind, it should come as no surprise that experienced leaders like Lotto, Kazakova and Omer find so many parallels between their own experiences and the report’s findings.
Not least that a CMO’s species classification can and does change according to circumstances and wants. Worldwide Partners’ research provides a critical framework to help marketers identify and develop the roles they need to embrace and adopt to ensure continued success.
An online tool allows users to determine their individual marketing species. Find out your CMO type here. Download the Confessions of a CMO report here.
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