No CMOs on a single FTSE 100 board. Don’t let anyone tell you that’s fine!

By Sarah White MCIM MBA, Fractional CMO

Not one FTSE 100 company has a chief marketing officer or marketing director on its main board. In 2007, 14% did. Today, according to new research from The Marketing Directors reported in Marketing Week, the figure is zero.

The research is quick to reassure us. Marketing hasn’t lost influence, the argument goes; it has simply changed shape. Seventy per cent of FTSE 100 boards have “meaningful” marketing, customer or brand expertise. Around one in ten chief executives has a marketing or customer background. Most companies have an executive committee below the board where marketing leaders now sit. And the CMO title has given way to chief growth officers and chief customer officers.

I’ve been a marketing director and CMO, and I now work as a fractional CMO with growing businesses. I don’t buy the reassurance. The headline is the story. This is a real loss of influence, and businesses of every size should be paying attention.

Expertise is not accountability

Having someone on the board who understands marketing is not the same as having someone who is accountable for it.

A non-executive director with a marketing background brings valuable perspective. They can ask sharp questions, challenge assumptions and spot when the customer has fallen out of the conversation. But that is an oversight role. They don’t own the budget. They don’t own the brand. They don’t own the pipeline, the pricing or the customer experience, and they won’t be the one answering for the results next quarter.

A CMO does. That accountability is the whole point. It is what turns marketing from an opinion around the table into a commercial responsibility with numbers attached.

Counting marketing “expertise” on a board and calling it representation confuses advice with ownership. Boards would never accept that logic for finance. No one would argue that a non-exec with an accountancy background removes the need for a CFO.

The growth officer: the right ambition, the wrong wiring

The rise of the chief growth officer is, in principle, something I welcome. Sales and marketing should work as one engine. When they do, the magic really happens: marketing creates demand and shapes the market, sales converts it, and each makes the other sharper.

But they are different disciplines with different skill sets. And in practice, combined growth roles are most often filled by leaders whose depth is in sales and new business. Their instinct, and their scorecard, leans towards pipeline and new logos.

That isn’t a criticism of those leaders. It’s a recognition that nobody can be deeply expert in everything. What tends to get thinner under a new-logo lens is exactly the work that takes a trained marketer to do well: positioning, differentiation, pricing strategy, customer insight, retention and the long-term brand building that makes every future sale easier.

So the title changes, the board looks modern, and a whole body of expertise quietly slips out of the room where the big decisions are made.

Strategy or saving?

The research frames all of this as evolution: governance has changed, job titles have changed, and marketing has found new homes. But it’s worth asking a less comfortable question. How much of this restructuring is driven by what’s right for the business, and how much by what’s cheapest?

Folding marketing and sales into one growth role means one senior salary rather than two. Leaving marketing off the board means one less voice arguing for investment. Pointing to a non-executive’s marketing background and calling it “expertise on the board” costs even less. Each decision is easy to justify on its own. Together, they look less like a strategy and more like a saving.

I’m not suggesting every business that has restructured did it to cut costs. But leadership teams should be honest with themselves about their reasons. If the real driver was the salary line, then the question isn’t whether marketing still has a voice. It’s what that saving is costing them in growth they will never see on the spreadsheet.

Why businesses should be concerned

When no one at the top table owns marketing, the consequences rarely show up as a single dramatic failure. They show up slowly, as a gradual erosion of the things that protect a business’s value.

1. Short-termism becomes the default. Without an accountable marketing leader, the loudest numbers win, and they are usually this quarter’s sales. Brand investment is the first thing cut when times are tough, because no one at the table is there to defend it or to explain the long-term cost of cutting it.
2. The customer drops out of the conversation. Big decisions about pricing, product, acquisitions and restructures get made on the spreadsheet. A non-exec might ask “what will customers think?” But no one is accountable for knowing the answer.
3. Businesses drift towards commodity. As markets get more crowded, and AI makes it easier than ever to produce more of the same, differentiation is the best defence a business has. If no one owns positioning, businesses end up competing on price, and that is a race very few win.
4. Marketing gets treated as a cost, not an investment. When marketing isn’t represented by someone who can speak the board’s language of risk, return and growth, it gets managed as a discretionary expense. The budget becomes the first thing cut rather than a lever to pull.
5. The leadership pipeline dries up. If there is no route to the top for marketing leaders, the best ones leave or retrain. Fewer future chief executives will come from a customer-focused background, and the problem compounds.

Why this matters even more for SMEs and scaleups

It would be easy to dismiss this as a FTSE 100 problem. Most growing businesses don’t have a PLC board, a governance code or an executive committee.

But that’s exactly why it matters. Smaller businesses take their cues from larger ones. If the UK’s biggest companies are signalling that marketing doesn’t need a senior, accountable owner, growing businesses have even less reason to put one in place.

And they have less margin for error. In my work as a fractional CMO, I regularly meet ambitious businesses with great products and capable people, and no one at leadership level who owns marketing strategy. The leadership team is often sales-led or founder-led. Marketing is delegated to a talented but junior hire, or to an agency. What follows is what I call random acts of marketing: plenty of activity, very little direction, and no one able to connect the spend to growth.

The symptom usually looks like a marketing problem. The root cause is almost always a leadership one.

What needs to change

For boards and leadership teams: Look at your structure honestly. Who is accountable, not just knowledgeable, for how customers see you, why they choose you and what you charge them? If the answer is “the growth officer” or “the MD”, ask whether that person has the depth in marketing to do it, or whether they are covering it on top of a sales remit. And if the structure you have was chosen because it was cheaper, be clear about what that trade-off is really costing you. For growing businesses, full-time CMO or fractional, the question is the same: does someone at the top own it?

For marketers: We have to earn the seat and then hold it. That means speaking the board’s language of commercial outcomes, risk and return, not activity and campaigns. It means making the case for marketing as an investment that protects value, not a cost that can be switched off. And it means working in genuine partnership with sales, because when sales and marketing work well together, both are stronger.

Marketing’s absence from the FTSE 100 boardroom isn’t a change of job titles. It’s a warning. The businesses that take it seriously will be the ones that stay distinctive, stay close to their customers and keep growing when others are competing on price.