Why the CMO is becoming the cornerstone of a growing business

A recent headline caught my eye: no CMOs sit on the main board of any FTSE 100 company. In 2007, 14% did. Moved, not vanished! The study behind that headline, from The Marketing Directors, also found that 70% of FTSE 100 companies have meaningful marketing, customer and brand expertise on their boards. Around one in ten FTSE 100 chief executives comes from a marketing or customer background.

What has changed is where the work happens. The UK corporate governance code now positions the main PLC board as a watchdog: governance and long-term oversight, not day-to-day running of the business. 86% of FTSE 100 companies have an executive committee beneath the main board, made up of the CEO and functional leaders. That’s where marketing sits now, shaping strategy, investment, customer experience and commercial performance without being a statutory director.

In other words, the marketing leader hasn’t left the room. They’ve moved from the formal top table to the CEO’s side.

The need is increasing, not shrinking

The title itself is under pressure, and not only in the UK. In the US, Forrester found that only 36% of Fortune 500 companies now use the CMO title, down from 49% a year earlier. Responsibilities are being folded into chief growth officer, chief commercial officer and chief customer officer roles.

You could read that as marketing being diluted. I read it differently. Businesses are renaming the role because they want it to own outcomes, not just activity. Growth. Revenue. Customers. That’s a bigger job, not a smaller one.

Technology cuts both ways

Technology is a big part of why the role is changing, and it’s pulling in two directions at once.

First, it’s making marketing execution cheaper and easier. AI can now produce a campaign brief, a set of ad variants or a month of social posts in minutes. Some marketing roles are already being replaced by the technology. When doing marketing gets easier, knowing what to do, and why, becomes the scarce skill.

Second, it’s scattering ownership of the customer. As digital, data, revenue and customer experience leaders have joined the executive team, McKinsey reports that executive teams have grown by 50% in five years. Its research also suggests that companies with one integrated customer-centric leader grow 2.3 times faster than those with overlapping responsibilities. More tools, more titles, more people with a slice of the customer, and often nobody owning the whole picture.

There’s a telling statistic here too. Gartner research suggests companies use only around half of the marketing technology they pay for. The tools aren’t the problem. Judgement about how to use them is.

So technology hasn’t made the senior marketing leader redundant. It has stripped away the parts of the job that were about producing things, and left the part that was always the most valuable: thinking clearly about the market, the customer, where growth will come from and how to achieve it.

What a trusted advisor actually does

The best marketing leaders don’t behave like heads of a department. They behave like the CEO’s thinking partner on everything that touches the customer. In practice, that means:

• Diagnosing before prescribing. Before anyone talks about a new website or a LinkedIn campaign, they ask why growth has stalled. Is it the proposition? Pricing? The sales process? The market itself?
• Joining up the business. Marketing sees across sales, product, operations, finance and people. A good marketing leader spots when the promise being made to customers doesn’t match what operations can deliver, or when sales and marketing are chasing different buyers.
• Saying the uncomfortable thing. An MD is surrounded by people with a reason to agree with them. A trusted advisor tells them when the brand is invisible, the message is muddled or the plan is a list of tactics with no strategy behind it.
• Agreeing a few numbers that matter. Not dozens of marketing metrics, but a small set of commercial measures the CEO, finance director and marketing leader all trust.

The evidence for getting this right is strong. McKinsey found that companies involving marketing leaders in strategic planning see 1.4 times higher revenue growth. Yet only around half of CMOs take part in those conversations with their CEO.

What this means if you run an SME

FTSE 100 companies have executive committees, chief growth officers and teams of analysts. Most growing businesses don’t.

In a £2m–£50m business, marketing often sits with a capable manager, a small team or an agency, all busy doing. What’s usually missing is anyone senior enough to step back and ask whether the doing is pointed in the right direction. The result is what I call random acts of marketing: plenty of activity, little strategy, and an MD who quietly wonders what it’s all adding up to.

If that sounds familiar, a few questions are worth asking:

• Who in your business owns the whole customer picture, from first impression to renewal?
• When you make a major strategic decision, is anyone in the room speaking for the market?
• Can you name the three marketing outcomes that matter most to your growth this year?
• Is your marketing technology earning its keep, or just adding cost?

If the answers are vague, you don’t necessarily need a bigger marketing budget. You may need a senior marketing voice at your side.

The real shift

The CMO isn’t disappearing. The role is becoming less about running marketing and more about advising the business on where growth will come from. Technology has made the execution easier and the judgement more valuable.

For larger companies, that voice now sits on the executive committee. For growing businesses, it doesn’t have to be a full-time hire. It does have to be there.

If you’d like a clearer view of where marketing is helping or holding back your growth, a Marketing Health Check is a good place to start. Book a call to get started.