The following is a guest piece written by Denise Dahlhoff, head of research, marketing and communications, U.S., for The Conference Board. Opinions are the author’s own.
Does marketing have a marketing problem?
As if ever more ambitious growth goals, the AI transformation and increasingly complex and often invisible customer journeys weren’t already enough of a challenge, marketing is showing symptoms of an internal marketing issue.
CMOs have one of the shortest tenures among Fortune 500 C-suite executives: Just 4.3 years in 2024, compared to 4.9 years for the entire C-suite, possibly reflecting CMO misalignment with the CEO. This can have an appreciable impact on resources. Fewer than half of CMOs feel well-equipped or very well-equipped with their budget to improve marketing’s impact on the business in the next six months, as The Conference Board consistently finds in our CMO-CCO Meter survey.
The problem is compounded by title confusion and fragmentation. The top marketer’s job varies from company to company, but the title might not: Chief marketing officer remains a common title but can now encompass vastly different responsibilities depending on the organization. This raises the question of whether CMOs need a new title, even if there is no suitable universal substitute. Instead, the role’s variety has led to a proliferation of broader titles — like chief growth or chief commercial officer — and more specialized ones, such as chief brand, digital or customer experience officer.
A third concern: Marketing sometimes has internal reputational issues, appearing “arrogant” to colleagues and key decisionmakers, as one marketing executive expressed in an interview.
Why does it matter?
When marketing’s mission and value aren’t clear, the function can be overlooked and undervalued by colleagues and even the executive team, affecting not just its image but also its budget, reporting line, responsibilities and strategic influence.
Preventing these negative consequences is reason enough to make marketing’s capabilities and contributions better understood within the organization, even if doing so requires extra work. But this goes beyond a communications campaign, instead requiring a shift in marketing’s internal operating strategy to position marketing as a collaborative key business function.
In our research, a marketing executive commented that “it seems unfair that marketing has to explain itself to the organization when other departments don’t have to do that. Plus, marketing already has so much on its plate.” But when marketing has better internal standing, its external performance is also more likely to improve.
Behind marketing’s misperception
There are a number of factors that contribute to an underappreciation of marketing:
- Marketing is often a black box for colleagues, sometimes even at the C-suite level. People might see marketing’s budget and visible work, such as ads or social media posts, but not the strategic analysis and planning behind it.
- Measuring marketing's impact remains challenging despite lots of data. Linking purchases to specific marketing initiatives, especially long-term brand-building efforts, is difficult given complex customer journeys and touchpoints that are often invisible and can’t be tracked.
- Unclear scope: Marketing’s role varies widely across organizations. Plus, its responsibilities have expanded even as some tasks from the traditional 4 Ps (product, pricing, promotion, place) have shifted to other functions. In addition, the complexities of “promotion” and “place” have expanded exponentially in the last decade.
- Limited shared understanding: Many colleagues and even executives lack a marketing background, yet campaigns, logos and other marketing decisions often attract comments from across the organization — a contrast to decisions by the finance function, for example.
What can marketing do?
Enhancing marketing's internal perception requires more than just explaining it. Marketing leaders and their teams should consider a variety of approaches:
- Align with the CEO on objectives and accountability. Work with the CEO to define marketing’s role and clarify boundaries with adjacent teams. Given how dynamic marketing is in reaction to market, tech and other developments, the definition of marketing’s role might require regular updates.
- Work closely with finance. The CFO is the keeper and communicator of financial numbers to the CEO and board. Marketing should align with the finance team on which marketing-related metrics to track, while keeping them informed on marketing initiatives and performance. Also helpful: Being in the finance team’s planning conversations, which close collaboration will facilitate.
- Show a commercial focus, including in the department name. Marketing metrics such as clicks, impressions, reach and engagement don’t mean much to nonmarketers. Instead, use financially oriented metrics such as pipeline contribution in terms of volume, value or conversion rate. The challenge of attributing revenue to marketing initiatives and thus pipeline contribution, especially long-term brand building, can partly be addressed by asking customers, when appropriate, what influenced their purchase. Even rough estimates of marketing’s impact on the bottom line are better than no financial insights at all. Giving the marketing team a name that highlights its focus on growth — e.g., “Marketing & Commercial Performance” — could be additionally useful.
- Start collaborations with other functions early on in projects. Show other functions how they can leverage marketing’s strategic insights and expertise for more meaningful impact compared to just executing preconceived plans. Cross-functional teamwork, including with finance, sales, strategy, IT, operations and HR, is an opportunity to share marketing's strategic and analytical way of working, growth orientation, expertise in targeting audiences, and effective use of data and technology.
- Help shape corporate strategy through customer and competitive insights. Marketing’s shorter-term focus on generating leads, conversion and data analytics has, to some extent, deprioritized longer-term strategy tasks in areas like customer insight, competitive intelligence and market understanding. Enhancing marketing’s strategic influence could entail suggestions regarding promising target customers, growth opportunities and brand positioning.
Marketers should remember that useful market intelligence includes rich qualitative insights that complement big data. In an interview, one marketing executive said: “We have ample data on customers, including their email and phone number, but not their heartbeat and not their perception.”
Enhancing marketing’s recognition as a rigorous discipline that requires education and expertise — just like finance or HR — needs to be a priority. The digitalization and increasing use of technology, including AI, are an opportunity to change the perception that anyone can do marketing. Emphasize not just practical experience but also educational requirements in analytics, AI, marketing finance, research and insights, and strategy. More emphasis on certified continuous education, especially in a field that changes so rapidly, can signal that it’s a job that requires up-to-date, specialized skills.
