OCT 16, 2024

How CMOs Are Leading Business Strategy and Brand Growth in 2024

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Article first published in AdAge on October 15, 2025. Read the original article here

The oft-cited data on declining CMO tenure belies an important fact: Two-thirds of exiting Fortune 500 CMOs in 2023 were either promoted to a new role within their company or moved to a new company in a lateral or step-up position, including chief growth officer, chief revenue officer and division president. We’re actually witnessing the rise, not the demise, of the CMO. 

Behind the rise is a reappreciation that marketing is a company’s No. 1 business driver. As CMOs reclaim their role as the voice of the customer within the organization, they’re seeking human solutions over merely functional ones: The pendulum is flowing back to the aspiration of the brand and the quality of customer experiences that can attain it.

Meaningful progress in the company’s market position, and the brand engagement that initiates it, is overcoming the impulse to simply chase incremental growth this minute. 

British Airways is an example. The company champions full-cycle growth and even makes it a core piece of HR’s onboarding process. Similarly, P&G’s Marc Pritchard emphasizes the importance of emotional values and the creativity that triggers them in selling everyday products. And Starbucks recruited Chipotle CEO Brian Niccol to run the coffee chain in part because he added a second assembly line to handle Chipotle’s anticipated mobile app order volume, whereas the Starbucks app had overcrowded stores with pickup lines that killed the coffee house vibe. 

The CMO job is 95% chief and 5% marketing. Its complexity encompasses the totality of how products and services are delivered. Because taking care of today’s problem doesn’t take care of tomorrow’s growth, progressive CMOs are shifting the data mindset from defense to offense. Defense justifies marketing with immediate-term metrics. Offense increases the flow of people to become customers and champions, and charts how the flow is creating a stronger business foundation. 

To support the offense, agencies and media must redefine their value. 

Agencies need to be scouts and guides—essential eyes and ears for clients—not just producers. To do it, they need to restore the truest sense of agency. It’s become popular to blame intensifying client demands for execution myopia in agency life. But as Kraft Heinz VP of Marketing, International Victoria Sjardin told a CMO peer group in the spring about agency-client collaborations, “You are half of the relationship, so if there’s a problem, it is 50% your problem.” The flip side is truer than ever for agencies in the matter of business growth.

Specifically, agencies need to prize marketing, not just specialty. That means putting more senior people on the front lines to bone up on the business well beyond the brief and uncover brand expansion opportunities. It means making forward investments in talent and the education, engagement and business mindedness of teams. You need energy and intelligence reserves to bring clients broader, more integrated growth solutions they can’t see yet. Invest ahead of the statement of work to widen the margin of value, and you’ll generate the impact to justify increased fees.

Media need to broaden their audience impact lens beyond immediate optimization. CMOs on offense will bring media partners closer and push vendors to the background. Partners marshal the data to show how platform investments forward brands by bringing specific audiences along the consumer journey; vendors push the point solutions of awareness or click and conversion. One rises to the urgency and architecture of a client’s vision with a service context and sustainable ideas; the other simply sells their disposable connections. 

What we sell, how we price, and how we deliver are the bedrock creative of a brand. The rise of the CMO will restore long-term, sustainable business growth by rebuilding on this foundation. Supporting cast need to adapt to the new design.

Written By:
John Harris

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