From Buzzwords to Business Outcomes
Rethinking the CMO Role for 2026 and Beyond
Early in my career, I assumed the pinnacle of marketing leadership was becoming a CMO. It was the job … the seat at the table, the influence, the responsibility for growth.
That ambition didn’t fade because my interest in marketing waned. It faded because the role itself did. Over the last decade, the CMO title has been diluted, stretched, and distorted into something far removed from how businesses actually grow. That contradiction isn’t accidental, it’s the result of how the role itself has been redefined, expanded, and misunderstood over time.
Today, the CMO role sits at the center of that tension. It’s one of the most visible seats at the executive table. It commands influence, budget, and expectations tied directly to growth. And yet, it’s also one of the most misunderstood, fragmented, and short-lived roles in the modern enterprise. Depending on who you ask, the CMO is responsible for brand. Or pipeline. Or demand generation. Or product positioning. Or customer experience. Or digital transformation. Or all of it - immediately. When CMOs fail, the conversation usually circles the same drain: “Marketing didn’t deliver.” But the deeper issue isn’t performance. It’s design.
We’ve built a role that’s structurally misaligned with how businesses actually grow, and then we act surprised when it collapses under pressure.
The Problem Isn’t That the Role Is Hard. It’s That It’s Fragmented
There’s a growing narrative that the CMO role has been “split” into multiple jobs: brand, product marketing, demand generation. That observation isn’t wrong, but it stops short of the real diagnosis.
The CMO role wasn’t split. It was allowed to fracture.
Over the past decade, marketing organizations optimized for channels, tools, and tactics instead of outcomes. Specialization became the default operating model. Dashboards multiplied, and new platforms promised certainty. Entire careers were built around mastering slices of the funnel instead of understanding the business behind it. I explored this shift in a previous piece The Marketing Leadership Gap - how the function quietly moved away from business stewardship and toward operational fragmentation, often without executive teams realizing it was happening.
The result is a generation of marketing leaders who are excellent at running parts of the machine, but were never developed to steer it. Brand leaders who can craft stories but struggle to tie them to revenue realities. Demand leaders who can generate pipeline but can’t articulate long-term market positioning. Product marketers who can frame features brilliantly but can’t answer board-level questions about growth trajectory. None of these are failures of talent. They’re failures of development and expectation.
A strong CMO isn’t three different jobs. A strong CMO is not just a visionary, they are an integrator; brand, product, demand, and revenue are not separate functions. They are interdependent systems. The job is to connect them, not choose between them.
Why the 18-Month CMO Lifespan Is a Symptom, Not the Disease
One of the more popular pieces of advice circulating among CEOs is to “hire the CMO you’ll need 18 months from now.” That’s directionally correct, but dangerously incomplete.
Eighteen months isn’t a runway. It’s a fuse.
And when leaders misunderstand what that fuse is actually attached to, the explosion is inevitable. When CMOs churn at that pace, it’s not because strategy takes too long. It’s because alignment never existed in the first place. In many organizations:
The CEO hires for immediate pain relief, not long-term positioning.
The board demands pipeline before strategy has time to compound.
The CMO is expected to fix structural issues they didn’t create, and in many cases, without the true authority to change them.
Success is measured through activity and optics instead of durable business outcomes.
The result is predictable: a cycle of hiring, optimism, pressure, disappointment, and replacement. The short tenure isn’t proof that CMOs can’t deliver. It’s proof that companies keep hiring them into roles that were never clearly defined. That misalignment shows up most clearly in how CMOs are forced to justify their role internally.
Sit in enough executive meetings and you’ll recognize the pattern: the CMO walks in with a 45-page deck that could have been ten. Teams scramble for weeks to assemble it. Every initiative is explained, defended, and quantified. Not because it lacks impact, but because marketing has been trained to justify its existence at every turn. Even when progress is real, the posture is defensive. And while the scrutiny is understandable given the budgets involved, the mindset is backwards. When marketing is forced to constantly prove activity instead of being trusted to drive outcomes, strategy gives way to theater.
What High-Functioning CMOs Actually Do Differently
When the role does work, and it does, quietly, in well-run organizations … the pattern is consistent. In those environments, the CMO is not treated as a functional specialist or a reporting layer. They are positioned as a business leader first. Someone expected to understand how growth actually happens, not just how marketing is executed.
That means, they understand:
How the company makes money
Where growth actually comes from
What sales hears in the field
How customers decide, delay, and defect
Which signals matter, and importantly, which are noise
They can speak brand and margin. Positioning and P&L impact. Demand and durability. And most importantly, they are trusted to operate at altitude, and not micromanaged through dashboards designed to create a false sense of certainty. That trust doesn’t remove accountability; it replaces performative reporting with real ownership. Read that again!
This isn’t about being “full-stack.” It’s about being business-literate first, channel-fluent second.
Where Marketing Leadership Went Off Course
Some of this fragmentation was inevitable. The marketing landscape genuinely became more complex as channels exploded, data multiplied, and technology promised ever-greater precision. But somewhere along the way, the discipline traded judgment for instrumentation. Instead of asking what the business actually needed next, marketing began asking what it could launch. Instead of building long-term advantage, teams optimized short-term signals. And instead of listening to the market, they listened to dashboards.
That shift didn’t just confuse executives - it quietly eroded marketing’s credibility at the table. When leaders can’t clearly connect activity to outcomes, trust weakens. And when trust weakens, tenure inevitably shortens.
What CEOs Should Be Hiring For. And What CMOs Must Reclaim
For CEOs, the mandate is clearer than it’s often treated. Don’t hire a CMO to fight today’s dumpster fire. Hire one to shape where the business is going – not 18 months, but 3 to 5 years out. That requires a different lens during the hiring process; one that prioritizes judgment and business fluency over surface-level marketing credentials.
That means testing for:
Business acumen, not buzzwords
Pattern recognition, not platform mastery
Strategic judgment, not slide production
The ability to say “no” as confidently as “yes”
And then, critically, trusting that leader enough to do the job. Accountability still matters, but it should be rooted in outcomes and direction, not performative reporting. Of course you can “trust, but verify.”
For CMOs and senior marketing leaders, the responsibility is equally real. The role can’t be reclaimed by defending it. It has to be re-earned through behavior. That means stepping out of specialization silos and back into the business itself. Learn how the company makes money. Sit with sales. Understand the P&L. Listen to customers without a survey in hand. Build hypotheses. Make calls. Own outcomes.
The role doesn’t need justification. It needs leadership.
From Marketing Theater to Market Leadership
Early in my career, I believed the pinnacle of marketing leadership was becoming a CMO.
It was the seat at the table. The responsibility for growth. The role where judgment, experience, and perspective were supposed to matter most.
That belief didn’t fade because marketing stopped being important. It faded because the role itself lost its center.
Over time, the CMO was pulled in too many directions at once; expected to manage channels, justify spend, defend dashboards, and deliver short-term results, often without the authority or alignment required to shape long-term growth. Somewhere in that shift, the role drifted away from being a business leader and toward becoming a steward of activity.
That doesn’t mean the role is broken beyond repair. It means it needs to be reclaimed, intentionally.
The future of marketing leadership isn’t about narrowing the job or splitting it into cleaner pieces. It’s about restoring its original purpose: understanding how the business actually grows, interpreting what the market is signaling, and aligning brand, product, sales, and strategy around durable outcomes. That kind of leadership doesn’t come from more tools, more channels, or more reporting. It comes from business fluency, pattern recognition, and the confidence to make decisions before the data is perfect. When CMOs are hired, empowered, and evaluated as business leaders, not functional operators, the role stops being fragile. It stops being defensive. And it starts doing what it was meant to do in the first place.
The question isn’t whether the CMO role can survive. It’s whether organizations are willing to design it, and trust it to succeed.
Perspective by Clint Allen | President & Founder, CLINTONSCOTT
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