In most boardrooms today, the chief marketing officer (CMO) or marketing director seat is the hottest, and often the shortest-lived. According to Spencer Stuart’s 2025 CMO Tenure Study, the average tenure for Fortune 500 CMOs is just 4.3 years, one of the briefest among executive roles. However, behind the statistic lies a deeper tension: marketing leaders are being asked to fill multiple roles and deliver a longer shopping list of deliverables.
They’re expected to drive short-term growth, build long-term brands, transform digital ecosystems and inspire teams — all while budgets shrink and expectations soar.
The real issue isn’t that CMOs can’t keep up. It’s that the leadership and organisation model itself hasn’t evolved to match marketing’s new complexity.
Why the old model is breaking
The traditional CMO was designed for a linear world: plan campaigns, manage agencies, and report performance.
Today’s marketing environment is anything but linear. Customer journeys fragment across platforms, AI automates creative production and brand meaning is negotiated in real time. Yet the role’s accountability has ballooned, part visionary, part analyst, part diplomat, part technologist.
It’s like going to your mechanic and expecting him to be your therapist while fixing that lower back problem – could it be that modern businesses are just expecting too much too quickly from their marketing leaders?!
On the other hand, most CMOs operate within organisations still built for silos, not systems. They must integrate data, creativity, technology, and culture — within structures designed for a simpler pre-covid age.
The result? Constant firefighting and diminishing influence.
When titles change, problems don’t
This has resulted in several global companies experimenting with “removing” or reconfiguring the CMO role.
Hyundai Motor America, for example, scrapped its traditional CMO structure, splitting duties between a chief creative officer and a VP of marketing performance. The logic was speed and focus. The result? Coordination challenges and diffused accountability.
Other companies have evolved or changed the marketing leadership title and role to reference more modern trends and demands.
But eliminating or changing titles doesn’t eliminate tension, it simply redistributes it.
Brands still need a unifying narrative voice that balances performance and purpose, short-term returns and long-term reputation. Without that, marketing becomes executional, not strategic.
Automation isn’t strategy
Meanwhile, many corporates and entrepreneurs are scrambling to keep up and gain some type of competitive edge or parity in the new AI arms race. The arrival of AI and automation has supercharged marketing’s operational power, but also accelerated its existential drift.
Yes, AI can optimise media spend, generate headlines, and even predict consumer behaviour. But it can’t interpret meaning. It can’t sense timing. And it can’t lead with empathy.
Too many organisations mistake technological capacity for strategic clarity. But when algorithms guide marketing decisions without human oversight, brands risk becoming efficiently irrelevant. They might be optimised, but become soulless.
The real root cause of the CMO dilemma
- The CMO challenge isn’t about competence, it’s about context.
- Marketing is still too often seen as a cost centre, not a strategic commercial lever.
- Marketing leaders are evaluated and judged on quarterly metrics rather than longer term cultural impact.
- Organisations value speed over synthesis.
- And if the CMO fails to deliver on short term metrics, they’re often not kept around for long enough to effect sustainable longer term change. However, if CMOs are failing it’s because their environments haven’t been redesigned for the demands of modern marketing: multi-disciplinary, insight-led, and human-centred.
So how should the CMO function and organisation be designed for improved success you ask?
A new framework for marketing leadership
In analysing how successful companies like Unilever, Adobe, and Airbnb restructured their marketing leadership models in the past decade, a few consistent organisation design principles emerge. These align closely with the mindset of design thinking – solving systemic business challenges through empathy, experimentation, and integration.
Redesigning marketing leadership isn’t about new titles, it’s about how leaders, teams, and organisations collaborate. This is a framework that I believe is already showing promising results.
- Problem-led, not channel-led
Great marketing starts with identifying a human problem worth solving; then aligning every channel and creative effort around that. Tools follow strategy, not the other way around.
- Dual operating horizons
Run parallel tracks: one for immediate performance, one for long-term brand equity. The best leaders know how to balance today’s conversions with tomorrow’s trust.
- Shared leadership triad (CEO–CMO–CFO)
Marketing must have a seat at the commercial table, not as a storyteller but as a strategic partner. The most successful organisations have shared KPIs across finance, operations, and marketing. Strategic and operational conversations and decisions should be made together.
- Culture over campaigns
The way your marketing team works internally reflects how your brand shows up externally. Internal culture design is brand design. This is not only limited to the marketing department but to every department within your company.
- Metrics that matter
Pair tactical indicators (CAC, ROAS) with strategic ones (brand health, employee advocacy, net emotional resonance). Measure what builds equity, not just what buys clicks.
These aren’t just principles for marketing departments, they’re design truths for any organisation navigating the intersection of technology, culture, and commerce.
The human imperative
Marketing’s future won’t be defined by who can automate faster, but by who can humanise smarter. The next generation of marketing leaders will succeed not by mastering every tool, but by asking the right questions of customers, of culture, and of the business.
Leadership is no longer about control. It’s about clarity: defining the problems worth solving and designing the systems that allow creativity and meaning to be implemented and scaled.
From marketing function to market force
If marketing remains treated as a function to be optimised, it will always be first in line for budget cuts, department restructures and staff redundancy.
But when organisation leadership recognises marketing as the force that translates human meaning into business momentum, the CMO becomes indispensable.
Marketing leadership doesn’t need a new name. It needs a new design built for business-wide integration, championing insight, and meaningful impact.
The future belongs to leaders who redesign not just campaigns, but contexts — where creativity and commerce finally move in harmony.
Jody Daniels is a brand strategist, thought leader and business change agent. With a sharp eye on culture and an unrelenting focus on relevance, he helps businesses translate deep consumer insights into growth strategies that convert and connect. Daniels is currently strategy director at Rapt Creative and Mortimer Harvey, and a published author of Deconstructing Design Thinking. Follow his thought-provoking takes on strategy and culture in his LinkedIn newsletter Cup of Jo Leadership Chronicle.
