Today’s CMOs: Chasing Business Growth While Juggling Executional Demands

Digital capabilities have facilitated the mission of the chief marketing officer (CMO) to drive growth through better customer insights, targeting, and measurement tools showing marketing’s impact in dollars and cents—but they also demand much more of CMOs in terms of daily execution and skills. 

This article describes the CMO’s multidisciplinary, strategy-plus-execution job and its challenges based on insights from interviews with CMOs, CEOs, and executive recruiters; a CMO roundtable and survey; and third-party sources.

This article is part of a series of insight articles on the CMO role.

• CEOs view the CMO as the crucial leader for propelling the company's growth.
• Numerous daily executional tasks can overwhelm CMOs, making it hard to focus on the long-term growth priorities and requiring a capable team for execution to free up the CMO for strategic work.
• Chief marketers often discuss revenue goals in marketing terms, but using financial language would better align their objectives with investors and the company’s financial plan.
• CMOs juggle various tasks across digital technology, data, strategy, and finance, demanding a high level of adaptability.
• Increasingly, CMOs with profit and loss (P&L) and operational backgrounds are moving into CEO and board roles, potentially leading to greater appreciation and support of marketing by future CEOs and boards.