The CMO Position Is Dead... Long Live the CMO

We’ve officially entered the era of Marketing Musical Chairs, except the music stops every 12 to 16 months, and it’s always the CMO left standing.

Why? Because the CMO role has become a lame duck gig. Disposable. Decorated. But damned. The title still sounds powerful, but it now often means: “You’re the first to go when growth stalls, vibes are off, or someone in the boardroom starts reading too much Martech Today.”

We’ve unbundled the role to death. In the name of "focus," companies have fractured marketing into Chief Something Else Officers: Chief Digital, Chief Growth, Chief Experience, Chief Customer, Chief Revenue, Chief Napkin Holder. Pick a flavor. But here’s the problem, no one owns the whole story anymore. Everyone owns a sliver of the customer journey, and the result is silo soup.

Let me be blunt: you can’t fire your CFO without triggering a panic attack in your investors. You can’t oust the CEO without a press release and six months of spin. But the CMO? They’re the corporate piñata. Hit them, replace them, and keep marching like it never happened.

And sure, marketing has gotten more complex. CMOs today are expected to master strategy, analytics, tech stacks, AI, culture, finance, digital personalization, demand gen, customer acquisition, customer retention, and somehow still write a decent subject line. It’s no wonder some companies are asking whether the title is outdated. Spoiler alert: it is, but not for the reason you think.

The real problem? We stopped letting CMOs be marketers. We turned them into dashboard operators. Platform priests. Martech mechanics. We traded big ideas for big data. We swapped intuition and customer understanding for attribution models and safe bets.

Because here’s what passes for strategy today:

Run paid ads on Instagram.

Watch them underperform.

Blame the algorithm.

Repeat.

That’s not marketing. That’s compliance. That’s pretending to do something so you don’t get fired before your stock vests.

Real marketing, demand creation, is about doing 25 weird, wild, low-cost things and doubling down on the 2 that catch fire. It’s stunts. Word-of-mouth. Creative tension. Cultural moments. It’s getting people to care when they weren’t even paying attention in the first place.

CMOs used to be the ones with the guts to say “let’s try something nobody else would dare.” Now we’re lucky if they can get a TikTok without legal reviewing it for three weeks.

The CMO role isn’t dead because it became irrelevant. It’s dead because we let it get hollowed out. And now we’re so scared of the mess, we’re renaming it instead of fixing it.

So what do we do?

If you’re a CEO: pick a horse. Either empower your marketing leader to actually lead, or stop pretending you want marketing to drive growth and admit you just want attribution reports and safe metrics.

If you’re a CMO: make noise. Be the voice of the customer and the voice of courage. Don’t go quietly. The companies that win aren’t the ones with the prettiest dashboards, they’re the ones with the strongest emotional connection to their customers.

And if you’re in marketing and wondering whether it’s still a place for brave, smart, culture-shaping work?

It is. But only if we stop worshipping platforms and start championing people.

Long live the CMO, not as a title, but as a force.

#marketing #leadership #CMO #brandbuilding #demandcreation #wordofmouth #growthmindset #advertising #creativitymatters