Strategy
I've never been a CMO. Let me be clear about that upfront. My perspective on this comes from the other side of the table: from working with CMOs, living with one, advising founders and marketing teams, challenging brand strategies in boardrooms, and watching, up close, the gap between what marketing promises and what the business actually experiences.
And what I keep seeing is a strange paradox. The people responsible for growth are often the least trusted to deliver it. Not because they're incompetent. But because they're playing the wrong game.
"The best marketers serve customer needs AND company needs. Most are only doing one."
Thomas Barta, who's spent years running leadership research across 68,000 marketer assessments, puts it with surgical precision: only 20% of CMOs get a top rating from their CEO for driving growth. One in five. That means four out of every five CMOs are, in the eyes of the person who hired them, a cost centre with a creative brief. The fact that the vast majority of CMOs are not even properly trained in Marketing doesn't help make a strong case on their behalf. But that's a different story.
This isn't a new problem. Marketing's representation at the board level has been shrinking quietly for decades. The CFO presents with numbers. The COO presents with systems. The CMO presents with... brand equity. And then everyone nods politely and moves on to capex.
The issue isn't that CEOs don't understand marketing. The issue is that most CMOs haven't made the case in boardroom language. They've been talking in segmentation and programmatic, while the rest of the table is talking in growth and margin. That's not a strategy problem. That's a translation problem.
Across all the profiles studied, four archetypes emerge.
The Flowkeepers keep the engine running. They're organised, reliable, and companies would fall apart without them. But they're not growing anything.
The Implementers are the ones CEOs love to delegate to. "Give it to Sarah, she'll get it done." Useful? Absolutely. Strategic? Not quite.
The Dreamers have the big ideas. They're the ones in the workshops and the strategy sessions. The problem is they can't mobilise. The idea stays on the slide. The slide stays in the deck. The deck goes into a folder no one opens again.
Growth Rebels have the big idea AND know how to move the organization. That combination is rare. And it's worth everything.
What makes them different isn't raw intelligence or creative brilliance or years of experience. 60% of the skills that define a Growth Rebel come down to one thing: bravery.
Speaking up when it's uncomfortable. Presenting the idea even when people might laugh. Calling out what isn't working when everyone else is nodding along.
The remaining 40%? Management skills. The basics. You still need those.
I work mostly upstream of execution. I'm in the room before the brief gets written, helping businesses understand what they're actually trying to solve, before they throw media spend at a symptom.
And from that vantage point, I haven't seen much, or any, Growth Rebels. Mostly Flowkeepers and Implementers, and then watched their teams get trapped in the system they're operating in. Being blamed and blaming everything in sight.
Companies hire CMOs for transformation. Then they penalise them for the discomfort that transformation creates.
They want the change, but not the friction. The vision, but only the parts that don't upset the CFO. The brand, but only if it doesn't require patience.
If you're a CMO or heading in that direction, here's a useful pressure test.
Ask yourself which of the four profiles you're actually operating from right now, not in aspiration, but in practice. Are you implementing? Dreaming without mobilising? Keeping things flowing? Or genuinely growing?
Then ask: what's the growth idea I believe in that I haven't had the courage to push properly? Not the version I've softened for the room. The real one.
And finally: who are the three people in the organisation I need to bring with me before I can make that case at the top? Because the Growth Rebel who wins isn't the one with the loudest pitch. It's the one who's already done the hall walking before the meeting starts.
That's a different kind of bravery. And it's the one that actually works.
Stay Strategic, my friends.
Reference: Uncensored CMO Podcast, featuring Thomas Barta, author of The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader.