By Carl Ronander, VP of Brand & Communications at Funnel
We’re not even halfway through 2025 and already we have yet another article that should turn off anyone pursuing a long-term career in marketing. Adweek, based on a study conducted by Gartner, is letting us know Why CMOs get fired. According to the study, the main reason is failure to deliver on promised results, followed by a number of ways the rest of the C-suite simply does not trust the strategic competency of their CMO. This, of course, is connected to the general sentiment that the CMO has the shortest tenure of the C-suite. Great….
Is it just me or are we as marketers constantly looking for ways to inflict pain on ourselves? And do we really deserve all this?
The ability of the CMO to communicate in a way that speaks to the rest of the C-suite has been in vogue amongst marketing thought leaders for the last couple of years. Yet, still, here we are. While I agree that marketing needs to be held responsible for its impact on the business and be able to strategise and communicate this – I believe there is one perspective that is often overlooked: the rest of the C-suite simply doesn’t know how marketing works. They think they do (because, how hard can it be?), but they don’t.
This quote from a study that LinkedIn’s B2B Institute conducted a while back says it all: “We saw that 96% of B2B marketers expected to see the main effect of their ad campaigns within 2 weeks.” What other investments (yes, marketing needs to be seen as an investment) have the same pressure to deliver immediate results? And this is in B2B where the clear difference from B2C is that it takes much more time to see results!
At a recent meeting at Meta, a striking statistic found that despite 77% of marketing leaders recognising the limitations of last-click attribution — outdated as it is — it still influences decisions in 78% of businesses. Awareness of marketing problems, therefore, does not always amount to the implementation of solutions.
So how do you change the situation and get your CEO and CFO to understand how marketing works? Let’s do 3 things so we can create a Venn diagram (marketers like Venn diagrams).
Embrace the marketing principles
A good place for a CMO to start is to actually understand how marketing works. Based on marketing science, we know what some of the fundamental principles of marketing are. These do not change depending on your category or audience – they are the effectiveness constants. Just look at the great recent study by WARC called The Multiplier Effect. It clearly lays out data-based rules for how you get the most out of your marketing investments. WARC’s findings are very much in line with what Peter Fields and Les Binette wrote in The Long and Short Of It over 10 years ago, that you need to have a balance between investments in Brand (long-term for future demand) and Performance (short-term for current demand). That balance, studies always conclude, is that a majority of marketing budgets should be invested in Brand. And the important thing here is balance – you need both, not either or.
So, the evidence is there and has been there for a long time. Still, according to another Gartner report (The CMO Quarterly Q4 2024), CMOs are not following the principles as investments in Brand have decreased by 40% YoY. One could debate what the chicken and the egg are as budgets continue to shift towards the short term. Is it the pressure on the CMO to show results, or is it simply that a majority of CMOs don’t know the principles? Unfortunately, the latter is probably true. So the first thing to fix is to know the principles of marketing to communicate these to the rest of the C-suite.
Brand marketing, when done with well-designed creative, works equally as effectively at activating current in-market buyers as Performance, as Dale Wilson recently noted. It is designed to create lasting memory associations for future buyers who are currently out of the market and will continue to bring buyers to your brand over many months and quarters in the future. So when 96% of B2B marketers want to see marketing working immediately, Brand can act upon the 5-ish percent of in-market buyers in exactly the way that a lead-generating ad will work immediately.
CMOs embracing the principles can then start looking into new emerging strategies and consider digging into the nitty-gritty of tools that will help them, not blinker and hurt them.
Differentiate between new shiny tools and real tectonic shifts
Experimentation is key in marketing. But, there is a difference between jumping on the latest trend with everything you have and working with MVPs. Again, CMOs need to know the difference between the two, not the rest of the C-suite that heard something on a podcast. Marketers being too keen to embrace the latest hot thing, I believe, is one of the reasons for the increasing lack of influence as identified in the Adweek/Gartner study. Marketers have forgotten that the foundations of marketing are the 4Ps, not 1P. Promotion will always be the sexy P. But constantly walking around horny for the next promotion kick is what will lose you real influence as a CMO. When CMOs start being part of discussions around Product, Pricing and Place they will increasingly show their value to the business with the unique customer-centric perspectives and creative problem-solving they can bring.
OK, before I lose your interest let’s talk a bit about that sexy Promotion as it is in the midst of one of those tectonic shifts. As argued by Catherine Kehoe (CCO at Nationwide) and subsequently marketing thought leaders such as Tom Roach and Dr Grace Kite, successful CMOs should implement a strategy of “lots of littles”. The way consumers and customers interact and buy brands today is not only through large and lavish campaigns (though these still play an important role) but by a myriad of smaller interactions.
This new fragmented reality for marketing adds complexity and shows that CMOs need new ways of staying on top of their data. But it also means going back to the principles defined by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute of building Mental Availability (easy to remember) and Physical Availability (easy to find and buy). Without clearly defined brand positioning and knowing what your distinctive assets are, a “lots of littles” approach is not for you and will end up hurting your brand through platform-led inconsistency.
Choreograph your data, measure incrementality
Lastly, CMOs need to go from deterministic vanity metrics (such as last-click attribution) towards understanding the incremental impact of marketing on business results. The way to achieve that is through probabilistic econometric modelling and working with Marketing Measurement such as MMM. If the KPIs that are defined are short-term, because they have been easy to get, don’t expect the C-suite to evaluate marketing in any other way.
When Meta and Google — which have built trillion-dollar businesses on digital attribution — have now introduced open-source MMM solutions with Robyn and Meridian, it is probably an indication of where marketing measurement is headed. Marketing departments and CMOs have a big challenge here as data and analytics literacy remains the key skill gap (Marketing Week).
If CMOs do these three things, voila! You have your Venn diagram to make marketing make sense.
And then, perhaps, the desire for self-spanking will become a bit less prevalent. Unless that is your thing, of course.
