CMOs Are Under Fire, But the Measurement Model Should Be

Companies keep trying to reinvent the CMO role. They restructure it, rename it, expand it, shrink it or merge it with something else. But the role itself isn’t the issue. What’s broken is the measurement model wrapped around it.

CMOs influence the systems and decisions that determine whether a business can grow, yet they are still evaluated by metrics designed for a different era. They shape alignment across teams, guide customer and commercial strategy, lead business development strategy and influence how the business shows up internally and externally. But dashboards still tend to define their success.

And that disconnect is creating instability at the top.
Forrester found that more than one in five Fortune 500 companies changed their senior marketing leader in a single year. McKinsey’s research shows the biggest predictor of CMO impact is alignment with the CEO, yet only about a third of business leaders agree with CMOs on what marketing is responsible for. Fewer than 30 percent of CEOs and CFOs believe their CMOs are exceeding expectations.

This is not a capability problem.
This is a role clarity and measurement problem.

Most organizations still evaluate CMOs by short-term outputs instead of long-term conditions for growth. But the reality is that CMOs influence the parts of the business that don’t always show up cleanly in attribution reports: cohesive messaging, customer pathways, client-experience consistency, cross-functional momentum and organizational readiness. These are the levers that make revenue possible, even if they don’t create tidy marketing KPIs.

And CMOs feel the strain.
An analysis compiled by Robert Collings shows roughly two-thirds of senior marketing leaders admit they struggle to tie marketing activity to financial results in a way that satisfies executive leaders. Not because the impact isn’t real, but because the impact isn’t linear. Growth depends on many interconnected parts of the business working in sync. CMOs influence that whole system, yet dashboards usually measure only one small slice of it.

At the same time, the expectations for the role keep expanding.

Companies rely on CMOs to operate across functions — influencing product, brand, sales, communications, culture and customer experience — but still judge them by marketing-owned metrics. The result is a role that is critical to the business but often treated like a cost center instead of a growth lever.

Yet when the conditions are right, the results are clear.
Research from HEC Paris shows that companies with CMOs outperform those without one, with roughly 15 percent stronger performance in the sample they analyzed. The role works. It drives value. But only when the organization understands what the role is actually built to do.

This is the shift modern CMOs are navigating.
They are no longer simply driving campaigns. They are shaping how the company operates. They influence alignment, expectations and decisions across the business. They integrate how the brand shows up with how the business performs. Their value is structural. Their impact is cross-functional. Their work is commercial. But the measurement model hasn’t caught up.

The remit has expanded, but the metrics have not. CMOs influence customer, commercial and organizational performance, yet are still evaluated by activity inside the function. As long as that gap exists, the role will remain vulnerable even when the work is strong.

Until the measurement model changes, the CMO role will continue to look unstable no matter how strong the leader is.

The CMOs who succeed today understand this landscape clearly. They define their role with precision. They set expectations early. They translate their work into the language CEOs and CFOs trust. They make the conditions behind growth visible, not just the outputs. And they help organizations build a measurement model that reflects how growth actually happens now.

CMOs don’t need reinvention.
They need recognition.
They need alignment.
They need a measurement model that reflects the reality of the work.

That is where the real impact is happening.
And where the next chapter of modern marketing leadership will take shape.