What a CMO Actually Does

Ask ten people what a Chief Marketing Officer does and you will get ten answers, most of them wrong and a few of them insulting.

Picks the colors. Approves the ads. Runs the Instagram. Throws the party at the trade show. Spends a lot of money and then makes a slide explaining where it went.

My own family's working theory is that I "do the internet." I have stopped correcting them. It saves time at Thanksgiving.

Here is the real answer, in one sentence.

A CMO owns the answer to the question "Why would anyone choose us?" and then makes the whole company act like it means it.

A CMO owns the answer to the question "Why would anyone choose us?" and then makes the whole company act like it means it.

That is it. Everything else is detail. Important, expensive, occasionally duck-related detail.

Marketing is not a department. It is the point.

I once came across a line from Peter Drucker, a management thinker who was smarter than most org charts put together. His idea, roughly: a business exists to create a customer, so it really only has two basic jobs. Marketing and innovation. Everything else is a cost.

I love that, partly because it is true and partly because it is great ammunition in a budget meeting.

But it also explains why the CMO job is so hard to describe. If marketing is the reason the company exists, then the CMO touches everything. Product. Pricing. Sales. Retail partners. Customer service. The tone of the out-of-office reply. The CMO is not the person who decorates the company. The CMO is the person who keeps asking whether anyone outside the building actually cares.

The six hats (and one of them is a duck costume)

If you followed me around for a week, you would see me switch between six jobs, often before lunch.

1. Translator. I bring the customer's voice into rooms where the customer is not invited. Engineers speak specs. Finance speaks margin. Customers speak "Will this survive my kid?" Somebody has to translate. That's me.
2. Storyteller. I decide who the brand is and how it talks. At STM, that sometimes means writing dialogue for a backpack with opinions. Yes, that is a real sentence from my real job.
3. Growth owner. Beautiful work that does not move numbers is a hobby. I own the numbers. Revenue, reach, conversion, and the awkward question of what we got for the money.
4. Product partner. In my case I also run product, which means I am the guy who promised the customer something and also the guy who has to build it. Accountability with nowhere to hide. Highly recommend. Mostly.
5. Team builder. I hire for taste, speed, and curiosity, then get out of the way. A small team that knows exactly what it is trying to win will beat a large team that is trying to win everything.
6. Change leader. Somebody has to drag the company into the future before the future drags it. These days that mostly means AI.

A typical Monday: approve a talking duck's punchline at nine. Review margin on a new case at ten. Explain to the CEO why the duck is a revenue strategy at eleven. Skip lunch and hit the gym instead, because burning off the morning's stress is cheaper than therapy and it gives my brain a fresh coat of paint for the afternoon. Repeat.

What I got wrong for years

When I first stepped into senior marketing roles, I thought the job was to be the chief creative person. Make the best-looking work in the building. Win the internal applause.

I was very good at the applause part.

What I was slower to learn is that the CMO is not graded on how the work looks. The CMO is graded on what the work does. A gorgeous campaign that nobody remembers is a failure with excellent typography. It took me a few of those to stop confusing "everyone loved it in the meeting" with "customers did something about it."

A gorgeous campaign that nobody remembers is a failure with excellent typography.

There is a reason the job has a reputation for short stints. Recruiting firms that track this stuff, with the enthusiasm of sports statisticians, regularly find CMOs have one of the shortest tenures in the C-suite. When the job is vague, it is easy to look busy and hard to look essential. The fix is to tie everything you do to the one question that matters. Why would anyone choose us?

AI just rewrote the job description

For most of marketing history, the CMO was basically a factory manager. Big ideas went in one end, and an army of writers, designers, editors, and agencies turned them into stuff at the other. The bigger the army, the more stuff.

That factory just got automated.

AI now handles a huge share of the production. Drafts, variations, images, video, resizes, translations, the forty-seven versions of the same banner ad. What used to take a department and a month can take a small team and an afternoon. Our two-person team at STM has reached 5 million organic views in ten months, and nobody hired an army to do it.

So what is left for the CMO? The parts that were always the real job, now with nowhere to hide:

• Judgment. Knowing which of the thousand options is the good one. The machine can make everything. It has no idea what is good.
• Taste. A point of view sharp enough that the output sounds like you and not like everyone else who typed the same prompt. Here is the catch: the machine does not want to ruffle feathers. Left alone, it plays it safe, polite, and middle of the road. But if you want to soar with the eagles, you had better plan on ruffling some feathers. So you have to prompt it with very specific direction, and push back when it gets timid, until it does what your taste demands instead of what offends no one.
• Orchestration. Running a team of people and machines like one system. Less factory manager. More conductor. Fewer meetings. Hopefully.
• Courage. Making the call, fast, and owning it when it misses.

The machine can make everything. It has no idea what is good.

The CMOs who thought their job was managing the factory are about to have a very confusing few years. The ones who knew the job was always about the customer are about to have the most fun of their careers.

I am firmly in the second group. Mostly because I spent enough time in the first one.

So, what does a CMO do?

We figure out why anyone should care. We make the company act like it believes it. We tell that story so well that people actually show up. Then we prove it worked, with numbers, before the next budget meeting.

And occasionally we write jokes for a backpack.

It is the best job in the building. Just do not ask my family to explain it.