There is a cruel irony at the center of marketing leadership. The CMO is in charge of one of the most complex and long-term positions in business. But everything they do is measured on a short-term performance system, using a shrinking budget, to boost company sales before time runs out.
Maybe CMO should stand for Chief Miracle Officer. Or, like some companies, why not just eliminate this role altogether? Bad idea. Especially with the advent of AI. But we’ll talk about that later.
According to Forrester’s 2025 report, “The Representation and Mandate of Fortune 500 CMOs“, only 49% of Fortune 500 top marketers hold the CMO title today, compared to 55% just a year ago. More than one in five Fortune 500 companies have changed their marketing leadership entirely in the past 12 months. The average CMO tenure has fallen to 3.9 years, still the shortest average in the C-suite.
Yet for some, the institutional response to a structurally broken model was not to fix it. It was about dissolving the role. UPS, Etsy, and Walgreens have all eliminated the standalone CMO position and not replaced it. Marketing responsibilities were integrated into sales director or operations director roles, and distributed leadership structures were implemented. Or worse yet, martech has been left to IT to implement.
The unspoken message: Leadership in brand building is about overhead, not infrastructure. As vice president and principal analyst at Forrester, Ian Bruce put it onthe CMO’s mission had become “extended between brand and demand, product and pipeline, digital and physical”.
CEOs did what was intuitive: They divided the work or assigned it to someone who offered analytical metrics and short-term ROI indicators. What they didn’t take into account is what happens to a brand when no one has to question whether it means anything.
As more people use AI to find products or services, your promotional spend isn’t generating sales. AI doesn’t care about your jingle, your clever ad, or your sales promotion. To the AI, this stuff is invisible. It’s searching for meaning.
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The plateau of indifference: what fills the void
When marketing turns to performance spend management and dashboard monitoring, brands drift toward what I call the indifference plateau.
It’s a deceptively comfortable place. Incomes are not collapsing. Customers don’t disappear overnight. The brand is always known, always available, always spendthrift. But that no longer makes sense to people. The justification for price versus value is eroding.
Consumers can always name the brand, but with so many solutions for me too, they choose based on price, which becomes the only real differentiator.
Well done. You have reduced your own margins and increased the need for promotional spending.
The fact is that market share varies between competitors running identical playbooks, and performance spending must increase simply to maintain stable results.
As you look at this number, notice how brand clarity takes you further on the indifference plateau than simple price.
The more things change, the more things change
For example, several decades ago, when General Mills bought the fashion brand Lacoste and merged it with Izod, things went pretty well.
But then they optimized it to generate short-term revenue. The brand is starting to appear in discount stores. Distribution expanded to mass sales points. It lost its premium cachet, and margins plummeted like a microphone at the end of a hip-hop concert.
Rebuilding these once-significant margins after the brand was purchased by Lacoste in 1992 required years of patient reinvestment: withdrawing from discount channels, increasing prices and restoring meaning. Sales ultimately soared 800% over the next decade. Leaving behind at least two decades of lost profits.
The lesson is not just that the turnaround worked. It’s about how long it took and how much of that time directly opposed the quarterly pressure to show faster results.
This is the true cost of living on the plateau of indifference. Not a bad quarter. Years of compounded irrelevance that become progressively harder and more expensive to undo.
McDonald’s learned a version of this lesson in 2019 when it eliminated its global CMO role. Within a year, the company reinstated his position and has since expanded its CMO portfolio.
It turns out that by removing the person responsible for making sense of the brand, we ultimately discover that the question still needs to be asked. Meaning matters to those whose money you would like to get in exchange for your product. These days, AI gets the first vote.
The stakes have changed, and there’s no way around it.
AI does not surface brands based on ad spend, impression share, or promotional pricing. It summarizes the narrative imprint of the brand. It reveals the problems the brand demonstrably solves, the values it consistently demonstrates, and how much customers value it.
A brand that has spent years in performance-only mode, with no one controlling its meaning, has a thin, transactional narrative. The AI reads this thinness and works around it. It will become more and more invisible.
The numbers behind this change are not trivial. Studies already show a decline in organic click-through rates between 15% and 64% when AI-generated answers appear in search results.
Brands without a clear meaning don’t just lose ground. They lose the ability to be found in the channel, replacing traditional searching.
Today there is a simple audit that any marketing director, or anyone who has inherited the marketing function, can carry out. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity to recommend a solution in your category.
If your brand doesn’t appear, or appears vaguely, you’ve just received a more honest assessment of your brand health than most tracking studies will give you. No amount of media spending corrects this result. Only the meaning counts.
The CMO structural trap (short tenure, performance metrics only, brand investment treated as discretionary overhead) has been quietly creating this AI vulnerability for years.
Removing this role didn’t just cost brands a title. It cost them the one leader whose job it was to prevent this invisibility.
3 things a marketing manager needs to actually do their job
The miracle C-suites keep asking for isn’t brand value in 90 days. The real miracle, the hardest and quietest, is getting the organization to understand that brand meaning is an infrastructure, not an overhead, and that without someone to protect it, the business operates without instruments.
1. A longer measurement window
Binet and Field’s research establishes the empirical baseline: short-term effects are measurable within a year, but the combined value of brand meaning, higher margins, lower acquisition costs, and greater resilience in an economic downturn plays out over three years or more.
CMOs are being asked to build something that might take longer than their likely mandate to fully realize. It’s not a talent problem. This is a system design problem.
2. Budget protection for brand development, separate from performance spending
Binet and Fields’ 60/40 principle (spend 60% on long-term brand building, 40% on short-term activation) is not a philosophical preference.
This is an empirical formula for maximizing total marketing ROI. When this ratio reverses, as it does in most organizations, short-term sales numbers hold up for some time. Then the baseline erodes.
You then find yourself on the plateau of indifference and wondering why performance spending continues to require more money to produce the same results.
3. A seat at the strategy table, not just the media table
The meaning of a brand begins with what a company does, not what it says. The CMOs who are driving growth and increasingly rising to the CEO position are those who are involved in product decisions, customer experience design and organizational values, not just creative approvals and media planning.
Work needs a new name
There is one last adjustment that deserves to be made. The title of chief marketing officer may itself be part of the problem. This signals a functional path: campaigns, creatives, media, at the precise moment when the work requires something broader.
What the role really requires is someone whose mandate is relevance. Relevance in the most operational sense: ensuring that the brand means something clear and consistent to the people it is trying to reach, to the algorithms that increasingly decide what those people see, and to the culture in which the brand operates.
Let’s call this role responsible for relevance. The companies that understand this first will have brands that AI can surface.
Those who still treat the CMO as a media interruption ROI spreadsheet jockey, or who distribute the function to a COO, or an IT department, and a dashboard, will not do so.
Companies that eliminated the CMO role lost the one leader whose job it was to make the brand meaningful, not only in the eyes of the people it’s trying to reach, but also in the eyes of the AI platforms that need that meaning to make you visible.
In the age of AI-mediated discovery, no other factor will be more consequential or costly to leave unaddressed.
