There’s a version of marketing that’s become very good at its own metrics. Reach up. Engagement up. The campaign is everywhere. And somehow, none of it feels like enough anymore.
The KPIs are being hit. The insight is sharper than ever, thanks to unimaginable amounts of data. And yet marketing’s influence within the organization is shrinking. Not because marketing got worse. Because the room changed.
Why do CMOs have more face-time with their CFO than their CEO?
Through many conversations, I’m seeing a disturbing pattern: marketers are no longer in the room when budget gets allocated, when growth strategy gets set, when the business decides what it does next. Sales is louder. Finance is closer to the centre. Other departments are making brand decisions without asking. Marketing is getting better at marketing and less central to the business at the same time.
These are symptoms. To understand what’s actually happening, it’s worth naming a few things that contributed.
Marketing invested heavily in understanding the customer — deeply, rigorously, with better tools and richer data than anyone ever had before. That understanding became marketing’s primary currency. Insight became the thing marketing was known for, tasked with, evaluated on. And in becoming the function that understood the customer, marketing quietly stopped being the function that understood the business.
Then came the efficiency narrative. AI as scale engine. CFOs with new appetite for efficiency. Marketing spend — historically the loosest line on the P&L — suddenly needing to justify itself in commercial terms that marketing had never been asked to speak. That’s a new language for marketing, one many don’t speak.
The consequence can be felt. When marketing loses its seat, the organization loses clarity. Sales gets louder. Finance gets more rigorous and cautious. Product gets more insular. The one function genuinely trying to understand the customer is no longer in the room. That’s a business problem.
Consider this:
Marketing’s reason to exist is brand and demand, and making product move. Sales’ reason to exist is to close the deal. These are different functions with different perspectives. When marketing gets cut or sidelined, the organization loses its forward vision and customer understanding. It also loses the function that sits closest to where the market is going.
Brand perception and revenue are now part of the same conversation. The line between what customers respond to and how the business grows no longer exists. A campaign that performs needs to move the needle in a measurable way. Customer insight without commercial logic produces direction without momentum. It tells you what people want without accounting for how the business gets there.
What the organization now needs from marketing is different from what it built marketing to do. It needs a function that holds both: what the customer wants and how the business gets there. At the same time, in the same conversation.
That’s a harder brief than anyone wants to admit. It requires marketing to move into territory that used to belong to other functions. Commercial logic. Distribution strategy. How value actually gets exchanged. And it requires the organization to let it, which is the part nobody is writing about.
The re-organizations happening right now aren’t neutral structural decisions — marketing folded under sales, under finance, under the Chief Commercial Officer i.e. They’re bets that the org can get to growth without the function that was closest to the customer. Maybe that works. Maybe the commercial logic is tight enough to compensate. Time will tell.
But something goes quiet when marketing leaves the room. And it’s not always obvious what it is until it’s been gone a while.