The title “Chief Marketing Officer” understates the role’s responsibilities. In large organisations, marketing leadership has expanded quietly but decisively, extending far beyond campaigns, channels, and brand stewardship, while the language used to describe the role has remained largely unchanged.
This creates a disconnect. Boards and executive teams often continue to frame marketing in familiar terms – awareness, demand generation, brand building – even as CMOs operate within more complex systems. They’re expected to influence growth, shape digital infrastructure, manage risk, align internal behaviour, and interpret market signals that rarely arrive neatly packaged or complete.
As a result, the role is defined less by what appears in formal job descriptions and more by what organisations require in practice, often urgently, and not always explicitly.
Growth ownership without full control
At large companies, CMOs are increasingly accountable for growth. Pipeline contribution, demand creation, customer acquisition efficiency, and revenue impact now clearly fall within the remit, as reflected in board expectations, performance assessments, and budget scrutiny. What hasn’t shifted at the same pace is the degree of control available to deliver those outcomes.
Growth depends on pricing strategy, product decisions, sales execution, data integrity, customer experience, and operational delivery, few of which sit cleanly within marketing ownership. Instead, CMOs operate across functions, influencing outcomes they cannot directly control and navigating structural dependencies rather than situational ones.
This shifts the role from optimisation to orchestration. Attribution models remain partial, signals conflict, and short-term performance often contradicts long-term brand health. The CMO’s task isn’t to resolve these tensions conclusively, but to navigate them coherently, making decisions that hold together commercially even when certainty is limited.
Within large organisations, growth rarely comes from single levers. It emerges through the alignment of multiple imperfect ones moving in the same direction.
From campaigns to platforms and systems
Campaign thinking begins to break down at scale. Large organisations no longer “go to market” intermittently; they exist in the market continuously. Websites, apps, CRM systems, e-commerce platforms, service layers, and data pipelines shape the customer experience on an ongoing basis, often exerting more influence than any individual campaign.
As a consequence, senior CMOs spend less time approving creative output and more time overseeing systems. Digital platforms are no longer ancillary marketing assets; they function as operational infrastructure. Decisions on architecture, speed, integration, and usability directly affect conversion, trust, and retention.
This has drawn CMOs closer to technology leadership. In many organisations, the boundaries between marketing, product, and digital experience are increasingly porous. Responsibility shifts from message production to governing environments, ensuring consistency between what the organisation communicates, demonstrates, and delivers across touchpoints. The work itself tends to be quieter than campaign launches, but its impact is longer-lasting and often more decisive.
Brand as risk and trust management
At enterprise scale, brand functions less as a storytelling exercise and more as a mechanism for managing expectations. It shapes how customers interpret delays, errors, changes, and uncertainty, influencing whether patience is extended or trust is withdrawn. In volatile markets and highly visible digital environments, this function becomes critical.
Brand failures now travel faster than brand successes. Inconsistencies surface quickly, over-promising is rapidly exposed, and the reputational cost of misalignment between message and experience is materially higher than it once was. CMOs therefore operate as custodians of credibility. Their responsibility isn’t simply to enhance perception, but to ensure that the organisation doesn’t move faster in its messaging than it can sustain in delivery.
This often demands restraint rather than ambition: knowing when not to say more, when not to accelerate claims, and when amplification would weaken rather than strengthen trust.
Within large organisations, effective brands tend not to feel louder. They feel controlled, predictable, and dependable over time.
The internal job no one sees
A substantial proportion of a senior CMO’s work never faces the market at all. Internal persuasion is a defining and often underestimated aspect of the role. CMOs must align executives, boards, finance teams, legal functions, technology leaders, and regional stakeholders around decisions that are frequently ambiguous, contested, or perceived as risky.
This involves translating marketing logic into commercial language, experiential decisions into operational implications, and long-term brand investment into outcomes that executive teams recognise as measurable and material. Formal authority is rarely sufficient on its own. Progress depends far more heavily on influence.
As organisations grow, this internal dimension intensifies. Scale increases coordination requirements, slows decision-making, and amplifies risk aversion. CMOs are required to create momentum without appearing reckless, and coherence without demanding control.
Many of the most consequential marketing decisions are therefore negotiated well before they’re visible externally.
Designing capability, not just output
At scale, CMOs are also responsible for the environments in which marketing work occurs. This includes talent models capable of balancing creativity, performance, data, and technology; agency relationships that complement internal capability rather than displacing it; and operating rhythms that allow decisions to be made without driving teams into exhaustion.
Output is rarely the root problem when marketing underperforms. More often, weak outcomes stem from misaligned incentives, unclear ownership, or structural overload. Senior CMOs increasingly focus on designing conditions – decision rights, feedback loops, accountability structures – rather than intervening tactically in execution.
In this sense, the role begins to resemble organisational architecture as much as communication leadership.
Why the role keeps being underestimated
Despite this expansion, the CMO role is still frequently framed as executional. Marketing is often brought into conversations once strategic direction has already been set, rather than included in shaping it. This limits insight, narrows available options, and weakens outcomes downstream.
The most effective CMOs are typically those who stabilise complexity early, surfacing trade-offs before they harden into constraints and reducing uncertainty through clarity rather than prediction.
Their impact isn’t always visible in campaigns or launches. It appears instead in coherence: in how smoothly organisations move, how consistently they show up, and how infrequently they are required to explain themselves.
That contribution is easy to miss, but it should never be taken for granted.
Opinion
What top CMOs at large companies actually do
