There is a CMO identity crisis, but the crisis isn’t a marketing performance problem. It’s a framing problem–and the fix starts with understanding how decisions are really made in the C-suite.
It is early May 2026. Q2 execution pressure is real, and boards are starting to ask the uncomfortable question: is the growth plan actually working? For many companies, that question will land squarely on the CMO’s desk — and what happens next reveals one of the most consequential behavioral gaps in modern business leadership.
Last week, the B2B CMO Project released its 2026 B2B CMO Imperative report alongside its inaugural CMO 100 list. The findings are striking, but not surprising to me or anyone else who has sat in a C-suite marketing leadership role. Based on interviews with more than 50 senior B2B marketing leaders, the report’s central conclusion is that the traditional CMO playbook has run its course — and that the most urgent problem facing marketing leaders today is not strategy, not technology, and not budget. It is credibility (B2B CMO Project, 2026).
The data backing that conclusion is hard to argue with.
The Numbers Spell Out a Crisis
According to Gartner, 84% of CMOs report high levels of strategic dysfunction within their function — driven largely by unclear, conflicting, or overly numerous enterprise objectives that marketing is expected to support (Gartner, 2025a). At the same time, a separate Gartner survey found that only 14% of CEOs and CFOs view their CMO as effective at market shaping (Gartner, 2024). Boathouse’s Fifth Annual CEO Study (2025) adds a harder edge: only 15% of CEOs gave their CMO an “A” grade — down from 24% just one year earlier — and 60% now view marketing as a cost center, up from 35% (Boathouse, 2025).
Spencer Stuart’s 2025 CMO Tenure Study found that 34% of Fortune 500 companies no longer have a true enterprise CMO reporting to the CEO (Spencer Stuart, 2025). Starbucks eliminated the global CMO title in March 2024. Lowe’s eliminated the role in 2022, reinstated it in 2024 — but even then, the CMO continued to report to the EVP of Merchandising, not the CEO. The optics of revival masked a structural demotion.
These are not isolated data points. They describe a systemic pattern.
The Behavioral Science Behind the Gap
Here is what the data cannot tell you on its own: this is not primarily a marketing performance problem. It is a behavioral one.
Role Identity Theory explains a significant part of what is happening. When CMOs see themselves first as marketers — rather than as business executives who use marketing as a tool — they behave, communicate, and measure accordingly (Stryker & Burke, 2000). They show up to executive team meetings with MQL dashboards, impressions, and campaign attribution models. Meanwhile, the CEO is thinking about revenue velocity, CAC payback, competitive positioning, and risk. The identity mismatch precedes the strategy mismatch.
The Framing Effect compounds this dynamic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981). “MQL growth” and “revenue acceleration” can describe the same underlying business activity — but they land in entirely different places in the minds of CEOs and CFOs. One sounds like a marketing report. The other sounds like a business outcome. How marketing leaders frame their work determines whether they are perceived as cost, activity, or enterprise value.
WYSIATI — What You See Is All There Is — is Daniel Kahneman’s term for the cognitive bias where decision-makers build their judgments based only on the information in front of them. CEOs and CFOs are not discounting brand equity, future demand creation, and category positioning because they are unsophisticated. They are discounting them because those assets are largely invisible in the reporting formats marketing has historically used. If the long-term value of brand investment never shows up in a format the CFO finds legible, it does not exist — as far as the CFO’s System 1 is concerned (Kahneman, 2011).
Loss Aversion then activates. In uncertain conditions, executives protect current cash and cut ambiguous spending. Marketing loses this argument almost every time when it cannot translate future value into present business risk.
What the Best CMOs Do Differently
The B2B CMO Project’s 2026 report profiles several CMOs who have broken through the credibility gap — not by doing better marketing, but by operating as business executives first.
Kimberly Storin, CMO at Zoom, has been explicit about rejecting the classic B2B playbook: “When it comes to the classic B2B playbook — MQLs, lead scoring, gated content — I don’t think any of it works anymore.” Her focus has shifted to business outcomes and buyer trust, not funnel metrics (B2B CMO Project, 2026).
Mandy Dhaliwal, CMO at Nutanix, frames her role this way: “As a C-suite executive, I lead as a business strategist first, marketer second. At Nutanix, that perspective has ensured marketing contributes directly to business priorities, be it growth, retention, or positioning.” Within nine months of joining Nutanix, she reframed the company’s strategic positioning around its software subscription model — a business architecture problem, not a marketing execution problem (B2B CMO Project, 2026).
Scott Morris at Sprout Social has built credibility by positioning marketing as the owner of structured customer intelligence — the function that brings systematic insight into why customers buy, why deals stall, and where market demand is shifting (B2B CMO Project, 2026). That repositioning gives marketing a seat at enterprise strategy conversations, not just campaign reviews.
The pattern across all three: they lead with business outcomes, not marketing activity. They replace MQLs and impressions in executive conversations with revenue velocity, CAC payback, net revenue retention, win-rate movement, and competitive positioning.
The Brand Measurement Problem Is Real — and Fixable
Gartner’s February 2026 forecast adds a specific warning: by 2027, more than 40% of CMOs who push for larger brand budgets without demonstrating returns will lose influence with the C-suite (Gartner, 2026). The same research found that 84% of companies are already caught in a brand “doom loop” — weak measurement creates skepticism, which creates underinvestment, which further weakens the case for brand.
This is a solvable problem — but only if marketing leaders translate brand into an economic argument. Brand is not soft. Poorly measured brand becomes politically fragile. Well-measured brand ties directly to pricing power, reduced CAC, improved conversion efficiency, and competitive resilience. McKinsey research found that companies with a single, integrated customer-facing C-suite leader grow 2.3x more than those with fragmented marketing ownership (McKinsey & Company, 2025). The integrating variable is not the title. It is the business fluency.
The Revenue Science Takeaway
Marketing does not earn power by explaining marketing better. It earns power by making the CEO’s growth model measurably more achievable.
The CMOs gaining credibility in 2026 are not winning with better decks or cleaner attribution models. They are winning by adopting what I call a first-team mindset: treating the executive team — not the marketing department — as their primary team. They start with the CEO’s growth hypothesis, the CFO’s constraints, and the CRO’s revenue reality, and then build marketing strategy backward from there.
The identity shift precedes everything else. Before the metrics change, before the dashboard changes, before the reporting cadence changes — the CMO has to decide whether they are a marketer running a function or a business executive using marketing to drive growth. Those two identities produce profoundly different behavior in the same room.
Three Questions to Run This Week
- In your last executive team meeting, did you present marketing activity or business outcomes? If you led with MQLs and impressions, that is the identity problem made visible.
- Can you articulate the connection between your brand investment and the company’s pricing power, CAC trend, or win rate? If not, you are carrying budget that cannot defend itself.
- Does your CEO think of you as the company’s best source of customer and market intelligence? If marketing does not own that insight function, someone else will — and they will use it to make strategic decisions without you.
About Rich Smith: Rich Smith is an executive advisor, behavioral marketing strategist, investor, CMO, and host of the Revenue Science Podcast, known for helping leaders understand not only what growth strategies work—but why. With more than thirty years of experience leading growth across financial services, healthcare, technology, and consumer brands, Rich has guided companies through crises, rebuilt brands from the ground up, and helped position organizations for nine-figure exits. Connect at RichMSmith.com, on LinkedIn, and on The Revenue Science Podcast.
References
B2B CMO Project. (2026). The B2B CMO imperative: The new rules for B2B marketing leadership in 2026. https://www.b2bcmoproject.com/research
Boathouse. (2025). Fifth annual CEO study: Marketing and the C-suite. Boathouse Group.
Gartner. (2024, December 3). Gartner identifies top three priorities for CMOs to deliver marketing excellence in 2025 [Press release]. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-12-03-gartner-identifies-top-three-priorities-for-cmos-to-deliver-marketing-excellence-in-2025
Gartner. (2025a, March 25). Gartner survey reveals 84% of CMOs report high levels of strategic dysfunction [Press release]. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-03-25-gartner-survey-reveals-84-percent-of-cmos-report-high-levels-of-strategic-dysfunction
Gartner. (2025b, December 4). CMOs’ top challenges & priorities for 2026 [Press release]. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2025-12-04-cmos-top-challenges-and-priorities-for-2026
Gartner. (2026, February 12). Gartner predicts over 40% of CMOs who push for larger brand budgets will lose influence with the C-suite [Press release]. https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2026-2-12-gartner-predicts-over-40-percent-of-cmos-who-push-for-larger-brand-budgets-will-lose-influence-with-the-c-suite
Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, fast and slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
McKinsey & Company. (2025). The changing role of the CMO — and what it means for growth. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-changing-role-of-the-cmo-and-what-it-means-for-growth
Spencer Stuart. (2025). CMO tenure study 2025: The evolution of marketing leadership. https://www.spencerstuart.com/research-and-insight/cmo-tenure-study-2025-the-evolution-of-marketing-leadership
Stryker, S., & Burke, P. J. (2000). The past, present, and future of an identity theory. Social Psychology Quarterly, 63(4), 284–297. https://doi.org/10.2307/2695840
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211(4481), 453–458. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7455683
