Marketing Can't Be Owned
Why the CMO role keeps collapsing under weight
CMOs are set up to fail not because marketing is broken, but because organizational design hasn't caught up to what marketing actually is.
Most executive roles are structured around control. The CFO controls financial operations. The CTO controls technology infrastructure. The COO controls operational delivery.
But the CMO role is structured around a huge contradiction. It asks one person to own outcomes they don't actually create, then holds them accountable for those outcomes.
The Main Issue
Marketing isn't a controllable department. It's the result of everything a business does.
You don't own marketing. You create it—through product decisions, pricing strategy, customer experience, operational delivery, and every touchpoint that affects how the business interacts with the outside world.
When a customer calls support and gets frustrated, that's marketing. When a product ships with missing features, that's marketing. When pricing doesn't match market positioning, that's marketing. When hiring reflects company values, that's marketing.
What we call “marketing” is really just reputation management.
But here’s the catch: marketing teams are held responsible for a reputation they didn’t create.
The Band-Aid Fix
Organizations keep rewriting the CMO job description instead of redesigning the role.
Give them more budget. Give them more headcount. Give them more creative freedom. Give them more cross-functional influence.
But that’s still not even the real issue. The real issue isn't bandwidth. It's that no single department can own something that’s a result of everything the business does.
“Marketing doesn’t work”
Most of the time, “marketing problems” aren’t even actually marketing problems. They’re business problems that become apparent through market response.
The market doesn't separate "business decisions" from "marketing decisions"—and they certainly don’t separate this campaign from that campaign.
They experience everything as a whole.
The Reality
Marketing is a mirror, not a department.
CMOs keep getting blamed for the reflection while everyone else controls what's being reflected.
Product teams determine what gets built. Operations teams determine how it's delivered. Sales teams determine how it's sold. Finance teams determine how it's priced. Leadership teams determine how the company behaves.
Only then can marketing teams step in to determine how to communicate all of that.
This isn’t a marketing problem. It’s an organizational design problem.
The Actual Solution
The most effective marketing leaders aren't better marketers—they're better leaders.
They operate like unofficial CEOs, aligning the business with market reality. They influence product positioning, impact pricing decisions, shape customer experience, and guide how to deliver it all operationally.
They succeed by gaining informal authority over business decisions that formal job descriptions and organizational charts don't give them.
But building a role that requires workarounds in order to function effectively isn't organizational design. It's organizational dysfunction.
The companies that get marketing right don't give CMOs more “marketing authority.” They give them business authority—or they distribute marketing accountability to every leader whose decisions affect market reputation.
The Bottom Line
This isn't a marketing debate. It's an organizational design problem.
Until we treat marketing as the result of coherent organizational design—not just creative output—we’ll keep assigning the impossible and wondering why it fails.
The CMO accountability discourse will continue until we decide whether we want someone to own marketing communications or to embed marketing across all business functions.
Right now, we’re asking for both while providing authority for neither.
The average stints of CMOs are lesser than the other profiles. For this very reason.
“Marketing is a mirror, not a department.” That one line reframes everything. Sharp, urgent, and overdue.