As the calendar careens like an unmanned bobsled towards 2026 (it was July only a couple of weeks ago, right?), marketing has never been more challenging, more complex, more … let’s be honest … confusing.  

How can CMOs be expected to stay on top of every evolving trend across every conceivable channel in an industry that reinvents itself every 18 months? 

Yet, if the job descriptions on LinkedIn are any indication, C-suites and boards expect more performance than ever from their CMOs, while simultaneously squeezing them harder.   

Apparently, the perfect CMO is a strategic visionary and a hands-on executor. They’re an expert on how to drive sales and revenue at the bottom of the funnel, and a master at building brand visibility and awareness at the top. A highly creative person with an editorial mindset and a designer’s eye, they can easily turn their hand to social media or content marketing. But they’re also a technical whizz, capable of implementing plans to increase marketing automation, data analytics, and AI. Naturally, they’re just as comfortable presenting a detailed business case to the board as they are collaborating with the team to make last-minute refinements to a landing page. Oh, and please include quantified and qualified evidence of your achievements in each of these areas as part of your application. 

These job ads are written by people who desperately want to believe. Their CEO wants to believe. Their board wants to believe. Because wouldn’t everything be so much simpler if such a mythical creature existed?   

Let’s be clear: Unicorns don’t exist, marketing or otherwise. Any previous sightings are more likely stories told by eager recruiters, like the Scottish tour guide who insists the Loch Ness monster is real while giving you a cheeky wink and selling you a Nessie t-shirt. Or they’re ambitious chancers willing to overstate their accomplishments; effectively taping cardboard cones to their foreheads.  

The reality is that marketing has become far too complex and fragmented for any one person to master everything. Unfortunately, that inconvenient truth hasn’t stopped the obsessive search for the impossible, making the CMO’s already precarious position even more vulnerable. 

The marketing disconnection 

Marketing has never had an easy relationship with C-suites and boards. As far back as I can remember, survey after report after study have revealed how marketing has become increasingly sidelined; it’s metrics untrusted, it’s impact undervalued. 

If anything, the numbers are even more sobering today. 

  • Only 70% of CEOs say marketing is clearly defined and understood by the C-suite in 2025, down from 90% in 2023 (McKinsey)  
  • 65% of CMOs say marketing is still seen as a cost centre, while only 52% of CMOs have marketing representation at board level (PwC) 
  • The average marketing budget is now 7.7 of overall company revenue, down from 9.1% in 2023 and 11% in 2020. (Gartner) 
  • 59% of CMOs say they lack the budget to execute their 2025 strategy (Gartner) 

Ironically, while your budget may have shrunk, your results are still weighed against what was possible five or ten years ago.  

Social media marketing has delivered diminishing returns for years. And now that just about every brand you can think of has a blog, YouTube channel and a library of downloadable resources, content marketing has never been more competitive. Meanwhile, consumers are increasingly using AI to carry out brand research and get product recommendations without the need to click through, leading to a fall in web traffic.  

If you’ve been fighting in the marketing trenches as long as I have, you already know all the reasons why marketing in 2025-6 isn’t the same as marketing in 2020. You might even have a bunch of ideas on how to pivot to a new visibility strategy or improve the effectiveness of your content.  

But how do you take the executive team on this journey with you when their entire understanding of search marketing can be summed up with “higher rankings equal more traffic”? How do you convince them to invest in high-quality content—with professional writers, designers and videographers—when the reason they probably slashed your budget in the first place was the assumption you could use AI instead? 

Marketing has never been cheap, but this combination of shrinking budgets, rapid change and AI hype places CMOs in an unsustainable position. The problem isn’t that organisations are setting the bar too high. It’s that they fundamentally misunderstand how modern marketing works. 

Marketing looks easy to non-marketers 

The entire point of the C-suite is to divide the key responsibilities within an organisation between senior managers with the necessary expertise. The CFO has custody of the company’s accounts and finances. The CTO has custody of the technical infrastructure that allows the business to operate. And the CMO has custody of the customer.  

Or, at least, they should have. 

What’s that you say? Surely the CSO or Head of Sales is responsible for the customer?  

Not if you really think about it. Sales might own that brief period from when someone becomes a qualified prospect to when they close the deal, but the brand’s relationship with a customer stretches a long way both before and after that window of opportunity. Marketing is the only department capable of taking the necessary macro view of the entire customer journey and lifecycle.   

Yet, when it comes to decisions around business strategy and growth, the CMO too often doesn’t have a seat at the table. And that’s usually because everyone thinks they understand marketing.  

When the CFO reports on the financials, nobody interrupts to suggest alternative accounting methods. When the CTO explains why the current cybersecurity measures need an upgrade, no one doubts their advice. 

But when you present the new marketing strategy, suddenly everyone wants to contribute. The CEO saw a clever digital campaign from a competitor and wonders why you’re not targeting the same channels. The COO is convinced the brand should be on TikTok because it’s clearly the top social network these days, based on a sample size of their teenage kids. The CFO questions why the content budget is so high when surely you can use ChatGPT. 

Marketing strategy isn’t a team sport. When everyone owns the customer, no one owns the customer. 

This is the environment you’re operating in: declining budgets, eroding influence, and a leadership team that simultaneously underestimates the complexity of your role while expecting you to excel at every aspect of it. They’re looking for a unicorn because they genuinely believe that’s what marketing requires.  

And when you can’t deliver on impossible expectations, it reinforces their suspicion that maybe marketing isn’t that strategic after all. 

Slaying the unicorn myth 

It’s one thing to attempt to explain why marketing should be taken more seriously. It’s quite another to demonstrate it. 

1. Reclaim custody of the customer 

Demonstrate how and why the CMO is accountable for the customer journey from end to end. Map every customer touchpoint and identify who owns it, where there’s overlap, and what messages are sent. Where there’s the risk of oversaturation or confusion, propose simplification. Think beyond campaigns and brand awareness. Consider pricing, product, retention, expansion, and customer success—all areas where marketing has an impact. 

2. Build a shared measurement framework with the CFO  

Instead of attempting to satisfy the C-suite’s obsession with marketing ROI by chasing short-term metrics like MQLs, impressions, and clicks, find ways to translate marketing data into business outcomes they care about: revenue, margin, and customer lifetime value. Sit down with your CFO and decide which metrics matter most. 

3. Close the perception gap 

Don’t assume your CEO understands what you do. Help them understand how customer behaviour, technology, and marketing continue to evolve. Explain the complexities inherent in every channel. Make the potential business impacts—the threats and opportunities—very clear. Frame everything as a business case, free of marketing jargon. 

4. Design your strategy with implementation in mind  

We’ve probably all experienced the thrill of getting an ambitious marketing strategy approved, only to watch it slowly crumble as more pressing priorities pull focus back towards the same routine short-term tactics. While designing a solid strategy is hard, implementing a strategy is harder. Build that implementation into the strategy itself, complete with a roadmap and clear milestones to set realistic expectations with your leadership team.  

5. Assemble your hybrid team 

Review your team’s skillsets, tools and capabilities. Be honest about what you can achieve internally—not only in terms of productivity and budget (volume) but also quality and strategic effectiveness (value). Be clear about the limitations of relying too heavily on AI to help make the strategic case for external support. Then assemble your hybrid team, including external agencies and contractors with the necessary specialisations, skillsets and resources to deliver each piece of your strategy. 

This hybrid model is crucial to solving three critical problems. 

  1. Access to specialist knowledge that would be impossible, or at least prohibitively expensive, to maintain in-house. 
  1. Credible support. While a CMO’s recommendations might be questioned or dismissed for all the reasons we’ve already covered, an external expert can provide the necessary validation for the initiatives to be taken seriously and move forward.  
  1. The ability to scale. When marketing budgets are tight, it’s even more important to be able to scale resources up or down as requirements change and priorities shift. 

Of course, core strategy, brand guardianship, and stakeholder management should always remain internal. Use external agencies and specialists for deep technical expertise, specialised creative capabilities, and project-based capacity. 

Unicorns don’t exist; but you can still be a marketing legend 

In many ways, the above steps might appear to echo the usual process of developing a new marketing strategy; mapping the customer journey, agreeing on metrics, and so on. However, this isn’t just about strategy. This is about taking the executive team along for the ride, as part of a concerted campaign to earn Marketing a seat at the leadership table. 

Instead of trying to live up to the exec team’s unrealistic expectations, you stand a far greater chance of success by not buying into their unicorn obsession. Be up front about your strengths, as well as those areas where you need to call in people with different skillsets, different talents.  

Collaborate with the CFO to set metrics. Collaborate with the CTO to implement the necessary technologies. Collaborate with the COO on implementation. Just as you want them to respect the complexities and expertise inherent in your role, demonstrate the same willingness to draw on their expertise where relevant. 

Of course, your campaign for greater influence at the C-suite or board level will also hinge on being open about current marketing threats and opportunities. Your role as CMO isn’t to address these yourself, but to bring together the required resources and expertise to develop the best strategic response.  

There’s no such thing as a unicorn CMO—but that doesn’t matter if you can assemble a hybrid team capable of delivering the necessary specialisations and outcomes anyway. That’s the real job of a CMO in 2026.  

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