A clearly defined marketing chair in the C-suite and true collaboration among C-suite functions are essential for creating a customer-centric organization and attaining sustainable growth.
Amid today’s rapid technological, economic, and geopolitical changes and unpredictable customer behavior, leaders cannot wait and see what happens next.
Against the backdrop, it’s no surprise that the overarching theme of the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity was navigating disruption. At the festival, senior partners Kelsey Robinson and Shelley Stewart III presented new McKinsey global research indicating that B2B and B2C companies with clearly defined growth or customer roles (typically the Chief Marketing Officer) in the C-suite tend to outperform their peers. Further, during a recent McKinsey Live, they stressed that the successful pursuit of sustainable growth requires harnessing the power of the CMO’s partnership with the CEO and the CFO to put the customer at the center of the organization.
In a truly customer-centric organization, marketing is the driving force behind growth strategies. According to the research, companies with marketing at the core of their growth strategy are twice as likely as their peers to have an annual growth rate higher than 5 percent. Bridging the gap among C-level leaders and creating such an organization requires the following:
- Marketing should have complete custody of the customer. Because customer journeys are so fragmented, organizations need a single leader to act as a chief advocate for customers and shape the brand’s end-to-end interaction with customers. The CMO who owns the customer journey has deep customer insights, strategic capabilities, and tech tools to navigate market challenges and opportunities. Companies with a single C-level executive playing a clearly defined and integrated customer-facing role have grown 2.3 times more than companies with multiple such roles.
- The CMO must adopt a general-manager mindset. While most CEOs have no marketing experience, nine of ten CMOs have never been general managers with P&L responsibility. CMOs need to think of marketing with a broader, more strategic perspective, setting long-term goals and making data-driven decisions that benefit the entire organization.
- A system must be in place to measure marketing’s impact on growth. To reconnect marketing to the company’s growth engine, the CMO must partner with the CFO to identify the metrics that truly matter and agree on how they will be measured and used. Linking marketing strategies directly to financial outcomes enhances accountability and transparency.
Q&A from the session
1. What role do boards need to play to bridge the gap?
Corporate boards are critical in aligning the C-suite, especially the CEO, CFO, CRO, and CMO, around a shared vision for long-term, customer-centric growth. They can hold the CEO accountable for cross-functional alignment, ensure marketing is at the table, treat it as a strategic growth lever, and push for metrics prioritizing brand strength and customer value alongside financial performance. Boards also influence investment decisions in data, talent, and brand-building, and can strengthen their oversight by including directors with marketing or digital expertise.
2. Why has the role of the CMO been somewhat undervalued compared to the rest of the C-suite?
The undervaluing of the CMO role stems from a lack of understanding of what and how marketing contributes to growth, like Sales, ambiguous accountability, misalignment with the C-suite, short tenures, and outdated perceptions of marketing’s role. As the marketing function has become more spread across various roles, it is often unclear what marketing does, leading to it being written off as merely the “advertisers” or “communications” team of the organization, rather than the true champion of the customer. Bringing marketing to the forefront of growth also sits with the CMO working as a unifier and integrator across the C-suite and organization to bring clarity to 1) how marketing adds value as a key growth contributor by aligning on MROI for the business, 2) shaping customer-centric growth strategy, 3) executing against those MROI, and 4) bringing the C-suite along on the journey to build champions and ambassadors in and outside the boardroom, across the org. For example, sales alone can’t drive revenue growth.
3. Does growth start with a shared vision or with shared incentive?
Growth starts with a shared vision across the C-suite, aligning leaders around a common goal such as customer-centric, long-term value creation. However, vision alone isn’t enough — it must be reinforced by shared incentives that align with how leaders are measured and rewarded. Without this alignment, even well-intentioned strategies can break down as functions prioritize conflicting goals. Shared vision with shared outcomes. That must be aligned at the top – across the C-suite and communicated to all the teams so that they are moving toward a shared vision, mission, and outcome across both.
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For more on this topic, see the articles “The CMO’s comeback: Aligning the C-suite to drive customer-centric growth,” and “The power of partnership: How the CEO–CMO relationship can drive outsize growth” and the podcasts “Bridging the (expanding) CMO-CEO divide,” “Analyzing the CEO-CMO relationship and its effect on growth,” and “How does the ‘fractional CMO’ measure up?” Additional themes and insights are available at McKinsey at Cannes Lions.