Why AI is making brand leadership more important

There is a vicious stigma at the center of marketing leadership. The CMO holds one of the most complex, time-consuming jobs in business. But everything they do is measured by a short-term plan, using a shrinking budget, to increase the company’s sales before their clock runs out.

Maybe the CMO should stand for the miracle chief. Or, like other companies, why not just eliminate the role altogether? Bad idea. Especially in the beginning of AI. But more on that later.

According to Forrester’s 2025 report, “Representation and Employment of Fortune 500 CMOs,” only 49% of Fortune 500 top marketers hold the title of CMO today, down from 55% one year ago. More than one in five Fortune 500 companies have changed their entire marketing leadership in the past 12 months. The average CMO tenure has dropped to 3.9 years, still the shortest average in the C-suite.

But for some, the institutional response to a failing model was not to fix the model. It was a role breakdown. UPS, Etsy, and Walgreens all eliminated the independent CMO position and did not replace it. Marketing responsibilities were folded into chief commercial officer or chief operating officer roles, and decentralized leadership structures were introduced. Or worse, martech is left to IT to implement.

The unspoken message: product development leadership is top, not infrastructure. As Forrester VP and Senior Analyst Ian Bruce put it, the CMO’s spending “has become stretched between product and demand, product and pipeline, digital and physical.”

CEOs did what made intuitive sense: they divided the work or gave it to someone who provided analytical measurement and short-term ROI metrics. They did not answer what happens to the brand if there is no one left to ask if it means something.

As more and more people use AI to find products or services, your marketing spend isn’t driving sales. AI doesn’t care about your jingle, clever ad, or sales promotion. In AI, those things are invisible. It wants an explanation.

The plateau of indifference: What fills the void

When marketing becomes an operational expense management and monitoring dashboard, brands drift to what I call a plateau of indicators.

It’s a deceptively comfortable place. Income does not roll over. Customers don’t disappear overnight. The product is still known, it is still available, it is still used. But it stopped saying anything to people. The justification for price versus value is eroding.

Consumers can still name the brand, but with many me-too solutions, they choose based on price, which becomes the only real difference.

Congratulations. You have cut your margins and increased the need for promotional money.

The thing is, market share shifts back and forth between competitors using the same playbooks, and spending has to rise to catch up with the low results.

As you look at that price, notice how far over the product specification plateau you are from just the price.

When things change, things change a lot

For example, decades ago, when General Mills bought the Lacoste fashion brand and merged it with Izod, things went reasonably well.

But then they fixed it for temporary money. The product started appearing in discount stores. Distribution expanded to supermarkets. It lost its initial cachet, and margins dropped like a microphone at the end of a hip-hop concert.

Rebuilding those fat margins after Lacoste repurchased the brand in 1992 took years of patient reinvestment: withdrawing from discount channels, raising prices, and renewing the definition. Sales ended up increasing 800% over the next ten years. Leaving behind at least two decades of lost profits.

The lesson is not just that the change worked. How long does it take, and how much of that time is directly under the pressure of the quarter to show immediate results.

That is the true cost of living on the plain of indifference. Not a bad quarter. Years of compounding disrespect that is becoming progressively harder and more expensive to reverse.

McDonald’s learned a version of this lesson in 2019 when it completed its global CMO role. Within a year, the company replaced us and has since expanded the CMO portfolio.

It turns out that if you remove the person responsible for adding meaning to the product, you eventually find that the question still needs to be asked. Important for those who would like their money if you change your product. These days, AI gets the first vote.

The stakes have shifted, and there’s no way around it.

AI does not identify brands based on ad spend, impression sharing, or advertising rates. It includes the narrative history of the product. It reveals what problems the brand clearly solves, what values ​​it consistently displays, and how much customers value it.

A brand that has spent years in performance-only mode, with no one directing its meaning, has little narrative and transaction. AI learns those subtleties and routes around them. It will grow out of sight.

The numbers behind this change are not small. Research already shows click-through rates drop between 15% and 64% when AI-generated answers appear in search results.

Brands that don’t have a clear definition don’t just lose ground. They lose the ability to find the channel at all, instead of a regular search.

There is a simple test that any CMO, anyone who has inherited a marketing job, can do today. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity to recommend a solution for your category.

If your product doesn’t show up, or is barely visible, you’ve just received a more reliable product health check than most tracking studies will provide. No amount of media spending can fix that. Only the description does.

The CMO structural trap (short-term, performance-only metrics, product investment treated as a special consideration) has been quietly building this AI vulnerability for years.

The elimination of the role has not only cost brands the title. For those who lost the officer whose only job was to prevent that from being seen.

3 things a CMO needs to do the job

The miracle the C-suite keeps asking for isn’t product fit in 90 days. A real, difficult, silent miracle, makes the organization understand that the meaning of the product is the infrastructure, not the surface, and that without protecting someone, the business flies without instruments.

1. Long measurement window

Binet and Field’s research establishes the basis of resilience: short-term results are measurable within a year, but the combined value of product definition, high margins, low acquisition costs, and greater resilience to declines, plays out over three years or more.

CMOs are asked to build something that may take longer than their time to be fully operational. That’s not a talent problem. It’s a system design problem.

2. Protection of the product development budget, which is different from operational expenditure

Binet and Fields’ 60/40 principle (spend 60% on long-term product development, 40% on short-term consumption) is not a popular philosophy.

It’s a power-based formula to maximize marketing’s total ROI. When that ratio changes, as it does for all organizations, short-term sales numbers take a hit. Then the foundation is eroded.

Then you are on the Plateau of Indifference, wondering why working capital continues to take more money to produce the same results.

3. A seat at the strategic table, not just the media table

Brand definition begins with what the company does, not what it says. CMOs who drive growth and rise to CEO are the ones involved in product decisions, customer experience design, and organizational values ​​- not just creative approval and media planning.

The job needs a new name

There is one final rearrangement to be done. The chief marketing officer may be part of the problem. It shows the active route: campaigns, art, media, at that time the work needs something wider.

What the role actually requires is someone who has been approved for compliance. Relevance in the most practical sense: ensuring that a brand means something clear and consistent to the people it’s trying to reach, to the algorithms that increasingly determine what those people see, and to the culture in which the brand operates.

Let’s call the officer responsible for the role. Companies that get that first will have products that AI can produce.

Those who still treat the CMO as a media distraction ROI jockey for a spreadsheet, or distribute the work across the COO, or IT, and the dashboard, will not.

Companies that have eliminated the CMO role have lost an executive whose only job was to make the brand mean something, not just to the people you’re trying to reach, but to the AI ​​platforms that need that meaning to make you stand out.

In the era of AI-mediated discovery, nothing else will be too consequential or costly to leave unanswered.