What Exactly Is the CMO Supposed to Do?
The Chief Marketing Officer has survived more reinventions than any other C-suite function. It has absorbed digital, surrendered digital, reclaimed digital, and is currently in an uneasy negotiation with AI about which parts of the role still require a human being.
It has been split into four separate titles, merged back into one, reported to the CEO, CFO, and, in several well-documented cases, eliminated and replaced with a growth team that does roughly the same thing but under a different name.
If the CMO seems confused about their own job description, there is a structural reason for that. The role has never fully recovered from the pace at which the marketing landscape changed around it.
A Brief and Undignified History of CMOs
“I have sat in organisational design conversations where the marketing function had been restructured three times in four years, each restructure solving the problems created by the last one and introducing three new ones. The CMO in that organisation spent more time defending their remit than exercising it”. Steve Gardiner
The original CMO was a brand custodian. In the era of mass media, marketing meant advertising — the management of how a brand appeared to a mass audience through a limited number of controlled channels. The CMO owned the message, the agency relationship, and the budget. The function was coherent because the channels were finite and the audience was, for practical purposes, passive.
Then the internet arrived, and the channels multiplied faster than any organisational chart could accommodate. Digital became its own discipline, then its own department, then its own C-suite title — the Chief Digital Officer, appointed to lead the transformation that the CMO was deemed too brand-focused to drive. Social media followed, bringing with it the Chief Social Officer in some organisations and, more commonly, the inexplicable decision to place social media under HR because it involved people, as HR involved people, it was logical. So they gave HR internal communication as well.
Content became a function. Then a strategy. Then, a department with its own head. Brand is separated from marketing in organisations large enough to afford the distinction and confused enough to believe it was meaningful. Growth became a title — the Chief Growth Officer, a CMO with better data skills and a more commercial mandate, appointed in organisations that had concluded the CMO was too focused on brand to be trusted with revenue.
Where It Stands Today - Who Knows, Who Cares
The modern CMO is expected to own brand strategy, demand generation, customer experience, digital marketing, content, communications, and increasingly — as the lines between internal and external narrative blur — employer branding and internal communications as well.
They are expected to be creative enough to inspire great work, analytical enough to justify every budget line in commercial terms, technological enough to navigate an increasingly automated marketing stack, and strategic enough to sit credibly at the table where business decisions are made.
This is not a job description. It is five job descriptions stapled together and given a single salary.
The Chief Communications Officer sits nearby, sometimes as a peer and sometimes as a direct report, managing the external reputation that marketing's activities directly affect — without always having the authority to influence those activities before they create a communications problem.
What the CMO Should Actually Own
Lighthouse PR's position on this is direct. The fragmentation of the marketing and communications function is not an organisational inevitability — it is a strategic choice, and in most cases it is the wrong one.
Brand, communications, and reputation are inseparable. The message a business sends to its customers, employees, investors, and its media contacts should be coherent, consistent, and owned by a single strategic function with the authority and mandate to maintain that coherence across every channel and every audience.
Whether that function is led by a CMO, a CCO, or a Chief Brand Officer is less important than whether it is genuinely integrated — internally aligned, externally consistent, and strategically connected to the commercial business objectives rather than optimising independently for its own metrics.
The title matters less than the architecture. And the architecture, in most organisations, still needs significant work.
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About the Author
Steve Gardiner (exec MBA) is a senior marketing and commercial leader at Lighthouse PR, bringing global experience from Accenture, Electronic Arts, Virgin Media, Telekom, and Etisalat. Latterly, as VP Business at Etisalat, he was responsible for $1.8B in revenue.
Today, Steve applies his strategic, marketing, and growth expertise to support Lighthouse PR clients as part of the agency’s service offering.
About Lighthouse PR
Lighthouse PR is a leading PR agency in Romania that works with a select number of organisations across Central and Southeastern Europe, delivering media relations, reputation management, crisis communications, social media and an extensive range of marketing services — always led by senior practitioners.
We hold exclusive membership for Romania and the Republic of Moldova in both the Eurocom worldwide PR network and the CCNE, Europe's leading crisis communications network.
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