Growth, Marketing & Sales Practice

Analyzing the CEO–CMO

relationship and its effect
on growth
CEOs acknowledge the expertise and importance of chief marketing officers and
their role in helping the company grow, yet there’s still a strategic disconnect in
the C-suite. Here’s how to close the gap.

March 2024
CEOs who place marketing at the core of their
growth strategies are twice as likely as their peers
to have greater than 5 percent annual growth,
according to a recent survey McKinsey conducted
with input from the Association of National
Advertisers (ANA). CEOs and chief marketing
officers (CMOs) must work together closely for any
marketing plan to flourish. On this episode of The
McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey partner Robert Tas
joins editorial director Roberta Fusaro to discuss
how to nurture the CEO–CMO relationship.
Our second segment features an excerpt from our
Author Talks series, with author Karin M. Reed. She
wrote Suddenly Virtual: Making Remote Meetings
Work (Wiley, March 2021) and shares tips on how to
create the perfect virtual meeting.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
The McKinsey Podcast is hosted by Roberta Fusaro
and Lucia Rahilly.
A closer look at CEOs and CMOs
Roberta Fusaro: McKinsey did some research
looking at the relationship between CEOs and
CMOs. Why did the research focus on this particular
C-suite relationship?
Robert Tas: Whenever you have a CEO
coordinating the strategy of a business, it’s
foundational for its functional leaders to have a seat
at the table. We spent a lot of time trying to
understand what the issues were in the relationship
between CEO and CMO.
Roberta Fusaro: What sort of value do CEOs place
on marketing in general?
Analyzing the CEO–CMO relationship and its effect on growth
Robert Tas: It’s interesting. The companies that
are doing it right are two times more likely than
their peers to have greater than 5 percent
annual growth. But there are many challenges
that CEOs and CMOs face. They have fallen
into a few buckets.
The first one is the ability to define the role of
marketing within one’s strategy. The second is
understanding the levers of modern marketing
capabilities. And the third is an age-old problem:
how do we measure impact? How do we tie our
marketing activities to business outcomes?
Roberta Fusaro: Do CEOs and CMOs tend to have
the same vision for the role that marketing should
play in the company?
Robert Tas: Unfortunately, according to the
research, 90 percent of CEOs think they know the
benefits of marketing. However, only 50 percent of
CMOs see the same connection. So that means
almost half of CMOs have a different view on the
marketing priorities of the organization.
Roberta Fusaro: In the companies you researched,
how defined is the C-level marketing role?
Robert Tas: Across the industry, there are lots of
titles and changes in the definition of marketing.
We’ve seen new roles such as the chief growth
officer, chief digital officer, and chief customer
officer. The traditional four Ps of marketing have
been fragmented across multiple roles in the
organization, which creates a challenge.
Roberta Fusaro: Robert, can you remind us what
the four Ps are again?
2
‘Ninety percent of CEOs think they
know the benefits of marketing.
However, only 50 percent of CMOs
see the same connection.’
Robert Tas: The standard Procter & Gamble
definition is product, price, place, and promotion.
The four Ps have been moved into different parts of
the organization. Even though some of this is good,
you still need that aggregator, that chief customer
advocate across the organization, to make sure the
four Ps are working together synergistically.
When we also looked at the official executive job
class for CMO, we saw that less than 40 percent of
Fortune 500 companies have a CMO or even a
customer officer at the C-suite table. That’s a
worrying sign.
This is not your father’s marketing
organization
Roberta Fusaro: There’s the evolution of roles, but
there’s this evolution of technology that gives
CMOs access to lots more data. Our survey
revealed that there’s a disconnect between data
analytics and business impact. So where’s the
disconnect coming from?
Robert Tas: Well, the CEO has less of a marketing
pedigree than ever before. It’s estimated that only
10 percent of Fortune 250 CEOs have marketing
experience. There’s also a dramatic acceleration of
digital technology in the world of marketing.
Analyzing the CEO–CMO relationship and its effect on growth
We’re no longer judging marketing by television
commercials. There’s a whole slew of different
components to think through. And the data piece
that you hinted at is that these customers’ signals
are now everywhere. It’s incumbent upon us as
marketers to interpret them and feed them back to
our organizations in such a way that we don’t talk
about data but we talk about insights and are able
to connect the dots.
We need to reimagine how we engage with
customers on all platforms, including YouTube,
TikTok, X, and Meta. And that means learning.
You’ve got to become data curious. You’ve got to
be somebody who’s always looking to figure out
how to serve that customer better and better.
As we come up with a means to measure marketing,
the CEO or CFO needs to learn the measurement
systems in place to understand what it means when
I cut budget, what it means when I invest in it, and
how we tie those activities to outcomes. That robust
measurement system can help you understand your
brand, how your customers perceive your brand,
and what level of fidelity they give you credit for.
3
‘We need to reimagine how we engage
with customers on all platforms,
including YouTube, TikTok, X, and
Meta. And that means learning.
You’ve got to become data curious.’
That’s where the brand scores are really helpful.
But you also need an econometric model to
connect how the money you’re spending on
different channels such as video, content, and
search—all working in tandem—helps create the
results you want. And then you have to test, test,
test—that is, incremental, meaningful testing and
holdouts to see whether your marketing is leading
to desired outcomes.
A holistic marketing approach
Roberta Fusaro: There’s probably also this sense
that even if you’ve mastered one technology or
approach, there’s just another one on its heels and
you must keep up.
Robert Tas: That’s a fabulous point. Lots of
companies choose the promotion lever, but the true
marketers who do all of the levers together make
really good choices as to how to use the top ones
for their customers, to bring their brand
propositions to life and drive sustainable business
and margin impact.
Analyzing the CEO–CMO relationship and its effect on growth
Roberta Fusaro: How are CMOs starting to use
data differently?
Robert Tas: The promise of one-to-one marketing
on the internet is not new. It’s been around for over
25 years now. But you’re seeing brands that are
using personalization and AI technology to help
make sure the right message reaches the right
person at the right time.
If I’m in the cosmetics business, such as Sephora, I
am now being targeted based on my preferences.
Sephora knows what I like, what color hair I have,
how I engage with that brand, and the best way to
communicate with me. Personalization technology
is changing the way we engage customers across
the full journey.
CMOs need a seat in the strategy-
planning room
Roberta Fusaro: Looking back at the data in the
report, how often are CMOs included in C-suite
decision making?
4
Robert Tas: Sadly, not enough. One of the troubling
things we saw was that CMOs were being moved to
executors of the strategy rather than being the
ones to help create the strategy. In order to make it
work really well, there needs to be a balance: CMOs
need to be at the table doing both. They need to
have a voice in shaping strategy. This is a great
example where you can clearly see that the CEO
and CMO are locked into propelling the business
and delivering those marketing activities that
produce the outcomes that everybody can
understand and relate to.
Roberta Fusaro: The research lays out a blueprint
for how to bring CEOs and CMOs closer. CEOs
need to define the role of the CMO as a growth
unifier. Can you describe what that means, based
on company needs? What does it mean to be a
growth unifier if you’re the typical CMO?
Robert Tas: This is my favorite one, because this is
what every company needs. It needs an executive
to remove friction for customers. We have to stop
operating like our org chart. We need to operate
how the customer wants us to. I view the CMO as
the chief customer advocate, because that person’s
role is to go across the company to advocate, to
make it easier for the customer to do business with
the company.
The CMO is the person who’s using customer
insights. They’re fighting for the different segments
the company might support, because they realize
not all customers are the same. They understand
how to serve their customers efficiently and
elegantly across the company’s products and
channels—such as affiliates, search engines, retail,
customer service, and social media marketing—to
capture customer demand. This is foundational to
any successful business.
Analyzing the CEO–CMO relationship and its effect on growth
Roberta Fusaro: How comfortable do you think
CMOs are with contextualizing themselves or
thinking of themselves as growth unifiers?
Robert Tas: The good news is that some of them
are very comfortable. And you can see that in the
way they operate, the way they navigate the entire
C-suite, the way they advocate for the customer,
the way they use data, and the way they use
new technology.
The essential message that I tell all CMOs is they
need to take the business strategy, fit it with their
customers’ needs, and then put the two together.
The final thing, and this is probably the most
important piece, is they need to be accountable for
real business outcomes and be able to connect
the dots.
Roberta Fusaro: How can the CMO help bring
the CEO up to marketing speed without stepping
on toes?
Robert Tas: This is one of those behaviors that we
see the great ones do. This is the exercise of taking
your CEO, your C-suite, and introducing them to the
innovation that’s rapidly changing our world. I have
great examples of CMOs taking their entire
executive team to the Consumer Electronics Show
or to Silicon Valley to expose them to companies
that are doing it right and exhibiting to their
leadership team the art of the possible. It’s an
ongoing effort. The great ones are always looking
for ways to learn, and they’re just curious by nature.
5
‘One of the troubling things we saw
was that CMOs were being moved to
executors of the strategy rather
than being the ones to help create
the strategy.’

The CMO’s struggle
Roberta Fusaro: What was the most surprising
finding from the report for you?
We no longer live in that world. We now have these
amazing little devices in our pockets that are always
on and always in our possession.

There are two things that are just going to be

Robert Tas: I’m a marketing operator at heart. I’ve
realities. One is that marketing is ever-changing.
been a chief growth officer, a CMO, and sat in the
It’s not going to be like, “Oh, you got it now and
chair. It was hard to hear the disconnect. It was hard
we’re done.”
to hear that my bosses didn’t understand and didn’t
recognize the priority of marketing as I did as CMO.
This adds a new level of fidelity that marketers and
companies need to meet. This means they need to
That was stunning to me. It was the same with my
continually test. They need to learn what works for
CFO, which was another thing we saw in the report
them and their customers.
that is a great best practice. When we see the
finance team buying into the marketing
My wife and I shop very differently, for example.
measurement system, it works really well. We talk
She loves information. She wants to see the
to CMOs a lot about making the CFO your BFF. We
reviews. She wants to go to a website ten, 15 times
still have work to do to get there.
before she buys. I just want to press that checkout
button and have that item show up the next day.
Roberta Fusaro: How has marketing itself changed
The beauty of marketing today is it can serve all
over the past 20 years?
kinds of shoppers really well.
Robert Tas: Marketing has changed so dramatically
We’ve seen studies and McKinsey’s done some in
over the last ten, 15 years. Everybody thinks back to
the past that show, especially in hard times,
the Mad Men era, when all we needed was a
marketing is the first thing to get cut.
television commercial and three networks that
reached almost all of the United States.

Analyzing the CEO–CMO relationship and its effect on growth 6

But the companies that actually invest in marketing
are the ones that pull ahead of the pack. After a
marketing downturn, two or three years later, we
see they’re the ones that are accelerating, because
they have invested and unlocked that growth lever
within their organizations.
You cannot be that black box anymore. We need to
be able to transparently demonstrate how it works
and how a dollar spent here equals value there. I
know the crutch is immediate short-term focus on
that dollar, but understanding how the dollars, over
time, all work together to create sustainable,
profitable, and impactful results is really critical to
getting that C-suite on the same page.
Roberta Fusaro: Robert, thank you for joining us on
the podcast today.
Robert Tas: Thank you for having me.
Lucia Rahilly: Next up, author Karin M. Reed offers
some ideas on how to make the most out of your
remote meetings.
Karin M. Reed: There are a lot of best practices for
making meetings effective that are not commonly
used. Bad habits are exacerbated in a virtual
setting. A lot of times, video calls don’t need to
happen if they’re simply a matter of checking a
point. There’s this overwhelming use of video
meetings as the default. This is what’s leading to
Zoom fatigue.
What we have found is that the most effective
virtual meetings are those that are shorter and
purposeful. Rather than having an agenda of ten
items, think about cutting it down to two. And
maybe have a 20-minute meeting as opposed
to a two-hour one, because you really have
to understand the limits of endurance and
attention span.
Analyzing the CEO–CMO relationship and its effect on growth
First of all, consider whether it should be a video
call at all. If the answer is yes, then make sure you
put it within the proper time frame. Don’t let your
calendar decide by default how long your meeting
is going to be. If you can get the business done in
20 minutes, schedule a 20-minute call, because a
lot of times we have these back-to-back-to-back
video meetings and there’s no time left to actually
get the work done or to have that moment of task
switching when you download what just happened
and then prepare for the next call.
It’s also important to determine who should be in
the meeting. The sweet spot for any productive
discussion is five to seven people. If you have
more than seven people in a virtual meeting and
you’re trying to have a productive dialogue, it’s
very unwieldy.
All trends indicate that we will be in a hybrid work
situation for the foreseeable future. You have to be
able to figure out how to handle a hybrid meeting,
where you have three people in a colocated
conference room and then five people who are
joining on individual webcams. The challenge for
the meeting leader is to figure out how to get
everybody to talk to each other, not just to their
own particular networks. So there’s a big burden
upon the meeting leader to get even participation
across the board. You might consider including an
extra role of “facilitator”—somebody who does not
have a stake in the outcome of the meeting, who
can simply ensure that everybody’s voice is heard.
Proactive facilitation is critical in any virtual
meeting. There’s a lot of stilted and stunted
conversation, because people don’t know when it’s
their turn to talk. You can look for nonverbal cues
that might indicate that somebody has something
to say. If somebody leans toward the camera, for
7
instance, that’s usually an indication that they have chat and be able to incorporate that into the verbal
something they want to add. conversation that’s going on as well.

It can be really daunting to get the gumption to
speak up. Other folks might find it much more
effective and easier for them to put their
participation in the form of text. The chat function
can lead to better participation across the board.
The challenge is for the leader to take a look at that
A lot of people have been relying on gut feel, but
we are in an age of data when you have a lot of data
points that leaders can use to make better-
informed decisions.

Robert Tas is a partner in McKinsey’s Stamford, Connecticut, office. Roberta Fusaro is an editorial director in the Boston
office, and Lucia Rahilly is the global editorial director and deputy publisher of McKinsey Global Publishing and is based in the
New York office.

Comments and opinions expressed by interviewees are their own and do not represent or reflect the opinions, policies, or
positions of McKinsey & Company or have its endorsement.

Copyright © 2024 McKinsey & Company. All rights reserved.

Analyzing the CEO–CMO relationship and its effect on growth 8