Only 8% of CMOs Are Seen as Strategic Leaders — Because Most Marketing Departments Have Never Actually Done Strategy -

Boathouse released its fifth annual CEO study this year, and the trade press is still chewing on one number: CEO confidence in the CMO role has dropped to 43%. Sixty-eight percent of CMOs are seen as actively contributing to strategy. Only 8% are seen as actually leading it.

The commentary since has mostly landed in the same place — CMOs need to build more trust, communicate better in the boardroom, and prove their seat at the table.

I think the CEOs have this one right. The fix everyone’s proposing is aimed at the wrong layer entirely. This isn’t a trust problem. It’s a strategy problem.

Most marketing departments — agency-side and in-house alike — have never actually practiced strategy. They practice very well-produced tactics and call it strategy. CEOs, whatever else you want to say about them, are usually good enough at pattern recognition to tell the difference even when they can’t name what’s missing.

What CEOs Are Actually Detecting

Mark Ritson has spent years hammering on a structure he calls the marketing triptych: Diagnosis, then Strategy, then Tactics — always in that order, never reshuffled.

Diagnosis is the data-driven situational read. Strategy is targeting, positioning, and objectives. Tactics is execution — the campaign, the content calendar, the media plan.

Most of what gets presented to a board as “marketing strategy” is actually just Tactics wearing a strategy costume: a creative concept, a channel mix, a budget ask, dressed up with a slide that says “strategic plan” at the top.

Porter explained why that distinction matters thirty years ago, and not specifically about marketing. Operational effectiveness — doing similar things better than competitors, benchmarking best practice, executing well — is not strategy.

It produces convergence, not advantage, because everyone eventually copies the best practice. Real strategy is a set of explicit trade-offs: a deliberate choice about who you serve, who you don’t, and what you refuse to do to win the ones you chose.

A CEO sitting across from a CMO who’s presenting tactics — however well produced — is sitting across from operational effectiveness, not strategy.

What I Watched Happen on Both Sides of That Table

I spent years on the agency side at Bolt Goodly. The structural incentive there is brutal and honest: clients hire agencies for execution.

You get invited into the room to produce the campaign, not to argue about which segment the company should stop serving. Even good agencies, mine included, mostly operate downstream of strategic decisions someone else already made.

Moving into the CMO seat at Pinnacle changed what I could bring into the boardroom. I used that change deliberately.

Before any budget request went to the board, it came with a written targeting rationale — which segments we were pursuing and, just as important, which ones we’d decided to walk away from and why.

That single discipline, upstream of any campaign or channel decision, was what let us defend a 60% cost reduction later without it reading as a cut.

The Fix Nobody’s Proposing

Every post-Boathouse take I’ve read recommends the CMO side of the equation: better storytelling, more financial fluency, tighter alignment with the CFO.

All useful, but none of it addresses the actual gap. If 92% of CMOs aren’t seen as leading strategy, the honest first move isn’t a communication upgrade.

It’s an audit of whether strategy — Diagnosis and the segmentation, targeting, and positioning work that follows it — happened at all before the tactical plan got built.

That cuts both ways, and CEOs aren’t off the hook here either. If your CMO has only ever been asked for a campaign calendar and a media budget, you built the incentive structure that produced a tactics-only CMO.

You can’t survey your way to strategic leadership out of a function you’ve only ever asked to execute.

The CMOs who will move that 8% number aren’t the ones who get better at presenting.

They’re the ones who stop bringing a campaign into the first meeting and start bringing a targeting rationale — a specific, defensible answer to who we’re not serving and why — before anyone talks tactics at all.

The next time your CMO walks into the boardroom, skip the trust conversation.

Ask one question instead: which segments are we deliberately choosing not to serve this year, and why?

If the answer comes back fast and specific, you have a strategic partner. If it doesn’t, no amount of confidence-building is going to close that 92%.