Marketing leaders face a critical paradox in 2025 that threatens their strategic influence and organizational standing. Boathouse Group’s fourth annual “CEO Study on Marketing and the CMO” — surveying 150 CEOs across diverse industries — reveals a troubling disconnect: While chief marketing officers have successfully built stronger relationships with their CEOs and demonstrated increased understanding of business objectives, their perceived ability to drive tangible financial outcomes continues to deteriorate.
This widening “growth gap” emerges at a pivotal moment when CEOs are prioritizing growth more intensely than at any point in the past decade. Despite improved communication and relationship-building, marketing leaders increasingly find themselves relegated to executing strategy rather than creating it, struggling with financial attribution and facing heightened scrutiny over their contributions to the bottom line. The implications are profound — not just for CMO job security, but for marketing’s ability to fulfill its potential as a core driver of business growth and transformation.
Strategic disconnect:
Relationship building vs. revenue generation
The biggest challenge facing CMOs today is demonstrating direct contribution to financial performance metrics. According to our 2025 CEO study, CMOs are increasingly adept at understanding business objectives and building stronger relationships with their CEO.
Yet paradoxically, grades for their ability to translate these advantages into revenue growth and measurable financial outcomes are declining. For example, CEO top grades for CMO’s ability to “drive company growth” dropped 22% from last year, while “translate company goals to marketing goals” fell 15%.
This concern is particularly pressing as Gartner’s 2024 CEO Survey found that growth as a top business priority has increased by 25%, reaching its highest level in a decade. A companion Gartner CEO/CFO survey reinforces these stakes, revealing that the top scenario that would trigger a CMO’s removal is “failure to deliver promised results from marketing strategies” (69%).
Despite recognizing marketing’s increasing relevance, half of the CEOs Boathouse surveyed still view CMOs as playing primarily executional roles rather than being core to company growth strategy.
The perception relegates marketing to the periphery of critical business decisions. McKinsey’s March 2024 study “Analyzing the CEO-CMO relationship and its effect on growth” identified this exact problem: “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.”
Their research demonstrates that companies placing marketing at the core of their growth strategy consistently outperform their peers by 1.5-2x in revenue growth.
Downward spiral:
How CMOs inadvertently widen the trust gap
When faced with performance pressure, many CMOs double down on activity metrics and brand measurements they can control. While these metrics matter, they sidestep the CEO’s primary concern: growth. According to PWC’s recent CMO study, “CMOs face a complex landscape. They should navigate these marketing challenges while driving innovation, aligning their strategies with both company goals and customer needs.” Yet many struggle to make this alignment explicit and measurable.
By focusing on marketing-specific metrics rather than business outcomes, CMOs inadvertently confirm the stereotype that marketing is a cost center rather than a profit driver. This creates a downward spiral: as trust erodes, marketing becomes further removed from strategic decisions, limiting its ability to impact financial outcomes, which further diminishes trust.
Breaking the cycle:
3 actions for strategic relevance
Our research, supported by multiple other studies, reveals that CMOs who successfully reverse this cycle take three specific actions:
- Translate the CEO’s strategic priorities into marketing execution: Align on the shared vision and measurement from which to execute brand and performance. You will need to demonstrate how marketing activities directly impact revenue streams and profit margins to drive sustainable business impact.
- Build financial acumen: Develop P&L fluency that enables marketing leaders to contribute meaningfully to broader business discussions and be core to shaping company growth strategy.
- Implement attribution frameworks: Deploy multichannel analytics and AI intelligence dashboards that connect marketing touchpoints to revenue events, even in complex B2B environments.
To bridge this trust gap, forward-thinking CMOs are establishing clear connections between marketing investments and business outcomes through regular financial impact reviews with the CEO and CFO. This financial clarity doesn’t diminish marketing’s creative brand and reputation-building role — it enhances it by securing the strategic influence needed to execute ambitious marketing visions.
The message from our CEO study for CMOs is clear: In an era where growth is CEOs’ highest priority in a decade, translating relationship capital into financial impact isn’t just a path to job security — it’s the key to unlocking marketing’s full strategic potential.
BONUS: See how Boathouse’s “CEO Study on Marketing and the CMO” has changed with a look back at the 2024 study.
Opinions expressed by SmartBrief contributors are their own.
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