Marketing brilliance doesn’t get CMOs the top job. Five things do.
(From my Marketing Week column).
The Ford brand received good news this summer. A J.D. Power quality study named it the top mass-market brand. For Jim Farley, its chief executive, the result had a pleasing symmetry. Before running Ford, he was its global VP of marketing. He understands brands because he once managed them.
Marketers rarely reach the top of large companies. Mr Farley belongs to a small club. Michelle Peluso runs Revlon, Jeff Dodds Formula E, Olav Silden Twinings, Catherine Tabaka Matrix Medical and Katie Vanneck-Smith Hearst UK. All began as marketers. All are exceptions.
The conventional route to the corner office is less exotic. Start in finance or operations, acquire a profit-and-loss account (P&L), become known to the board and wait. Being male also helps. In the first half of 2026, 84% of incoming CEOs at the world’s largest listed companies were men, according to Russell Reynolds.
And that was a good year for women.
Boards love engineers and accountants. So they make them CEO. A few years later, the company has lost touch with its customers. So the board pays consultants a fortune to make it ‘customer-centric’. Lufthansa and BA, take note.
The paradox is hard to miss. Annual reports routinely place the customer ‘at the heart’ of the business. Yet when the top job falls vacant, the executives trained to understand customers rarely make the shortlist. That isn’t only the boards’ fault. Too many CMOs have never mad clear they could run anything bigger than marketing.
To be clear, this is no plea for affirmative action. A bad marketer would make a dreadful chief executive, just as a bad finance director would. But ignoring marketers by default isn’t good governance. It’s a habit.
Almost thirteen years ago, Sherilyn Shackell, Katherine Tulpa and I, together with McKinsey, sketched out what became The Marketing Academy Fellowship (applications for next year close on 27 November: https://themarketingacademy.org/programs/the-fellowship/). Its purpose was not to produce better CMOs. It was to help CMOs become CEOs. More than 440 Fellows later, many made the move. The sample is now large enough to show which behaviours move marketers towards the top. Five stand out.
1 - Wearing the revenue perfume. Boards want one thing from marketing: profitable, sustainable growth (obviously). Brands matter. Campaigns matter. Digital matters. Artificial intelligence matters. But they are means, not ends. In the eyes of many CEOs, not every CMO wears the revenue perfume.
The best CMOs pick the levers they control. They measure the impact. And they link it to the revenue numbers the board cares about. Marketing measurement is tricky. That is not a place to hide. No salesperson closes a €20m deal and announces: ‘I cannot really claim the credit. Engineers made the product and marketing generated the demand.’ They say: ‘I sold €20m.’ CMOs need the same nerve.
2 - Owning the bigger growth agenda. When I ask a room of marketers how a business grows, the answer is depressingly narrow: market share, followed by something involving ‘brand’. Yet growth has many more sources: new products, customers and markets, shifts in demand, mega-trends, buying and selling businesses. In my growth workshops, teams routinely find three or four times as many routes to growth as they first imagined.
CMOs must keep expanding what we call the Value Creation Zone: the overlap between what customers need and what the company needs, today and tomorrow. Becoming the company’s most credible authority on growth makes CMOs very hard for a board to ignore.
3 - Following through to the bottom line. Revenue is half the scent. Profit is the other half. Many marketers lament that they don’t control all the profit levers. Well, finance chiefs don’t own profit either. Yet they roam the organisation asking every function to improve it. CMOs should be just as nosy, following the money beyond marketing, even where the organisation chart says ‘not yours’.
Many Fellows asked to run a P&L, even a small one. A surprising number got one. Pricing is another way in; it’s among the biggest drivers of revenue and profit. Conjoint analysis, unlikely as it sounds, can be rather good fun.
Make no mistake. The best CMOs remain outstanding brand builders who turn the company’s promise into a strong following, in the market and inside the company. Add the first three lessons consistently for a few years and a CMO starts to look less like a specialist and more like someone who might run the place.
Two further moves speed things up.
4 - Going sideways to go up. Marketing students often say they want to become CMOs. Finance students say ‘CEO’. Nobody reaches the corner office by accident. Cross-functional projects are a start, but a real job in sales, operations or finance is better. Many marketers find they enjoy the escape. Boards don’t appoint chief executives for mastering one function. They appoint people who understand the whole company. People who can handle employees, investors and suppliers, not just customers.
5 - Saying it out loud. CMOs who wait for the board to knock on their door will wait a long time. Successful CMOs face a particular trap. Their boards like what they do and want more of it. Headhunters offer them more CMO roles because it’s safe and lucrative. The better the marketer, the easier it is to stay one forever.
CMOs must state the ambition and ask board members which experiences are still missing. The conversation must move from ‘if’ to ‘how’. They also need to leave the marketing bubble. Few board members wander around Cannes clutching a rosé. Relationships with search consultants, investors, board members and sitting CEOs matter. Not to beg for a job, but to become known before the vacancy appears.
The CMOs who want to reach the corner office won’t wait for others to pull them upwards. They’ll wear the revenue perfume, take the P&L, and tell the board they want the job.
After all, the best way to run marketing on a grander scale is to leave the marketing department behind.