The CMO Is Being Asked to Do the CEO's Job. Without the CEO's Authority.

The expectations placed on CMOs have expanded well beyond traditional marketing responsibilities.

Traditionally, the CMO was responsible for brand, demand generation and marketing performance. Now the CMO is expected to explain where next year's growth will come from, why last quarter came in short and which bets the business should make next. Those are CEO questions. More and more often, they land on the marketing leader's desk.

I don't think the CMO is replacing the CEO, and I don't know many CMOs who want to. But accountability for growth has expanded faster than the authority to act on it. When responsibility and authority don't align, opportunities can get overlooked. Marketing may identify a shift in audience behavior or an emerging growth opportunity but lack the influence needed to turn those insights into business decisions.

Growth accountability has outgrown the org chart

Look at what actually decides whether a company hits its growth target. Pricing usually sits with finance or the CEO. The product roadmap belongs to product and sales coverage and follow-up belong to sales. The budget envelope is often set on last year's logic before marketing has made its case for this year.

Marketing owns the message, the channels, the campaigns and the spend inside its own budget. They're also only part of the growth equation, and a CMO measured on the whole equation will eventually be judged on decisions they didn't make.

This isn't a knock on sales, product or finance. Those teams own their levers for good reasons, but the problem is structural. The person accountable for the outcome is often just a recommender on the decisions that shape it, with no agreed process for when that recommendation has to be heard.

Part of what makes this difficult to address is that the shift happened gradually. The CMO's responsibilities expanded over time, but their decision-making authority didn't necessarily grow alongside them.

The market moves before the decision rights do

Marketing is usually the first function to see demand change. We hear it in community conversations, in the language customers start using and in which voices suddenly carry trust with a specific audience. Marketing often recognizes these shifts early, but getting the rest of the business to respond can be much more difficult.

Picture a premium running brand. In March, the marketing team notices a growing conversation among runners over 50. One is training for a first marathon after a knee replacement. Another wants to keep up with a daughter who just started running. A third is tired of shoes built for speed when what they need is a way to stay in the sport another ten years. None of them is the brand's core customer, but they're all asking questions the brand could answer.

The team flags it in the quarterly business review and everyone agrees it's interesting. Then it goes nowhere. Product has already locked the roadmap. Finance set the budget against last year's buyers. Sales is focused on the retail accounts that drove last year's revenue. Each decision makes sense on its own, but collectively, they leave a potential growth opportunity unexplored.

Six months later, a competitor could be building a position with those same runners while the original brand is still planning around last year's customer. The marketing team identified the opportunity early, but the business never made a decision about whether to pursue it. The shortfall lands in marketing's number, but the insight was there in March. What was missing was a path for it to change a decision.

How we're using audience intelligence at Lickly

As part of building Lickly's marketing strategy, we used our own platform to run audience segmentation to better understand the marketers we want to reach.

Lickly identified seven distinct audience segments. Two stood out to me because their priorities reflect the growing expectations placed on marketing leaders. The first, Revenue Architects, are experienced B2B growth marketers focused on connecting marketing investments to pipeline, revenue and business outcomes. They care about attribution, budget allocation and demonstrating marketing's contribution to growth.

Commercial Storytellers are senior content, product marketing and demand generation leaders focused on positioning, differentiation and making marketing evidence compelling enough to influence business decisions.

What interested me was how much their priorities extend beyond traditional campaign execution. These marketers are concerned with revenue, investment decisions, business impact and earning influence across the organization.

We're using these audience insights to inform how we position Lickly, the content we develop and the influencer programs we plan to launch. Rather than starting with a list of creators or deciding what content to produce, we can start with a clearer understanding of the audiences we're trying to reach, what matters to them and the conversations we want to be part of.

For me, that's the practical value of audience intelligence. It gives us a stronger foundation for deciding where to focus our marketing efforts and why those investments make sense.

What a CMO needs before owning the number

Closing this gap starts with clarity about which growth decisions the CMO can make, which ones marketing should be consulted on and which ones it can escalate when the evidence warrants it.

I would start by listing the growth decisions instead of the functions. Entering a new segment, changing a price point, moving budget mid-quarter or reprioritizing a product feature. Each one has an owner, whether or not anyone wrote it down. Then be honest about marketing's role in each. Most CMOs will find they recommend far more than they approve. The arrangement can work, as long as the recommendation has a defined place to land.

The next consideration is what evidence would justify revisiting an existing decision. Changes in audience demand, for example, could warrant a fresh look at sales priorities or product plans. It's much easier to agree on those criteria ahead of time than in the middle of a debate, when everyone already has a position to protect.

This is one of the reasons I believe Decision Intelligence has a much bigger role to play in marketing. At Lickly, we're working to connect audience understanding with the other intelligence marketers need to evaluate opportunities and make investment decisions. In my own role, I want that intelligence to inform our positioning, the audiences we prioritize and where we put our marketing resources. And when I bring a recommendation to the leadership team, I want to be able to explain the reasoning behind it.

The real job behind the growth target

If CMOs are going to carry growth accountability, one of our most valuable contributions is making the market clear enough that the rest of the business can act on what we see.

Audience evidence needs to be part of planning while there's still room to adjust budgets and priorities. Recommendations should also be specific about the opportunities worth pursuing, what it would take to act on them, and who is responsible for making those decisions.

As CMOs, we can identify growth opportunities, build the investment case and influence the direction of the business. But accountability only works when the people responsible for results have a meaningful role in the decisions that produce them.

The CMO can own the growth number. Someone still has to own the decisions behind it.

Lickly is an AI-driven Decision Intelligence platform for marketing, helping brands and agencies connect audience and market intelligence to evidence-backed recommendations. Book a demo to see how it works.