A recent McKinsey report surveying C-suite-level marketing and growth officers from CPG and retail companies revealed what the industry has known for some time: the purview of the CMO has expanded… yet again.

Traditional marketing functions—like content and creative, consumer insights and communications—are now joined by a slew of commerce-related responsibilities, including shopper insights, promotions, design, ecommerce, product innovation, pricing and genAI. Yet despite these new areas of focus, only 27% of marketing leaders feel as if their marketing organizations are equipped to handle the new duties.

Additional insights from the report, which surveyed 104 marketing leaders across Europe and North America, in March through May of 2024, include the following:

• 87% of CMOs believe that brand-building is strategically important, but only 58% rate their companies as mature or extremely mature operationally. Similar gaps between importance and capability exist for full-funnel marketing strategy, KPI clarity, strategic budgeting and defining a creative strategy.
• 83% of CMOs agree that measuring marketing performance management is a must-have, but just 41% are confident in their abilities.
• While 74% of CMOs view genAI as an opportunity more than a risk, only 9% have evaluated genAI-enabled automation opportunities, 5% are building genAI capabilities, and just 4% are scaling up genAI use cases.
• Top genAI use cases include creative efficiency (39%), personalization at scale (28%), media optimization (28%) and automating the business of marketing (22%). Twenty percent are testing use cases for customer experience improvement.
• 42% of marketing leaders with mature operating models cite a link between marketing activities and business outcomes as their biggest differentiator. Other strengths include clearly articulated marketing strategy (39%), sufficient budget (35%), and distinctive talent and capabilities in priority marketing functions (32%).
• The biggest challenges to advancing operating models include: a siloed structure and a lack of cross-functional collaboration (36%), insufficient budget to support desired marketing activities (34%), insufficient talent and capabilities in-house (32%), incoherent strategy (32%) and insufficient budget to support resourcing requirements (28%).

We sat down with report author Biljana Cvetanovski, Partner at McKinsey’s Growth, Marketing & Sales practice, to discuss the findings in more detail.

Chief Marketer: What surprised you most about this research? Was anything unexpected?

Biljana Cvetanovski, Partner at McKinsey’s Growth, Marketing & Sales practice: I’ve been running research on the role of marketing and growth leaders for a number of years. The most surprising part of this research was just the expansion of the CMO (we refer to “CMO” as marketing and growth leader) remit again. And I say “again” because if we talked a few years ago, I would’ve said, it’s marketing with a capital “M.” And now I’d say it’s almost marketing in all caps. So if your plate was already full as a CMO, now you’re spinning even more plates—and they’re all very full.

The second big insight for me was around what is important in the CMO’s role versus the disconnect to its maturity. What was less surprising is that we know that more than 80% of CEOs historically have looked at the CMO to drive the growth agenda. And we continue to see that. We just see that it’s become an increasingly complex landscape for the CMO to drive it.

Another surprise: We expected to see a lot more maturity around marketing performance because it’s something that’s been around for a long time. But the onset of things like genAI and automation has affected and had implications on things like marketing performance. The statistic there was 83% of CMOs said it is very important, but only half of them felt like they had the maturity. So this new remit is having a [cumulative] effect.

CM: Why do you think that the performance capabilities are not as high as you would’ve expected?

BC: One, it’s this expansion of the remit of the CMO. But it’s also that genAI, AI, the effective automation, new channels, new types of experiences… are all new types of marketing to measure. Immersive brand experiences is one that’s very prevalent. And by that we mean, how do you engage consumers with brands beyond the shelf, beyond traditional marketing? The channels, if you like, in the old language, or the experiences around that, the onset of new things like automation technologies, have all had that cumulative effect on performance.

CM: Can companies remain successful while adding additional responsibilities to the CMO position?

BC: The answer is around focus. The precursor to all of this: What is that aligned view of the growth strategy and how are you going to drive against it? We saw three broad areas of increase in the CMO remit. The first is around the functional, so taking on more design innovation, AI, genAI, even pricing and promo distribution for some organizations. The second element is this integrative role of, how do I drive next horizon innovation? Where do I get my next wave of growth? How do I build immersive brand experiences? And the third is around crosscutting themes, such as diversity, equity, inclusion.

We found that those high-growth companies tended to hone in on four main areas and be very clinical about how they focus in on them. And those are: clear strategy based on insights-led growth; being much crisper in terms of your marketing performance; being very focused on where you have your high-impact use cases around tech; and having a fit-for-purpose operating model.

CM: How do you think marketers can improve their KPI tracking?

BC: Some of the challenges that we saw were around operating model. One out of every four (27%) of CMOs are saying, we have the mature or the right operating model for us to deliver on this expanded remit and still deliver on growth. And some of the challenges are, I don’t have sufficient cross-functional collaboration. I don’t have sufficient budget. I don’t have the talent that I need in-house. I don’t have that aligned view of what it takes or what the strategy should be.

We’ve spoken in previous reports around the CMO or marketer’s role as a unifier, connecting across the different functions, connecting across the different elements of the organization. There’s the infrastructure that is needed for CMOs, but also starting with this aligned view and playing that role of collaborator or connector in the organization.

CM: When it comes to companies that have achieved this operational maturity, as you call it, what are they doing that has led to their success?

BC: Firstly, the prerequisite for all of this is having this crisp view of, what is my marketing strategy? How does it connect to growth? What are my clear KPIs? How do I connect them to the organization and make sure I have that shoulder-to-shoulder with the CFO, the CEO and other leaders of the organization? Then there are three ingredients we talked about. One is connecting teams, and this is about mobilizing beyond your reporting lines. We found that less than 40% of marketers and CMOs have the know-how to connect beyond their own four walls of marketing. So, it’s thinking about how do you actually connect, with informal mechanisms or formal mechanisms, to allow you to break through and have that cross collaboration in the organization.

The second thing is around connecting ways of working. How do you incentivize for things like agility and failure? I think especially with this onset of new technologies or new thinking or new experiences, how do you encourage “progress, not perfection” in marketing, and that leeway to experiment? A few years ago everyone felt like we’ve cracked marketing. But now there’s a new wave.

The third element is around connecting your expertise, your capabilities, directly to your growth drivers. How are you over-investing in things that matter? Now, things that matter will be anchored directly in the strategy of your organization. We’re seeing a disconnect with things like creative, which used to be very core and center to the CMO. Less than a third of CMOs feel like they have a strong creative strategy. But focus on those things that matter. It could be personalization and scale. Make sure you’re connecting your expertise to where you want to drive growth.