The digital businesses that are pulling away commercially from their peer group right now are not the ones with the best CMOs. They are the ones that replaced the CMO model with something that reads the commercial system rather than managing a function inside it.
I am not making this observation theoretically. I am making it from thirty years of watching commercial systems perform above and below their investment level and identifying the organisational characteristic that most consistently predicts the difference.
The businesses performing above their investment level have someone at the senior commercial level who can see the whole system at once. Who understands how acquisition connects to conversion connects to retention connects to product connects to the data that feeds back into acquisition. Who can sit in a board meeting and say with genuine confidence that the number on the revenue line is being produced by these specific structural conditions, that changing those conditions will produce these specific commercial outcomes, and that the evidence for both claims is here.
That person is not always a CMO. In the businesses performing best, they are often something that does not yet have a standard title. A commercial systems thinker. An operator who sits above the channels and reads the whole machine. The role the industry is moving toward whether or not it has caught up to naming it.
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