The CMO job spec has not changed in fifteen years. The commercial environment it is supposed to serve is unrecognisable from what it was fifteen years ago. Nobody in the room seems to think that is a problem worth naming.
I look at VP Marketing job descriptions in 2026 and I see the same construction I saw in 2010. Leadership experience. Brand narrative. Cross-functional collaboration. Data-driven mindset. Ten FTEs. The vocabulary has been updated. The underlying model of what the role is for has not.
The role was designed for a world where marketing was a department. A function with a budget and a brief and a set of channels to operate. That world does not exist in a serious digital business anymore. Marketing is not a department. It is the connective tissue between product, data, acquisition, retention, pricing and commercial performance. The person running it is not a department head. They are a systems operator. And the job spec being written for them is selecting for precisely the wrong capability.
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