The reason the marketing function in a scaling digital business becomes politically difficult is not personality. It is architecture.
When marketing owns the top of funnel and product owns the middle and CRM owns the bottom and nobody owns the connections between them, you do not get a commercial system. You get three optimised silos producing metrics that look good individually and tell an incomplete story collectively.
Each function defends its metrics to the board. Each function's metrics are accurate. The commercial picture that emerges from them is not. And the CMO, who is supposed to own the narrative that connects those metrics into a coherent commercial story, is instead managing the political consequences of three functions that are optimising against each other.
That is not a talent problem. It is a structural one. The structure was designed before the commercial system became complex enough to require someone to own it whole. That person is not the CMO. The CMO is part of the problem.
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