Long on belief, short on skill

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Only 12% of the people running marketing came up through brand.

That figure comes from CMO Outlook 2026, a survey of 541 senior marketers published in June by the consultancy Lippincott with Bloomberg Media. It asked marketing leaders which discipline their career background most closely aligned with. Performance and growth marketing came top at 35%. Strategy and operations took 15%, product marketing 13%. Brand sat fourth on 12%, ahead of media and campaign marketing on 11% and communications on 2%. Lippincott notes the tilt toward performance holds across industries, geographies and company sizes.

The composition of the room has changed too. More than a fifth of the senior-most marketing decision-makers surveyed do not have marketing anywhere in their job title, and 15% report they are not the top marketing decision-maker in their own organisation. In many of these companies the final call on marketing sits with a chief growth, revenue, commercial or digital officer.

Most of the coverage of this study has focused on a familiar tension, which is that marketers know they should be building brands and keep funding performance instead. That reading assumes an argument is being lost. The more uncomfortable possibility is that the argument is no longer being had, because the people who used to make it have largely stopped being hired.

This has been widely read as a trade-off. Marketing leaders have won influence by becoming fluent in the language of the C-suite, and the price of that fluency is the long-term work. It is a comfortable story, because it casts marketers as people making a difficult choice under pressure. The remedy follows naturally, which is to make the case for brand more forcefully and get long-term metrics back onto the agenda.

There is evidence for the first half of it. Boathouse's 2026 study of chief executives found that CMOs have never been more aligned with their business counterparts while simultaneously losing their CEO's confidence in their ability to drive growth. Research with the Association of National Advertisers, surveying more than 200 senior marketers over the winter, found 67% saying their CEO considers brand important and only 19% reporting that the C-suite regularly connects brand equity to business outcomes. Fluency bought alignment rather than comprehension.

What the trade-off story cannot explain is the composition data. A trade-off implies someone weighing two options they understand equally well. The survey suggests something more mundane has happened to who is in the room. When the discipline was told its problem was credibility, organisations listened, and they solved it in the most direct way available, which was to put people in charge whose credibility was never in question because their work had always shown up in a quarterly number.

That is a different problem with a different remedy. If marketing leaders are choosing performance over brand, better arguments might move them. If the marketing leadership was selected for a disposition toward performance, better arguments will land on people who have no particular reason to find them persuasive and, more to the point, no training in what to do if they did.

For companies in the middle of their category, the picture is worse. They are the smallest group in the survey, so the numbers are indicative rather than firm, but the pattern is consistent.

Middle-of-the-pack companies are more likely than category leaders to struggle with the fundamentals, including getting audiences to recognise what their products are worth. They are much more likely to strongly disagree that their company accurately measures marketing's impact on business outcomes, and more likely to be neutral on whether their metrics align with business metrics at all. They are more likely to say the skills in their marketing organisation will become more of a challenge over the next two to three years. Marketing in these companies is more likely to be treated as sales enablement, and finance is more likely to be the department that slows decisions down. They are also more likely than better-performing companies to say they rarely or never run culturally relevant work.

Read that list as a description of a job and it becomes clear why the hiring pattern makes sense. A company in the middle of its category, with a measurement function nobody trusts and finance standing over the budget, has an obvious immediate need, and it is not for someone who can build preference over three years. It is for someone who can demonstrate that the money did something. Hiring a performance leader into that situation is a defensible decision, and anyone arguing otherwise has to explain what the alternative buys in the first twelve months.

The difficulty is what the same data says about how these companies grow. Middle-of-the-pack respondents were the most likely of any group to report that strategic external partnerships and culturally relevant campaigns had worked as growth strategies. Which reads as borrowed equity mattering more when a brand lacks the resources to build its own. The companies with the least brand capability in the room are the ones getting the most out of brand-shaped work when they attempt it.

The mid-market brand hires someone who can prove marketing works, then discovers that what would actually work is the thing that person was not hired to do.

The instruction that follows from all this is usually to build the brand, which is not an instruction at all. It names a budget line and leaves the person holding it to work out what to buy, which is precisely the thing a performance-trained marketing leader has no reason to know.

A more usable specification comes from James Hurman, who runs the Master of Advertising Effectiveness programme and has spent much of his career on this evidence. His framing is future demand: the job is to make people who are not in the market yet familiar with you and positive toward you, so that when they do enter the market they come to you and pay more. Two numbers track it. 

1. What percentage of category buyers are familiar with you

2. What percentage feel positive toward you

What makes it usable is that it survives contact with a budget meeting. It names an audience, a mechanism and a measure, none of which require a marketing director to ask their board for faith.

It also comes with a warning that has to be delivered in advance. Hurman's point about the shape of the return is that a split between brand and performance produces a flat or slightly negative first few months, then compounds from around month six. A marketing director who does not say that before the money moves will spend month three explaining a dip, which is the conversation that kills the strategy.

For a mid-market brand, the question to ask is not whether the marketing leadership believes in brand, because most of them say they do. It is whether anyone in the building can write the brief. If the answer is nobody, that is a hiring decision, and it is a more consequential one than the next agency review.

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Amar Chohan, Founder and CEO - Department of Creative Affairs.