I read a lot of senior marketing job descriptions.
I also spend a lot of time working with organisations on marketing, strategy, growth and leadership. And there is a pattern I keep coming back to.
We keep hiring marketing leaders to solve the same problems:
- Bring structure
- Make marketing more data-driven
- Improve reporting
- Create a clearer strategy
- Sharpen the brand and messaging
- Put customer insight at the heart of decision-making
- Align Marketing with Sales and the wider business
- Build better processes
- Connect marketing activity to commercial outcomes
These are not fringe requirements. They appear again and again in senior marketing roles.
A current Head of Marketing role in Ireland, for example, asks the incoming leader to be highly organised, bring structure to competing priorities, develop a data-driven strategy, own CRM and reporting, strengthen positioning and messaging, and demonstrate marketing's contribution to pipeline and revenue. A current CMO specification similarly calls for building marketing infrastructure, reporting, measurement and scalable processes.
None of that is particularly surprising. In fact, it makes perfect sense.
The problem is what happens next.
What keeps repeating
A new marketing leader arrives.
They audit the function. They identify gaps. They create a strategy. They introduce frameworks. They establish KPIs. They improve reporting. They clarify the brand. They build plans. They create processes. They align the team.
Things improve.
Then, a few years later, the organisation hires another marketing leader. And that person is given almost exactly the same mandate:
- Bring structure
- Make us more strategic
- Improve our measurement
- Fix our positioning
- Get Marketing and Sales working together
- Create better processes
- Make marketing accountable for growth
And so the cycle starts again.
I am not suggesting that every previous marketing leader failed. Far from it.
CMO tenure is relatively short, but the story is more nuanced than simply “CEOs keep firing bad CMOs.” The average CMO tenure in the S&P 500 is currently 4.1 years, while Spencer Stuart reports that 62% of departing S&P 500 CMOs move into a similar or larger role.
Perhaps we are asking individual leaders to solve an organisational problem.
The evidence is hard to ignore
This is not just something I have noticed.
Gartner's 2024 survey of 403 CMOs found that 84% reported high levels of strategic dysfunction. Even more strikingly, 94% said translating enterprise strategy into actionable marketing plans was a challenge.
Only 40% of CMOs said they take a primarily proactive, market-oriented approach to planning. Meanwhile, 61% said their planning is primarily driven by operational needs.
The measurement problem is just as revealing.
McKinsey found that 70% of CEOs say they measure marketing's impact through revenue growth and margin, while only 35% of CMOs identify those as their top metrics. And only 30% of CMOs say there is a clearly defined view of what constitutes marketing ROI.
Then there is the data itself.
Nielsen found that 85% of marketers are confident in their ability to measure holistic performance, but only 32% actually measure performance holistically. Among the barriers cited: siloed internal teams, incomparable data, and too many vendors or tools.
So we have an interesting paradox: more data than ever. More dashboards. More analytics. More CRM systems. More marketing technology. More frameworks. More AI.
And yet we are still struggling to answer some very basic questions:
- What are we trying to achieve, and why?
- What do we know about the customer that informs that decision?
- How does our brand and positioning reflect that understanding?
- What are we actually going to do, and what are we investing?
- What should Sales, Product and Marketing each be doing?
- Which metrics actually matter?
- What have we learned, and what should we change as a result?
The problem is not a lack of information. It is fragmentation.
Most organisations do not have a shortage of marketing information. They have too much of it.
The strategy is in one deck. Customer research is in another. The brand strategy is in a PDF. The marketing plan is in a spreadsheet. The budget is somewhere else. Campaign activity lives in a project management tool. CRM data lives in the CRM. Social performance lives in native platforms. Website analytics live somewhere else. Sales has another set of numbers. Finance has another. And the CEO often has yet another view of what marketing is supposed to be doing.
The organisation may have all the ingredients. But they are not connected.
And when they are not connected, the organisation has to rely on people to connect them. Usually, that means the marketing leader. Which creates another problem.
What happens when the leader leaves?
Some of the most valuable organisational knowledge is never written down. It is in someone's head:
- Why we chose this positioning
- Why we are targeting these customers
- What we learned from the last campaign
- Why a particular metric matters
- Which assumptions we are testing
- What Sales has been telling us
- What the customer research actually means
- Why we changed direction six months ago
- What did not work
- What we are seeing now that changes the original strategy
The marketing leader often becomes the connective tissue between all of these things. That is valuable while they are there. But it is fragile.
When a marketing leader leaves, the organisation can lose something much more important than a person. It can lose context.
And then the next leader starts asking the same questions. They audit. They diagnose. They rebuild. They restructure. They create their own frameworks. They establish their own dashboards. They put their own interpretation on the strategy.
Gradually, another layer of infrastructure is added to the organisation, until someone eventually decides it is time for another reset.
What if the problem is the operating system?
This is the part I find most interesting.
Maybe the answer is not another brilliant marketing leader. It is not another dashboard. It is not another planning workshop. It is not another piece of MarTech.
Maybe organisations need to think differently about what they are building when they build a marketing function.
Not just a team. Not just a strategy. Not just a collection of campaigns.
A shared commercial operating system.
Something that connects insights to strategy, strategy to brand, brand to plans, plans to investment, investment to execution, execution to measurement, measurement to learning, and learning back to decisions.
And connects those things across every person responsible for growth.
So that Marketing, Sales, Product, Finance and leadership are not operating from different versions of reality. So that a strategic decision does not disappear into a PowerPoint deck. So that customer insight does not sit isolated in a research report. So that a KPI is not just a number on a dashboard, but something connected to the strategic objective it is supposed to help achieve.
So that performance does not simply tell you what happened. It helps you understand why it happened and what to do next.
And so that when a marketing leader eventually moves on, the organisation does not have to start again.
Why we care about this at STRAETCH
It is also why this has become one of our favourite topics in marketing and leadership.
This piece began as advice from our founder, David Hardarson, to the marketing leaders he works with. The more we looked at the pattern it describes, the clearer it became that it explains why STRAETCH exists.
STRAETCH is built around the same idea as the argument above: that marketing does not need another tool, another dashboard or another brilliant individual to hold it together. It needs a shared commercial operating system.
STRAETCH brings insights, strategy, branding, planning, budgets, execution, collaboration, CRM, publishing and performance into one connected environment. The AI works across the full strategic context rather than treating every task as an isolated prompt.
The technology is not the point.
The structure is the point.
The technology simply makes that structure easier to share, maintain, analyse and act upon. And that distinction matters, because organisations do not need another tool. They need to stop rebuilding the same thinking every time the people responsible for it change.
Build something that outlasts the leader
Perhaps that is a better definition of successful marketing leadership.
Not: “What did the CMO achieve while they were here?”
But: “What did they build that continues to make the organisation better after they leave?”
- A strategy that lives beyond the strategy deck
- A customer understanding that informs decisions beyond the research project
- A brand framework that guides execution beyond the brand guidelines
- A measurement system that the CEO, CFO and CMO actually share
- A planning process that connects investment to outcomes
- A body of organisational learning that compounds rather than disappears
- A common commercial context that does not belong to one person
Because the goal should not be to hire another marketing leader to rebuild the foundations.
The goal should be to build foundations that allow every marketing leader to build on what came before.
That is when marketing infrastructure stops being administration and starts becoming a competitive advantage.
If you would like help building that system, our certified partner Consequence Consulting uses STRAETCH to design it with you, whether that means working with your existing stack or implementing it as your commercial operating system. Or Start your 14-day free trial on STRAETCH and see how it changes the way your team plans, decides and grows together.
