Why AI makes brand leadership more important

There’s a cruel irony at the center of marketing leadership. The CMO is in charge of one of the most complex, long-horizon jobs in business. But everything they do is measured on a short-term performance system, using a shrinking budget, to boost company sales before their clock runs out.

Perhaps CMO should stand for chief miracle officer. Or, like some companies, why not just eliminate the role altogether? Bad idea. Especially with the onset of AI. But more about that later. 

According to Forrester’s 2025 report, “The Representation and Tenure of Fortune 500 CMOs,” only 49% of Fortune 500 top marketers hold the CMO title today, down from 55% just one year ago. Over one in five Fortune 500 companies changed their entire marketing leadership in the past 12 months. Average CMO tenure has dropped to 3.9 years, still the shortest average in the C-suite.

Yet for some, the institutional response to a structurally failing model wasn’t to fix the model. It was to dissolve the role. UPS, Etsy, and Walgreens all eliminated the standalone CMO position and didn’t replace it. Marketing responsibilities were folded into the chief commercial officer or chief operating officer roles, and distributed leadership structures were implemented. Or worse, the martech was left to IT to implement.

The unspoken message: brand-building leadership is overhead, not infrastructure. As Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Ian Bruce put it, the CMO’s remit had become “stretched between brand and demand, product and pipeline, digital and physical.” 

CEOs did what made intuitive sense: they split the job up or gave it to someone who offered analytical measurement and short-term ROI metrics. What they didn’t account for is what happens to a brand when nobody is left to ask whether it means anything.

As more and more people use AI to find products or services, your promotional spend doesn’t drive sales. AI doesn’t care about your jingle, clever ad, or sales promotion. To AI, that stuff is invisible. It’s looking for meaning.

The plateau of indifference: What fills the vacuum

When marketing becomes performance spend management and dashboard oversight, brands drift onto what I call the plateau of indifference.

It’s a deceptively comfortable place. Revenue doesn’t collapse. Customers don’t disappear overnight. The brand is still known, still available, still spending. But it has stopped meaning anything to people. The justification for price vs. value erodes. 

Consumers can still name the brand, but with so many me-too solutions, they choose based on price, which becomes the only real differentiator. 

Congrats. You’ve cut your own margins and increased the need for promotional spend.

The thing is, market share shuffles back and forth between competitors running identical playbooks, and performance spend has to increase just to hold flat results.

As you look at that figure, notice how much farther over the plateau of indifference brand clarity gets you than just price. 

The more things change, the more things change 

For example, decades ago, when General Mills bought the Lacoste fashion brand and merged it with Izod, things went reasonably well. 

But then they optimized it for short-term revenue. The brand began appearing in discount stores. Distribution broadened into mass outlets. It lost its premium cachet, and margins dropped like a microphone at the end of a hip-hop concert. 

Rebuilding those formerly fat margins after Lacoste repurchased the brand in 1992 took years of patient reinvestment: pulling back from discount channels, raising prices, and reestablishing meaning. Sales eventually climbed 800% over the following decade. Leaving behind at least two decades of lost profits. 

The lesson isn’t just that the turnaround worked. It’s how long it took, and how much of that time ran directly against quarterly pressure to show faster results.

That’s the real cost of living on the plateau of indifference. Not a bad quarter. Years of compounding irrelevance that get progressively harder and more expensive to undo.

McDonald’s learned a version of this lesson in 2019 when it eliminated its global CMO role. Within a year, the company reinstated the position and has since expanded its CMO’s portfolio. 

It turns out that when you remove the person responsible for instilling meaning into the brand, you eventually discover that the question still needs to be asked. Meaning matters to those whose money you’d like in exchange for your product. These days, AI gets the first vote.

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The new penalty: AI doesn’t care about your media budget

The stakes have changed, and there’s no way around it.

AI doesn’t surface brands based on ad spend, impression share, or promotional pricing. It synthesizes the brand’s narrative footprint. It surfaces what problems the brand demonstrably solves, what values it consistently demonstrates, and how much customers appreciate it. 

A brand that has spent years in performance-only mode, with no one stewarding its meaning, has a thin and transactional narrative. AI reads that thinness and routes around it. It’ll grow more and more invisible.

The numbers behind this shift are not trivial. Studies already show organic click-through rates dropping between 15% and 64% when AI-generated answers appear in search results. 

The brands without clear meaning aren’t just losing ground. They’re losing the ability to be found at all in the channel, replacing traditional search.

There’s a simple audit any CMO, or whoever inherited the marketing function, can run today. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity to recommend a solution in your category. 

If your brand doesn’t appear, or appears vaguely, you’ve just received a more honest brand health assessment than most tracking studies will give you. No amount of media spend fixes that result. Only meaning does.

The CMO’s structural trap (short tenure, performance-only metrics, brand investment treated as discretionary overhead) has been quietly building this AI vulnerability for years. 

The elimination of the role didn’t just cost brands a title. It cost them the only executive whose job was to prevent that invisibility.

3 things a CMO needs to actually do the job

The miracle the C-suite keeps requesting isn’t brand equity in 90 days. The actual miracle, the harder, quieter one, is making the organization understand that brand meaning is infrastructure, not overhead, and that without someone protecting it, the business is flying without instruments.

1. A longer measurement window 

Binet and Field’s research establishes the empirical baseline: short-term effects are measurable within a year, but the compounding value of brand meaning, higher margins, lower acquisition costs, and greater resilience in downturns, plays out over three or more years. 

CMOs are being asked to build something that may take longer than their likely tenure to fully materialize. That’s not a talent problem. It’s a system design problem.

2. Budget protection for brand-building, separate from performance spend

Binet and Fields’ 60/40 principle (spend 60% on long-term brand building, 40% on short-term activation) isn’t a philosophical preference. 

It’s an empirically derived formula for maximizing total marketing ROI. When that ratio inverts, as it has across most organizations, short-term sales numbers hold for a while. Then the baseline erodes. 

Then you’re on the Plateau of Indifference, wondering why performance spend keeps taking more money to produce the same results.

3. A seat at the strategy table, not just the media table

Brand meaning starts with what a company does, not what it says. The CMOs who are driving growth and increasingly making the leap to CEO are the ones involved in product decisions, customer experience design, and organizational values — not just creative approvals and media planning.

The job needs a new name

There’s a final reframe worth making. The title chief marketing officer may itself be part of the problem. It signals a functional lane: campaigns, creative, media, at the exact moment the job demands something broader.

What the role actually requires is someone whose mandate is relevance. Relevance in the most operational sense: ensuring the brand means something clear and consistent to the people it’s trying to reach, to the algorithms increasingly deciding what those people see, and to the culture the brand operates in.

Let’s call the role chief relevance officer. The companies that figure that out first will have brands that AI can surface. 

The ones still treating the CMO like a media interruption ROI spreadsheet jockey, or who distribute the function across a COO, or IT, and a dashboard, won’t.

The companies that eliminated the CMO role lost the only executive whose job was to make the brand mean something, not just to the people it’s trying to reach, but to the AI platforms that need that meaning to make you visible. 

In the age of AI-mediated discovery, no other factor will be more consequential or more expensive to leave unanswered.