What Five Hundred CMOs Said, and What They Are Actually Doing

A global study of more than five hundred marketing leaders, conducted by Lippincott in partnership with Bloomberg Media, finds a gap that is remarkable in its consistency.

CMOs believe long-term brand building is critical for sustainable growth. They are systematically deprioritising it anyway.

The mechanism is not mysterious. CMOs have earned greater organisational influence by becoming fluent in the language of the C-suite: performance metrics, quarterly targets, demonstrable commercial outcomes. The cost of that fluency is time and budget taken from brand building, customer experience investment, and cultural relevance work. Seventy-nine percent of respondents say bureaucracy getting in the way of decision-making is common. Only forty-eight percent believe marketing gets sufficient credit for its contribution to business growth. Only forty-three percent think marketing metrics are understood or valued outside the marketing function.

The data paints a function under significant pressure. Dr Leeya Hendricks’ reading of it is characteristically direct.

Three CMO Roles, a PhD, and a Book That Arrived at the Right Moment

Dr Leeya Hendricks has held CMO roles at Oracle, IBM, Accenture, Gartner, Prytek, and Delta Capita, among others, and is now Managing Director and Founder of Hark Consultants, a strategic growth advisory firm. She is a Non-Executive Director on the CIM board, an adjunct professor at Management Center Innsbruck, and the author of The Platform Playbook, published by Palgrave Macmillan in January 2026. Her PhD, completed at Antwerp Management School and MCI Innsbruck, focused on B2B platform ecosystems and value co-creation.

She arrived at sustainability marketing through a specific angle: the question of how organisations create value that persists rather than value that reports well in the next quarter.

That question sits at the centre of the Lippincott study and at the centre of the episode.

Flip the Frame: This Is Not Something Being Done to CMOs

Leeya’s first intervention is a reframe. The study’s headline finding, that CMOs are being pushed into short-term thinking by boards and executive pressure, is real. Her response is to resist the passive framing.

“It shouldn’t be a case of us being forced into a space. It’s the job of the CMO to really have those strategic long-term discussions, saying this is the value that we bring.”

Her argument is that the short-term drift is partly a failure of the marketing function to make its strategic case with sufficient rigour. CMOs who allow quarterly metrics to define the terms of their engagement with the C-suite have, in effect, accepted a narrower mandate than their role requires.

The Lippincott finding that only forty-eight percent of CMOs believe marketing gets sufficient credit for its contribution is read by Leeya not as a structural injustice but as a demonstration that the case is not being made well enough.

That is a demanding position. It is also an empowering one.

The AI Trap Nobody Is Naming

The Lippincott study surfaces a specific and underreported problem. CMOs are racing to invest in AI tools and technology. Simultaneously, many are cutting budgets for the digital foundations AI depends on: web experience, content architecture, data quality, thought leadership. The infrastructure that determines how AI understands, surfaces, and represents a brand is being defunded to pay for the AI implementation it is supposed to support.

Leeya’s response to this is pointed. “AI is no longer the headline act. It’s becoming the operating environment.”

The question, she argues, is not whether to adopt AI. It is whether organisations understand what AI adoption actually requires. A brand that neglects its content architecture and digital foundations while investing heavily in AI tools is building on sand.

She draws an analogy to the legal sector. Firms like Harvey are not disrupting law because they have AI.

“They’ve fundamentally rethought how value is created.”

The technology is instrumental. The strategic redesign is the work. “That’s a strategy conversation, not a technology conversation.”

Whether Boards Are Ready Is the Harder Question

Leeya’s deepest challenge to the Lippincott findings is not about CMOs at all. It is about boards.

“The question isn’t simply whether marketers should be in the boardroom. It’s whether boards have the capabilities needed to lead organisations in an AI-enabled economy.”

If marketing is being squeezed into short-term thinking by board-level pressure for quarterly performance, and if boards lack the capability to evaluate what AI-enabled long-term strategy requires, then the problem is not a marketing problem. It is a governance problem.

The CMO trade-off described by the Lippincott study is a symptom of something upstream.

Only fourteen percent of CMOs in the study say they are confident their organisation is prepared for impending challenges. That number sits alongside the eighty-three percent who describe their company’s growth trajectory as positive. The gap between those two figures is where the real risk lives.

Responsible Growth Is Not About Sacrifice

Leeya’s magic wand answer returns to the foundational question the episode orbits. She would change how organisations define and measure value, moving beyond quarterly performance to a model that captures long-term outcomes across customers, employees, partners, society, and shareholders.

“Responsible growth isn’t about sacrificing commercial performance. It’s about creating businesses that can sustain it.”

The Lippincott data suggests the gap between that aspiration and operational reality is widening. CMOs know what long-term value requires. The conditions in which they operate are pulling in the opposite direction. Whether those conditions change, or whether marketing leaders find ways to change the terms of the conversation, is the question the episode leaves intact.