Customer-Centric Growth Why the CMO's role is to be the custodian of the customer inside the organisation, and what that means for how companies grow

Marketing is still the best growth engine most companies have. The question is whether anyone is letting it work.

Marketing has become one of the most misunderstood functions in the C-suite. And that misunderstanding is costing companies more than they realise.

McKinsey & Company's most recent research on marketing leadership found something that should trouble any leadership team: companies with a single empowered marketing leader in their executive team see up to 2.3 times more growth than those where commercial responsibility is fragmented across multiple roles. That is not a marginal difference. It is a structural one.

And yet the trend in many organisations has been to fragment marketing further, adding Chief Digital Officers, Chief Commercial Officers, and Chief Revenue Officers alongside the CMO, with overlapping remits and no single person owning the customer. The result, as McKinsey put it, is that no one owns the customer. Everyone has a view of the customer. No one is accountable for the experience.

I have worked in both types of organisation. At Worldpay, marketing was a genuine commercial function, closely connected to sales, embedded in strategic account planning, and measured against enterprise pipeline and revenue. At earlier points in my career, I worked in environments where marketing was primarily a communications and campaign execution function, producing beautiful collateral that had no visible connection to commercial outcomes. The difference in what was possible was enormous.

The CMO as integrator

The original purpose of marketing was not to run campaigns. It was to be the organisation's connection to the market, the function that translated what customers needed into what the company built, sold, and communicated. In that framing, the CMO is an integrator: the person who holds the commercial thread that runs from customer insight through product investment to pipeline to revenue.

When that role works well, it shows up in some specific ways. The CMO knows which product investments are generating customer value, not just product usage. They know which customer segments are most strategically important and why. They can tell the CFO which marketing investments are producing commercial returns, in the language the CFO uses, not in marketing's own metrics. And they can tell the board a coherent story about where the company's growth is coming from and what it will take to sustain it.

At Farfetch, the most valuable work I did was not running campaigns. It was building the framework that connected product investment decisions to GMV contribution, and making that connection visible to the Board, the CFO, and the Investor Relations team. That is marketing in its most strategically important form: not generating leads, but making the company's commercial logic legible to everyone who needs to understand it.

The CMO-CFO partnership changes everything

One of the most consistent findings in the McKinsey research is that the CMO-CFO relationship is the critical lever. When those two functions are aligned, when marketing can speak in the language of unit economics, CAC payback, and NRR, and when the CFO understands that marketing investment is a growth driver rather than a cost centre, the whole organisation moves differently.

This is not a soft or cultural point. It is a structural one. Marketing budgets dropped to 7.7% of revenue last year, according to Gartner, down from 9.1% the year before. And 80% of CEOs and CMOs believe marketing is underfunded. That disconnect exists because marketing has not yet built the measurement model that makes its contribution to commercial growth auditable. The CFO cannot fund what they cannot trace.

The solution is not to advocate louder for marketing. It is to build the enterprise measurement model that connects every meaningful marketing investment to a commercial outcome the CFO would recognise. Pipeline influenced. Deal velocity changed. Customer acquisition cost reduced. Net revenue retention improved. These are the metrics that earn marketing its seat at the investment table.

What this means for founders

For founders who are still early in the journey of building a marketing function, the implication is worth sitting with. The question is not whether to invest in marketing. It is whether to invest in marketing leadership that understands its job as connecting customer value to commercial growth, or in marketing execution that produces activity without accountability.

There is a version of marketing that looks very busy and produces almost no measurable commercial impact. There is another version that is quieter, more focused, and directly traceable to the metrics that determine your company's next fundraising conversation. The difference is not budget. It is whether someone in the organisation owns the connection between the customer and the commercial outcome, and whether they have the authority and the tools to act on it.

The best marketing leaders I have seen are not the most creative or the most technically sophisticated. They are the ones who are most commercially clear. They know which customers matter most, which investments create the most durable value, and how to tell that story in a way that every stakeholder in the organisation can act on.

That is the function worth building. And it is available to companies of every size, the question is whether the leadership team has decided to make it a priority.

In your organisation, who owns the connection between the customer and the commercial outcome? Not the customer journey. Not the pipeline. The whole thread, from customer need to product investment to market presence to revenue. That question is worth answering carefully.