In accordance with the Chatham House Rule, the discussions at the inaugural MarkHack CMO Circle are reported here without attribution to individual speakers or the organisations they represent. Participants spoke freely on that understanding, and their identities will not be disclosed.
For decades, the Chief Marketing Officer occupied a well-understood, if sometimes contested, position in the corporate hierarchy. They were the brand’s most senior advocate, they were the executive responsible for awareness, affinity, and the long-term equity of the products and services their organisations took to market. They managed agencies, approved campaigns, defended marketing budgets, and translated consumer intelligence into strategic direction. That role, familiar and relatively self-contained, is no longer enough. In fact, among Nigeria’s most senior marketing executives, there is now a growing consensus that it may already be obsolete.
This was the central verdict that emerged from the inaugural MarkHack CMO Circle, a high-level, invite-only roundtable held recently at the Wheatbaker Hotel, Ikoyi, Lagos, and convened by MarkHack. Bringing together between some of Nigeria’s most experienced marketing leaders from FMCG, financial services, telecoms, media, real estate, and management consulting among others, the session produced one of the most frank and substantive conversations about the state of marketing leadership in Nigeria in recent memory.
Their collective and overwhelming verdict is that the traditional CMO which is defined by brand stewardship, communications management, and the classical application of marketing theory has been superseded by a new archetype. Call them the Chief Business Officer or, more precisely, the enterprise-wide commercial leader who happens to operate from a marketing foundation.
The Brand Silo and Its Commercial Cost
The core critique that ran through the CMO Circle’s opening exchanges was directed at the marketing profession itself. Senior practitioners in the room held that for years, many CMOs have operated within a strategic silo of their own construction, deeply fluent in brand metrics while remaining disconnected from the financial and operational realities that determine whether a business grows or declines.
Marketers have historically been oriented towards top-of-mind awareness, brand equity scores, and market share. Though these metrics matter, they do not, by themselves, tell the story that boards, chief executive officers, and chief financial officers need to hear. The more important questions of how does this marketing investment impact shareholders’ equity, what is its effect on the value of the business, and how does it translate into sustainable profit growth, have too often been left unanswered, or answered poorly, by the marketing function.
Indeed, the general consensus was, when CMOs cannot articulate the commercial value of their decisions in the language that the rest of the C-suite uses, they cede influence over the very conversations in which marketing’s most important contributions should be made. The result, participants noted, is that marketing is treated more often than not, as a cost centre rather than a revenue driver.
One of the more striking observations from the room was that consumers, whatever the sophistication of a brand’s marketing architecture, do not interact with departments. They interact with businesses. They experience a company through its products, its pricing, its availability on shelves, the responsiveness of its customer service, and the consistency of its brand promise across every touchpoint. A CMO who limits their concern to the communications dimension of that experience, and the CMO who remains indifferent to whether products are actually available when campaigns break, or whether pricing decisions are aligned with the brand positioning being advertised is not practising marketing leadership, but marketing in a vacuum.
The New Mandate For The CMO
The participants at the CMO Circle did not simply catalogue the failures of the past. They also constructed a case for what marketing leadership must look like going forward. The most articulate formulation of this new mandate centred on unit economics. The CMO of today, participants argued, must understand and take ownership of the financial drivers of their business at a granular level.
This means engaging seriously with the concept of naked margin which is the gross profit a business generates before fixed cost allocation, and more importantly, understand how marketing decisions directly and indirectly influence it. It means comprehending the relationship between distribution depth, pricing architecture, volume growth, and profitability, not as finance department concerns, but as marketing concerns, because they are the commercial infrastructure on which every brand-building investment depends.
This orientation towards financial accountability according to them, is not an abandonment of marketing’s traditional strengths. The four Ps that include product, price, place, and promotion remain structurally central to how well-run marketing functions operate. But participants were emphatic that these frameworks must now be applied through a commercial lens and not a purely brand-driven one. This makes Price a profitability mechanism; Place a demand-fulfilment system with direct operational dependencies and Product a commercial proposition that must be designed, priced, and delivered in ways that create measurable value for the business and the consumer.
Indeed, the modern CMO must be willing to tell their organisation, “this is my budget for the year, and it is a percentage of the expected revenue that I am prepared to be held accountable for delivering.” They added that taking ownership of revenue changes the quality of a CMO’s presence in the boardroom. It takes the CMO from a function head presenting a departmental report into a business leader presenting a commercial case.
The Demand Generation Imperative
Participants also reflected on a structural shift that has reshaped the CMO’s operating environment in recent years, which is the emergence of hyper-informed, hyper-individual consumers as the primary challenge of modern marketing practice.
The era in which it was sufficient to reach consumers through well-placed television advertising, maintain strong billboard presence, and ensure adequate shelf distribution is, participants agreed, definitively over in many categories. Nigerian consumers, accelerated by mobile internet penetration and the proliferation of social commerce, now operate with a level of information asymmetry that reverses the traditional power dynamic between brand and buyer. They research products across multiple platforms before making purchase decisions. They compare prices in real time. They respond to peer recommendation and influencer endorsement with greater trust than they extend to conventional advertising. And increasingly, they expect brands to recognise and respond to them as individuals.
Meeting this expectation requires a marketing function that is deeply integrated with data infrastructure, customer relationship management systems, and the analytical capability to translate behavioural signals into actionable commercial intelligence. It requires a CMO who can navigate conversations about data architecture, personalisation engines, and customer lifetime value with the same authority they bring to brand strategy discussions. And it requires an organisational structure in which marketing is not isolated from the commercial functions it needs to influence sales, customer service, digital product, and distribution but is actively connected to all of them through shared data, shared metrics, and shared accountability.
The blunt summary offered by one participant captures the shift precisely: the CMO’s job has moved from “pushing the brand” outward to understanding consumer behaviour from the inside and translating that understanding into the financial and operational decisions that actually drive business growth. In this model, brand-building is not replaced by demand generation.
Where is Marketing’s Seat at the Table?
Underlying the entire CMO Circle conversation about the role of the CMO was a more existential concern of whether marketing leadership, as a profession, is doing enough to secure and sustain its relevance at the highest levels of corporate decision-making.
The evidence from the room suggested that the answer, for too many organisations, is no. Several participants reflected on the experience of sitting in C-suite discussions where marketing’s voice carried insufficient weight and where the function was respected for its creative output but not trusted with its commercial judgment, valued for its consumer knowledge but not consulted on its strategic implications for the business. The reasons for this, participants argued, are structural as well as individual.
Structurally, marketing has allowed its success metrics to drift away from the metrics that matter most to boards and executive leadership teams. Revenue, profit, and shareholder value are the currencies of C-suite conversations. Brand equity, engagement rates, and share of voice are marketing currencies that are important in their own right, but insufficient as standalone justifications for investment or influence. Until the marketing function closes the translation gap between what it measures and what the business ultimately values, it will continue to be seen as a support function rather than a strategic one.
