The CEO–CMO Compact: Building a Marketing Function That Earns Its Seat at the Table

Executive Summary Brand pull, not sales push , determines margin health. When companies rely on incentive-led volumes, pricing power and product quality both weaken.

Marketing’s key role is enabling premium pricing, because if it cannot prove pricing power over competitors, its metrics are largely vanity.

Relevance is earned by identifying early shifts in consumers, channels and categories. This is what earns a CMO strategic investment attention.

Most companies are more B2B than they admit, and understanding the true purchasing architecture determines where marketing investments should go.

Organisational alignment across sales, product, finance and operations is a CMO superpower because marketing is the only function centred on the consumer.

The defining question for modern CMOs, one that makes them strategically invaluable, is, ‘What builds enterprise value?’

. The relationship between marketing and the rest of the C-suite has always been contested terrain but the terms of the contest are shifting. As growth cycles compress, pricing power ebbs and boards press for demonstrable returns on brand investment, the question is no longer whether marketing deserves a seat at the table; it is whether marketing leaders are showing up with the right currency. Ranjeet Oak, Managing Director, South Asia at Kohler Co., examined this question with a candour that comes from having sat on both sides of the table. Previously as a career leader across P&G, MakeMyTrip and Pernod Ricard, and now in an CEO role, he evaluates every marketing proposal against a single test: Does it build margin?

Desire as a Business Variable The session opened with a provocative question: What would an organisation actually lose if its marketing department ceased to exist? The answers from the room (‘leads’, ‘brand equity’, ‘consumer voice’, ‘pricing advantage’, ‘long-term direction’) were individually correct but collectively revealing. Taken together, they pointed to an inescapable fact: marketing, when it functions well, is the force that keeps a business from becoming a commodity.

Ultimately, desire is the variable that determines whether a business is being pulled or pushed through the system. In a pull model, channel partners compete to carry the brand; in a push model, the company bears escalating incentive costs to move inventory. The difference, in economic terms, is not marginal. When push dominates, margins erode, quality is quietly compromised to sustain trade economics, and the brand enters a downward spiral that is very hard to reverse. Companies that go off the cliff – ones that perform strongly until they suddenly don’t – are often those that run on a push momentum until the system can no longer sustain them.

For CMOs, desire-building is not an aesthetic aspiration but a risk management function. A brand without pull is a business with a fragile PNL, and the CMO is the only person in the room structurally positioned to identify and address that fragility before it becomes a crisis.

The Margin Mandate: What CEOs Actually Evaluate Mr Oak was unambiguous about how he evaluates marketing spends. The criteria is not whether the campaign is creative, or whether awareness scores are moving, or even whether the brand is loved. It is whether that spend is enabling the organisation to price up, to command a measurable premium over a comparable competitor. If the mix is not improving, if the portfolio is not moving up the value ladder, if market share is being held through incentives rather than preference, then the function is not delivering what the CEO needs.

This sort of (re)framing has powerful implications for how CMOs should make the ROI case internally. Rather than defending spends on the basis of marketing-centric metrics, they should identify what creates enterprise value for the specific business and then demonstrate, in those terms , what marketing's contribution is (or could be). For a luxury product business such as Kohler , that would mean pricing premium over relevant competitors. For another sort of business, it might mean contract renewal rates, architect specification rates or developer loyalty metrics. The language changes; the underlying logic does not.

Nearly every marketing-versus-sales conversation contains a ‘short-term versus long-term’ tension. The aim is not necessarily to resolve this tension, but instead, to run both tracks simultaneously, supporting the sales organisation's immediate delivery requirements while maintaining the longer view that only marketing can hold. CMOs who invest in understanding the levers that help sales win in the short term earn the credibility to sustain longer-cycle brand investment.

Relevance: Calling the Shift Before It Arrives Few would question whether marketing should continue to exist from an institutional perspective. However, there are questions around the sort of intelligence marketing provide, especially when it comes to investment decisions. The CMO's highest-value contribution is not campaign execution, but rather, the early identification of shifts: in consumer cohorts, in channel dynamics, in category usage patterns and in the competitive landscape.

The value of this intelligence compounds when it leads the organisation rather than follows it. A CMO who can demonstrate, 3 years before a competitor acts, that a specific consumer segment is growing in absolute terms and/or shifting its channel behaviour is doing something that neither the sales function nor the product team is positioned to do. Bonus points go to one who can connect such an observation to a capital-allocation recommendation. Being able to make connections between consumer foresight and investment choices is how CMOs can become genuinely indispensable to the CEO.

One’s choice of trade partners and the design of one’s channel architecture both matter greatly. Partners with significant regional scale often see market shifts before the manufacturer does; their intelligence, treated seriously, can be as valuable as consumer research. The CMO who builds genuine relationships with major trade partners, and translates those relationships into investment recommendations, is operating at a different level of strategic contribution than one focused exclusively on consumer-facing output.

The B2B Reality Most Companies Ignore One of the more provocative arguments that Mr Oak made concerned the actual purchasing architecture of businesses that present themselves as B2C. Mr Oak examined Kohler's own model: approximately 40% of revenue is direct project business with developers (pure B2B) and the remaining 60%, though nominally consumer-facing, is almost entirely mediated by architects. In practice, close to 100% of the business moves through a B2B relationship before it reaches the end-consumer.

The implications, for marketing, are significant. A single product must be positioned differently for the consumer, for the architect and for the developer: each with distinct decision criteria, anxieties and definitions of value. For the consumer, the relevant question is sensory and functional: Will this product hold up in an Indian kitchen or bathroom? For the architect, it focuses on installation flexibility and design compatibility. For the developer, the relevant issues are skilled labour scarcity and project timeline predictability. A marketing function that speaks only the consumer language misses two-thirds of the purchasing decision.

The broader point is that most organisations, particularly those in categories like building materials, financial services and enterprise software, are more deeply B2B than their marketing self-image acknowledges. Mapping the real purchasing architecture, and tailoring the marketing proposition to each decision-maker within it, is both an intellectual discipline and a commercial necessity.

Alignment: The CMO's Structural Advantage In many ways, the CMO possesses an alignment capability that the CEO lacks. A CEO can use positional authority to direct functions, and in India, that authority carries real weight. But positional authority mostly drives compliance, not conviction. By contrast, the consumer is a unifying focal point that no other function can rationally contest – and the CMO is that function's owner.

An organisation that has genuinely placed the consumer at the centre of its decision-making will find that product, sales, operations and finance all have a common reference point. The CMO who builds that architecture (such as by democratising consumer intelligence, and making the consumer present in every functional conversation) is performing a role that earns the board's attention. This is because the board can see the whole organisation responding to a single signal. That is not a campaign outcome, but an organisational outcome, and one that is disproportionately within the CMO's reach.

Accountability – including for failed marketing investments – should rest squarely with the CEO who approved or endorsed the decision. More importantly, though, CEOs who accept accountability without deflection, and who create environments where CMOs can argue passionately for investments they believe in, are the ones who build the kind of trust that sustains long-cycle brand commitment.

At the end of the day, marketing's relevance, rather than being defended by metrics, must be earned through demonstrated results. When it can prove that it shapes what the organisation charges, what consumers choose and where capital is allocated, it is no longer a support function seeking a seat at the table. Instead, it is a strategic wing that the CEO cannot afford to manage at arm's length. The question for marketing leaders is not whether to build that kind of relevance, but how quickly they are willing to reframe what they are in the business of doing.