CMOs are facing unprecedented challenges in 2025. Multiple, compounding disruptions make it increasingly difficult for marketing teams to plan and execute long-term strategies that deliver the enterprise’s growth and transformation goals.
The result – few CMOs are recognised by their senior leadership peers as true enterprise growth leaders, consistently identifying and capturing market opportunities. Moreover, a significant number of customers feel misunderstood, leading to marketing campaigns that often fail to justify their costs.
But CMOs can rise above these challenges and drive transformative growth. They do so by focusing on three key priorities.
Bridge marketing strategy and operations
Ongoing disruption and the pace of change have resulted in tactical thinking dominating marketing, as teams react to the next urgent issue in front of them. This diminishes marketing’s long-term strategic impact. To counteract this, CMOs must reassert the primacy of strategy and take steps to bridge the gap between strategy and operations, ensuring that near-term results build towards long-term goals.
Minimising the gap between strategy and operations is not a simple change in the planning process or culture, but rather a targeted investment in ongoing strategy management. With marketing budgets squeezed, new asks for funding can be a challenge. But the good news is that the core components of a strategy management capability are already present in many marketing organisations — what’s required is the scope and mandate to be truly effective.
CMOs should take steps to transform strategy from a static exercise into a dynamic discipline. They can do this by empowering and upskilling staff, developing robust processes and KPIs and leveraging technology to establish clear links between goals and outcomes.
Lead marketing to deliver differentiation
Many CMOs are not reaching their potential in terms of delivering business growth and maximising their leadership effectiveness. Their most critical internal stakeholders, the CEO and CFO, simply don’t see them as growth leaders who leverage the potential of differentiation as a growth driver.
But a subset of CMOs are markedly more successful; the highest-performing CMOs are “market shapers” who identify and fulfill unmet customer needs. Market-shaping CMOs are 2.6 times more likely to exceed revenue and profit goals. Unfortunately, only 14% of CMOs are seen as effective market shapers by CEOs and CFOs.
All CMOs can learn from market shapers, understanding and emulating the skills and accountabilities that enhance their standing in the enterprise. Market-shaping CMOs excel in data-based decision-making, strategy management, and market knowledge. These skills allow them to synthesise insights from various sources to find differentiation opportunities, transforming marketing into a forward-looking customer insights engine.
They extend their influence beyond brand strategy, impacting areas like product strategy to ensure promises to customers are met. By collaborating with product innovation leaders and using customer insights, CMOs can shape product concepts and refine positioning. The key is not just capturing data but applying it strategically to drive business growth and transformation.
Prioritise customer journey investments
While understanding customers is the key to growth, many consumers feel that brands don’t understand them. As a result, many marketing campaigns underperform. Right now, technology-driven customer engagement is at an inflection point. The vast majority of marketing teams are accelerating AI initiatives – 95% of CMOs in 2024 reported that GenAI investments are a priority.
In 2025, CMOs must avoid the pitfalls of AI-driven excess and focus on customer journey investments that offer the greatest economic return. This involves evaluating martech and omnichannel marketing strategies together to determine how well they align with customer needs. Start by focusing on the three most important customer journeys – the ones with the biggest impact on strategic goals – and determine the degree of channel and technology changes necessary to achieve business objectives.
Next, CMOs should focus their team’s efforts towards the ultimate goal of customer journey orchestration: catalysing customer change. The highest form of customer value is what we term “catalytic”. Experiences offer catalytic value when they change a customer’s understanding of their own needs and make them more confident moving in a new direction. A data- and hypothesis-led approach will help CMOs identify opportunities to build catalytic value.
The year ahead will demand extraordinary efforts from CMOs and their teams to achieve transformational results. By focusing on these three key priorities – bridging strategy and operations, leading marketing to deliver differentiation, and prioritising customer journey investments – CMOs can rise to exceed expectations. With ever greater vision and discipline, they can earn the confidence of the business, expanding their leadership and stewardship of resources.
Sharon Cantor Ceurvorst is VP, research and Ewan McIntyre is VP analyst in the Gartner Marketing Practice. Join Gartner’s marketing experts at the 2025 Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo, taking place in London on May 12-13 2025
