The seat is going to whoever answers for the money

Forrester published its third annual look at marketing leadership in the Fortune 500 this month, and the direction is hard to miss.

Marketing executives who sit on the executive team or report to the chief executive are now found at just over half of those companies, down from 58% last year and 63% the year before. Three consecutive years of decline. The title itself is thinning out faster still.

The usual reading is that marketing is being demoted. I don't think that is quite it. Look at what the role is being replaced by: Chief Growth Officer, Chief Commercial Officer, Chief Customer Officer. Every one of those titles has something in common. It owns a number.

That is the part worth sitting with. The seat is not vanishing so much as being handed to whoever will answer for the commercial outcome. Forrester's own analyst puts it plainly, and I think generously:

Searching for the right model. That is a fair description of where most boards are. And the usual advice that follows is to widen the remit: take on retention, take on customer success, take on more. I would put it the other way round. Authority follows evidence, not scope. A leader who cannot yet evidence the responsibility they hold will not be strengthened by being handed more of it.

What earns the seat is producing the number nobody currently owns: what it costs to win a customer, fully loaded, against what that customer is worth over their life. Sales cannot produce it, they are measured on the top line. Finance sees the totals but not the mechanics of acquisition. It sits in the gap, and it is the one figure that says whether growth is creating value or quietly consuming it.

It is an unusual sort of opportunity: the most commercially important number marketing touches is also the one nobody has claimed.

The number

From the workThe argument brand always loses, and the way round it

Here is the version of this I meet most often. A marketing leader knows the brand case is right. They cannot make it in the language the budget is decided in, so it loses to activation, which resolves inside the quarter and is easy to count. That happens every planning cycle, and it is a rational decision on the information finance has.

The way through is to stop arguing the upside. Nobody can prove what brand will generate on a ninety-day view, and a finance team is right to discount a promise that arrives over three years. But you can price its absence, and that number is available today.

A weak brand means every deal starts cold and competes on price, so it raises the cost of winning every customer. That premium is a brand tax, and it is sitting inside your acquisition cost right now. Expressed that way, brand stops being an act of faith and becomes a cost line finance can already see. It shows up in this month's cash, not in a horizon they can discount away.

Same truth. Opposite side of the balance sheet.

This month's reading

References. Forrester (2026), The Representation and Tenure of Fortune 500 CMOs in 2026; and Forrester blog, New analysis suggests the CMO role in the Fortune 500 is at a crossroads, July 2026, from which the Ian Bruce quotation is taken.