CMO title inflation – anyone else seeing these job descriptions?

bigcoffee

I've lost count of how many times I've seen a Head of Marketing role advertised with a job description that's basically a CMO's remit - positioning, vision setting, marketing strategy. Then right there in black and white: 'reports into the CMO.' Make it make sense.

Either the company actually needs a CMO but wants to pay Head of Marketing rates, or they already have a CMO who's supposedly doing the strategic work while this hire executes. Either way, someone's getting short-changed.

Here's what gets me:

HR and CEOs seem incapable of distinguishing between the two roles. If the JD says 'define the long-term vision and own the P&L,' that's not a Head of Marketing job. That's a C-suite role.
Yet the same organisations insist the existing CMO is 'strategic' while the new hire will 'execute.' So what exactly is the CMO doing? Attending board meetings and approving fonts?

A few years back I read reports predicting the CMO role would have to evolve - less ivory tower strategy, more revenue ownership. Instead, I see CMOs hiring junior people to rip off their strategy, present it as their own, and take all the credit. It's a grift.

Anyone else spotting these conflated JDs? Feels like the title gets both inflated and deflated depending on what the company wants to pay.

dailygrind

I've seen this play out countless times in growth-stage FinTech. The CMO title is simultaneously the most inflated and most misunderstood role in the C-suite. You'll see a job description demanding strategic vision, board-level stakeholder management, and a track record of scaling ARR from £5m to £50m - and then the salary band is barely senior manager level. Conversely, you'll get companies offering £200k+ for a role that's really just a glorified growth executioner: one person running paid ads, SEO, email, and content, with no budget or team.

Here's the reality:

Title inflation vs. deflation - Some 50-person startups hand out 'CMO' to the person who sets up their Mailchimp and runs a few LinkedIn ads. Meanwhile, a 5,000-person enterprise might have multiple VPs of Marketing and the CMO is almost a figurehead. The gap is massive.
Scale matters more than the label - I've worked with both. At a small company, CMO means you're doing the work and defining the strategy. At a large one, you're managing managers and spending most of your time in budget meetings. Completely different skill sets.
Pragmatic take - If the job description, scope, and compensation align with what you actually want to do, the title is noise. I've turned down "CMO" roles that were effectively head of growth with no support, and accepted "VP Marketing" titles that came with a real team and real budget. At the end of the day, the mismatch only matters if you care more about the title than the actual work.

metricsmuse

Honestly, this has been my experience across a bunch of corporate marketing roles over the last decade too. Every single CMO I've worked under contributed absolutely nothing.

Most of them had next to no clue about actual marketing strategy or how things really worked on the ground. They'd just float around, check in with their directors occasionally, and whip out the company card to pay someone on Upwork for the most brain-dead tasks because heaven forbid they lift a finger themselves.

The C-suite in general rarely feels earned. It's way more about who you're mates with than what you've actually done.

tiktokguru

I could totally relate to this. 😅 A company recently approached me with a CMO title - but in reality it was a marketing manager unicorn role. They balked at my salary expectation of £135K, acting like it was outrageous. I politely told them I already earn more as a Head of Social. It's baffling how disconnected some organisations are from what's standard in marketing these days. No one seems to know what roles are worth anymore.

communityfirst

Oh, I feel that. But honestly, in my world that's almost a blessing in disguise. A CMO who's just a tweet copywriter? Imagine one who treats your entire visual strategy like a mood board for their next LinkedIn post. It can and does get worse.

We had a CMO who thought "Pinterest strategy" meant pinning every corporate press release to a single board called "Brand News." No audience targeting, no keyword research, no Seasonal Trends. Just... text-heavy pins with stock photos. I spent three months trying to explain that Pinterest is a visual search engine, not a blog feed. They kept saying "but the copy is clever."

So yeah, a tweet copywriter at least understands short form and audience psychology. I'd take that over someone who genuinely believes a board with 12 pins is a "content pillar." It's frustrating when marketing leadership doesn't get the platform mechanics - but sometimes you just have to pivot from educating to showcasing results. Data doesn't lie, even if the CMO's bio does.

digitalnomad

Ugh, I feel this so deeply. 🙃

Here's what I've seen play out time and again:

🎤 CMO's out there collecting speaking gigs and podcast credits
📊 Meanwhile the team is drowning in campaign execution, reporting, and firefighting
🏆 Awards season rolls around and guess who's on stage? Not the people who actually did the work

It's a brutal disconnect. The figurehead role seems to be rewarded more than the actual craft of marketing these days. Makes you wonder if some CMOs even remember what a pixel or a conversion path looks like.

gmbpro

I've seen this play out from the analytics side. A CMO who's "just a director" can still move the needle if they've got a clean attribution model and actual control over spend. The tension with sales is usually a data gap, not a competence gap.

If your CMO can't show blended ROAS across channels with a clear halo effect, they're flying blind.
If sales leadership is pushing back because they don't trust your pipeline tags, that's a tracking issue, not a title issue.
I've consulted for organisations where the "VP of Marketing" was running five-figure budgets with zero cross-channel attribution-that's a director's scope.

The real sh*t C-suite is the one that ignores measurement fundamentals, regardless of title. You can be a Global Head and still be clueless about GA4 configuration, or a Director who nails UTM hygiene and gets promoted within a quarter. It's not about the number of hats-it's about whether those hats fit the data infrastructure.

splittester

That post hit me right in the brand soul. It's like looking into a cracked mirror - you know the reflection's off, but you can't look away. There's this chasm between the holistic vision we're meant to steward and the scatter-gun tactics that get cheered in boardrooms. The sting comes from recognising too much of the truth in it.

tagmanager

CMOs seem to be losing touch with the one thing that matters-the actual customer. Seen more and more roles morph into revenue-focused positions, like CROs, because marketing without a direct line to sales and retention just looks like a cost centre. It's a shame, really. The best marketing comes from understanding how people feel, not just pushing them through a funnel.