CMOs and marketing professionals are operating in one of the most volatile environments we’ve ever seen. Consumer expectations shift overnight, while acquisition costs are rising faster than budgets and fragile loyalty compounds the issues we’re facing. But our mandate remains the same: create growth, build brands and prove it all with data. Here are five powerful practices marketing leaders can adopt today to deliver on these objectives:
- Purpose: Align marketing to the commercial outcomes that matter most
Marketing is no longer just storytelling; it’s a revenue system. That means defining how every initiative contributes to outcomes like acquisition efficiency, retention, brand preference, repeat purchase behavior, and lifetime value.
Campaigns must feel human, contextual, and aligned to where customers actually spend their attention, not where legacy plans say they should be.
When purpose is clear, creative becomes sharper, customer experiences feel more personal and commercial lift follows.
Action: Audit your current initiatives and map each one directly to a commercial metric (CAC, conversion rate, LTV, brand equity lift). Eliminate or reframe anything that doesn’t ladder up.
- Profile: Elevate Marketing as a strategic growth engine
Inside most organizations, Marketing carries an internal brand which is often “the team that executes campaigns.” But today’s CMOs must be perceived as enterprise growth architects. That shift happens when Marketing consistently shows how its work drives demand, strengthens the brand, and accelerates commercial performance.
One of the first things I do when starting a new position is to create easily accessible dashboards and reports to show the impact of marketing. Then, when we launch campaigns, we are able to see if they are working or not, and re-redirect resources, adjust priorities as needed.
Action: Build a concise, data-rich narrative that shows how marketing’s work has directly improved revenue performance, brand equity or consumer behavior. Share it consistently with product, finance, operations, exec teams and any other stakeholders.
- Priorities: Ruthlessly focus resources where impact is highest
In today’s environments, the volume of requests is relentless, and the temptation to “do it all” is real.
The key is to prioritize initiatives by both commercial potential and uncertainty. Test new messaging, campaigns, products and more directly with consumers in ways that are fast, iterative, and cost-effective. For example, today’s AI-driven, conversational research tools enable rapid validation in days, helping marketing avoid costly misfires and double down on what resonates.
I always tell my team to experiment and try new things – this is still very much on the table, on a daily basis. But we must be able to measure and test, so we know whether or not our experiments were successful and if we should do them again.
Action: Adopt a rapid experimentation model. Validate high-impact, high-risk ideas with real consumers in 3-to-5-day cycles before deploying budget at scale.
- Performance: Make creativity accountable for growth
Creativity matters more than ever, but so does its proof. CMOs must show exactly how creative investments influence revenue, preference, and behavior.
ROI is part of your communication strategy. When we link creative decisions to real customer insights (and connect those insights to measurable outcomes), we gain credibility, unlock future budgets, and earn enterprise-wide influence.
And the story doesn’t need to be complex, it just needs to be consistent and commercially grounded.
Action: Implement a simple, repeatable reporting framework that ties campaigns to revenue, brand lift, conversion or customer behavior metrics. Show how consumer input directly shaped the work.
- Personal: Lead with authenticity, speed and evidence
Your team watches how you navigate ambiguity, make decisions, and balance creativity with accountability. When campaigns move at high velocity, leaders who personally engage with real consumer input create cultures that learn fast and adapt faster.
When you show that evidence matters to you, it becomes embedded in how the organization operates. I join our customers’ quarterly business reviews, listen in on sales prospect calls and attend conferences to directly connect with prospects and customers. This way, I can learn from them, validate assumptions, and create connections that allow me to reach out later for marketing-related activities or just continued relationship building.
Action: Dedicate a weekly 30-minute ritual to reviewing raw customer insights, such as video snippets, conversational responses, message tests, etc., (or to connect directly with your real-life customer if that’s available to you) and use them to guide decisions and model evidence-based leadership.
The relationship between Marketing and Insights is becoming one of the most important strategic partnerships in modern organizations. Together, these functions enable speed, precision and commercial predictability in an environment where consumer behavior can change in an instant. Embrace these five practices to unlock marketing’s influence across your organization.
The author, Paula Catoira, is CMO of Rival Group.