In this environment, sales leaders concentrate solely on increasing sales, while technology leaders ensure operations run smoothly. These two roles have become the closest partners to today’s CEO. CFOs, meanwhile, prioritize cost reduction rather than growing revenue, making long-term strategic planning nearly impossible.
This chaos leaves marketing caught in the middle, with little clarity or consensus on its definition or responsibilities—especially between CEOs and CMOs. As the CMO’s agenda diverges from these other stakeholders, marketing becomes even more marginalized within executive leadership. Often the marketing role struggles to find a seat at the table, or remains passive in strategic decisions, silencing the “voice of customer”—the true source of company revenue—in critical management discussions.
A McKinsey study found only 40% of Fortune 500 companies have a CMO or a customer-centric executive role. Hence, in many sectors, marketing still remains as a tactical function, not considered a strategic leader. Few CEOs, across industries, have marketing backgrounds, limiting marketing’s influence over direct profitability activities like creating new markets, acquiring and retaining customers, influencing audience behavior, and generating loyalty. As a result, marketing’s perceived value diminishes.
In recent years, marketing’s role has diminished into only communication and promotion from its traditional definition, where the classic marketing mix (4Ps) values marketing’s priceless contributions in product management, pricing, and distribution, which had been proven for years. Today’s marketing organization charts and titles resemble even deeper overlaps and division in the field: digital, growth, customer experience (CX), customer relations… Within this tight space, misaligned titles, responsibilities, and reporting lines spawn fragmentation and ambiguity over who’s accountable for success or failure. Critically, the company’s greatest asset—the “customer”—often lacks a clear champion inside the organization.
To be fair, marketing professionals themselves share blame for this situation. Though a deeper analysis is needed to understand the reasons behind the status quo rather than the above facts, one core truth remains: marketing needs a fundamental redefinition in order to prosper.
In the past fifteen years, marketing’s communication role has faced mounting difficulties. About every six months, a new communication channel or platform enters the scene and is rapidly adopted by consumers. Marketers feel compelled to add these channels into their strategies and communications mix immediately. Yet, without a tailored message strategy across channels or audio/visuals suited for each channel’s nature, messages simply shoehorned into new platforms through visual or technical tweaks. What’s more, each channel is usually managed in a siloed fashion, without taking multiple channel exposures of consumers into account. Therefore, todays’ consumers can easily get exposed to these misaligned messages. Once this happens, brands lose a great chance to grasp a portion of an already short attention span of their target audiences, which may sometimes mean lost revenue, diminished brand messages or at least become a part of “the noise” in consumer perception.
Another dilemma: most new platforms are designed with consumer engagement in mind, not brand integration & measurement. Marketers struggle to gauge interactions and track journey touchpoints across channels, integrating these results into overall communications effectiveness. Content prioritization algorithms, designed to keep consumers engaged, can further complicate visibility — marketers cannot always tell whether the right people are seeing their messages, where traffic originates from, or which communications (online or offline) trigger specific actions. Without proper cross-channel measurement, campaigns become fragmented, exposing consumers to disjointed or even contradictory messages, trapping communication in isolated silos and exposing customers to fragmented experiences. Worse, poorly timed messaging—like a discount offer just after a purchase was made—can breed resentment toward brands.
I can hear multi-touch attribution supporters saying that “no, we can do this (with Google Meridian, or some other digital tool)”! Unfortunately, what I mean here is something more than being able to combine a few channels’ reporting infrastructure but rather being able to connect all customer data with online and offline efforts and understand the whole picture.
Let’s admit: Digital has brought a cultural shift into marketing: now, “everything must be measured.” Yet, we still have some unrealistic, immature & overly simplistic expectations — that a single tool, approach, or investment will solve all our problems and deliver endless positive ROI. Instead of building the organizational capabilities, processes, and mindset required to generate value, many teams end up blaming the tools when results fall short in today’s multi-faceted and multi-channeled consumer relationship.
The explosion of data in recent years is another story. While the opportunities seem clear, “short-term blindness” and outcome pressure mean marketing often takes the easy road: using third-party data for advertising and chasing new customers, or, at best, recording purchases in so-called “CRM projects.” Rarely does marketing incorporate anonymous footprints and journey data as a deep source for strategy. Data collection mostly means CRM records—with untapped potential left behind.
Finally, despite the explosion of available data, companies often exploit it only superficially. Under pressure for short-term wins, many default to running ads with third-party data to acquire new customers (perhaps the same customers, who knows), or at best, recording transactions in so-called “CRM projects.” But online and offline data rarely gets integrated across processes, but rather used in their own silos, i.e. anonymous events and behaviors only used for digital advertising purposes but not get connected with any other available data source in the company, i.e. the data warehouse, loyalty data, marketing automation data, etc. Too often, we still think “data” just means CRM records, ignoring the vast behavioral footprints customers leave behind.
These might be broad generalizations, and some companies might have broken free of these traps. But across industries worldwide, variations of these challenges are still commonplace in everyday business.
Modern Marketing 2.0 was designed to directly address today’s challenges, clarify goals, and provide solutions.
The model has five main components. At its heart lies data — the foundation of next-generation marketing. Intuition no longer suffices; data must fuel the creation of truly omnichannel experiences. Importantly, “omnichannel” here does not mean simply “multi-channel.” It means that all channels recognize where a customer is at in their journey in any given time, avoiding silos, and ensuring seamless continuation of interactions across touchpoints.
The goal of this is not just to be present across channels, but to create a meaningful interaction and engagement shall be the ultimate objective. Bombarding audiences with messages is useless unless those messages create engagement. If there is no engagement, then our message (or brand) becomes only a non-significant dot in the content cloud all consumers are exposed to every second. Therefore, engagement is the true driver of business impact and profitability. Achieving this requires customized, creative, and personalized content tailored to each channel & each “moment of the consumer”.
This is why marketing operations have become so critical. The core creative idea must be adapted — sometimes into hundreds of assets — across diverse media. Production now means more than films and videos: a simple email template or hundreds of display banners also count. To succeed, brands must embrace and accept their role as “publishers”, while starting to think & strategize as is, allocating budgets accordingly. Seamless orchestration and tailored production for each audience, context, and situation are the key to creating interactions that deliver results.
The core components of Modern Marketing 2.0 are:
• Data: The foundation
• True Omnichannel Experience: The method
• Engagement: The result
Data
If the IDs assigned to customers in existing CRM systems were Version 1.0, we now need a new identity mechanism — one that tracks and unifies not only known data but also anonymous footprints across digital and physical touchpoints, i.e. web & app event & behavior data, CRM data, contact center, e-commerce, store activities and loyalty data. We call this “Brand Identity 2.0” (BrandID2.0). This redefines marketing data: instead of just transaction records, it brings together all known and anonymous interactions (transactions, behaviors, and signals), either online or offline, into a single profile. The goal is a truly unified view of all customer actions, wants, and journeys—a 360° perspective, powered by AI, ML, analytics, and interpretation tools, while respecting privacy laws.
True Omnichannel Experience
For real omnichannel experiences, this unified data must flow across all channels in real time, in every channel. Today, for example, ad data and customer service data live in separate worlds. Breaking down these walls means instantly logging that social media complaint and excluding that customer from all online or offline promotional campaigns until it is resolved—which would dramatically improve customer experience. Brands should remember: customers perceive each company as one seamless, single & coherent entity, not as isolated departments, and all communication should reflect that.
Engagement
It’s time to rethink why and how we communicate with audiences—beyond mere notifications. In this model, every action the audience takes, including but not limited to “conversions,” is classified as engagement. Engagement is the ultimate result: communication that fails to spark engagement is practically worthless, but only a “noise in the message cloud” of the consumer from every brand and stakeholder in his/her life. Holistic measurement of engagement, therefore, is crucial.
To make Modern Marketing 2.0 a reality, the skills, attributes, and responsibilities of today’s marketers—especially CMOs—must be fully redefined.
The new-generation CMO should not be positioned solely as a brand builder but as a strategic leader of all customer-facing activities, focusing on profitability and new revenue streams, and shaping both strategic and executional decisions. To succeed, the CMO must have key competencies, including:
• Being the advocate and voice of the customer within the organization
• Driving strategy based on data and insights, not intuition
• Acting as a champion and facilitator of innovation and transformation
• Continuing to be a spokesperson for creativity and brand building
• Orchestrating true omnichannel customer journeys and media usage
• Excelling as a storyteller
• Focusing relentlessly on growth and profitability
• Embracing technology and becoming knowledgeable in customer experience platforms
CEOs should frame their expectations for marketing along these lines, ensuring a focus on consumer demand creation and sustainable growth. Beyond cost-cutting, marketing organizations must evolve toward spearheading profitability, creativity, and innovation, while nurturing new skills.
This article was first published in Harvard Business Review Turkiye
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