Almost Half of CMOs Say Marketing Is Viewed As An Expense, Rather Than A Strategic Investment

STAMFORD, Conn., September 18, 2024--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Only 52% of CMOs and other senior marketing leaders said they were successful in proving the value of marketing and receiving credit for helping meet enterprise objectives, according to a survey by Gartner, Inc.

A survey of 378 senior marketing leaders conducted in April and May of 2024 revealed that CMOs ranked CFOs (40%) and CEOs (39%) as the top executives most skeptical of marketing's value at their company (see Figure 1).

"One of the significant challenges in proving marketing’s value is dealing with entrenched beliefs and lack of understanding and alignment," said Joseph Enever, Senior Director Analyst in the Gartner Marketing practice. "In a Gartner survey of 395 CMOs from February through March 2024, 47% of CMOs said marketing is viewed as an expense rather than a strategic investment. Overcoming this barrier requires CMOs to provide persistent education and communication efforts to reshape these outdated perceptions and highlight marketing’s critical impact on the bottom line."

Proving Marketing’s Long-Term, Holistic Impact
CMOs and other senior marketing leaders who communicate marketing’s value through a long-term, holistic view have greater success in proving value and getting credit for it. The survey results show that this approach is both the most common and most successful approach. Of the 41% of leaders who used this approach, over two-thirds reported they were able to prove marketing’s value and get credit for business contributions.

"Taking a wider perspective of value can mean measuring marketing’s effect across other functions, such as sales, customer experience and operations," said Enever. "Leaders must be disciplined in aligning success measures to different stakeholders, teams and goals as they widen the aperture of their marketing value story."

Increase Variety and Sophistication of Metric Types
Gartner experts highlighted three metric types that will help provide a deeper or more complete understanding of marketing’s value story:

• Relationship metrics: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV), Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), LTV:CAC ratio?

• Return on transactional metrics: Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), Return on Investment (ROI)?

• Operational metrics: Stakeholder satisfaction with deliverables, productivity of marketing resources, percentage of expected capacity utilization?

"Leaders can get more bang for their buck by leveraging more complex metrics to communicate value," said Enever. "CMOs and other senior marketing leaders who incorporated two or more of these ‘high complexity’ metric types were up to 1.8 times more likely to prove value and get credit than those who used none of them, and 1.4 times more likely than those who incorporated just one of them."