The CMO’s Impossible Balancing Act
There’s an old saying that generals are always preparing to fight the last war.
I sometimes think CMOs are asked to do the same: justify tomorrow’s battles with yesterday’s numbers.
In 2025, the CMO has the hardest job in the C-suite. They are pulled in two directions at once. On one side, the CFO demands proof now: every euro traced to an immediate return. On the other hand, the CEO wants long-term growth, market relevance, and cultural impact, things that next quarter’s dashboards can’t measure.
The result? CMOs have to be statisticians, investors, and storytellers at the same time.
Most fail because they choose one side of the paradox. The winners will be the ones who learn how to defend both.
The seduction of performance marketing
Performance marketing is intoxicating. Clicks, conversions, cost-per-acquisition, the numbers roll in fast, like the sugar rush of fast food.
You can walk into a board meeting with charts that prove exactly how many units were sold because of that campaign.
But here’s the catch: every euro that goes into short-term performance at the expense of long-term brand equity is eating away at future growth.
Brand equity is not an indulgence; it’s a multiplier. It’s what keeps consumers choosing you when cheaper options crowd the shelf. It’s the memory in the marketplace. Without it, you’re not a brand, you’re just another transaction.
Consider Costco. No glossy ads. No celebrity endorsements. No viral campaigns. Just an obsessive focus on value, consistency, and trust with its members. Costco’s marketing looks invisible compared to consumer brands that live on splashy activations, and yet its stock has tripled in the past decade. Member loyalty is cult-like, churn is low, and the company has managed to grow steadily even through inflation and shifting consumer behavior. Costco proves that quiet consistency and trust compound in ways performance dashboards never will.
The courage to invest in the invisible
Brand building is like infrastructure. You don’t notice it when it’s there, but you immediately feel its absence when it fails. The challenge for CMOs is that brand equity doesn’t show up in next quarter’s P&L. It shows up in resilience during a crisis, in pricing power over the long term, in loyalty when everyone else is cutting prices.
This requires courage: the courage to argue for investments that won’t “pay off” tomorrow but will determine whether the brand still exists in five years.
No company embodies this better than Hermès. While luxury rivals chased relevance through celebrity stunts, collabs, and fast-turn fashion cycles, Hermès stuck to scarcity, craftsmanship, and a zero-discount policy. Their strategy seemed stubborn in the age of hype. Yet over the past decade, Hermès has delivered the best stock performance in luxury. Its refusal to chase short-term noise became its greatest long-term advantage.
The lesson? True equity is built in silence, through discipline, not spectacle.
Trust, authenticity, and stakeholder alignment
The paradox becomes sharper in industries where trust is fragile. Pharma is a brutal space: you need to build credibility with patients, doctors, regulators, and entire health systems, stakeholders whose interests often conflict.
Novo Nordisk managed to do the impossible. By investing in long-term science, keeping a disciplined voice, and building trust step by step, they went from being “just another pharma company” to the leader in diabetes care and now weight-loss treatments. Their stock has soared, not because of a marketing stunt, but because they built trust across an ecosystem where most brands fail.
That’s what invisible excellence looks like when the stakes are life and death.
The C-suite language gap
One of the biggest reasons CMOs lose the battle is language. The CEO and CFO live in the world of growth, risk, and capital. The CMO often comes in talking about impressions, clicks, and campaigns.
No wonder marketing gets treated as a cost center.
The future-proof CMO is bilingual.
They can translate brand into balance sheet.
They can show how reputation lowers cost of capital, how trust increases lifetime value, how cultural relevance creates pricing power.
It’s not about defending creativity against numbers. It’s about showing how creativity is a number multiplier.
How to turn performance into brand equity
The paradox only breaks when CMOs stop treating performance and brand as rivals. The trick is to make every performance campaign a brick in the wall of brand equity. That requires a shift in both mindset and execution:
- Start with the brand story, not the channel.
A discount ad can be just a discount ad, or it can also reinforce your brand’s values. Even tactical campaigns should carry the brand’s voice, tone, and moral stance. - Measure more than conversions.
Yes, count clicks. But also track how campaigns change perceptions: trust, preference, recommendation. Performance without perception is short-lived. - Design for memory.
The goal isn’t just to trigger a sale; it’s to plant a story in someone’s head. Make sure even the most transactional campaigns carry assets (visuals, slogans, rituals) that are uniquely yours. - Embed values into the everyday.
Don’t save sustainability, ethics, or inclusion for big campaigns. Infuse them into small, performance-driven messages. That’s how brand truths scale invisibly. - Translate into C-suite language.
When you present results, don’t just talk about conversions. Show how tactical wins are accumulating into strategic equity: loyalty, pricing power, resilience. That’s how you get the CFO and CEO onside.
The real impossible act
So yes, the CMO’s job is impossible if you believe the role is to choose between brand and performance.
The truth is harder and braver: to make them inseparable.
Costco shows that quiet consistency beats noise.
Hermès proves that discipline outlasts hype.
Novo Nordisk demonstrates that trust compounds even in the most skeptical markets.
The lesson for CMOs? Performance may buy you today, but only brand equity buys you tomorrow.
The impossible balancing act is not to pick sides. It’s to win both wars at the same time, and write a story the whole C-suite can believe in.
The moral?
Brand equity is not built in campaigns; it is built through campaigns. Performance is the fuel, but the brand is the engine. If you only chase the fuel, you’ll run out. If you build the engine, you can go anywhere.
If this resonated with you:
- Explore these ideas more deeply in my book The Mentor Brand: How Great Companies Become Irreplaceable Brands
- Get weekly reflections like this in The Real Hero newsletter
- Join me in person at the Story-Driven Lab in Madrid (Sept 26–28), a three-day experience to practice the craft of storytelling and learn how to hold attention in ways that last.
