Jessica Hawthorne

expert panel

A rising conversion rate is the kind of metric that can make a leadership team feel good about growth. Customers are moving through the funnel more efficiently, acquisition costs may be improving and marketing can point to a clear return on investment. But there’s a critical question hiding behind those results: Is the business actually creating more demand, or simply getting better at converting the demand that was already there?That distinction matters because efficiency can improve even as a company’s future growth potential weakens. A business can become highly effective at reaching people who already know the brand, have an existing need or are close to making a purchase without expanding the pool of potential customers. Research from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising reinforces the importance of balancing short-term sales activation with longer-term brand building, noting that sustained investment can contribute to growth over time.For marketing leaders, the challenge is to make that difference visible inside the organization. Members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank bring deep experience in brand storytelling, digital advertising and customer engagement to this challenge. Here, these marketing leaders explore how to tell if a business that is turning interest into revenue today is also creating the conditions for more customers to enter the market tomorrow.

expert panel

For CMOs and agency leaders, a lean team may no longer be a temporary state—a rough quarter or short hiring freeze—but the new normal. Many organizations are remaining cautious about adding headcount, and the broader U.S. labor market continues to reflect a “low-hire, low-fire” environment in which employers are holding teams relatively steady rather than expanding quickly.At the same time, the demands placed on marketing teams haven’t become any lighter. CMOs are still expected to support growth, strengthen customer relationships, build brands and keep pace with rapidly changing technology. And many marketing leaders are being asked to do all this not only with small teams but also with limited funds. In Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey, 56% of respondents said their budgets aren’t big enough to fully deliver on 2026 strategies, and 54% reported insufficient resources.  That combination—small teams and tight budgets—leaves marketing and agency leaders with an important question: When capacity is limited, which work truly deserves the team’s attention? The answer can’t simply be to squeeze more activity out of fewer people. When additional hires may or may not be coming, effective prioritization means making deliberate trade-offs, protecting the work that creates the most value, and getting comfortable with leaving some worthwhile ideas undone.Members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank are a curated group of experienced marketing leaders with expertise in brand storytelling, digital advertising, customer engagement and leading lean teams. Here, they share lessons CMOs and agency leaders can use to set sharper priorities, make better use of limited capacity, and keep lean teams focused when future hiring remains uncertain.

expert panel

Companies increasingly look to their CMOs for more than brand awareness, campaign performance and lead generation. Today’s marketing leaders are often expected to influence revenue, customer loyalty and long-term growth, even as research has found that many CMOs believe their roles as designed hinder their ability to maximize marketing performance outcomes.Part of the challenge is that CMOs and their executive colleagues may define growth—and marketing’s contribution to it—differently. For example, McKinsey found that 70% of CEOs measure marketing’s impact through year-over-year revenue growth and margins, while only 35% of CMOs consider those to be top metrics. CMOs may also take a longer view of brand building and customer relationships, while CEOs and CFOs face pressure to demonstrate more immediate financial returns. But even when there’s little to no C-suite agreement on priorities, timelines and measures of success, a CMO is often held responsible for delivering growth—without the necessary shared framework.Closing that gap requires more than expanding the CMO’s job description. Members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank are a curated group of experts with years of experience in marketing, including brand storytelling, digital advertising and customer engagement. Here, several of them explore the mindsets and strategies that need to change if CMOs are to have the influence, alignment and operating support needed to achieve what today’s organizations expect of them.

expert panel

Marketing leaders are used to proving their work through numbers that move quickly: leads captured, conversions completed and pipeline generated. Community-led growth, however, plays by a different set of rules. Its value often develops over time through relationships, conversations and shared experiences, and a strong brand community may influence business outcomes long before they can be traced to a transaction.Gen-Z’s skepticism toward polished advertising campaigns is leading many brands to shift from chasing clicks to building relationships. The benefits go beyond simple discovery: A large audience may see a brand’s message, but a genuine community chooses to return, participate and bring others into the conversation.Where many organizations stumble is in trying to create and manage community initiatives with the tools, timelines and expectations built for traditional demand generation. When leaders look primarily for immediate conversions, they may undervalue promising progress or pressure teams into tactics that weaken the relationships they’re trying to build. Further, with communities like TikTok and Instagram playing a large role in community-building, brands that don’t understand the priorities of today’s social media algorithms—which favor metrics like watch time, engagement rate and content relevance—may even struggle to get out of the starting gate.Community-led growth, then, requires leaders to rethink both how value is created and how progress is demonstrated. Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank draw on their expertise in brand storytelling, digital advertising and customer engagement to examine where community-building initiatives go wrong, what leaders should do differently and how they can measure success more accurately.

expert panel

The modern marketing calendar can feel like an airline flight board—constantly updated, rerouted and in need of attention. When a trending conversation erupts, a platform changes its algorithm or a competitor jumps on the meme of the moment, sitting out can feel like falling behind. But a brand that’s always changing course may never give its customers a clear sense of where it stands.Timely marketing certainly has value, but speed and effectiveness aren’t the same thing. Maintaining a coherent identity across channels helps strengthen recognition, trust and loyalty. Constantly shifting a brand’s messaging, voice or presentation in response to external events can make that invaluable customer bond much harder to build.At the same time, brands can’t afford to tune out cultural shifts or emerging conversations altogether. Trends can reveal changing customer interests, new expectations and opportunities to participate in moments that matter to an audience. Brands today have many ways to engage with culture as it unfolds, but doing so effectively requires speed paired with sensitivity and sound judgment. The challenge for marketing leaders, then, isn’t to ignore what’s happening around them. It’s to recognize which moments can strengthen the brand—and which will merely pull the team off course. Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank draw on their expertise in brand storytelling and customer engagement to examine the mistakes leaders make when immediacy takes priority over long-term brand-building and explain what teams should do instead.

expert panel

Is your marketing team producing more content than ever, yet still failing to convert customers or align employees around a single story? The problem might not be content at all; it's clarity. Members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank break down the specific signals that separate a content gap from a clarity gap, and the first, often counterintuitive, steps to close it.Ask five people inside the same company what it actually does, and you might get five different answers: The VP of sales talks about solving one problem. Marketing's slide deck talks about another. The newest hire on the support team simply repeats whatever's on the website. Customers notice the mismatch even when they can't name it, and the result is hesitation, not conversion.It's tempting to solve that hesitation with more content: another landing page, another explainer video, another round of ads. But volume rarely fixes what's actually broken. According to a Forbes Agency Council analysis of e-commerce checkouts, a Baymard Institute study found that the average cart-abandonment rate is more than 70%, driven largely by confusion and surprises at checkout—not by a lack of information. The same pattern shows up well before checkout: when a brand's story shifts depending on who's telling it, messaging confusion sends buyers straight to a competitor, no matter how much content sits behind it.So how does a leadership team tell the difference between a company that needs better content and one that needs a clearer story altogether? And once that diagnosis is made, where's the right place to start? Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank, whose backgrounds span brand strategy, performance marketing and high-stakes corporate communications, share the signals they watch for and the first moves they'd make to turn a fuzzy narrative into one everyone in the building can repeat with confidence.

expert panel

Marketing teams have never had more data, automation or channels to work with. Yet the problems that stall growth, weaken trust or drain a team’s energy often aren’t technical at all. They’re rooted in people: how customers feel, how teams collaborate, how leaders handle uncertainty, and how organizations respond when old assumptions stop working.That tension is becoming harder to ignore as AI changes both the volume and nature of brand communication. Americans remain cautious about AI’s broader impact, and recent industry conversations have pointed to a related marketing reality: As AI-generated content and commerce tools multiply, brands still need real trust, relevance and direct human connection to stand out.A marketing problem may look like a messaging issue, a measurement issue or a channel issue, but to resolve it, leaders often need to look deeper. Because no matter how many campaigns launch or what dashboards say, marketing is only effective if it reaches and connects with the audience—and that requires both inward and outward focus on the humans who write and receive the story.Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank, a curated group with expertise in brand storytelling, customer engagement and the rise of AI in marketing, share and discuss examples of the human challenges that will always impact marketing and how teams can adjust their strategies once they adopt a human-centered viewpoint.