Lindsey Groepper

expert panel

Internal communication is easy to treat as a housekeeping function—something that happens after leadership has made the real decisions. But the way those decisions are explained can shape whether employees understand the direction, trust the people setting it and know what their own role is. According to a spring 2026 survey by Gallup, employees who strongly agree they trust their organization’s leadership are 3.7 times as likely to be engaged, yet just 20% of U.S. employees place themselves in that group.Those numbers suggest that successful internal communication is about more than just getting information out in a timely fashion. And there’s evidence leadership teams in many organizations are struggling to convey their plans and perceptions about the current environment and their vision of the path forward. The American Psychological Association’s 2025 Work in America survey found that upper management consistently reported more positive views of organizational change and their work experience than frontline workers and individual contributors did. Bridging that gap requires leaders to understand how employees are actually experiencing change, then frame their messages so they’re received and understood as intended.Marketing leaders spend their days translating complex ideas into messages that work for distinct audiences, so they’re well positioned to spot communication problems inside the business, too. Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank, with expertise spanning brand storytelling, customer engagement, digital marketing and more, share internal communication mistakes business leaders should address and how marketing expertise can help.

expert panel

For years, search marketing has been built around a familiar goal: earn enough visibility to get a customer to click. AI-generated search results are changing that equation. For example, a 2025 analysis found that Google users clicked traditional search results in just 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% when it didn’t—suggesting brands may have fewer opportunities to speak for themselves on their own turf.When an AI system becomes the layer between a company and a prospective customer, brand reputation isn’t shaped only by what the company publishes. The system may synthesize information from a range of sources, and that synthesis isn’t guaranteed to be accurate. Widespread problems, from speculative answers to fabricated links, have been found with the ways generative search tools retrieved and cited source material. For CMOs, that makes the broader information ecosystem surrounding a brand a more immediate marketing concern, since an incomplete, outdated or inaccurate answer can influence perception before a customer ever reaches the company’s website—if they reach it at all.As AI changes how customers discover and evaluate companies, marketing leaders need to rethink what it takes to earn authority when they may not control the first—and sometimes only—description a buyer sees. Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank, a curated group with expertise in brand storytelling, digital advertising and the rise of AI in marketing, discuss how CMOs can approach brand authority, message consistency and reputation in an AI-mediated search environment.

expert panel

Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose; the same is true of brand authority. It can't be purchased with a bigger ad budget or manufactured through a clever campaign. The brands that earn it do so by being consistently useful, credible and clear about what they stand for. Buyers today are flooded with claims for their attention, and they’re savvy. They’ll simply tune out generic, promotional brand messaging that shows no understanding of their real needs. Conversely, a coherent narrative backed by genuine expertise and validated by real outcomes becomes something customers actively seek out. A brand that masters that kind of messaging shifts from just another seller to a trusted resource and, eventually, to the obvious choice.So what questions do businesses need to ask and answer about themselves, and how can they build brand authority systematically rather than accidentally? And how do the pieces—narrative clarity, a distinctive value proposition, subject matter expertise and proof points—fit together into a winning strategy that compounds over time? Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank discuss what this kind of disciplined approach to brand building looks like in practice, sharing their expertise in establishing the kind of authority that customers trust and actively seek out.