Latest / The CMO Podcast with Fexingo: Marketing Leadership, Budgets, and Executive Strategy / How CMOs Are Killing The Marketing Department
Transcript
- Lucas: If you look at the org charts of the most aggressive tech companies right now, the marketing department is disappearing. It isn't just shrinking or rebranding as a growth hub; it is being dissolved and its functions are being scattered across product, sales, and customer success. Luna: That sounds chaotic. How do they keep a coherent voice if everyone is writing their own narrative? Lucas: They don't rely on a central creative team anymore. Instead, they use what I call embedded full-stack marketers. These are individuals who sit inside the product team but report into revenue operations. They handle everything from user onboarding emails to paid acquisition for specific feature launches. Luna: So the brand manager is gone, replaced by a generalist who reports to the CFO's office? Lucas: Exactly. And the budget follows that same fragmentation. We are seeing major software firms in October 2026 shifting ten to fifteen percent of their total marketing spend directly into product experimentation funds. That money used to go to agencies for broad awareness campaigns. Now it goes to A-B testing tooling and direct to user incentives. Luna: That is a massive pivot. Does the traditional brand team still exist, or is it just a ghost unit keeping the lights on? Lucas: The ghost unit is real. You have legacy brand strategists who are suddenly tasked with managing community forums instead of running Super Bowl spots. The tension comes from accountability. When the marketing department exists, the CMO takes the blame for low conversion. When it is dissolved, every VP claims they own the funnel. Luna: So who actually owns the revenue number when there is no single head of marketing? Lucas: That is where Revenue Operations steps in. The RevOps leader becomes the referee. They build the unified dashboard that shows which product features drove signups versus which sales outreach closed deals. Without a clear marketing silo, data integrity becomes the new brand equity. Luna: It feels like we are trading clarity for speed. Is that worth the organizational friction? Lucas: For high-growth B2B SaaS companies, yes. Speed matters more than polish. But for consumer brands, this model is failing. If you sell physical goods, you need a centralized creative vision. Fragmentation kills consistency. Luna: So this is really a bifurcation of the industry. Tech moves one way, consumer stays put. Lucas: Precisely. The divergence is stark. In consumer retail, we see massive investments in first-party data warehouses. In enterprise tech, we see the actual dissolution of the marketing title. It is becoming an administrative function rather than a strategic driver. Luna: I am curious about the talent market here. Do junior marketers have a path up if the department vanishes? Lucas: That is the scary part. The entry-level copywriter role is evaporating because AI handles the initial drafts, and senior leaders prefer hiring experienced product marketers who can write code-adjacent documentation. It is a much harder ladder to climb. Luna: It sounds like the bar for entry has jumped significantly. You need technical fluency now. Lucas: You need to understand SQL queries to pull your own attribution data. The romantic idea of the marketing person who just brings creative ideas to the table is dead. They are now data engineers with a vocabulary lesson. Luna: That changes the entire culture of the office. It turns marketing into engineering support. Lucas: Not exactly support. More like internal consulting. They are hired to solve specific growth bottlenecks. If churn spikes, the embedded marketer analyzes the exit survey data and builds a retention campaign without waiting for permission from a VP. Luna: Autonomy over hierarchy. I can see why CEOs love that. Less middle management, more output. Lucas: But it creates blind spots. When sales teams start writing their own collateral, the messaging gets messy. They talk about price and features while ignoring the emotional hooks that usually come from the brand team. Luna: So you lose the soul of the company in exchange for faster transactions? Lucas: Not soul, but distinctiveness. You end up sounding like everyone else because everyone is optimizing for the same conversion metrics. Homogenization is the risk. Luna: This brings up a great point about sustainability. Can this decentralized model last through a downturn? Lucas: That is the million-dollar question. In a boom, decentralized teams thrive because resources are abundant. In a bust, companies realize they cannot afford three different people doing similar research roles. They tend to recentralize quickly when the pressure hits. Luna: So it is a cyclical pendulum? We might be at the peak of decentralization right now. Lucas: Possibly. We are seeing early signs of consolidation in late 2026. Some companies are bringing brand leads back in-house to ensure compliance and tone consistency across global markets. Luna: It seems like the market is correcting itself. Structure always returns eventually. Lucas: Or it evolves into something we haven't named yet. Maybe the next iteration is not a department, but a protocol. A shared set of rules that all teams follow regardless of where they sit on the org chart. Luna: A protocol rather than a place. That is a fascinating way to think about it. Lucas: Before we go deeper into the protocol idea, I want to take a quick moment. If these conversations about business strategy and marketing shifts have been valuable to you, please consider supporting the show. You can find us at buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo — that's F. E. X. I. N. G. O. Luna: Yeah, it really helps keep the research deep and the analysis sharp without relying on flashy ads. Lucas: Thanks for the support. Let's get back to the protocol concept. What does a marketing protocol actually look like in practice? Luna: Does it mean standardized templates for every piece of content created across the company? Lucas: Exactly. Think of it like an operating system for communication. Sales uses the same value proposition framework as product updates. It ensures that no matter who talks to the customer, the core message remains consistent. Luna: So it is less about banning the department and more about enforcing discipline through design. Lucas: Right. It removes the ego from the process. The protocol dictates the best path, not the loudest person in the room. It makes collaboration mandatory rather than optional. Luna: That sounds like a lot of upfront work to build out, but potentially less chaos downstream. Lucas: Very true. The heavy lifting happens in year one. After that, it runs automatically. Teams just plug into the workflow and execute. Luna: It reminds me of open-source software development. Shared standards allow anyone to contribute without breaking the build. Lucas: Perfect analogy. And in marketing, that means we stop asking who owns the message and start asking how the message serves the customer journey. Luna: Shifting the focus from internal politics to external utility. Lucas: Always. Because at the end of the day, customers do not care about your org chart. They only care if the information is clear and helpful. Luna: So the ultimate goal of dissolving the department is to make marketing invisible? Lucas: To make it frictionless. If done right, you won't notice the marketing happening. You will just notice that every interaction made sense. Luna: A seamless experience. That is a high bar, but a worthy one. Lucas: It forces us to ask whether our structures serve our goals, or if our goals are just serving our structures. Luna: A good question to leave with as we wrap up.