Authored by: Shiva Bhavani, Founder & CEO of Wing CommunicationsÂ
There’s a quiet crisis happening inside Indian boardrooms that nobody wants to talk about openly. The Chief Marketing Officer — once the voice of the customer, the architect of brand narrative, the person who sat at the table when business direction was being decided — has slowly been reduced to a campaign executor. A budget manager. A performance dashboard owner. And the worst part? Most CMOs don’t even realize it’s happened to them.
How Did We Get Here?
The digital revolution did something paradoxical to marketing leadership. It gave CMOs more tools, more data, more channels — and in doing so, quietly buried them in execution. Suddenly, the CMO’s week looked like this: review the Meta ad performance, align with the agency on the content calendar, chase the SEO team for rankings, sit in a product launch sync, approve creatives, justify the quarter’s CAC to the CFO, and somewhere in between, try to think about “brand.”
Strategy became a word used in presentations. Not in practice. Meanwhile, the CEO moved on. Hired growth hackers. Brought in consultants for market positioning. Made narrative decisions without the CMO in the room — because frankly, the CMO was busy managing campaigns. This is not a talent problem. It’s a mandate problem.
What the Role Actually Demands Now
I work closely with founders and leadership teams across sectors — from funded startups to established enterprises. And one pattern I see consistently is this: the brands that are winning aren’t necessarily the ones with the biggest marketing budgets. They’re the ones where the marketing leader thinks like a business strategist first, and a marketer second.
The new CMO mandate is not about running better campaigns. It’s about three things:
1. Owning the Narrative Before the Campaign Exists
Most CMOs wait for a product, a launch, or a brief before they start thinking about communication. That’s backwards. The CMO’s job is to own the brand narrative at the business strategy level — before anything is built, before a campaign brief is written. What story are we telling the market? What position do we want to occupy in the customer’s mind three years from now? What does the media say about us today, and what should it say? These are not marketing questions. They are business questions. And the CMO should be answering them in the boardroom, not in a campaign debrief.
2. Making Earned Credibility a Business Asset
There’s a fundamental shift happening in how brands build trust — and most CMOs are still operating on the old playbook. Paid reach is getting more expensive and less trusted. Consumers are skeptical. Algorithms are unpredictable. But a founder’s byline in a credible publication? A quote in Economic Times on an industry trend? A leadership perspective that gets picked up across twenty media outlets? That compounds. That builds authority that no ad budget can replicate. The modern CMO must understand that earned media and thought leadership are not PR department tasks — they are core strategic assets that the CMO should be driving, protecting, and measuring with the same rigor as any paid channel.
3. Sitting at the Revenue Table, Not Just the Marketing Table
For too long, marketing has been treated as a cost center that produces creatives and awareness. The CMO who accepts that framing will always fight for budget and never have real influence. The shift is this: CMOs need to reframe their function as a revenue-generating, market-positioning, and credibility-building engine — and they need the language, the data, and the narrative to prove it to the CEO and the board. This means connecting PR and brand activity to pipeline. It means showing how thought leadership shortens sales cycles. It means demonstrating how brand authority reduces customer acquisition costs over time. The CMO who can make that case owns a seat at the revenue table. The one who can’t will keep getting cut in the next budget cycle.
The Founder-CMO Tension Nobody Talks About
Here’s something I observe constantly in the startup ecosystem: founders are increasingly bypassing their CMOs on brand and communication decisions.
Not because the CMO isn’t capable. But because the CMO hasn’t established themselves as the authority on narrative strategy within the organization.
When a journalist calls, the founder picks up — not the CMO. When a positioning decision needs to be made, the founder and the product team figure it out in a room — without the CMO. When the company is about to raise a round and needs to build investor narrative, someone hires a consultant — because the CMO “handles campaigns.” This is a failure of positioning. The CMO’s own positioning within the company.
The irony is sharp: the person responsible for positioning the brand has failed to position themselves as an indispensable strategic voice. The fix is not political. It’s not about fighting for turf. It’s about earning the role through the quality of strategic thinking — showing up to every conversation with a point of view on narrative, market context, and long-term brand equity. Not just campaign metrics.
What Separates a Strategic CMO from an Execution CMO
The difference shows up in the questions they ask.
An execution CMO asks: “What’s the brief? What’s the budget? What’s the deadline?” A strategic CMO asks: “What’s the story we want the market to tell about us in two years? What do we need to do today to make that true?”
An execution CMO measures success by reach, impressions, and click-through rates. A strategic CMO measures success by share of voice, narrative ownership, media authority, and the quality of conversations the brand is generating in its industry.
An execution CMO reacts to the market. A strategic CMO shapes it.
The AI Dimension That CMOs Are Underestimating
There’s one more layer to this that very few marketing leaders are factoring into their strategy yet. We are moving into an era where the first point of discovery for a brand — for a customer, an investor, a potential hire — is increasingly an AI engine. ChatGPT. Perplexity. Google AI Overviews. These systems don’t surface brands based on ad spend. They surface brands based on the quality, consistency, and credibility of information available about them across the web.
What that means practically: the brands that have invested in consistent earned media, thought leadership articles, credible third-party mentions, and structured narrative presence are going to have an enormous discoverability advantage in the next three to five years. CMOs who understand this will start treating PR and earned content not as a quarterly activity — but as long-term infrastructure. As searchable, citable, AI-trainable brand equity.
This is the new frontier of marketing strategy. And right now, the CMOs who are in campaign execution mode are not even looking at it.
The Mandate is Clear
The role of the CMO is not to manage campaigns. It’s to architect how the world perceives and talks about the company — across media, across conversations, across the digital landscape that increasingly runs on AI.
That requires a different mindset. A longer time horizon. A willingness to measure things that don’t show up in a weekly performance dashboard.
It requires the CMO to stop waiting for a brief and start writing the narrative.
The companies that will dominate their categories in the next decade will not be the ones with the biggest ad budgets. They will be the ones with the clearest, most credible, most consistently communicated story — driven by a marketing leader who understood that their real job was never to run campaigns.
It was always to own the story.
Shiva Bhavani is the Founder & CEO of Wing Communications, a strategic PR and reputation management agency working with high-growth brands across India & InternationalÂ
DISCLAIMER: The views expressed are solely of the author and theprpost.com does not necessarily subscribe to it.
