Why the CMO of tomorrow must think beyond campaigns

The famous Indian marketer Piyush Pandey once said that “People may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel”. This statement is a reminder of the fact that storytelling is the heart and soul of effective marketing. However, as the communication channels, technology, and consumer expectations continue to move at an ever-evolving pace, the kind of leadership that is needed to guide modern marketing communication also needs to change. In the years to come, marketing leadership will be all about developing strategies that help create business impact.

The new skill sets marketers must build:

From executors to strategists

There was a time when marketing communication was just treated as an after-effect. The marketing team received a brief, based on which they created a campaign, bought in the media, and moved on. That model worked in a time when consumer attention was abundant, and media was predictable.

Today, the rules have changed a lot. Rather than the consumers waiting for the brands to speak, they are already engaging with each other, be it on Instagram comment sections, Reddit threads, and other community channels. Today, by the time a brand campaign goes live, an opinion has already been formed. This has led to campaigns no longer being measured by how good it looks, but by how well the brand performs in the market after the campaign ends.

This is why the modern marketer’s role is upstream. It is about building the narratives and strategic engine that decides what the brand should stand for, what it should prioritise, and what it should never compromise on.

Translating data into strategic direction

In the age of information, garnering data is not the problem, but putting it in the right direction is.

Marketing teams have dashboards filled with metrics, such as click-through rates, engagement, cost-per-lead, and impressions. But putting those numbers into answering the strategic questions is making the real difference: Why are customers hesitating? Why is a competitor suddenly gaining momentum? Why is the same message working in one market and failing in another?

The future-ready marketing leader is the one who can translate data into a decision-making compass. That requires a shift in mindset. Instead of treating data as a reporting tool, marketers must treat it as a behavioural lens.

For example, a consumer goods brand might see a surge in online engagement but the sales might still go down. A surface-level marketer might push more media spend, but a strategic marketing leader asks a different question: what is the friction point between interest and purchase? Is the product too expensive? Is the pack size wrong? Is the distribution inconsistent? Is the product story failing at the shelf?

This difference in thought and action is where marketing becomes business strategy.

Integrated storytelling with cultural fluency

Technology can automate processes, but the essence of marketing is human connection. The next generation of marketers must not only understand how to harness the skill of mastering a story that works across cultures and geographies but also be adept at telling stories that stretch beyond the boundaries 

Brands that have successfully done this have considered culture as the central strategy, not an add-on. For example, Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke campaign was successful because it leveraged identity and belonging. It is a story that works across cultures but can be localized.

Even in B2B environments, understanding culture is important. When you talk to converters, packaging companies, and industrial partners, their choices are not just driven by price and performance but by their market realities such as regulatory forces, supply chain challenges, customer demands, and sustainability commitments. Marketing communication needs to speak their language, not ours.

Designing AI-human collaboration systems

Building AI-human collaboration systems

In the coming times, marketers who speak the language of how to best leverage AI will get ahead of the competition. It will be less about superficially using technology and more about how to best integrate AI with human intelligence to make something that includes the best of both worlds. For achieving this, marketers must focus on:

Building AI processes that improve creativity (for example, creating draft ideas that can inform but not replace human writers).

Employing predictive analytics to forecast customer needs.

Ensuring AI results meet brand safety, ethics, and relevance standards.

Take, for example, streaming services that utilise AI-driven content analytics to forecast audience interest, allowing marketing teams to adjust promotion plans before the content is even released. Instead of needing to learn about AI, leaders need to learn about AI governance, risk, and effective application in real-world marketing campaigns.

Personal reflections from the field

Over my years leading marketing communication across South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, one insight has crystallised: context is as important as content. The leaders who succeed are those who listen first, then craft with insights.

I’ve observed three patterns among teams that win consistently:

1. They put strategic brand meaning at the core of every initiative and not just tactical engagement.
2. They test early and pivot fast, treating campaigns as evolving systems rather than static plans.
3. They empower cross-functional teams. Marketing no longer operates in a silo but as a partner in product, data, and customer experience design.

These patterns signal a deeper shift in what leadership means in marketing today.

The death of campaign thinking

We are entering an era where the biggest threat to marketing is irrelevance.

Consumers are rejecting lazy communication. They are rejecting brands that show up only when they want attention and disappear when trust needs to be earned. The future will thus be about building a brand that performs consistently across touchpoints, across markets, and across moments of truth.

In other words, the future belongs to CMOs who will stop thinking like advertisers and start thinking like institution builders.

Because in the end, brands don’t lose market share when their ads fail. They lose market share when their promises fail. And the CMO of tomorrow will be the person who ensures that the brand’s promise is engineered into reality.

This article is penned by Shagun Walia, Marketing Communication for South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa at Avery Dennison.