[PART 2] Are CMOs and Marketers Disposable or Indispensable?

[Part 2]: The Future of Marketing is Customer-Centric: Are CMOs and Marketers Disposable or Indispensable?

REFERENCE: “The Customer Excellence Enterprise: A Playbook for Creating Customers for Life”

Chapter 10: Reimagining Commercial DNA

Are CMOs and Marketers Disposable or Indispensable?

In The Future of Marketing is Customer-Centric (PART 2), we build on the foundation of the impact of AI and Experiential Commerce established in PART 1 to focus on a fundamental question: Are CMOs, Marketers and Marketing Disposable?

Synopsis. Over the last fifteen years, marketing has enjoyed a period of influence and investment not seen since the Mad Men era, when television advertising and mass media transformed brands into cultural icons. Venture capital and corporate spending have fueled a marketing arms race as CMOs have wielded unprecedented budgets to experiment with content, influencers, automation, and AI. Yet, as with every cycle of investment and exuberance, the question now looms: how long can the glory days last? As AI automates more aspects of marketing execution and CFOs begin scrutinizing ROI with increasing intensity, CMOs and marketers are facing real cyclical and structural threats —The Four Horsemen of Modern Marketing—and another pivotal question: Are CMOs and marketers disposable?

With a unique capacity to capture the imagination, generate demand, and even shape culture, it’s not hard to think of marketers as the corporate version of the "rich cousins". You know the ones, the cousins from the branch of the family with the beach house and summer vacations in Paris, the worldly ones that ate sushi and knew how to use chopsticks in elementary school. As the rich cousins of the corporate world, marketers get to dazzle the senses with Super Bowl commercials starring A-list celebrities, collaborate with TikTok and Instagram influencers, and get wined and dined by agencies courting their account.

Marketing's Paradoxical Cycle

Unfortunately, through the attention those high-profile campaigns, celebrity endorsements, and big-budget activations garner in the C-suite and across other functional areas and departments, marketing can often be mischaracterized as wasteful, extravagant, discretionary, and at worst, disposable. In companies where anything close to this perception takes hold, CMOs and marketers can find themselves in a bit of a paradoxical cycle:

First, when times are good, companies invest freely in marketing to drive brand awareness, customer engagement, and revenue expansion.
However, when the economic winds inevitably begin to change, and corporate belt-tightening kicks in, those hopeful investments quickly get reframed as sinister costs as marketing gets recast as a cost center rather than a growth engine.
Next, marketers of all levels and stripes, who were seemingly just at the top of their game as “bells of the ball” at CES, Davos, and Cannes, are then among the first to get impacted with unfortunate reorgs and devastating “personnel actions”.
Yet, as soon as the organization inevitably shifts back into growth mode, there seems to be a change of direction and a collective realization that strong marketing is essential to capture new opportunities, rebuild lost momentum, and differentiate in crowded and noisy markets.
This leads to a rehiring and new investment wave, often with a new vision, fresh talent, and ambitious mandates—until the next downturn restarts the cycle.

This exposes a fundamental tension in many companies: marketing is expected to be a primary driver of growth and financial performance, yet when financial performance suffers, marketing (along with recruiting and sales) is often among the first functions to face increased scrutiny, severe budget cuts, and the extreme of layoffs. It’s like companies choose to slight their hand in the middle of a high-stakes poker game—the move feels instinctive and is done with a sense of certainty that it will work but ultimately ends up undermining any chance of changing their fortunes. This paradox surfaces deep questions about marketing, and whether it is truly viewed, valued, and treated as a business-critical function, something more discretionary, or in the worst case, disposable.

The Four Horsemen of Modern Marketing

The forces and factors underpinning marketing’s perception paradox can limit the ability for CMOs and marketers to assert the function’s true value, making it seem “disposable”. This fragility is not accidental—it stems from deep-seated structural and perception-driven barriers that weaken marketing’s strategic influence and make it an easy target in times of financial strain. These threats, The Four Horsemen of Modern Marketing, can hinder the function’s ability to drive sustainable growth through good times and bad:

1. THE COST CENTER CONUNDRUM—Marketing is often viewed as a cost center because its impact on revenue is not always immediate or directly measurable in the same way as sales. Investments in brand-building, customer engagement, and demand generation yield results over time, making them more difficult to quantify in traditional financial terms. This perception is further reinforced by misaligned measurement models that focus on short-term metrics like campaign performance and ad spend efficiency rather than long-term indicators such as share of wallet, repeat sales, customer lifetime value and brand equity. As a result, marketing can be undervalued as a financial contributor, often seen as more of an enabler rather than a revenue driver, leaving it vulnerable to budget reductions and leadership skepticism when the stakes are highest.

2. THE PRODUCT-BRAND TRAP—Customers no longer make purchase decisions solely on product factors nor do they blindly buy into brand messaging and advertising. With a habitual focus on product and brand attributes in marketing, what can get missed is the shift toward Experiential Commerce —where the company to customer value exchange has shifted from tangible to intangible, and experiential factors have become an equal partner to product and brand factors when customers are evaluating, choosing, and making purchasing and loyalty decisions. CMOs and marketers that double-down on the product-brand paradigm and fail to adequately consider experiential factors become increasingly misaligned with customer preferences and risk losing their competitive edge and ability to maintain relevance in their hearts, minds, and lives.

3. THE CAMPAIGN-CENTRIC FIXATION—Marketing campaigns can be alluring —working on film sets, collaborating with top agencies, and engaging with creatives is exciting stuff. Rather than fostering meaningful connections, campaigns risk becoming background noise—blending into the digital clutter as consumers tune out repetitive, impersonal messaging. This dynamic may be even more pronounced with the weaponization of digital marketing, which manifests in an unrelenting cadence of promotional messaging deployed across multiple channels at scale, creating a constant barrage of ads, emails, and social media posts. In this context, success is too often defined by campaign performance metrics like clicks, impressions, and engagement rates rather than long-term brand building and customer value. As a result, CMOs and marketers can get caught in a cycle of continuous customer acquisition campaigns without the necessary foundation for sustainability through retention and expansion, creating a revolving door of customers.

4. THE AI REPLACEMENT NARRATIVE—Fueled by AI and the democratization of digital marketing tools like Google Ads, Facebook, Adobe, and HubSpot, CMOs and marketers face a dilemma. While these technologies promise enhanced efficiency, automation, and data-driven decision-making, they also fuel a perception that marketing leaders and teams are becoming less essential. As AI optimizes media buying, personalizes content at scale, and generates predictive analytics with unprecedented speed, executives outside of marketing may begin to question the need for large marketing teams and sustained, outsized expenditures. Reinforcing this AI Replacement Narrative, which suggests that marketing expertise is increasingly replaceable by technology, there is a palpable expectation that efficiencies should follow the tech— people, lower costs, and faster results. Suppose marketing is seen merely as a set of automated workflows rather than a core driver of customer relationships, brand equity, and competitive differentiation. In that case, companies may strip it down to a leaner, tech-enabled function—eroding both influence and investment in the long term.

To counteract both the cyclical threats of capital reallocation and new priorities and the structural pressures of the "Four Horsemen", CMOs and marketers must fundamentally reshape their value proposition. The risk is that they may find themselves increasingly marginalized if they fail to redefine their value. In extreme cases, companies may even eliminate the CMO role or conclude that marketing can be absorbed into lines of business or some other enabling function. This means CMOs and marketers must pivot from a legacy campaign-centric mantra, making themselves indispensable by evolving to a new mindset and model that leverages technology as an enabler—rather than a replacement—of a deeply human approach where customers and marketers all win.

The Future of Marketing is Customer-Centric.

Five Essential Shifts: How CMOs and Marketers Become Indispensable

Hidden in the story of the Four Horsemen of Modern Marketing is good news around a singular purpose—Making CMOs and Marketers Indispensable. Specifically, to fight back against misperceptions of disposability, the future of marketing must be customer-centric. An untapped win-win opportunity for CMOs and marketers, with a customer-centric marketing model, both customers and marketers win. This approach requires structural and systemic changes and the need for CMOs, marketers and CX professionals to collectively adopt a new playbook focused on facilitating their companies and career paths through five essential shifts:

The customer-led shift from tangible to intangible value exchange;
The shift from a campaign-centric to customer-centric paradigm;
Positioning experiential factors as an equal partner to product and brand factors in corporate value propositions;
Evolving from a transactional to relationship-based mindset; and
Delivering customer value beyond the funnel, across the entire customer lifecycle.

Fortunately, marketers can follow the lead of Customer Excellence Enterprises, perennially high-performing outliers that are predisposed to deliver exceptional experiences. This opportunity means evolving past the marcom stack to build integrated experience delivery systems like those at Amazon or The Ritz-Carlton. With this evolution to Customer-Centric Marketing, CMOs and marketers can reclaim their strategic influence and become indispensable by focusing on what truly matters: customers.

Key Takeaways

1. To combat budget cuts and layoffs during downturns, marketing leaders must continuously demonstrate their impact on revenue, customer lifetime value, and business growth.

2. Customers increasingly value seamless, personalized, and emotionally resonant experiences, meaning marketers must integrate experiential factors into value propositions rather than relying solely on product and brand attributes.

3. To escape the short-term, campaign-driven cycle, marketing must shift from transactional engagement to a relationship model, ensuring sustained value creation beyond the funnel and across the entire customer lifecycle.

Readiness Questions for CMOs and Marketers to Consider

1. Is marketing in our company viewed as a revenue-generating function, or does it still suffer from the perception of being a discretionary cost?

2. Are we prioritizing experiential value exchange, or are we still trapped in the product-brand paradigm and campaign-driven marketing model?

3. How well is our marketing function integrating AI and automation in a way that enhances customer-centricity rather than diminishing marketing’s perceived expertise and influence?

📙 Pick up your copy of my recently launched book, The Customer Excellence Enterprise (Wiley, 2024) Available at Amazon: https://lnkd.in/ehYMaNkW and all major booksellers

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[PRACTICE NOTE] The Next Chapter of Commercial Excellence in Pharma

By Wayne Simmons • March 15, 2026

Why Customer Excellence is emerging as the discipline that turns scientific innovation into real-world impact. Pharmaceutical science has never been stronger. Pipelines are more diverse, clinical development more precise, and manufacturing more advanced than at any point in history. Yet amid this extraordinary progress the industry faces a defining paradox. Scientific excellence has accelerated dramatically, while the experiences through which that science reaches physicians and patients have not kept pace. The next chapter of commercial excellence will not be won by companies that merely communicate their science more efficiently. It will belong to organizations that deliver it more meaningfully. The companies that lead the next era of healthcare will treat customer experience with the same rigor as clinical efficacy, ensuring that every engagement becomes living proof of their science, their purpose, and their credibility. For decades the pharmaceutical industry has set the evidentiary standard for science and the trust standard for its brands. What now emerges as the next frontier is an experiential standard capable of matching both. Only when the experience of engaging with a company reflects the same precision, credibility, and consistency that govern its science will the full value of innovation reach the people it is intended to serve. This evolution begins with Customer Excellence , the discipline that unites marketing, sales, and launch excellence into a coherent commercial operating system capable of earning both permission and preference. From Science as Foundation to Experience as Fulfillment Science remains the foundation and heartbeat of the pharmaceutical enterprise. It drives the Path-to-Prescribe, where evidence, education, and clinical outcomes shape physician confidence and influence treatment decisions. Yet even the most extraordinary science cannot fulfill its promise unless it moves successfully through the broader system that surrounds the prescribing moment. Once a therapy is recommended, the journey continues through the Path-to-Fulfill , where access, affordability, operational coordination, and patient readiness determine whether a prescription ultimately becomes therapy in the patient’s hands. Across this journey, friction, administrative burden, and fragmented processes frequently erode impact and delay treatment initiation. Sustained outcomes then depend on the Path-to-Adhere , where patient support, education, monitoring, and continuity of care determine whether individuals remain on therapy long enough to realize its intended clinical benefit. The therapeutic value created in the laboratory is only fully realized when patients are able to begin treatment and stay on it with confidence. Clinical innovation can demonstrate efficacy, but experience determines whether that efficacy becomes reality. The journey from lab to life depends on what occurs before, during, and long after the moment of prescription. Before prescribing, healthcare professionals form impressions of credibility, clarity, and relevance. At the point of decision, trust and confidence influence uptake. Afterward, access, patient readiness, and ongoing support sustain adherence and belief in the therapy. In some therapeutic areas, as many as half of prescriptions go unfulfilled or therapies discontinued prematurely. This is rarely a failure of science. It is more often a failure of system design, where burden-heavy and friction-heavy journeys make it difficult for healthcare professionals to initiate and sustain therapy for their patients. Pharma has long set the benchmark for scientific evidence and brand trust. What is now required is an experiential standard equal to those same heights, ensuring that engagement with the company feels as credible, coherent, and confidence-inspiring as the science itself. Science drives the Path to Prescribe. Experience shapes the Path to Fulfill. Sustained engagement enables the Path to Adhere. Together, these journeys define the new frontier of Customer Excellence. Why Transformation Is No Longer Enough Transformation has become the default response to nearly every commercial challenge. Digital transformation, omnichannel transformation, and now AI transformation have each promised to close the gap between companies and their customers. Yet despite billions invested across platforms, data systems, and engagement technologies, the experiences delivered to healthcare professionals often remain inconsistent, impersonal, and disconnected. The issue is not intent but orientation. Transformation modernizes tools, yet rarely challenges the mental models that define success. Organizations become more efficient at executing familiar patterns rather than reimagining how value should be delivered.Pharma does not require another transformation initiative. What it requires is a disciplined reinvention that questions the orthodoxy of activity metrics, channel proliferation, and functional isolation while restoring coherence and humanity to how the industry delivers its science to the world. Customer Excellence as a Rebellion Customer Excellence represents that shift. It is a disciplined and systemic redefinition of how value is created, delivered, and sustained. Rather than measuring progress through scale and speed alone, it positions coherence, trust, and ease as the true measures of commercial excellence. This shift is not a rebellion against compliance but against complacency. It challenges leaders to move beyond optimization toward orchestration, building organizations where the quality of engagement reflects the quality of the science itself. The Seven Shifts Defining the Discipline The seven shifts form the architecture of Customer Excellence, uniting marketing, sales, and launch excellence into a single human-centered model for sustainable growth. Shift 1. From Tangible to Intangible Value Exchange Customers increasingly evaluate companies through intangible dimensions such as trust, relevance, and ease. Experiential Commerce has elevated these factors from soft considerations to structural drivers of enterprise value. Shift 2. From Campaign-Centric to Customer-Centric Journeys Marketing can no longer rely on episodic campaigns alone. Value is created across continuous journeys where engagement extends far beyond the initial promotional moment. Shift 3. Experience as a Third Pillar of Value Product and brand may attract attention, but experience determines whether relationships endure. Organizations that integrate experience alongside product and brand create a far more resilient value proposition. Shift 4. From Transactions to Relationships Customer health must be measured over time. Longitudinal relationships built on trust ultimately drive sustainable commercial performance. Shift 5. From Funnel to Flywheel Growth no longer ends at conversion. Customer Excellence transforms disconnected interactions into a compounding cycle of engagement, trust, and expansion. Shift 6. From Neutral Interactions to Brand-Defining Moments Every interaction communicates brand character. Thoughtfully designed experiences become evidence of reliability and partnership. Shift 7. From Vertical Silos to Horizontal Journeys Customers experience companies horizontally across journeys, not vertically through internal functions. Customer Excellence realigns organizations to reflect this reality. From Rebellion to System The seven shifts describe how pharmaceutical organizations can close the gap between scientific mastery and the lived experiences that bring that science to life across the full continuum of care. Customer Excellence does not replace Marketing Excellence, Sales Excellence, or Launch Excellence . It integrates them. Together these disciplines form a unified, customer-aligned commercial operating system capable of translating scientific promise into real-world clinical and commercial impact. Within this system, marketing shapes the scientific narrative that informs the Path to Prescribe. Sales brings that narrative to life through trusted engagement with healthcare professionals. Launch orchestrates the critical moments that accelerate adoption. Customer Excellence ensures that the experience surrounding the therapy enables succes s across the Path to Fulfill and the Path to Adhere, where access, support, and sustained engagement determine whether therapeutic value is ultimately realized. This is the next chapter of commercial excellence in pharma. It moves the industry beyond transformation toward orchestration, beyond scale toward coherence, and beyond message toward meaning. Science drives the Path to Prescribe. Experience shapes the Path to Fulfill. Sustained engagement enables the Path to Adhere. Customer Excellence unites all three. Science earns permission. Experience sustains belief. Customer Excellence earns both. Key Takeaways The future of differentiation in healthcare is experiential. Scientific innovation remains essential, but the experiences surrounding therapies increasingly determine whether that innovation achieves its intended impact. Customer Excellence represents the structural response to this shift. By integrating marketing, sales, launch excellence, and service functions into a coherent operating system, organizations can translate scientific value into lived value. Trust is no longer assumed simply because a therapy demonstrates clinical efficacy. It is built through the design, coherence, and consistency of the experiences that surround prescribing, access, and patient support. Transformation initiatives may modernize tools, yet genuine change occurs when organizations replace compliance-driven thinking with a deeper conviction about the centrality of the customer. Science earns permission through evidence, while experience earns preference through delivery. Together they form the foundation of enduring growth in the era of Experiential Commerce. Diagnostic Questions to Consider As the commercial model evolves, leadership teams must confront several difficult questions. Are we still benchmarking our engagement against other pharma companies, or against the best experiences healthcare professionals encounter in their everyday lives? Where does friction persist across the real journeys of prescribing, access, and patient adherence, and how clearly do we understand the barriers preventing clinical intent from translating into treatment? Do our commercial systems reinforce the promise of our science and brand, or do they introduce complexity that quietly undermines them? Have our investments in digital platforms, omnichannel engagement, and artificial intelligence reduced the cognitive burden on healthcare professionals, or simply multiplied the number of touchpoints they must navigate? A re we organized around internal functions and campaigns, or around the journeys through which physicians and patients actually experience our therapies? Most importantly, are we building organizations that only aspire to be customer-centric , or enterprises that are structurally designed to deliver customer excellence? Closing Reflection The pharma and life sciences industry has mastered the science of discovery and the discipline of evidence. The next era of leadership will belong to companies that apply that same rigor to the experiences through which science reaches the world. When organizations align their commercial systems with the realities of modern customer expectations, innovation no longer struggles in the final mile between prescription and patient care. Instead it arrives with clarity, coherence, and confidence. Your breakthrough science deserves experiences worthy of it. Together, we turn customer excellence into real-world impact. About the Author Wayne Simmons is a customer excellence strategist and founder of The Customer Excellence Agency, where he partners with pharmaceutical and life sciences leaders to turn customer-centric ambition into durable commercial advantage. He previously served as Global Customer Excellence Lead within Pfizer’s Chief Marketing Organization and has held leadership roles with Bayer Pharmaceuticals and The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center. Wayne writes The Customer-Centric Marketer newsletter and is the author of The Customer Excellence Enterprise: A Playbook for Creating Customers for Life. The Customer Excellence Agency: Advancing the Pursuit of Excellence in Service of Science.

Pharma commercial engines have reached unprecedented sophistication in generating prescribing intent

[PRACTICE NOTE] Journey Operations for Field Excellence

By Wayne Simmons • February 23, 2026

Pharma commercial engines have reached unprecedented sophistication in generating prescribing intent, yet a persistent structural gap remains between conviction and realized patient and commercial impact. The issue is not selling effectiveness.

[ABOUT] Advancing Human Health through The Pursuit of Excellence in Service of Science™

January 9, 2026

The Founding Philosophy of The Customer Excellence Agency Founded on the conviction that scientific brilliance only becomes human impact when excellence is engineered into leadership, culture, and experience delivery. This is a philosophy of rigor, responsibility, and reverence for the people science exists to serve.