How to make sure marketing is not just welcomed in the boardroom, but valued
I've sat in many boardrooms over the years, in finance, in commercial, and now in marketing. Whatever gets said in the room, marketing tends to get the least benefit of the doubt, and the least patience when results take longer than a quarter to show.
That's the problem worth solving: how we get the respect, and the money, from the board.
Why getting a seat at the table isn't the same as being valued
Getting a seat at the table is the easy part these days. Most CMOs have one, but what's harder, and what nobody puts on the meeting invite, is whether anyone actually weighs what you say once you're sitting in it.
There is a difference between being present and being trusted with the next big call.
Why 73% of CMOs say their boards undervalue marketing strategy
Marketing Week's 2025 Career & Salary Survey is blunt: 73% of CMOs, marketing directors and vice presidents said their own businesses undervalue marketing strategy, the third year running it has topped the list of most undervalued skills.
Strategy, not creative or campaigns, is the thing marketing is supposed to bring to the boardroom table.
Some of this is self-inflicted. Marketing spent the last decade getting very good at reporting impressions, click-through rates, and ROI on individual campaigns, and less good at connecting any of it to the questions a board actually asks: where growth comes from next, and what's standing in the way of it.
When the conversation stays at the level of dashboards, marketing sounds like a cost centre justifying its spend. When it moves to growth drivers and competitive position, it sounds like strategy.
How CMOs earn influence in the boardroom
For me, it starts with a commercial background. I came through finance and commercial first, building an analytics function from scratch before I ever ran a marketing team, and I've sat on the other side of the table wanting the same fluency in numbers and risk that finance and commercial bring as standard.
That's what lets marketing translate what it knows into a language the board already trusts, rather than asking the board to learn a new one.
Five things that have worked for me
Do the internal homework first. Before marketing can speak the board's language, it has to understand the business's priorities, not just the customers'. Finance, operations and legal all have their own worries, and ignoring them turns a marketing strategy into a marketing department's wish list with a business logo on it.
Time the ask, don't just make it. Standard Life's brand and marketing director, Ben Rhodes, has made the point well: you can't walk into a board and simply ask for budget, and that conversation has to feel like the inevitable next step rather than a cold pitch. That means bringing the board along months, sometimes years, before the ask, rather than turning up with the finished plan and hoping the numbers speak for themselves.
Don't trade away the creativity to sound credible. It's tempting to lean entirely into spreadsheets once you're in the room, but Bloom & Wild's CMO, Charlotte Langley, has made the case that marketers shouldn't shy away from bringing creativity and emotional storytelling into boardroom conversations too. Financial literacy earns you the seat, and creativity is what makes people remember what you said once you're in it.
Be upfront about risk, not just upside. Test-and-learn data is reassuring, but boards respect honesty about what might not work as much as confidence about what will. Pretending every plan is a sure thing is usually what erodes trust the moment something underperforms.
Help the board hold its nerve after the ask, not just before it. Getting the budget signed off is only half the job. The harder moment comes a few months later, when the campaign is live, the money is spent, and the results haven't caught up yet. Good marketing takes time to compound, so build the ROI timeframe into the pitch itself and keep the reporting flowing. Boards often lose confidence in marketing not because a campaign is slow to show results, but because nobody told them it would be, and nobody showed them the evidence along the way.
What actually earns the second hearing
Boardroom-friendly usually gets taken to mean softer language and more caveats. That is not what earns influence. The marketers who get it translate what they already know about customers, growth, and risk into a language the rest of the business can act on.
Visibility gets you seen; reputation gets you in the room. What you do once you're there decides whether you're asked back.