What Forces are Shaping the Future for CMOs?

By: David Bickerton

Straight to the Point

What We See: The challenges of today’s world—where both information and misinformation are widespread—are having a profound impact on businesses and their marketing efforts. To better understand the changing dynamics, Purple conducted a series of in-depth interviews with 15 Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) from leading Asset Management companies, revealing key themes and challenges that should set the agenda for Marketing teams in 2025 and beyond.

What It Means: Marketing in the Asset Management sector has historically added value by building trusted relationships and integrating activity across the enterprise. Increased external scrutiny and the rise of AI are impacting how trust is built and maintained. In today’s information-rich ecosystem, greater transparency is a given. Truth is no longer certain. Trust only comes with verification.

What to Do About It: The role of Marketing needs to evolve. The guardians of the white space of brand distinction must be equally adept at spotting and addressing the gray space of dissonance between words and actions across the organization. New processes must be defined, and new partnerships must be formed to respond to reputational risks. The mindset of the Marketing function must evolve with the CMO thinking and acting as the “Chief Trust Officer”—looking for new ways to build and nurture trust with clients and other influencers.

What We See

Today, we live and work in an increasingly complex, information-rich and attention-poor world—one where both information and misinformation are widespread. This means that, in matters of brand and reputation, we can no longer rely on the fact that all decisions are made based solely on trusted information sources—as there is evidence to suggest that perceptions now outweigh facts in some circumstances.

To better understand how these changing dynamics impact foundational aspects of business, Purple Strategies and Caffeine Partners conducted a series of in-depth interviews with 15 Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) from leading Asset Management companies across the United States, UK, and EU. These interviews revealed six key themes:

1. The changing role of Marketing: As the Asset Management sector faces a race for relevance, the relationship between Sales and Marketing has evolved. Marketing has become more specialized—with particular focus on digital touchpoints—and plays a bigger role in the client experience than ever before, with promotional activity being prioritized over product knowledge.

2. Marketing continues to move from art to science: Given Marketing’s enduring role in creating relationships of value, the use of business intelligence has become increasingly important. Shifts in media consumption have made content creation (format, creative, branding) as much science (user data, audience profiling, content habits) as it is art. As a result, the traditional four pillars of brand building—brand identity, image, culture and personality—have been replaced by a new set: platforms, personalization, prompts, and purpose. These shifts are fundamentally impacting the way organizations coordinate their paid, owned, and earned media efforts and how they engage throughout their marketing funnels.

3. Asset management brands have become more multi-dimensional: Investors are increasingly looking beyond products and asking for help in solving their challenges. Thought leadership has become an essential part of building brand distinction and if a relevant news story makes the front page, clients are expecting you to share a point of view with them.

4. The next technology frontier will be more challenging for marketing: AI is expected to have profound impacts on investment-centric and sales-centric organizations. Generative AI is a disruptive technology, and its potential to collapse the marketing funnel is a game-changer that requires a different mindset. Capability building for these advancements needs to be different, and CMOs need to have a seat at the table in assessing their impacts on the business.

5. Misinformation risks are recognized but not yet addressed: In an era where deep fakes and fake news are emerging issues that can move markets, truth is fundamental to building trust. The new playbook to address misinformation is being created on the fly, and companies need robust processes in place to ringfence the truth and create sources of fact rather than opinion.

6. New demands of the CMO: Demands on CMOs are increasing—as they need to be customer champions, capability builders, growth drivers, storytellers, and innovation catalysts. The scope of Marketing teams often transcends the organization, so CMOs are uniquely positioned to “join the dots” internally regarding reputation risk and opportunity.

What It Means

In today’s hyper-connected world, Marketing teams must support the delivery of business outcomes through their engagement with key audiences. Simultaneously, organizations face competing pressures from policy, financial, and societal audiences. These expectations have resulted in three unique challenges for CMOs today:

1. It’s about the gray space and the white space: Historically, CMOs have been tasked with building trust by seeking out the white space of distinction. Today, due to the interconnected nature of their roles, CMOs are increasingly asked to look beyond the white space and find areas of disconnect across their organizations. This requires active engagement, robust internal partnerships, and an integrated mindset towards identifying reputational risks.

2. Preparing for the misinformation monster: Traditionally, CMOs and corporate leaders have prepared to tackle reputational crises—caused by operational challenges and external events—and cyber threats. However, with advancements in technology and changes in the way people consume information, the risk of an informational crisis The in-depth interviews uncovered a lack of preparedness to handle informational crises—stolen truths, not just stolen data. When such issues arise, CMOs will need to work to safeguard sources of truth and activate advocacy support.

3. The CMO as a Chief Trust Officer: In addition to marketing their products, companies are building trust in a new paradigm—and this landscape is one that CMOs and Marketing departments need to navigate. Rapidly changing political and social dynamics are exerting pressure on organizations—and in some cases, they have a direct impact on a business’ bottom line. In this unpredictable environment, being “campaign ready” has a different meaning, and requires different capabilities and a new leadership mindset to build trust with the audiences that matter. For CMOs today, establishing trust in a product and brand is becoming as important as the performance of the product they are marketing.

What to Do About It

In this increasingly complex landscape, what steps can CMOs and corporate Marketing departments take to navigate these challenges? Here are a few places they can start:

• Expanding priorities: Marketing should actively expand its remit by leveraging its cross-company integration role to continually monitor for brand/reputation dissonance and look for ways to correct areas of concern—be it actual or potential future issues.
• Strengthening internal partnerships: CMOs today must proactively strengthen their partnerships with other internal teams across their organizations. An example would be partnering with HR/People teams to engage with Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) to test and understand attitudes on emerging socio-political issues, and—if the situation warrants it—consider mobilizing employees to proactively advocate for the company.
• Developing critical processes: Preparation is critical. Marketing teams should look to implement new early warning processes to test and respond to misinformation incidents. Much like how a company would develop plans to address a “stolen data” (cyber) event, Marketing should consider how best to develop a new crisis playbook for a “stolen truth” event.
• Building new capabilities: Marketing teams should actively seek skills to understand the full breadth of new technologies. Building strong capabilities in large language models, to stay in step with AI developments and gain insights into potential uses for research and publishing, can merit the CMO a seat at the table to discuss AI strategy for the company.

Discover More:

For a deeper dive into Purple’s insights from this research, download the full report below.

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The Purple team has helped some of the world’s most well-known companies manage their brand and reputations and navigate critical business challenges. If you need support, feel free to contact us — we are here to help.

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