Insights · Marketing Leadership

Why Communications Leadership Has Become a C-Suite Priority

Reputation, trust, employees, investors, media, and public expectations increasingly converge. Communications leadership now sits at the center of some of the most consequential decisions an organization makes.

Corporate communications was once too often viewed primarily as a function responsible for media relations, announcements, and managing the company’s external narrative.

That definition no longer reflects the role.

Today’s communications leaders operate across a far more complex stakeholder environment. They advise CEOs. They help organizations navigate moments of change. They shape employee communications, corporate reputation, executive positioning, crisis response, public affairs, investor narratives, and increasingly the intersection between all of them. As those responsibilities have expanded, so has the strategic importance of the function.

Companies No Longer Communicate to One Audience at a Time

The boundaries between audiences have largely disappeared.

An internal message can become external within minutes. A customer issue can become a media story. An executive comment can affect employees, investors, regulators, and the public simultaneously.

Companies therefore cannot manage communications as a series of isolated channels.

The strongest communications leaders understand how different audiences intersect—and how a decision intended for one constituency may be interpreted by another. They help organizations see the entire stakeholder environment rather than one message at a time.

Reputation Has Become an Enterprise Issue

Reputation is not created solely through communications.

It is shaped by what an organization does: how it treats customers, how leaders behave, how employees experience the company, how it responds to challenges, and whether its actions are consistent with its stated values. But communications leadership plays an essential role in helping organizations understand and navigate those perceptions.

That requires proximity to decision-making. A communications executive brought in only after a decision has been made can help explain it.

A communications executive involved earlier can help leadership understand how the decision may be received in the first place. That is a fundamentally more strategic role.

CEOs Need Trusted Counsel, Not Simply Communications Support

The most effective communications leaders often serve as close advisors to the CEO and senior leadership team.

Their value is not limited to crafting messages. They provide perspective.

How will employees interpret this?

What questions will journalists ask?

Where could the company’s explanation create confusion? How does this fit with what leadership has said previously? What does the organization need to communicate now—and what would be better left unsaid?

That counsel requires judgment, confidence, discretion, and the ability to challenge senior leaders constructively.

The communications executive must be capable of operating as both advocate for the organization and interpreter of the audiences around it.

Complexity Has Increased the Stakes

Organizations are navigating a communications environment that is faster, more fragmented, and less forgiving.

Employees expect transparency. Customers can amplify experiences publicly. Executives increasingly communicate directly through social platforms. News cycles move quickly. AI is accelerating the creation and distribution of information. At the same time, many companies operate across markets and stakeholder groups with very different expectations. This makes communications leadership less about controlling a narrative and more about navigating complexity. The strongest leaders know when speed matters and when restraint matters. They know when consistency is essential and when different audiences require different context. And they understand that credibility built over years can influence how an organization is perceived when difficult moments arrive.

The Best Communications Leaders Understand the Business

Strategic communications cannot operate separately from business strategy.

To advise senior leadership effectively, communications executives need to understand how the company makes money, where it is growing, what risks it faces, how its industry is changing, and what matters to the people making decisions around it.

That commercial understanding allows them to move beyond messaging.

They can anticipate issues, identify opportunities, help leadership establish priorities, and connect communications decisions to broader organizational objectives.

When evaluating communications candidates, companies should therefore ask more than whether someone has strong media relationships or experience managing high-profile situations. Ask whether they understand the enterprise.

What Companies Should Look For

Exceptional communications leaders combine capabilities that are difficult to evaluate from a résumé alone. They have strong judgment under pressure.

They can build credibility with senior executives while remaining connected to external perspectives. They understand the difference between attention and reputation.

They can communicate with clarity without oversimplifying complexity. They know how to build relationships before those relationships are needed.

And they are comfortable telling leadership something it may not want to hear. Those qualities become particularly important when the stakes are highest.

Communications Has Moved Closer to the Center

The elevation of communications leadership is not simply the result of a noisier media environment. It reflects something larger.

Companies are increasingly judged by multiple audiences, in real time, on decisions that extend well beyond their products and services.

Reputation influences customers, employees, investors, partners, and ultimately business performance. Organizations that recognize this are treating communications less as a downstream function and more as a source of strategic intelligence and leadership counsel.

The question is no longer simply how a company communicates. It is whether communications perspective is present when the decisions worth communicating are being made.

Insights · Marketing Leadership

What Companies Should Look for in a Modern CMO

The CMO role has expanded. The way companies evaluate marketing leadership needs to expand with it.

There was a time when the Chief Marketing Officer could be evaluated primarily as the steward of a company’s brand and marketing organization. Today, that definition is increasingly incomplete.

Modern CMOs are being asked to operate across brand, growth, customer experience, data, technology, product, and increasingly AI—while demonstrating a clearer connection between marketing decisions and business performance.

That expansion has made the role more consequential. It has also made hiring the right marketing leader more difficult.

The strongest candidate is not necessarily the executive with the largest résumé, the most recognizable brands, or the longest list of marketing capabilities. The more important question is whether that leader’s experience, judgment, and leadership approach match what the organization actually needs next.

Start With the Mandate, Not the Résumé

Before evaluating candidates, companies should be clear about what they are actually hiring a CMO to accomplish.

A business entering a new category may need a different kind of marketing leader than one trying to accelerate organic growth. A company repositioning an established brand faces different challenges than a founder-led organization building a sophisticated marketing function for the first time.

The title may be the same. The leadership mandate is not.

Effective CMO searches therefore begin with context: the company’s strategy, growth stage, customer, competitive environment, organizational structure, existing capabilities, and expectations for the role. Only then does a candidate’s experience become meaningful.

Look for Commercial Fluency, Not Simply Marketing Expertise

Marketing leaders increasingly operate alongside CEOs, CFOs, product leaders, sales leaders, and boards on questions that extend well beyond campaigns and communications.

The strongest CMOs can connect marketing decisions to the broader economics and priorities of the business.

They understand where growth comes from, how customers make decisions, where the company has a right to win, and how marketing can create value across both the short and long term.

That does not mean every CMO needs to be a performance marketer or revenue operator. It means they need to understand the business well enough to make marketing an integral part of its strategy rather than an adjacent function.

Evaluate Their Ability to Make Tradeoffs

The modern marketing mandate contains inherent tensions: brand building versus near-term performance, centralized consistency versus local relevance, established channels versus emerging ones, technology-enabled efficiency versus human judgment, and growth opportunities versus organizational focus.

Strong marketing leaders are distinguished not by their ability to pursue everything simultaneously, but by their judgment about what matters most.

What did they prioritize?

Where did they invest?

What did they choose not to do?

When interviewing candidates, go beyond asking what someone accomplished. Ask what tradeoffs they made and what they changed when the evidence challenged their original assumptions.

Those decisions often reveal more about an executive’s judgment than the finished outcome alone.

Assess Leadership Across the Enterprise

A CMO’s influence increasingly extends beyond the marketing organization. They may need to align sales and marketing around a common customer strategy, work with product teams on positioning and launches, advise the CEO on reputation, communicate with a board, or lead organizational change across multiple functions.

That makes influence, communication, and organizational leadership essential parts of the assessment.

Can this person lead marketing?

Can this person lead within this executive team?

Don’t Mistake Familiarity for Fit

Recognizable company names can create a powerful halo around candidates. But experience at a highly resourced global brand does not automatically translate to success inside a growth-stage company—and the reverse is equally true.

The environment in which an executive produced results matters.

What resources did they have? What team did they inherit? How established was the brand? What authority did they hold? What problems were already solved for them?

Understanding that context helps distinguish between a candidate who has experienced success and one whose leadership meaningfully contributed to creating it.

It also gets to a principle that has long informed Phifer & Company’s approach: evaluating candidates beyond the résumé, including culture, chemistry, and leadership compatibility.

AI Changes the Toolkit. Judgment Still Matters.

AI is changing how marketing organizations produce content, analyze information, personalize experiences, automate workflows, and operate at scale.

For companies evaluating marketing executives, familiarity with these capabilities matters. But knowing the newest tools is unlikely to be the defining characteristic of an exceptional CMO.

The more important capability is knowing where technology creates leverage—and where human judgment, creativity, customer understanding, and leadership remain essential.

As execution becomes easier, deciding what should be done, why it matters, and how it supports the business becomes more important.

The Right CMO Is Specific to the Company

There is no universal profile for the modern CMO.

For one organization, the right leader may be a brand builder. For another, a commercially oriented growth executive. Another may need a transformation leader capable of rebuilding the function, introducing new capabilities, and earning credibility across the enterprise.

The objective of an executive search should not be to identify the most impressive marketing executive in the market.

It should be to identify the leader whose experience, capabilities, judgment, and ambition are best aligned with what the organization needs to become.

That distinction is where great searches begin.

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