You’re at the Table. Now What?
Four years. That’s the average healthcare CMO tenure. The clock is running. Are you using the seat or just happy to have it?
Let’s get something straight.
Having a seat at the table and using it are two completely different things.
Some healthcare CMOs are genuinely in the room — shaping growth strategy, setting the competitive agenda, making the case for brand investment in the language of the C-suite. They’re hard to ignore and harder to cut.
Others are at the table the way a centerpiece is at the table. Present. Visible. Occasionally admired. Not actually doing anything. Happy to be there.
Most are somewhere in between — close enough to the conversation to feel like they’re in it, far enough from the wheel to know they’re not driving.
Here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: Some of this is a skills problem.
Mark Ritson and Ipsos just dropped a study that should make every marketing leader uncomfortable. Only one in three marketers passed a basic test of marketing knowledge. Two-thirds failed. And these weren’t interns. These were working marketers — mid to senior level — who rated themselves above average. Eighty-four percent of them, in fact. The gap between perceived competence and actual competence is not small. It is a chasm.
Healthcare is not immune to this. Not even close.
Walk into a lot of health system marketing departments and what you find is not a marketing function. It’s a communications function wearing a marketing hat. Smart people. Hard workers. Genuinely good at content, events, campaigns and collateral. But trained in MarCom, not marketing. Execution, not strategy. Getting things out the door, not diagnosing what door to go through.
That’s not a character flaw. It’s a functional and training gap. And it has real consequences.
Because the CFO across the table was trained in finance. The COO was trained in operations. When the budget conversation happens — and it always happens — marketing shows up with campaign “results” and creative awards while everyone else speaks in the language of growth and margin. And then wonders why the budget gets cut.
Here’s the other number worth sitting with. The average healthcare CMO lasts 4.1 years in the role. Four years. That’s not a long runway. And a CMO who spends the first year getting oriented, the second year doing the work and the third year defending the budget doesn’t have much time left to actually move the business.
The CMOs who make the most of the seat — who extend their tenure and their influence — don’t wait for permission to be strategic. They show up strategic from day one.
That means owning the growth metrics before anyone asks for them. Market penetration. Share of mind. Branded search share. These are not soft measures. They are leading indicators of volume and share, and they belong to marketing. Build the dashboard. Bring it to the room before the CFO asks why awareness is up and volume is flat.
It means connecting brand investment to business outcomes in language the C-suite actually speaks. Binet and Field’s work is unambiguous — brand building is the primary driver of long-term growth. Adidas found that 65% of their total sales were driven by the 23% of their budget spent on brand. Not performance marketing. Brand. That’s a board conversation. That’s a CFO conversation. It’s also a marketing conversation — and most healthcare CMOs aren’t having it.
It means getting into the strategy discussion before it starts. Not waiting for the brief. Being in the room when service line priorities are set, when market expansion is on the table, when leadership is deciding what kind of organization this is going to be in five years. Marketing connects organizational strategy to human behavior. No other function owns that. But you have to show up and claim it — and keep claiming it, because the default is always to call marketing when the work needs to be made, not when the thinking needs to happen.
And it means being honest about the gap between MarCom and marketing. If your team is better at producing than diagnosing — better at executing than strategizing — that’s fixable. But only if you name it. The discipline of diagnosis, strategy, tactics and measurement is not a process framework. It’s the difference between a marketing function that drives the business and one that supports it.
Four years goes fast.
The CMOs who leave a mark don’t spend that time perfecting the campaign. They spend it redefining what marketing means in their organization — loudly, persistently, with data — until the function is too central to the growth story to be left out of any room that matters.
The seat is there.
The question is whether you’re using it or just glad to have it.
Jerry Hobbs is a marketing strategist and the president of Prairie Dog, a healthcare marketing group headquartered in Kansas City.
