Seven Forces Eroding Your Marketing Team’s Effectiveness

Marketing capabilities — the complex bundles of skills, processes, and organizational know-how that enable companies to implement customer-related activities and adapt to marketplace changes — are rated by marketing professionals as important to business success. At the same time, artificial intelligence is rewriting the rules of content creation, customer targeting, and performance measurement. Responsibilities such as managing generative engine optimization (GEO) are emerging as vital online capabilities that did not exist even two years ago.

Eighteen years ago, one of us (Christine) launched The CMO Survey, polling marketing executives about the state of the industry and their organizations. In January 2026, we conducted the 35th edition of the survey, which received 308 responses from marketing leaders at for-profit U.S. companies. The results are troubling.

It’s our assessment that two critical things are happening right now. The first is that the requirements of effective marketing are shifting faster than at any point in The CMO Survey’s history, led by the need to figure out where and how to incorporate AI capabilities. The second is that the state of the marketing profession is not ready for this moment. Instead, marketing teams are systematically undermining their own ability to build the capabilities important to their success.

This is not a minor inconsistency. We see a pattern — visible across budgets, hiring, organizational behavior, and strategic priorities — that raises fundamental questions about how companies today are making decisions about investing in marketing capabilities. Our prediction is that this soft commitment to what we believe is critical marketing know-how will cost organizations competitively if it is allowed to continue as it is today.

Underinvestment Looms Large

Nearly 60% of marketing leaders reported that their primary approach to building marketing capabilities is through internal training and hiring rather than via external partnerships or acquiring other companies. This preference hasn’t changed since we last asked about it in 2020, despite six years of dramatic shifts in what successful marketing requires. And despite this reliance on internal resources — and surveyed leaders’ belief that marketing capabilities are important to business success — getting financial support for capability building remains a challenge.

In particular, when we look at what companies are actually doing to support that stated commitment to training and hiring, the details tell a story of underinvestment.