I spent 20 years training as a high-level brand marketer at companies like IBM and Mastercard. By every traditional metric, I was successful. I had the titles, the budgets, the seats at the table. Yet for two decades, I was operating miles away from actual revenue. I wasn’t an architect of business growth. I was a custodian of optics. The moment that crystallized this for me came when my business partner placed “CMO” next to my name on a slide deck . My stomach dropped. It was a visceral reaction, because in most organizations, the CMO is the coloring officer: brought in after the product is built, the sales strategy is set and told to make it pop. They’re handed a disconnected product and asked to manufacture a benefit from it. That shows how far marketing has drifted away from its core purpose. It is more focused on optics, activity and internal validation than on driving real business outcomes.…