UpTrajectory Review

The CMO is vanishing from the Fortune 500, and the tools built to serve that office may be heading for an identity crisis. Forrester's 2026 analysis found only 36% of Fortune 500 companies still retain a chief marketing officer—a striking collapse for a role that once sat securely in the C-suite. What's replacing it is not the elimination of marketing work but its diffusion: CEOs are claiming brand ownership, product managers control the 'Product' in the four Ps, pricing lives with sales, and channel strategy belongs to operations. The marketing department, in this telling, has been slowly stripped down to 'Promotion' and now risks losing even that residual territory as AI and automation reduce the headcount required to execute campaigns.

For small-business operators, this corporate restructuring carries a specific warning and an opportunity. The warning: do not build your marketing around a single titled role or a single department, because the logic now reshaping the Fortune 500 will eventually reach you—through vendor pricing, through talent markets, through the expectations of customers who experience your brand as a whole rather than as a campaign. The opportunity: small businesses already operate with blurred lines. The owner often is the brand strategist, the salesperson, and the customer service department simultaneously. If marketing is becoming everyone's responsibility, your organizational flatness is an advantage, not a deficit. The question is whether you have systems that let that distributed responsibility function without chaos.

Riemersma's piece raises a genuinely unresolved tension that much martech coverage avoids. The industry has sold tools on the premise of CMO empowerment—better dashboards, tighter attribution, AI-driven personalization—yet the buyer of those tools is evaporating. The Ralph Hamers quote, that 'the CEO, not the marketing team, is responsible for the brand,' is not a fringe opinion; it is increasingly conventional wisdom among executives who see brand as the accumulated result of every customer touchpoint. We are skeptical of the celebratory framing that 'marketing got promoted.' Promotion without budget authority, without a seat at the investment table, and without the ability to shape product or pricing is not elevation. It is fragmentation dressed in optimistic language. The David Packard quote has been recycled for decades; its current deployment feels more like justification than insight.

The downstream effects will hit martech vendors and their small-business customers unevenly. Enterprise platforms built around CMO workflows—complex procurement, dedicated implementation teams, annual renewals justified to a single executive—face a structural problem if the economic buyer becomes a committee of CEOs, CFOs, and operations leads with different success metrics. For small businesses, this may mean pricing pressure on mid-tier tools as vendors chase enterprise committees with broader suites, or it may mean opportunity as point solutions prove easier to adopt without a CMO's political capital. The more consequential shift is in decision rights: if no single person 'owns' marketing technology, who evaluates it, who implements it, who is accountable when it fails? The default answer in small businesses is often 'the owner,' which is another way of saying it falls through cracks.

What to watch: whether martech vendors retool their sales and product narratives from 'empower the CMO' to 'enable the CEO-led brand,' and whether that re positioning carries a price tag small businesses can absorb. What to do now: audit whether your marketing technology decisions assume a marketing department that may not exist in its current form in three years. Map your actual customer touchpoints—product experience, pricing transparency, support responsiveness, physical environment if applicable—against your martech spend. If the latter is overwhelmingly weighted toward promotion and the former is underinvested, your technology stack is optimized for a disappearing organizational model. Rebalance before the market forces your hand.

The uncomfortable question Riemersma poses—'can martech continue to do business as usual?'—deserves a direct answer from small-business operators, not just Fortune 500 observers. The answer is no, but the pivot available to smaller organizations is sharper and faster than anything enterprise bureaucracy can manage. The CMO's disappearance is not your problem unless you have built your strategy around replicating one.

“Marketing is too important to be left to the marketing department.” — MarTech

Takeaway: Audit your martech spend against every customer touchpoint, not just promotion, before the role you bought it for disappears.