2 days ago
The Unofficial #1 On Forbes' 2025 World's Most Influential CMOs List
Wondering if and when the other shoes will drop
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The Unofficial #1 designation is given to a person, force, or condition with outsized influence over CMOs and their ability to influence growth.
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Stepping back 125 years to early 20th-century New York City, and you find the origins of an almost apt metaphor for the current state of global affairs and global marketing alike.
Returning to your tenement apartment after a day in the factory, you'd sit on your bed and begin getting out of your work clothes. As you took off your first shoe and it dropped to the floor, your downstairs neighbor couldn't help but hear its thud through the tenement's thin ceiling. Then they'd wait for the thud of your other shoe dropping.
While these are certainly 'other shoe' times, the metaphor is only almost apt because then, there was a certainty the other shoe would ultimately drop. Today however, nothing is certain, little is inevitable or predictable, most everyone is on edge, and seemingly any crazy thing could happen (or not) in any given moment. In fact, in April and across 142 countries, The International Monetary Fund's World Uncertainty Index, recorded the single highest level of global uncertainty—higher than during the Pandemic or the 2008 economic crisis—since tracking began 17 years ago.
While much is uncertain, regardless of your politics or nationality, what's not is that no one and nothing has greater influence over the ripple effects of what happens next from shoes that do or don't fall than the current American president.
And so—and not because by any objective measure he is a marketing savant—for his outsized influence on global uncertainty, its near and long-term consequences, and thus on what CMOs and the brands and companies they help steward do and don't next, I've named Donald Trump The Unofficial #1 on the 2025 Forbes World's Most Influential CMOs list.
No one and nothing thrive on uncertainty, and the discomfort, wariness, volatility and the should-we-or-shouldn't-we vacillation it creates is good for neither one's best laid marketing plans nor buying behavior.
Whether by design or disposition, from Wall Street to Main Streets, China to Chicago, the chaos and radical uncertainty sown by the President's words and deeds finds consumer and corporate sentiment jumpier than Elon at a Trump rally before their break-up. Any semblance of predictability around tariffs, interest rates, taxes, retaliatory taxes, prices, jobs, inflation, recession, geo-political alliances, trade wars and military ones, is confounding capital markets, forecasts, budgets, supply chains, human brains and emotions in real-time.
Willingness to spend by consumers and companies alike whose expectations are tossed-about by contradictory signals and volatile moods is throttled. So, corporate guidance and forecasts are being cut, as costs and prices remain in limbo. No small part of why Global GDP is expected to grow at its slowest rate in almost 20 years, and why The World Bank anticipates this being the weakest decade of economic growth in almost 60.
Admonishing anyone
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As quick to publicly admonish and/or punish stalwarts of the global economy from Apple to Walmart to Los Angeles as he is to threaten Presidents Zelensky, Ramaphosa and Xi, Greenland and NATO, his all-caps proclamations can have as much near-term impact on global markets—and thus marketing—as any actual policy that may or may not follow.
CEOs and CFOs want growth without risk and savings without sales impacts, as if that were a thing. Legal wants safety. Boards want clarity. And no one wants to be wrong. All of which delays corporate actions and decisions, and equally, makes the creative and bold-ideas so essential to value creation and capture feel riskier than they'd otherwise be.
While self-help books are replete with counsel about not obsessing over that which you can't control, that's not advice CMOs can heed (at least professionally) at a time when distracted audiences are harder to predict, reach and influence; when longer-term strategies seem disposable, and most everyone is doomscrolling their feeds on the regular to see what was or wasn't said and how this might affect what they do or don't next.
Over the past five years, CMOs have learned that this year's plan could become this week's fire drill or act of triage in any given moment. But, thanks to the President, this has never been more so. And so, chief marketers are pushed to 'do more with less,' (not unreasonable in and of itself) and to just 'wait and see.'
Yet so it goes during this second Trump presidency, and so it goes for CMOs wondering when another all-caps tweet will drop. Or not. As Tom Petty sang, 'the waiting is the hardest part,' which is why this year, for his outsized influence on markets, marketers and marketing (to say nothing of humanity), Donald Trump is The Unofficial #1 on the 2025 Forbes World's Most Influential CMOs list.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
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Note. I'd finished writing this when reminded that Mr. Trump was also named Time's Person of the Year, in December. Reminded, I considered going in another direction but, despite the redundancy, decided no one/nothing is a more appropriate choice. Under no illusion about the difference in attention the two designations get; I also hope to offer a reminder to the CEOs, CFOs and Board Directors reading this that anyone or anything influencing global conversations and sentiment influences what CMOs do and don't in turn.
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For those interested, in 2022, I named 'Anyone' the Unofficial #1 because 'Anyone' with a keyboard can change the trajectory of a brand and business in an instant. In 2023, Sam Altman was recognized as proxy for the then (and still) TBD implications of GAI on marketing. Last year, 'The CEO' was the Unofficial #1 for their oft unwitting and unintentionally but ultimately marketing-ignorant influence over the expertise and actions of CMOs.
