Why Most “Digital Transformation” CMOs Are Just Bad Traditional Marketers

There’s a tiresome debate happening in marketing right now. On one side, you have the “digital natives” who think everything before 2010 was cave painting. On the other, you have the brand guardians clutching their penetration curves and muttering about Byron Sharp. Both sides are utterly convinced the other lot haven’t a clue.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth neither camp wants to hear: they’re the same bloody job.

I’ve spent years scaling technology-driven products to millions of users across international markets. I’ve also diagnosed fundamentally broken business models within 90 days of arrival and recommended killing multi-year partnerships to rebuild platforms from scratch.

The reason I could do both wasn’t because I’m some sort of marketing polymath. It’s because the supposed chasm between “traditional” and “digital” marketing is largely invented by people who’ve only done one and need to justify why they’re shit at the other.

The False Dichotomy That’s Killing Your Career

Let me be specific about what I mean. I’ve seen companies spend years and significant capital building platforms that bleed money. The diagnosis is rarely complex: they’ve built technology solutions to problems customers didn’t particularly have, wrapped them in partnership complexity that makes unit economics impossible, and then tried to market their way out of structural disasters.

This is what happens when “digital transformation” becomes code for “we don’t need to understand fundamental business strategy anymore because algorithms.”

Conversely, I’ve watched brilliant traditional FMCG marketers completely faceplant when they move into digital categories. They bring their beautiful brand books and their segmentation frameworks and their six-month campaign planning cycles. Then they’re stunned when a competitor ships three product iterations in the time it took them to get legal approval on their TV script.

This is what happens when “brand building” becomes code for “we don’t need to move fast or measure anything precisely because fame.”

Both groups have mistaken their context for their competence.

What Actually Travels (And What Doesn’t)

After 20 years moving between tobacco, consumer electronics, MedTech, insurtech, and back again, here’s what I’ve learned travels across categories:

Strategic diagnosis matters more than industry knowledge. I’ve walked into sectors I didn’t know. What I did bring was the ability to read a P&L, map a customer journey, calculate unit economics, and identify when a business model was structurally broken. That diagnostic muscle — built across dozens of product launches — transferred perfectly. The specific knowledge about new regulatory frameworks and category dynamics? I learned that in weeks, not years.

Category creation beats category expertise. The most valuable thing I did in consumer goods wasn’t managing existing brands. It was building a new category from absolute zero and capturing majority market share within a few years. The skills that create categories — understanding Jobs To Be Done, positioning against non-consumption, building distribution before demand — those travel. Knowing which trade magazines to advertise in? That doesn’t.

The fundamentals remain fundamental. Whether I’m marketing a technology product or a digital service platform, the questions are identical: Who are we targeting and why? What’s the value proposition versus current behaviour? What’s the activation trigger? How do we reduce friction? What creates retention? If you can’t answer these crisply, no amount of “digital native” hand-waving or “brand purpose” waffle will save you.

But speed and measurement change everything. In FMCG, you plan campaigns in quarters and measure success in share points that move like glaciers. In digital businesses, you can ship a product change Tuesday, see usage data Wednesday, and kill or double down by Thursday. Both ways of working contain important truths. You need both.

Both groups have mistaken their context for their competence.

The Uncomfortable Data Point Nobody Wants to Discuss

Here’s something I noticed managing marketing across dozens of international markets: the best local market managers weren’t specialists in the category, or retail, or even marketing. They were generalists who could connect dots.

The ones who failed were either brilliant strategists who couldn’t execute (“we need to completely rethink our retail paradigm before we can open stores”) or brilliant executors who couldn’t strategise (“we’ve opened stores but nobody’s coming and I’m not sure why”).

The same pattern repeats across sectors. The category “experts” know every feature competitors have shipped. What they can’t do is step back and ask whether anyone is even solving the right problem. The people who added value were the ones who could zoom out and zoom in — strategic on Monday, operational on Tuesday, and financial on Wednesday.

This isn’t a “digital” or “traditional” skillset. It’s just good marketing. But we’ve convinced ourselves otherwise.

Why This Matters for Your Career (Especially Now)

If you’re a traditional marketer reading this thinking “see, fundamentals matter, all this digital stuff is just tactics” — you’re wrong and your career is at risk.

If you’re a digital marketer reading this thinking “see, legacy marketers just need to learn to ship faster” — you’re also wrong and your ceiling is lower than you think.

When I teach Marketing Strategy at university, my students are obsessed with whether they should pursue “digital marketing” or “brand marketing” careers. The question itself is the problem. It’s like asking whether you should learn strategy or execution. Yes. Both. Obviously.

The marketers winning CMO roles aren’t the ones with the purest brand pedigree or the most startup logos on their CV. They’re the ones who can walk into a boardroom, diagnose a business problem — not a marketing problem, a business problem — and then marshal whatever combination of brand building, performance marketing, product development, pricing strategy, and organisational change is required to fix it.

The CMOs winning now can walk into a boardroom, diagnose a business problem — not a marketing problem — and marshal whatever is required to fix it.

The Coming Reckoning

Here’s my prediction for the next five years of marketing careers: the “specialist” model is dead, and we’re all just too polite to say so.

Not because generalists are better than specialists — they’re not. But because the half-life of category-specific knowledge has collapsed. Whatever landscape you’re learning today will be meaningless in three years.

What doesn’t decay is the ability to learn new domains quickly, diagnose strategic problems accurately, and lead execution effectively. These are the transferable assets. Everything else is depreciating in real-time.

The CMOs who’ll thrive aren’t going to be the ones with the most polished brand credentials or the most impressive growth metrics. They’ll be the ones who can walk into a broken business, figure out what’s actually wrong, design a solution that might involve blowing up the current approach entirely, and then execute the hell out of it.

That’s not traditional marketing. It’s not digital marketing. It’s just marketing. Real marketing. The kind that changes businesses rather than decorates them.

The question isn’t whether traditional or digital skills matter more. The question is whether you’re brave enough to become genuinely good at both, even though neither tribe will ever fully claim you as their own. Based on 20 years of evidence, I’d argue that outsider status is exactly where the most interesting marketing careers happen.