Marketing has spent a decade optimizing itself, while the business around it started asking for something else. In this interview, Marc de Swaan Arons, founder of the Institute for Real Growth (IRG) and former Unilever marketer, explains the findings of Marketing 2030, a global study built on hundreds of CMO interviews and a survey of more than 1,500 marketers. He argues that growth is human by design, that AI is a powerful but backward-looking tool, and that CMOs must move from managing a budget to architecting enterprise growth. This means talking to the CFO about intangible value.

Key Takeaways:

• Stakeholders are audiences: Companies win by creating value for all stakeholders (customers, employees, communities, regulators, investors). Here, marketers are trained to understand audiences, so they must be natural experts.
• Three CMO roles: Marketing leader, business partner, and enterprise growth architect. They are roles, not levels, and your credibility and context decide which one you can play.
• The measurement gap: Most of the C-suite believes marketing creates value, but only 21% say that value is measured properly. The fix is to talk about intangibles, which now make up roughly 80% of company value.
• The AI double edge: AI predicts by looking in the rear-view mirror. When every leader uses the same models, output turns to vanilla. The human premium is judgment, creativity and empathy.
• Apprenticeship is back: If AI automates entry-level work, juniors and seniors should work side by side, and juniors bring the fresh questions AI doesn't ask.

What is humanized growth?

Humanized growth is a growth model in which a company creates lasting value for all of its stakeholders, using human judgment, creativity, and empathy alongs with AI and efficiency. It is the central idea of the IRG's Marketing 2030 study, which positions the CMO as the business's expert in understanding what people need and why they choose what they choose.

From marketing machine to marketing for all stakeholders

Twelve years ago, the Harvard Business Review cover story on "Marketing 2020" described the ultimate marketing machine. Now the same organisation, has partnered with Google to ask what marketing looks like in 2030. Marc de Swaan Arons spent 14 years at Unilever, built and sold the consultancy Effective Brands to WPP, and now runs IRG as a not-for-profit. Our founder, Coen Olde Olthof, spoke to him about what changed and what did not.

You spent your career at Unilever, then founded Effective Brands, and now IRG. How did Marketing 2030 come about?

"We were lucky with Marketing 2020. The findings ended up as a cover story in Harvard Business Review, and if you're a consultant, you want that. So when our partners at Google came to us and asked why we shouldn't do it again for 2030, and with AI in the picture, it felt worth doing. This time it's a dedicated research effort with 25 marketing associations around the world, several hundred CMO interviews, and an online survey of over 1,500 marketers, around 30% of them very senior."

Was treating marketing as a machine a thinking error?

"I wouldn't call it the wrong route. That focus was probably needed to get marketing on the map. But look at what companies now need from the outside world. You want loyal customers who pay a price premium. You also want a city that welcomes your new plant, and talent that says: this is where I'll spend the most important hours of my day. The companies that win aren't the ones that think about short-term profit for the loudest stakeholder, the shareholder. They create value for all of them."

"And once you run your business like that, all stakeholders become audiences. Audiences to understand, to find unmet needs in, to build value propositions around, and to learn how to communicate with. Those are all things marketers were trained to do. So the biggest opportunity Marketing 2030 identifies is that the marketer has so much to offer that the business needs right now."

Is humanized growth a survival requirement, or a luxury for when things go well?

"That's a false choice people often make. If you cut brand investment, your business won't die in six months. You'll probably have a good quarter, a good year, more profit, and people will be happy. But we know, and there's a lot of data, that after two or three years it hurts. Whether it's brand, training or talent, you can save for a while, but it catches up with you. Quarter to quarter is fine if the quarters add up to a long-term strategy. If they're on the road to nowhere, that's a big problem."

Vanilla by Default: The Risk of Collective Dehumanization

One of your warnings is that if everyone uses the same AI models, everything becomes bland.

"A commodity. Vanilla, exactly. Every leader now tells you at dinner what they did with Claude or ChatGPT yesterday, from a new kitchen to a mathematical model. People are enthusiastic, and there's a real risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. These technologies don't come up with new, innovative propositions. They predict, and by definition prediction is looking in the rear-view mirror at what happened next. The real challenge for leaders is getting the right mix of human and technical."

You're launching the IRG Inspirator, an AI advisor for CMOs. What does it do?

"A 28-page PDF can carry the core concepts and a few data points, but it's a one-way street. The Inspirator lets us ask you questions about your situation and benchmark you against the winners. It's a closed system: it doesn't go out on the internet and pull the latest article, because we don't know if it's any good. Everything in it comes from our own work and from the discussions among CMOs in our programmes."

"And here's the kick. If the person still doesn't feel they have their answer, we can take the question to our community of over 1,000 CMOs. It's CMOs, by CMOs."

The team built it by drafting around 250 questions CMOs might ask, narrowing them to the 50 that matter most, and having partners write and challenge the answers. One answer ran to 16 pages. "We give the answer, and we give the reasoning behind it."

Three roles, One CMO

You describe the CMO as a marketing leader, a business partner and an enterprise growth architect. How do they fit together?

"We call them roles, not levels. Probably 70% of marketers are focused on marketing, and only that, which may be exactly right if you're in a category where functional performance is 90% of why people buy. As a marketing leader, your influence stops at one stakeholder, the customer. As a business partner, you look at the P&L, not just the cost, and you might even give up some of your own budget for a bonus scheme, because it's better for the business as a whole. The third role is different. The business needs a window on the world, on what all its stakeholders expect from us, and how we make a positive difference to each of them over time."

How do CMOs react when a self-assessment tells them where they really are?

"It's a big point, because a lot of what defines your role is outside your control. If the shareholders want this business to deliver a fine profit in under two years, everything you know about brand equity goes out of the window. So this starts before you take the job. Align with the board and CEO on what they expect from marketing. And be honest about your credibility. If you're a 20-year comms person, walking into the CFO's office to talk about shareholder value isn't credible on day one."

The Measurement Gap: Talking to the CFO about Intangibles

Your report says most of the C-suite sees marketing creating value, but only 21% say that value is properly measured. What should CMOs do?

"We call it work that is unseen and unmeasured, therefore uncelebrated, and eventually unhealthy. It's a structural design flaw. Marketers often say 'those are great metrics at our little table, but we trade at the table of profit, loss and balance sheet.' Try this with your CFO: take five businesses bought and sold in your industry over the last decade. Look at what the buyer paid, and compare it with the tangible assets: plants, land, cash in the bank. What's left over is intangible."

"Over the last 50 years, tangible assets have gone from around 90% of a company's value to maybe 20%. Some say 70% intangible, some 90%, but it's in that realm. So what are the intangibles? In the age of AI fake news: trust, reputation, brand, future pricing power, retention and the cost of recruiting and training. Every one of those is an intangible, and there's one C-suite leader who's the master of intangibles. That's us."

If a new CMO could put one intangible on the dashboard on Monday morning, what would it be?

"Price. That's where brands start, and it's a great time to look at it. Over the last five years, with post-Covid inflation and supply-chain crises, some brands could push through price increases without losing share, and others fell off a cliff. Compare the brand investment of those two groups five years ago and you have exactly the story a CFO can take back to the board: remember when we said this investment was worth making? Now look at the data."

AI, Apprentices and the Human Premium

If AI automates entry-level work, how do we build brilliant CMOs a decade from now?

"Those who say they know the answer are certainly wrong. But I'd say we're heading back to an era of apprentices. An apprentice is a junior who does the work that a senior person can't, or no longer has the time for, and they work side by side. Experienced marketers use AI to do things they'd never have had the budget or manpower for, like listening to 6,000 podcasts and pulling out the ten essentials. But there's also a lot the senior leader still thinks about, and we can pass on how to evaluate, and how to think about creativity, ideas and stakeholder management."

He expects a flatter pyramid, and points to NextGen boards as a model: "Juniors, with no experience and a fresh perspective, ask questions about things everyone believes to be true. AI doesn't do that. You can automate a lot, but you don't want to automate that away."

So what is uniquely human?

Marc credits Chris Burggraeve, former CMO of AB InBev, for pushing back on an early draft: are we sure humans are better at these things? "His point was fair. I don't know where AI will be in five years. Maybe more creative than you and I together. But today these are the skills. That's why the profile is Da Vinci. He was the model left-brain, right-brain thinker, but most people forget he was also a founder of the humanist movement. You bring a heart into it."

He gives a demonstration he uses in boardrooms: he shows a photo of a man in a queue, about twentieth in line, with a silver roller bag, and asks what the man feels, based on the data. "The CFO and CEO look at the data: 20 people ahead of him, he must be frustrated. Only the marketer says: look at the context. There are 200 people behind him, so he feels like the king of the hill. That's what a marketer knows. And if the marketer isn't in the room, you make the wrong decision."

What is next for Marketing 2030?

Marc's team is now collecting feedback from around 75 contributors before the full launch, with CMO summits planned in 15 cities and four follow-up initiatives: Agency 2030 (the ecosystem of the future), Windows on the World (the CMO's integrating role), a CMO-CFO playbook with McKinsey on intangible metrics, and a marketing AI excellence task force with Unilever, Mars, L'Oréal and Google. "Years ago Unilever wrote its first training on interactive marketing for 5,000 marketers. Now we're setting the standard for marketing excellence for organizations across the world."

Watch the full interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=iT5N3Em28_N8iONq&v=6aEEUPEw0Tk&feature=youtu.be

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