Companies are quietly shifting brand ownership from Marketing to Communications, and the signal is getting louder.

The rise of the Chief Communications and Brand Officer (CCBO) reflects a simple reality. Brand is now interpreted in real time by employees, regulators, press, partners, and AI systems that collapse everything a company says into one unified story.

Axios claims that a Heidrick and Struggles scan found eighty four Fortune 1000 executives with merged communications and brand mandates.

IBM, Dropbox, Anthropic, and GM have already placed brand inside communications because reputation now travels faster than campaigns. How a company behaves, responds, and explains itself shapes the brand more than any single creative moment. The CCBO model is a structural answer to that shift.

AI flattened the discovery funnel. LLMs surface “the company’s story” as a single, synthesized narrative. Comms teams are best equipped to shape and defend that narrative.

Reputation risk became real-time. A mid-tier creative decision can spark national controversy by lunchtime. Boards want someone who can read cultural volatility, not just build demand plays.

Stakeholder maps exploded. Trust-building now spans employees, regulators, communities, partners, and customers. Comms already owns those relationships across channels.

The brand is judged in moments marketing doesn’t control. Press, policy shifts, internal leaks, layoffs, political reactions, employee sentiment, all now shape perception more than the homepage hero.

The CEO wants a single point of narrative truth. This may be the key. A CCBO gives leadership one advisor who understands risk, culture, timing, and message discipline.

The stakes are higher in an outrage-driven world. American Eagle, Bud Light, and Cracker Barrel are the consumer examples, but B2B firms feel it too: buyer trust evaporates with one misread signal that catches fire.

Brand fragmentation has become a growth blocker. As we like to say around here, siloed teams stifle growth. Siloed comms + siloed marketing + siloed brand = inconsistent stories and confused markets. Consolidation in one form or another is the fix.

How should CMOs navigate this shift? Show the CEO that you can read risk as clearly as you shape narrative.

When you demonstrate that balance, you reinforce that brand belongs in Marketing, not in a newly merged comms structure.

If the CCBO trend tells us anything, it is that the safest jobs in marketing belong to the leaders who make their brands unmistakable.

When brand ownership drifts toward Communications, it is usually because the work has become too safe, too neutral, too easy to overlook. The surest way to stay essential is to build a brand that cannot be mistaken for anyone else. This is often not really that difficult in B2B.

It begins and ends with being bold.

We repeat it often because most brands still drift toward the comfortable middle. George Sanders’ argument in this Drum article is a good reminder. Playing safe feels responsible, but it slowly erodes distinctiveness until the brand no longer commands attention, internally or externally. That is when control of the narrative starts to slip away.

The opportunity for CMOs is simple. Use creative risk as proof of strategic clarity.

Show that you can guide a team toward ideas that matter, ideas that provoke feeling, ideas that create mental availability. The fact that next to no one in your category is doing so is a green light, not a warning sign.

We help B2B teams build that kind of clarity.

Make fewer choices (and make them more substantial).

McKinsey’s new “Seven tests for B2B growth” lays out what separates companies that consistently outpace their markets. The most striking insight, viewed through our theme this week, is their finding that top performers always commit to a small portfolio of three to five meaningful growth bets. Not ideas. Not experiments. Actual bets, each big enough to move enterprise revenue by roughly 100 basis points.

That level of discipline is exactly what CMOs need right now. Brand power is shifting toward Communications because too many marketing teams spread themselves thin, chase incremental wins, and leave the narrative up for interpretation. McKinsey’s growth leaders do the opposite. They choose what matters, ignore what doesn’t, and signal conviction to the rest of the business. For CMOs navigating a tighter power map, that kind of clarity is the thing that earns trust and protects the seat.

CMOs who want to hold onto brand leadership need to operate with the same clarity as top B2B growth companies.

Choose a small set of meaningful bets, commit to them, and make the narrative unmistakably yours. Strategic focus builds credibility, and credibility is the leverage that protects your influence in a shifting power landscape.

Attention is collapsing in the same way narrative control is collapsing.

This new CSG data shows what happens when brands flood the market with messages instead of meaning. Seventy percent of consumers now say they no longer care what brands say, and many are deleting critical messages because they assume everything is noise. More than one third have stopped buying from a brand entirely because the communication volume became unbearable.

The pattern mirrors our theme this issue. CMOs are losing brand ownership when their work becomes easy to ignore. Excessive messaging accelerates that erosion. What protects your seat is not more personalization or more touchpoints. It is clarity, restraint, and narrative discipline. The brands that stand out speak less often and with more intention.

Consumers are drowning in communication, and the volume is destroying trust rather than creating relevance.

Personalization is not the antidote. Clarity is. Restraint is. A coherent, unified narrative is.

Most CMOs think they’re losing brand power because Communications is gaining influence. That is only the surface. The deeper truth is that narrative ownership drifts toward the person who shows the most certainty about what the brand should mean, how it should behave, and where it should take a stand.

—Jay