70% of Marketing Leaders Are Stuck on Channels, Not Business

Ask a marketing leader how last quarter went and the answer usually sounds like a media plan: search CPL down 12%, Meta ROAS holding at 3.8x, maybe reach and follower counts. What’s missing is whether the business itself is healthier.

The India CMO Index 2026, reported by Afaqs!, found that 70% of marketing leaders identify short-termism and ROI pressure as their biggest challenge. That statistic deserves a pause: the system is not producing bad marketers. It is producing rational ones responding to the incentives in front of them.

Channel metrics are not business metrics

Channel metrics track what happens on a platform; business metrics track what happens to the company. A brand can lower its cost per lead by targeting cheaper, lower-intent audiences. It can lift ROAS by retargeting people who would have bought anyway. Each move makes the dashboard look better. Each quietly hurts the business.

Social media reporting has the same blind spot. Reach, likes and follower growth can look healthy while the brand’s margin and retention stand still. The question to ask a social media agency is not “how much reach did we buy?” but “what did this work do for margin and retention?”

The incentive problem is structural

Most marketing leaders are evaluated on CPL and ROAS. Bonuses are tied to those numbers. So the system rewards channel management, and channel management is what talent produces. The logic is airtight; the outcome is a set of brilliant campaign reviews that never touch the P&L.

Brand building is the compounding interest of marketing—invisible in the short run, irreplaceable in the long run.

— Nandita Kamath, CMO, Britannia Industries

The same long-run logic applies to business-level thinking. Its returns show up in margin trajectory and customer retention, not next month’s dashboard.

What a business-level review opens with

Channel data does not need to be dropped. It needs to be subordinated. A business-level review starts with three questions:

• What did marketing contribute to contribution margin, not just revenue?
• What is the payback period for new customer acquisition, and is it rising?
• How does this year’s cohort quality compare with last year’s?

Once those are answered, channel metrics become useful supporting evidence rather than the main event. In review meetings, join marketing data to finance data. Real-time dashboard optimisation creates a myopia where campaigns look brilliant on screen and hollow in the P&L, as Afaqs! noted from the 10th Digies Conference.

From dashboard owner to business partner

Marketers who bring business-level answers earn a seat in strategic decisions. Those who bring channel dashboards earn a budget review. The channels will keep running either way; the real question is whether the business is moving.

Source: Afaqs!