Steve Odland: [00:00:00] Welcome to C-Suite Perspectives, a signature series by The Conference Board. I'm Steve Odland from The Conference Board and the host of this podcast series. And in today's conversation, we're going to talk about The Conference Board's 2026 C-Suite Outlook survey and the specific implications for the marketing and communications areas.

The C-Suite Outlook survey was carried out in the end of 2025 with more than 1,700 C-suite executives responding, including 771 CEOs from around the world. And this is the 27th annual survey that we have conducted for the C-Suite Outlook. So, a longtime survey and really interesting results.

Joining me today is Ivan Pollard, the leader of our Marketing & Communications Center. Ivan, welcome.

Ivan Pollard: Thank you for having me, Steve. Looking forward to it.

Steve Odland: So Ivan, this is the survey we do every year. You've been part of this for many years. And there's lots of really interesting stuff that has come out of this survey. We're going to [00:01:00] focus together today on the marketing/communications areas, but got a lot of CEOs and a lot of CMOs and CCOs who have taken this survey.

It's interesting to see where CEOs and CMOs are aligned and where they are different. Maybe you could just give us a top line on that.

Ivan Pollard: Top line on that is actually globally, there is alignment, in terms of the priority order. And yet some of the focus points for the CEO and the CMO do start to diverge a little bit, by which I mean, whilst they might rank something number one, both of them rank something number one, 20% of CEOs think it's the most important, but maybe 40% of CMOs think it's the most important.

Steve Odland: Yeah, but better alignment than we've seen in the past. And this is important cause, as you and I have talked about many times, the turnover among CMOs is really high. What, two every two or three years? Which means that they're not meeting each other's expectations in total. So [00:02:00] getting alignment is really important here.

And I think, one of the key areas that we've learned in this study, as well as past studies, is that CEOs are really focused on trying to drive growth. How did you see the focus on growth diverge in this survey?

Ivan Pollard: So actually I think that they are both focused on growth. I think the way that the CMO has to react to that and drive it is dictated by the CEO. And CMOs do tend to follow it. And as you said, if they don't, they don't stay around. And if they do it really well, some other CEO will try and pinch them. So, tenures are short. But in terms of driving growth, revenue growth, brand building, customer experience tend to be the same for the CMO and the CEO to focus. And we do see a few regional differences from place to place, but they're pretty much aligned in terms of what needs to happen to make growth come about.

Steve Odland: OK. Now how about [00:03:00] profitability?

Ivan Pollard: Yeah, profitability's an interesting question, Steve, because one of the things that I think is a tension point—always has been and always will be between those driving marketing and those driving the business—is proving that money spent actually returns profitable growth. It's easy to spend money to chase growth. It's not easy to do it profitably.

And that's the challenge for marketers: that they have to adapt and adopt to new market conditions and new opportunities, and prove that every dollar spent is worth spending because it returns growth.

Steve Odland: Yeah, and CEOs are focused on the outside community and their shareholders and investors or owners, if they're private. And they've got to be thinking about profitability at all times. And sometimes I think it's kind of a view among CEOs, but also others in an organization, that marketing people are, they're just spending, and they call it an investment, but it never really returns.

That's not fair, and it's not true, necessarily, but that is the rap [00:04:00] on this. And you kind of pick that up over time, don't you?

Ivan Pollard: Yeah. And I think as I say, I think that's a really productive and creative tension. A marketer wants to experiment and find new markets, areas, new segments, new innovation, new routes to market. That often takes investment to get there. And you need to prove short-term returns in order for the CEO to have their strategy and their objectives fulfilled. So I think it's a creative tension, Steve, but I don't disagree. It's a tension.

Steve Odland: Yeah. So, and where does marketing rank, relative to business model changes, as a driver of that profitability?

Ivan Pollard: So it is interesting, as you say, we've been doing this for several years. We always see marketing and promotional spending in the top two or three objectives and strategies to drive growth. So they come near the top of the list. This year, marketing's ranked third by CEOs from the selections that are offered. It was fifth last year, but was tied together with promotional spending. And that's what the [00:05:00] CEO thinks.

Relative to business model changes, business model changes are first: 51% of CEOs globally are seeing that as their top priority. And it's the constant choice, actually, across all C-suite leaders, by the way, including the CMOs. So how we find business model changes is going to be an interesting challenge for 2026.

The second ranked for CEOs was price rises, so increasing prices, and that's a big change since last year, where price rises were ranked seventh on the list. So, marketing and promotional spending is going to be important to drive growth. Business model change is going to be even more important.

And some places, we are going to see people having to put prices up. Inflation's an issue, in many cases driving prices, but it's also a market in which there are opportunities to create more revenue by increasing.

Steve Odland: Yeah, this whole pricing area, though, is a real slippery slope because you've got [00:06:00] a lot of political pressure out there and consumer pressure. And politicians just don't think the companies should be raising prices. When your supply chain costs are going up and your input costs are going up, you have to do something to raise productivity and raise profitability. So it a real tough tension that companies face.

Ivan Pollard: It is, Steve. And we've been through it before, and those with experience of having dealt with it can apply that experience to what's going on now. But what is going on now, I think, is different in terms of its speed and its scale and its implications.

So all around the world, actually, price rises was a top three choice for CEOs, with one exception, which is Asia, where it was the seventh-ranked choice, with only 15% of executives prioritizing this.

With that uncertainty that is being generated by economic and geopolitical, but also technological and societal shifts, there's both opportunity and risk. And the truth is, prices are [00:07:00] going up. And if businesses are expected to grow profitably, at some stage, you're going to have to play that card. And it's going to differ, industry by industry, of course, about what the dynamics are and what the elasticity is. That means that your customer is willing to accept a price rise if it's explained sensibly and they understand it, and more importantly, if they still see value created on their behalf.

Steve Odland: Yeah. You mentioned these tensions that are global, and of course, there are these exogenous tensions, like geopolitical tensions and wars and that kind of thing. But AI is a huge thing. It's disrupted everybody's thinking, it's disrupted views of investment. Talk about the priorities around AI.

Ivan Pollard: Well, AI is, we've talked about this before on this podcast, it is an inflection point, not just in how we get things done, but what business even means. I don't know if you've noticed, Steve, but I still watch television, and I saw some good old-fashioned TV ads from [00:08:00] IBM. And their end line is IBM will help you change how AI helps you do business. So, the idea that business is going to change is a real big thing.

AI as a priority is pretty much up there in the top three for everybody. And in fact, when we get to marketing, many CEOs put AI and marketing in the top three priorities. In fact, CEOs rank it fifth of the 10 priorities for marketers, and marketers rank it fourth. But the telling factor inside of that is when you ask them, well, what are your priorities within AI, rather than AI for business? What are your priorities in ai? It is actually, for both the CEO and the CMO, proving that the investments in AI are changing business productively.

It's not just about productivity gains and efficiencies. It's now about effectiveness and proving that the money I spend is generating more money on the revenue growth. And so those ideas are coming [00:09:00] here, and I think there's more to come in this space than perhaps we realize.

Steve Odland: It's a really interesting thing because two or three years ago, CEOs couldn't spell AI, and then all of a sudden they're spending crazy amounts on AI. And last year, we were told by CEOs that their biggest fear was that they were going to fall behind and their competitors were going to spend more and get ahead of them. It was almost like they were blindly throwing money at it before they really understood what it is. I feel like it's more focused here, and marketers in particular are using AI as a tool, more like apps and, more like software tools than just this blind, undefined thing.

Ivan Pollard: Yeah, I think that's a really insightful comment, Steve, and the data kind of hints at it, doesn't tell it exactly, but hints at it.

So both the CEO and the CMO and actually the CFO are all focused on proving and improving the ROI on AI. And, of course, other expenditures such as marketing. So the data [00:10:00] inputs and the outputs, improving the quality of that to try and see how this is working, is really important.

When you dive into the priorities for CMOs, you are exactly right. I think the CMOs are seeing this now not as a task to be done—where are you on AI?—but as a tool to be used to deliver on the expectations of marketing: growth, new ideas, customer experience. So we're seeing that happen. For instance, 25% of CEOs rank "leverage the most effective AI tools" as one of their top two AI priorities for growing the business. But 34% of CMOs say the same thing: I'm after leveraging the tools to grow the business.

Steve Odland: About a half a dozen years ago, the human capital area started talking their use of ai and it was really large language models and quantitative stuff. Really, marketing has begun to use and leapfrog those uses in agentic AI and also [00:11:00] creative AI and content production. Those two areas have really vaulted marketing. I mean, the speed at which people can create campaigns and understand their customers, analyze and do one-to-one marketing, all the things that we used to dream about. It's really affected that, and marketers are demonstrating that around the world.

Ivan Pollard: Yeah, I think you're right. We do see some regional differences, actually, in where AI is and where companies are around the world. But I remember us asking AI, " Hey, which business unit should adopt AI first?" And even AI told you marketing should, because that ambition to do marketing at the right moment, to the right person, in the right way, but to do it at a cost that was affordable—AI has unlocked that through the digital ecosystem.

So I do think we were very fast in marketing to get to content creation, to scenario planning, to predictive analytics. We're seeing the rise of things [00:12:00] like synthetic data to test scenarios and to look at, for instance, pricing models and see how they're not always going to be right, but they're better, faster, and smarter. And now with agentic AI, they're much more adaptable and can work end-to-end processes.

But I think we're also at a pivot area here. So one of the things I thought was interesting in the C-Suite Outlook survey was: One of the top priorities for a CEO is enhancing AI expertise, and yet that's lower down the list for the CMO. And I hope this isn't a moment of hubris where the marketers believe and the communicators believe that they've worked AI out. Cause AI is going to change again with agentic.

And as you and I were discussing the other day, we think there's going to be a shift from e-commerce, which was coined in the '80s, electronic commerce, to "aCommerce." So agentic commerce, where AI search and AI agents start to do all of the work that we used to do ourselves to find which is our new [00:13:00] supplier in our supply chain, or which are the new pair of running shoes I'm going to buy to finally do a marathon.

So all of that sort of stuff is going to change. Agentic will change everything from the customer journey, the funnel, the pipeline, the conversion, pricing, transactions, payments, customer service, innovation—almost everything marketing has to do will have to adapt to agentic. And my proposition is, I think actually a lot of what businesses have to do will have to adjust to agentic. So marketing might lead, everybody else is going to do their thing, too.

Steve Odland: I just want to point out to our listeners, first time you've heard the term aCommerce, and you're listening to the guy who created it, Ivan Pollard, head of our Marketing & Communications Center. Brilliant term, Ivan.

Ivan Pollard: Thank you. Again, we'll have to learn how to spell it properly, Steve.

Steve Odland: Yeah, I think it starts with an A, but who knows. Listen, we're talking about our C-Suite challenge and our survey that we do every year and its impact on marketing and communications. We're going to take a short break and be right back.[00:14:00]

Welcome back to C-Suite Perspectives. I'm your host, Steve Odland, from The Conference Board, and I'm joined by Ivan Pollard, leader of our Marketing & Communications Center. So, Ivan, in the first half, we were talking at length about the CMO and their responses to our surveys. Let's shift for a moment to the CCO, the chief communications officer, and talk about what some of the key insights were from CCOs in this survey.

Ivan Pollard: It's interesting, and I think when you look at the expectations, as we said, the CEO wants the CMO and their team to drive growth and to build short-term revenue, returns, profitability. But also actually, we saw brand building come up the list for a little bit more of building long-term value into the brand.

The CEO, for communications, actually thinks much more long term. They're top, by far, the top priority for communications in the eyes of the CEO is much more strategic. It's about the long-term expectations [00:15:00] of all of the shareholders and all of the stakeholders and all of the investors, including employees and customers, of course, and it's about their expectations and how you meet those.

So, 41% of CEOs pick corporate strategy as their number one priority. And the second priority for corporate communications is. at 28%. is internal communications, which is both a short-term thing, responding to crises, but is more important to the CEO as a long-term, "How do I engage the workforce?"

Steve Odland: Yeah, the CCO title and area is a little more complex. Everybody knows what a CMO does. The CCOs sometimes report to the CEO, sometimes report to the CMO, sometimes report to the CHRO. So there are internal and external communications priorities depending on what the firm is. Sometimes there are multi-stakeholder priorities, including investor relations. So all of this is a little bit under the umbrella of CCO.

As you look at the priorities [00:16:00] for communications in total, how are CEOs talking about it differently today than they may have in past years?

Ivan Pollard: Well, I think we've seen a flip that started, I think, with COVID, which was the comms team used to be there for taking the order and telling the story that the executives wanted to put across to any given set of stakeholders. And then occasionally, they would be asked for their input to strategy.

I think we saw that flip during COVID and beyond that, which is the really smart CEO and the really smart CCO work together. Because actually, the communications team tend to be, from what you said, Steve, it doesn't matter how or who they report to, but they have to cover all of those stakeholders, and they have to understand what's on their mind and how that might shape strategy.

So the CCO, the corporate communications leaders, and their team have become more of an input to strategy perhaps than they were before. And this doesn't get them off the hook for still doing that immediate [00:17:00] response to issues that arise. So we have to do both of those. But actually, in today's tumultuous environment, with constant change and uncertainty, that input loop is a constant ongoing thing, where what stakeholders say and what they expect should affect your strategy and your tactics for what you're going to do tomorrow.

I think the comms role has changed. I think the marketing role has changed just as much, by the way. So, ask a CMO what they do, and if they're not connected to the CCO, they're going to, they're going to run out of steam.

Steve Odland: I think you make an important point here because the comms team used to put out press releases, announce what was going on, basically take what was given to them and go. What you're saying now is it's kind of a loop, and they need to feed what they're hearing from the constituents back in.

But the constituents are multi here. You've got customers, employees, owners. You've got community, you've got environmentalists. So it's all of that. And they've got to balance that. So it used to be thought of as internal and [00:18:00] external communications, but when you're thinking about it strategically, it all kind of comes together and is a way of packaging the story and really affecting the strategic implementation. That's different, isn't it?

Ivan Pollard: It is. I mean, it affects strategy formulation, strategy implementation, the narrative around the strategy that gets people aligned to it.

We have a corporate communications event every year at The Conference Board that's been going on for many years. And a few years ago, they coined the term "mixternal." There was no such thing anymore as internal comms and external. There was no such thing as investor relations that your employees did not hear about. So that's a connected loop, especially with social media and with all of the voice of the employee being out there, but also the activists and the commentators and the media.

Those things now interconnect, and you have to be on top of that, feeding that machine, but also feeding off that machine.

Steve Odland: Our world is shrinking, [00:19:00] Ivan. And even if companies and listeners are focused on one country, call it the United States, you really can't get away from the geopolitical influence on everything that's going on.

And yeah, there's been war before. Yeah, there's been trade issues before, but it just seems that we are in one tightly interconnected world today. And social media is one aspect of that. How do you see priorities changing here for 2026, given all of these geopolitical tensions and interactions coming into play?

Ivan Pollard: Well, we had a little bit of a lesson in 2025, in the last few months. And I think it's not slowing down. And we're not getting that much better at handling it. So we have to be prepared for rapid, agile response to things that go on.

So, the priorities are staying pretty much the same. Those [00:20:00] external factors that will shape the way businesses are doing business, they are the same, but they are, to your point, Steve, that world is getting smaller. It's also getting smarter, and it's definitely getting faster. So something happens in place A, and suddenly businesses have to adapt to it in place B through Z.

So that those things are happening and I think what. Companies have come to realize what the 2026 outlook is telling us is: Listen, sure there are threats, and there is always the parameters outside, like shifting behaviors, that often present threats, but more importantly, present opportunities. And when everything's settled down, if you are in business, you have to shake the tree to get a customer. Now the ground is shaking, and the fruit is falling. So you've got to work out where you can best take advantage of this.

And so, for instance, shifting consumer buying behaviors as an external factor. It's up five points from last year for where it is in terms of the CMO priorities around the world. And has [00:21:00] stayed roughly the same up a little bit for CEOs. So, it's the number two priority for CMOs around the world—shifting consumer behaviors and how can I capitalize on that to add value and drive growth?

Steve Odland: Yeah, and I think what we're hearing from CCOs and CMOs around the world really is that, when stuff happens somewhere, the old model was, marketers and CCOs looked at that and go, does that affect me? No. OK, check, move on. But in fact, you have to almost assume it's going to affect you, and you have to therefore say, "OK, something, something just happened in the South China Sea. Now how is that going to affect me, and what do I need to do about it?"

So you need to game this out even though it may seem irrelevant. So this is the point, that you can no longer assume that these faraway events are isolated.

Ivan Pollard: No, and I think we're seeing a rise in the power of agentic systems to actually help us do that. The "what if?" scenario. The Conference Board for instance, has a Gray Swans Tool [00:22:00] you can put into things like that. The "What if this happened, what should I do?" But more importantly now with synthetic data, then plan out "What will be the implications and outcomes if I do X instead of Y?"

So, yeah, the world is connected, and it moves fast, and if you don't move as fast as the world moves, you will get left behind.

Steve Odland: One of the key things that we saw in this survey for 2026 is the priority for customer experience. What does that mean?

Ivan Pollard: This was a really interesting point. Last year, it was pretty high, as well, and we saw enhancing the customer experience coming up. It was number two or number three priority for almost everybody for affecting business growth. And I think what this means is that the expectations of your customers—irrespective of what business you're in—the expectations of customers for quality, value, service, responsiveness, value for money, ethical behavior, [00:23:00] societal behavior, those expectations will continue to rise as we get more transparency into how business is conducted.

And I think there is another aspect of it for me, which is the more automated transactions and interactions between a company and its customer, the more automated they get, I think the more advantageous it will be to have a human interaction. Our customer experience will change over time. I think it's going to be an issue that the marketing teams and, in fact, the entire business leadership team will have to think about the human nature mixed with the automated nature of interactions. And that experience needs to constantly improve.

Steve Odland: It's an interesting thing because now, with all of the input of AI and the implementation around the world, human beings become differentiating. And at the end of the day, we do business with people, and we make friendships with [00:24:00] people, social things. So B2B and B2C are affected by this. It's a really important point going forward. That doesn't just go away. You hear all these companies talk about, well, we're going to use AI and do away with customer service jobs. Yeah. And they're also doing away with customer service, period. It's just really awful. Even the best ones are just not the same.

It's a really important point that people have to think about this. Customer experience used to be a retail focus because you deal with your customers directly. It was never a focus for, say, consumer products marketers, But increasingly, as there is direct communication, social media, interaction on the website, even if you're not directly selling to the consumer, that customer experience with them is something people should be thinking about.

Ivan Pollard: That experience is going to get reshaped. I used to go on a website to read about a company and what its mission was, and then I'd look at its employees, I'd see what they were saying on Glassdoor and then I would say, OK, I'm going to get you to come [00:25:00] and build my roof, or I'll buy a car from you, or this is where I'm going to buy my favorite ice cream.

Increasingly, that's getting shortcut by AI, just by the AI search and the AI Overview, and I think, whilst that has advantages for efficiency and effectiveness and speed, I do think it's got question marks over where the human factor, like you said Steve. How do I learn to trust and value what it is you say you're going to do, and what are the implications if it goes wrong?

So customer service, I think, and the end-to-end customer experience from the first time I meet you to the last time I interacted with you and bought your product. Those things are getting more connected. And of course, if my experience is bad, like Winston Churchill said, a bad story will get halfway around the world before you've had your time to put your trousers on in the morning. So that speed, if he thought that in 1940, the speed of that today is the backlash, the things that happen with a [00:26:00] bad customer experience, they can get amplified very quickly.

Steve Odland: And the key insight from that is, wear your trousers at night to bed. Listen, any final thoughts, insights from this survey?

Ivan Pollard: I would urge everybody to have a look at it cause, as you said, Steve, we saw the transition to a bit of a tumultuous world last year. This is now businesses thinking, OK, how do we move forward within this uncertainty? And for the marketing and communications teams, they have to get better at marketing, and they have to get better at communications, without a doubt. But this survey will help you get better at doing business.

Steve Odland: And they can find the results of this survey and our analytics at TCB—that's initials of The Conference Board—dot org.

Ivan Pollard, thanks for being with us today and sharing your insights.

Ivan Pollard: Thank you very much for having me, Steve.

Steve Odland: And thanks to all of you for listening to C-Suite Perspectives. I'm Steve Odland, and this series has been brought to you by The Conference Board.