Meet the 2025 Forbes World’s Most Influential CMOs: The Leaders Redefining Marketing

The 13th annual Forbes World's Most Influential CMOs list recognizes 50 chief marketers whose influence on brands and business around the world stands apart.

Influence is a funny thing. Not ha-ha funny but rather the hard-to-define, hard-to-precisely-quantify, kind of funny, like how the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is funny.

In our world, which is to say the world of business globally and marketing specifically, influence often hides-in-plain-sight, and can be confused with visibility, or a type of popularity measured by follower counts, “likes”, or the stuff of performative thought leadership.

And while these can provide and be platform for the exercise of influence, in and of themselves, they’re not proof of it. They’re optics, and as the unreliable testimony of an eye-witness proves, optics can distort.

The most influential CMOs are not necessarily those posting or speaking on panels most often. Theirs often isn’t the loudest voice in the room, because sometimes like that not done that not said speaks volumes.

As we at Forbes consider the evolving nature, impact, and measurement of influence, we offer that nothing is as influential as impact. We are certain that the ultimate measure of influence is not about the spotlight but a CMO’s commercial impact on the business and brands they help steward, and the marketing community globally.

We are certain the most effective exercise of a CMO’s influence lies in their ability to change the attitudes and behaviors of others—the “consumers” and “customers” they court externally and, as surely, their C-suite colleagues and teams internally.

We know that not every job brilliantly done necessarily gets recognition, and that the measure and impact of a CMO’s influence amongst their global peers—the kind that moves markets, companies, culture, and behaviors in service of commercial returns—doesn’t always announce itself.

Which is why, in partnership with Sprinklr and with supplemental data provided by LinkedIn, we take a broad, multifaceted, rigorous, and data-led approach to our evaluation. Beginning with an eligible universe of over 1500 CMOs from industries around the world, using 20 proxies for it, and through an analysis of 10 billion data points (up from 9 billion YoY), we concern ourselves with what can be seen, understood, and evaluated.

Of course, like the job of the CMO itself, the nature of influence itself continues evolving. As marketing authority becomes ever more decentralized, distributed, and democratized, so too does CMO influence. That which once flowed top-down, is now networked, lateral, circular, ambient. The tools of marketing influence are now in everyone’s hands, sentient and not.

Brand-building and, sometimes brand-tearing-down, has become a shared exercise among stakeholders inside and outside any given company—across the C-suite, business units, customer support, comms, operations, employee advocacy, and every keyboard with or without a corporate login.

All of this and the shifting sands of consumer sentiment, tech acceleration, geopolitical unrest, economic uncertainty, the absence of understanding of what marketing truly is and does from CEOs and CFOs without experience in the practice, cultural fragmentation and 1000 other things, makes the effective deployment of a CMO’s influence more complex than ever.

It also makes the achievement of being recognized on a list measuring it even more meaningful.

The 50 chief marketers on the 2025 Forbes World’s Most Influential CMOs list, along with the six 2025 Forbes CMO Hall of Fame inductees, are shaping the companies they serve, the character and destiny of industry, and in ways that might not yet be recognizable, the world itself.

They are influencing others through word, work, actions, inactions, culture, peers, platforms, partnerships, and impacts—not hierarchy. They aren’t just influencing what a brand says but shaping how a company thinks, what it does, and when, why, and how often others buy. They aren’t just steering creative—they’re stewarding growth. They’re leading from the center, even if their titles—and/or CEOs and Boards—don’t always put them there.

Individually and collectively, their influence and impact deserve our appreciation, and their examples our consideration.