Last week, I wrote about the gap CMOs are defending without knowing it. This week: what the gap is doing while you can’t see it.

Let’s say your company believes it owns “innovation.” Board decks say innovation. The brand tracker confirms it. Leadership alignment is strong. Everyone agrees. There’s just one problem.

Your customers chose you for reliability.

Not because you told them to. Because your product was the one that worked when they needed it. Because your support team answered. Because your platform didn’t go down during their busiest quarter.

They don’t think about you when they think “innovation.” They think about you when they think “it just works.” But nobody in the building knows this. Because nobody asked the right question. And the tools you have can’t surface the answer.

Here’s what happens next.

You build a strategy around innovation. You allocate budget to campaigns and emphasize it. You present innovation leadership as a competitive differentiator to the board.

Your VP translates that strategy into execution. Campaign plans are built around innovation themes. Team structures are optimized for product launch velocity. Performance metrics reward innovation-related KPIs.

The VP senses something is off. Sales feedback doesn’t match. Win/loss reports hint at a different story. But challenging the CMO’s strategic premise without hard evidence isn’t a career-advancing move. So the VP adjusts. Quietly. Around the edges.

Your Marketing Manager receives the brief. “Position us as innovation leaders.” They write the agency brief. They develop the competitive analysis — feature comparisons, product roadmaps, and innovation timelines. They entirely miss that customers are choosing based on reliability signals because the brief didn’t ask them to look there.

Your content team produces the work. Blog posts about innovation. Social content about innovation. Ad creative about innovation. The language they use sounds nothing like the language customers use to describe you.

Internal stakeholders love it. They share it. They comment on it. Engagement looks good — from employees. Not from buyers.

Nobody made a mistake. Every person did exactly what the system asked them to do. And every layer amplified the original error. That’s the cascade.

It doesn’t stop there.

Over 12–18 months, the gap between your narrative and market reality starts showing up in places that get attention. Campaign performance declines. Not dramatically. Just enough to trigger questions.

The CFO asks for tighter accountability. Budget scrutiny increases. Not because marketing failed — because the numbers aren’t going up the way they were supposed to.

You start reporting defensively. Metrics are reframed. Dashboards are redesigned. Not to lie — to survive. To present the version of truth that keeps the budget intact for another quarter.

Your VP absorbs the pressure. Passes it down. The Manager gets tighter constraints. Fewer risks allowed. The creative brief narrows. And the content team, already working from a positioning assumption that the market doesn’t hold, is pushed further into safe territory that resonates with nobody.

The system tightens. The gap widens.
Here’s what makes this structural, not situational.

Every feedback loop in the organization is pointed inward. Brand tracking measures what you put out. Not what the market takes in. Campaign metrics measure your activity. Not the customer’s perception. Internal alignment meetings confirm that everyone agrees — which is the problem, not the solution.

When the data contradict the narrative, organizations don’t reassess. They question the methodology. They adjust the tracking until it confirms what they already think. One CMO said it plainly: “We’re spending $250K on studies that tell us what we already believe.” That’s not measurement. That’s confirmation with a receipt.

The cascade has a body count.

Your best Managers, the ones who can see the gap, leave. They go somewhere that invests in better perception infrastructure. The ones who stay learn to stop raising the concern.

Your ICs, the ones closest to actual customer language through social and community channels, see the gap in real time. They read the comments. They know the reviews don’t match the brief. But they have no authority and no infrastructure to escalate what they observe.

The intelligence that could close the gap exists at the bottom of your org. The authority to act on it sits at the top. And there is no mechanism connecting the two.

You’re not managing a marketing department.
You’re managing a cascade.

One wrong assumption at the top. Four layers of amplification below. Feedback loops that reinforce rather than correct. And a 12-to-18-month delay before the consequences surface in a form the board can see.

By then, the narrative is already locked. The budget is already committed. The team has already built 18 months of work on a foundation that doesn’t match reality. And the next CMO will commission a new study. Wait 3 months. And start the cycle again.

This is the second post in a series for CMOs operating within systems designed to confirm what they already believe.

The first post was about the gap you’re defending. This one is about the gap you’re feeding. The question isn’t whether the cascade is happening beneath you. It is. The question is how long you want to keep building on it.