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Drawing on nearly 30 years in global business, former Volkswagen Group CMO and MTM Choice founder Alexei Orlov says today’s marketing leaders need to understand customers, commercial strategy, operations, and growth.
NEW YORK, USA, Sep 16, 2026, ZEX PR WIRE — The chief marketing officer may have “marketing” in the title, but Alexei Orlov believes the job requires a much broader understanding of how a business actually works.
After nearly three decades working across global brands, agencies, entrepreneurship, and executive leadership, Orlov has seen the marketing function from several sides. He spent eight years at Wunderman/WPP, eventually becoming Vice Chairman and helping lead a client portfolio worth approximately $300 million. He later served as Group CMO for Volkswagen across China and ASEAN, overseeing eight consumer brand portfolios during five consecutive years of record sales.
His career later took him into broader executive leadership, including serving as a Divisional CEO within Omnicom and founding MTM Choice.
Those experiences shaped Orlov’s view that marketing leaders cannot afford to understand only marketing.
“A CMO needs to understand what creates value for the customer, but also what creates value for the business,” Orlov said. “You cannot separate the brand from the commercial reality supporting it.”
Marketing Does Not Operate on Its Own
Marketing has traditionally been associated with advertising, communications, brand identity, and customer acquisition. Those responsibilities remain important, but Orlov believes the strongest marketing leaders understand what happens before and after a customer sees a campaign.
A promise made through marketing eventually has to be delivered by the business.
That means CMOs benefit from understanding pricing, distribution, customer experience, operations, product decisions, and the organization’s financial goals.
If marketing promises convenience while the customer encounters a complicated buying process, the campaign cannot solve the problem. If a company positions itself around premium service but consistently fails to deliver that service, stronger advertising may only make the gap more visible.
Orlov believes this is why marketing leadership increasingly requires a company-wide perspective.
“Customers do not experience an organization according to its departments,” Orlov said. “They experience the product, the service, the communication, the people, and whether the company ultimately does what it said it would do.”
For the CMO, understanding those connections can lead to better marketing decisions and better conversations with other executives.
Customer Behavior Belongs in the Boardroom
Orlov’s experience leading Volkswagen’s marketing activities across China and ASEAN reinforced the importance of understanding customers within their actual markets.
He was responsible for eight consumer brand portfolios across regions with different cultures, expectations, buying habits, and competitive environments.
The experience demonstrated that customer behavior cannot simply be reduced to a marketing metric.
What people buy, why they buy it, what they value, and what earns their trust can influence product strategy, pricing, investment, growth plans, and the broader direction of a business.
Orlov believes CMOs can bring that customer understanding into senior executive discussions.
“Marketing should be one of the places where the organization becomes more curious about the customer,” Orlov said. “But that knowledge becomes much more useful when it informs decisions beyond the marketing department.”
That requires marketers to look beyond clicks, impressions, reach, and campaign performance. They need to understand what customers are actually doing and how that behavior affects the business’s economics.
CMOs Need Commercial Fluency
Orlov also believes aspiring marketing leaders should become comfortable with the commercial side of business.
A creative idea can be excellent and still need to answer practical questions. What is the company trying to achieve? How does the work support growth? Which customers create the greatest opportunity? What resources will be required? How will success be measured?
The ability to participate in those conversations can change the role marketing plays within an organization.
Rather than operating as a department that receives a budget and produces campaigns, marketing can become part of how the company identifies opportunities and makes growth decisions.
Orlov saw the relationship between creativity and commercial performance differently when he moved further into executive leadership.
As a Divisional CEO within Omnicom, his responsibilities included integrating and transforming multiple businesses, improving commercial performance, and creating a more unified operating model.
Later, as the founder of MTM Choice, commercial questions became even more immediate.
Orlov secured $35 million in growth funding and built MTM Choice into an approximately 200-person multidisciplinary creative and advisory group generating roughly $55 million in annual revenue. Growing the company required decisions about people, investment, international expansion, clients, and organizational structure.
For Orlov, experiences like these reinforced the importance of understanding the entire business, not just one function within it.
Operations Can Strengthen or Undermine the Brand
Operations may seem far removed from marketing, but Orlov sees a close relationship between the two.
A brand is partly built through what a company says. It is also built through what happens after the customer responds.
A brilliant campaign may attract attention, but inventory shortages, poor service, confusing processes, or inconsistent delivery can quickly reshape how customers see the company.
That means marketing leaders should care about operational reality.
They do not need to run every department. They do need enough understanding to recognize when a marketing challenge is actually a product, service, or operational challenge.
Orlov believes that distinction can prevent companies from trying to advertise their way out of problems that marketing did not create.
Sometimes the best thing a CMO can do for a brand is identify where the customer promise and the customer experience have stopped matching.
The CMO Is Becoming a Broader Business Leader
For marketing professionals hoping to reach the C-suite, Orlov recommends developing experience beyond the discipline’s traditional boundaries.
That might mean becoming more comfortable with financial statements, participating in product discussions, spending time with sales and operations teams, learning how investment decisions are made, or better understanding how the company earns and retains customers.
It also means learning to communicate with executives who may approach problems very differently from marketers.
A CFO may begin with economics. An operations leader may begin with capacity and execution. A CEO may be balancing investors, employees, customers, and long-term strategy at the same time.
The CMO needs to participate in all of those conversations while continuing to represent the customer and protect the brand’s strength.
“You should understand your discipline deeply, but you should never allow your discipline to become the boundary of your curiosity,” Orlov said. “The more you understand about how the whole business works, the more useful you can become.”
For Orlov, that principle reflects his own progression from marketing and brand leadership into CEO, founder, and advisory roles.
The title may change, but the underlying lesson remains useful: understanding the customer is powerful. Understanding how the entire organization creates value for that customer is even more so.
About Alexei Orlov
Alexei Orlov is a global CEO, CMO, entrepreneur, and strategic adviser with nearly 30 years of experience building, transforming, and scaling businesses and consumer brands across the United States, United Kingdom, Europe, and Asia.
His career includes senior leadership roles at Volkswagen, Omnicom, and Wunderman/WPP. He is also the founder and former CEO of MTM Choice, which grew into an approximately 200-person multidisciplinary creative and advisory group with an international presence. Orlov secured $35 million in growth funding and helped build the company to approximately $55 million in annual revenue before transitioning it to new leadership. He remains an adviser to the chairman.
Today, Orlov works with founders, boards, investors, and leadership teams on business transformation, brand strategy, growth, and organizational change.
