Play at cmogame.com. It's fun and it's free!

I made a game. It's called The CMO Game. 

You have 12 months and a $5M budget to launch a product and climb from Director of Marketing to the C-Suite. But your CEO has aggressive goals, and if you fail, it's game over.

It's like The Oregon Trail, but for marketing (and less dysentery).

You can play it right now at cmogame.com.

Why Make a Marketing Game?

One thing I keep coming back to is how hard it is to teach marketing. Books, lectures, and podcasts are great, but they're passive.

Marketing is learned by doing. By allocating budget with incomplete information. By investing in long-term brand while hitting this quarter's target. By navigating competing pressures from sales, finance, and the CEO.

I designed The CMO Game with this in mind, taking marketing education from passive to active.

Like my podcast A History of Marketing, it's free and built for marketers who want to get better.

How The CMO Game Works

You start by picking a product: soda, shoes, skincare, or software. Then you lock in positioning: premium, value, lifestyle, or disruptor. Each combination has unique marketing channels and tactics that work best.

Next, you hire your team and make pre-launch investments in brand identity, your website, market research, and promotional tactics. 

Then, you launch.

Over the next 12 months, you face unexpected challenges, respond, and adjust your budget. Every decision has tradeoffs.

The game models something I think is underrated in marketing education: the tension between brand and performance marketing. 

Brand grows like compound interest, it's invisible early and dominant late in the game. Performance marketing is efficient and immediate, but growth is linear and lacks long-term payoffs. 

The CMO Game reflects this tradeoff in your revenue and brand equity score.

Strategy, Luck, and the Messy Reality of Business

Not everything is in your control. Some months you get lucky. Other times you face a crisis. How you respond matters as much as how you plan.

Premium skincare, value sneakers, and enterprise software all require different approaches. The game rewards players who grasp this, and penalizes those who treat marketing as one-size-fits-all.

And yes, the CEO can fire you. If revenue stalls, if brand equity craters, if you make too many bad calls in a row... you'll end up #OpenToWork.

What Marketers Are Saying

I shared early builds of The CMO Game with marketers, professors, and friends who work in gaming. 

Elton X. Graham, CMO of Sur La Table, put it well:

"Mitrak's game sparks the right conversations by not giving you marketing answers, but better questions to ask... which is where real learning starts."

My former professor plans to use it in his Advanced Marketing course, describing it as a "great way to break the ice in the first class."

This is what excites me most: that people might learn timeless marketing principles while having fun playing a game.

Play It and Share It

The CMO Game is 100% free. No login. No email capture. No in-app purchases. Just cmogame.com.

A full playthrough takes 10-20 minutes, depending on how much time you spend considering your strategy.

If you’re happy with your results, you can submit your score to the “Hall of Fame” leaderboard. If you don't, try again with a different approach.

If you enjoy it, the best thing you can do is share it with someone: a colleague, a student, or a friend who's curious about marketing.

I'd love to hear what you think. Email me at hello [at] marketinghistory.org or find me on LinkedIn.