Today’s CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) face a set of completely different challenges than their predecessors as a result of the emergence of new media, the growing number of sales and service touch points, more complex distribution models, and the fragmentation of customer segments. Successful CMOs have moved from focusing primarily on brands and clever advertising to serving in a larger, more strategic role designed to enable a company to meet the ever-changing needs of a diverse and global customer base. Even though the tenure of CMOs has increased, the scrutiny hasn’t.
In an environment where the CMO is being asked to prove Marketing’s value every day, what can a CMO do today to survive and thrive? To survive and thrive, CMOs need to see themselves as champions of growth who develop a strategy that can anticipate customers, develop their organizations’ Marketing capabilities, and measure Marketing’s impact on the business in terms that matter to their CEOs, CFOs, and leadership teams. This will require CMOs with a bent towards the analytical end of the Marketing spectrum instead of the creative end. Successful CMOs will need to exercise analytical muscle and have a deep understanding of the business landscape in order to predict and recommend which markets, products, and/or services will deliver the most profitable revenue growth.
Six Survival Tips for CMOs
According to board members surveyed for the MarketBridge study, CMOs with greater quantitative focus and measurement emphasis have a 20 percent longer tenure. Specifically, surviving CMOs will need to exhibit these six skills:
- Move business-focused responsibilities to the front and center.
- Talk in the language of business. This includes reading balance sheets, understanding business models, as well as key drivers of business value, and identifying key growth opportunities.
- Leverage emerging marketing channels to build strong brand loyalty, reach targeted audiences, and gain insight into customer needs.
- Understand which metrics are valuable for demonstrating the impact of marketing on the business.
- Build collaborative teams committed to adding and demonstrating value to the business.
- Prove that the investments they are making on behalf of the company are working.
Five Ingredients for Thriving
While surviving CMOs will focus on demand generation, pipeline management, branding and customer acquisition, the most important ingredient for thriving CMOs is their ability to increase their stake in growing customer lifetime value and focus on developing long-term customer profitability.
Four remaining essentials for the thriving CMO include:
- Embracing analytics and metrics and leading the way for Marketing Performance Management (MPM) initiatives.
- Closing the gap between the company and the customer, leading the charge for a customer-centric business strategy, and serving as the “voice of the customer”.
- Leveraging data to analyze market and customer trends and strengthening their knowledge of ethnography, lead-user analysis, and online customer communities to create customer-driven products.
- Taking the helm in helping the company anticipate and respond to rapidly changing market and customer needs, creating new business models, and leading the charge in establishing new Marketing capabilities.
CMOs who want to survive and thrive must actively align every brand touch point under the corporate umbrella with the core values of the corporate entity and reconcile the brands with one another. They must initiate intra-business collaborations that develop, deliver and communicate a value proposition that resonates with customers.
Only by building tight relationships between Marketing and the rest of the organization and developing relationships outside the business will CMOs be able to tap into customer information that enables the business to extend into emerging markets and bring innovative products to market. CMOs will need to use their creativity to develop new ways to gain a deeper insight into the needs of customers and understand the trade-offs that will be required to design innovative products that meet customers’ buying criteria.
The global market is growing in complexity. Only those CMOs who can leverage data-management tools and processes to help companies maintain a consistent brand while optimizing pricing, placement and promotion within specific markets and connecting Marketing to the business, will be left standing.
Thriving CMOs Earn a Seat at the Strategy Table
To earn a seat at your organization’s strategy table requires CMOs to go beyond blocking and tackling. For Marketing to be a success in any organization, the CEO must believe customer value is the focus of the Marketing organization. Without this perspective, it may be difficult for Marketing to rise above Sales support. And with so many C level persons and boards being preoccupied with short term performance right now, your ability to be a source of revenue and profits are key.
Upon asking Marketing executives who have achieved seats at the table how they did it, a few key themes surfaced.
- Each has a keen understanding of the competition and customers.
- Each delivered demonstrable results
- Each employed quantitative performance indicator is the language of the C-Suite
- Each worked collaboratively with across the organization
- The thriving CMOs didn’t go it alone. They tapped external expertise to expand capabilities and close skills gaps.
You will need a solid handle on metrics and must be comfortable using quantitative tools to demonstrate your impact, make pricing and placement decisions and test and modify promotional strategies. It can be very difficult to master both sides of the equation, addressing the challenges of profitably solving customer problems and growing the business and also having to market Marketing internally.
Thriving CMOs Have a Marketing Plan that Connects the Dots
Does Your Marketing Plan Address
2 Key Performance Indicators?
FAQ:
A: New media, complex distribution, fragmented segments, and multiple touchpoints require CMOs to shift from brand/advertising focus to a strategic role enabling companies to meet diverse, global customer needs.
A: Proving Marketing’s value daily while navigating higher scrutiny—despite increased tenure. CMOs must demonstrate impact in terms that matter to CEOs, CFOs, and leadership.
A: They see themselves as champions of growth who anticipate customer needs, develop organizational capabilities, and measure impact in business terms—leaning analytical over creative.
A: CMOs with greater quantitative focus and measurement emphasis have 20% longer tenure—proving that analytical rigor drives survival.
A: (1) Move business-focused responsibilities to center, (2) talk business language (balance sheets, drivers, growth), (3) leverage emerging channels, (4) understand valuable metrics, (5) build collaborative teams, and (6) prove investments are working.
A: Increasing stake in customer lifetime value and long-term customer profitability—moving beyond demand generation and acquisition.
A: (1) Embrace analytics and lead MPM, (2) close company-customer gap and be voice of customer, (3) leverage data for market/customer trends and innovation, and (4) anticipate change and establish new capabilities.
A: By understanding competition/customers, delivering demonstrable results, using quantitative language, collaborating across the organization, and tapping external expertise to close capability gaps—proving Marketing drives revenue and profits
Recent Posts
- From Hindsight to Foresight: Closing the Growth Measurement Gap
- Focus on Solving Customer Pain Points to Future-Proof Your Company | What’s Your Edge?
- The Destiny of Siloed Priorities is Random Acts
- The Power of Customer-Led Product Development for Market Growth | What’s Your Edge?
- Footprint Expansion: A Customer-Centric Growth Strategy for Scaling
You must be logged in to post a comment.