In the U.S., the average tenure for a CMO is roughly 23 months. In the U.K., it is even shorter. Al Ries states over at AdAge that of all the firms in the Fortune 1000, only 7% of the most highly paid executives have marketing in their job title, and only 15% of those same firms even have a senior level marketing position, such as CMO.
When we consider that commoditization, not just of brands, but of entire industries has never happened faster or with greater impact, we know that something is wrong. Surely marketing exists to fight such commoditization and help the business find continued competitive advantage amongst the constituency it serves? It should perhaps, but often it doesn't actually deliver.
There are many reasons for this, including a fundamental lack of respect in many corporations, but one reason lies closer to home: specifically with how marketers have chosen to define themselves.
Ask many marketers what a marketer is and they will tell you a "communications professional." Someone whose role is to understand the most effective way of communicating the brand, the product or the service and (increasingly) generating effective results from communications in ROI terms.
Unfortunately, the challenge when you define yourself as a communications professional is that you are also defining what you are not: Rather than shaping the offer, you shape the way the offer is communicated. Rather than defining the experience, you get to communicate the experience. Rather than driving the proposition, you get to advertise the proposition.
This somewhat self-defined role--not as a part of the business, but as a part of the communication of the business will be a key issue as we move forward. It's becoming a basic truth that consumers are choosing to trust each other much more than they trust what brands have to say. They're also choosing to talk about what brands are doing for them (or not doing for them) rather than what they are saying to them.
In a nutshell, marketing communications is not just becoming more fragmented and "noisy," but fundamentally less influential--a worrying proposition for any communications professional with ROI targets to meet.
As we move forward, many marketers will need to re-think their own roles.
Fundamentally, they will need to begin thinking of themselves less as communications professionals, and more as differentiation professionals. People whose focus is on creating experiences that demonstrate difference. People who care less about the mechanics of communication, and more on connecting the unique capabilities of the corporation to the perhaps hidden needs of the consumer.
This will require marketers who can truly use both sides of their brain--on the one hand fluent in the language of business, and deeply connected to the decision-making frameworks of that business. On the other hand, fluent in the language of customer, and driving the kinds of innovations that will lead this customer.
Those marketers who can demonstrate this will not be the sometimes disposable, sometimes disconnected executives we see today, but crucial drivers of business performance and innovation--the indispensable glue that connects the consumer to the business.
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Read more of Paul Worthington's blog
Paul Worthington is head of Strategy for the New York office of Wolff Olins, a global brand and innovation consultancy. You can find both Paul (@pworthington) and Wolff Olins (@wolffolins) on Twitter.
Related Stories: | Topics:Leadership, Magazine, Paul Worthington, Marketing Shift, branding, Marketing, Wolf Olins, Business, Marketing, Wolff Olins Ltd., Paul Worthington, United States |
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Recent Comments | 10 Total
August 7, 2009 at 11:43am by Freddy Nager
Great article. One key issue is the number of marketing execs who know little to nothing about marketing. Many tend to be friends or relatives of the founder or CEO, or -- in Silicon Valley -- a programmer who has an MBA. Most entrepreneurs wouldn't hire a CFO who didn't have expertise in finance, but they'll appoint marketing execs who might have taken a class in marketing "once like you know five years ago I think." I actually met a marketing exec who -- I kid you not -- thought "positioning the brand" meant where you put the logo on a webpage.
August 8, 2009 at 3:38am by Evan Scott
One of my favorite books addressing this topic is Marketing as Strategy, by Nirmalya Kumar. Actually, our company was formed to help CMOs and other executives transition their companies "from having a marketing department to BEING a marketing organization."
Kudos on the article!
--
Evan Scott, CEO
Terrain SIM
August 8, 2009 at 11:45am by Kirk Brand Coburn
Paul, good show. Marketing is the function responsible for the creation, maintenance and growth of the value an organization. Unfortunately, the Fortune 1000, the AMA and most mid-size companies have missed this point. Instead, industry has decided to delegate this responsibility to other C-Level positions. The cause of this can be found in 3 main areas. First, many CEO's and CMO's have missed the most fundamental rule of business. The CEO is the #1 marketing executive in the company responsible for vision. The CMO is the #2 marketing executive responsible for translating the vision and value proposition of the company into an insight, actionable and measurable plan that delivers results. Second, your article addresses this point well. Most current CMOs are unqualified to be a CMO. I asked Walmart's CMO, Stephen Quinn, how he chose his senior team. He hires business people first, marketers second. CMOs have a bad rap because most of them do not have business and financial acumen. They do not know how their marketing budget impacts both the income statement and the balance sheet. Forget a marketing class, how about finance and operations? Finally, CMOs fail because they do not have skin in the game. Why is sales the only function forced to live and die based upon results. If you want a great CMO, ask them to put their money where their mouth is. We do.
--
Kirk Brand Coburn
Chief Marketing Outsider
August 9, 2009 at 4:14pm by Freddy Nager
Ideally, the CEO should have the marketing vision. Realistically, many CEO's are more operationally oriented, with little to no marketing expertise: they're engineers, lawyers, non-profit directors, or casual entrepreneurs with a lot of money who just woke up one day and decided to start a company. Many of them need an expert to guide their vision -- or even decide it for them. The TechCrunch Deadpool is filled with startups whose CEO's did not have a clue about marketing. The investors and/or board of directors should assess how much marketing expertise their CEO does have, and staff the company accordingly.
August 9, 2009 at 9:29pm by Kirk Brand Coburn
Freddy, very good point. The CEO/Founder almost always knows where they want to go. They do not have marketing training; however, they understand inertly the strengths and weaknesses of the company and the customer need that was originally filled in the first place. When companies are born (rarely from well trained marketing executives), the founders who have little training in marketing discipline already know that there is a need that is not being filled. The founders build a company around solving the need which naturally sets them apart from the competition creating a value proposition. When they reach a certain point (what I call Land of the Lost: http://www.chiefoutsiders.com/blog/bid/4340/When-Companies-Arrive-in-the...), the founder/CEO needs to bring in strong marketing discipline to translate the vision into a plan that leverages the company's strengths and passions, solves the evolving customer need and sets the company apart from the competition. We do not believe the CMO is the #1 visionary. The CMOs role is to aid the CEO in translating the vision and driving alignment. I have searched numerous articles regarding CMO tenure. I have found a consistent pattern. One of the main reasons CMO's get fired is due to the fact that they have an ego on the same level or beyond the CEO. This ego is built around the CMOs belief that they know more than the CEO. We do not hire or staff CMOs with this outlook. It doesn't work in the long-run for our clients and their long-term objectives. Our clients agree.
August 12, 2009 at 9:11am by Augie Ray
Paul, Brilliant and succinct! It pains me to read lines like, "the challenge when you define yourself as a communications professional is that you are also defining what you are not." As you know, there was a time when Marketing focused on Four P's--Product, Place, Promotion, and Price. Somehow, we marketers have narrowed our focus to just the Promotion part of that equation, but brands cannot thrive merely through effective communications.
Back in June, I posted my own (much longer) article on what is wrong with Marketing, why Marketing professionals increasingly sound like Financial professions, and what can be done to reclaim the high ground on my blog: http://www.experiencetheblog.com/2009/06/restoring-marketing-and-finance...
August 13, 2009 at 2:51pm by Jim Kent
Having been in this mar-comm field for 20 years, I think the leading reason for short CMO tenure is a lack of understanding by executive management about what marketing is and what it can and can't do. I place most of the blame for this on the marketing people who fail to "market marketing" effectively to internal stakeholders. In addition, for marketers to rise above the tactical role of communicators, their first order of business is not marketing. It is winning trust in order to gain a seat at the table where strategic descisons are made. Without that trust, your role will be to forever turn around someone else's sentences until they offend no one and enter with world toothless.
August 14, 2009 at 3:32pm by Ferdinand Felix Casantusan
Excellent points, Kirk. You speak of the truth and nothing but the truth. The facts are there, universally and globally. The CEO is definitely the visionary and the No. 1 Marketing Executive, nobody else. The CMO is somehow getting very obsolete, sorry to say. But could it have something to do with the current trend thru technology and the way marketing is done, making it to continuously evolve into new genetics of income-generating and effective ingenuity? I also see CEOs being the COO and CFO at the same time, and I highly respect that. CEO is the visionary, the planner, the Commander and Chief, and the Marketing Manager is his/her Sergeant, the true tactician in the field of Marketing, not the CMO.
August 24, 2009 at 4:57am by Walter Adamson
Isn't shaping the way the offer is communicated "branding", which as you said is what marketing has become and it has a very short half-life in the social media. So the social media is accelerating the death of branding and these types of CMOs. This also has a negative effect on brand.
If, on the other hand, CMOs were helping shape the whole brand behavior and experience, as I think Evan Scott is suggesting, then they would be also engaging in the social media in a brand positive way and not seeing it as another "channel" for pushing their brand "messages".
If they do not understand the connectivity of the business and its operations, and how that plays out in the social media, then they won't be the brand guardians. I'm not suggesting that they should be, but I am saying they can't be if they don't have these skills.
The point is that a CMO's ability to produce strategies for the social media, as an ever increasingly important contributor to brand behavior, will play an larger and larger role in defining the CMO's future.
Walter Adamson @g2m
Social Media Academy, Australia
August 30, 2009 at 4:07pm by William Koleszar
Paul:
Your commentary is painting CMOs with a broad brush. Some quick facts are in order. Recent findings from Penn State researchers Raj Grewal and Rui Wang, which appears in the current issue of The Chief Marketing Officer Journal, shows that an increasing number of Fortune 100 firms appear to be creating CMO positions. Indeed, from 2004 to 2008, the number of firms with a CMO position increased from approximately 13.3% to 23.0%.
Grewal and Wang also propose a framework that categorizes CMOs into various archetypes based on a detailed analysis of Fortune 100 job descriptions of heads of marketing. What you propose above is certainly consistent with some of the archetypes they propose, but not all.
Regardless, as a discipline your assessment points out some painful realities that we need to overcome. Thanks for bringing these issues to light in your forum.
Bill Koleszar
Editor, The CMO Journal
www.ChiefMarketingOfficer.com