The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) has become a more, and more common corporate designation in recent years. Given the tremendous marketing potential offered by the new media and proliferation of distribution channels, companies have begun to realise the huge potential of marketing in guiding corporate level strategies and substantially contributing to the financial bottom line. In spite of such an understanding, it is startling to note that the average tenure of a CMO is merely 23 months compared to a CFO that typical lasts 4-5 years.
Not many companies have a senior marketing representative in their C-suite. This begs the question – do companies need a CMO or is the role of a CMO a mere hype?
Does my company need a Chief Marketing Officer?
As the business world changes so has marketing changed in a system-wide strategic discipline. Given marketer’s knowledge of the customers, it is imperative that the CEO and the corporate board have a representative of the customer to continually educate them.
I am struck by the line that so many companies tout “Our customers come first” or something along the lines of, “the customer is always right” in mission statements. So where is the representation?
In todays global market place, where you can buy your bolt, or search for your house on any number of portals sites, the customer and understanding what he wants is paramount.
So back to the question “Does my company need a CMO?” What would he or she do?
Well, for a start he/she would:
Align marketing with the corporate business strategy.
Connect the corporate boardroom with the customer.
Create a customer-centric organisation.
Challenges faced by the CMO
The challenges faced by the CMO are the problems increasingly faced by marketing as a discipline off late. It has been long argued that one of the fundamental challenges of marketing that has undermined the credibility of marketing, challenged the standing of marketing within a company, and even threatened the existence of the very discipline as a distinct entity is marketing’s failure to quantify its outcomes and justify investments into marketing activities.
The three main reasons in this regard are:
- Relating marketing activities to long-term effects
- Separation of individual marketing activities from other actions
- Use of purely financial methods for justifying and benchmarking marketing investments.
The future of the CMO.
In the future, the CMO will emerge as the strategic connection between the corporate boardroom, the top management team, the CEO and the customer. The time is not too far when the success of the company depends on the strength of its marketing and the CMO.
Advertising Partner
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I agree that the big issue is understanding what the position entails and what the interdependencies with other disciplines are. Marketing is not just about making TV ads or doing something clever on Facebook, its about understanding your market and developing product offerings targeting specific segments with the classical 4p’s. It is also about building the internal brand so that the company is in a position to deliver on its brand promise. In my opinion marketing is strategy first and then execution after. It is so central to the business it is normally presided over by the CEO, although the big boss may not have all the skills and knowledge to do the science behind it. The formulation of marketing strategy needs the involvement of all aspects of the business, meaning either it must be led by the CEO or a CMO position should be created with the teeth it needs to be effective.
The term “marketing” has been so much and so widely abused. I am afraid it has lost its essence even among professionals and scholars.This is the cause of large misunderstanding of who marketing people are, what they do and what they should do.
Thus, for the matter of clarity, let’s say that marketing has very much to do with “business development, “strategy” and “consumer behaviour” and very little to do with “advertising”, “social media”, etc. People who care about long-term income and take actions to have consumers buy, are doing marketing. It’s just an unfortunate fact that this has been done most of the time by managers and financial officers, instead of people bearing the title of marketing-whatever-doers.
Why is it an unfortunate fact? It is because managers and financial officers by definition do not have training in understanding consumer behaviour and manipulating it. What they do, even in the moments of undeniable success, is the fruit of intuition, trial and error or experience. What is even more unfortunate, though, is that, on a large scale, those “people bearing the title of marketing-whatever-doers” have even less training in strategy and consumer behaviour than managers and accountants and generally happen to be not very intelligent. Why is this so is a long story and the key to the future of CMOs could be found in it.
Another reason for the misunderstanding of the concept of marketing is that only recently do consumers see enough competition to have enough power to exert pressure by their choice and feedback. Companies have long been able to cynically disregard the final users of their services/ products because there had not been enough competition (both in terms of quantity and quality). It is not surprising to see older managers have hard time grasping why consumers should be listened to or “worse yet”, why their feedback should be taken seriously.