I have argued in We Are NOT Our Market that the marketer (ultimately, the CMO) has responsibility for standing up for the customer. A recent McKinsey Quarterly article The Evolving Role of the CMO, makes a similar point, and goes further. As McKinsey argues, the very best way the CMO can stand up for the customer (and other key elements of their role) is to get CEO commitment to supporting the CMO. Too many CEOs leave too much of marketing to the CMO, partially because the percentage of CEOs with marketing backgrounds has declined in recent years. This overdelegation reduces the CMO’s ability to impact the organization.
Too many CMOs don’t step it up to insist on CEO involvement and support. I believe a CMO must make substantial CEO support a requirement to take the job in the first place.
McKinsey discusses many challenges faced by the CMO. While the role of the CMO should be broadening, the CMO finds themselves limited by narrowly defined roles that focus on building brands, making advertising more effective and market research. Here are three key items the CMO must get the CEO’s substantial support on:
- Helping the company (especially the Sr. management team) understand what’s really happening with customers. How are your market segments evolving? How are customers changing their decision-making processes? What are the social influences on their decision-making? The CMO, the CEO and other senior executives must be part of the conversation about customers.
- Creating a closer connection between marketing and the rest of the organization. This becomes particularly critical when a CMO is asked to lead major corporate initiatives on strategy. The CMO-led initiative must be viewed as sufficiently strategic to ensure that the right senior executives are involved, rather than their delegates. With CEO support, the right senior executives will want to be involved, ensuring that the CMO-led initiative has needed impact on the organization.
- Providing coaching to the CMO as they lead the transformation of the marketing organization. Transformation will be required as the CMO takes the mantle they deserve and increases their responsibility and impact on the organization. CEOs often have the organizational development skills that a CMO needs to ensure this effort is successful.
The old “CMO as “Chief Marcom Officer” must go. The accelerating pace of change in markets, customer decision-making, social influences, etc., will make the CMO evolution more and more important. What do you think the CMO should do?
Or I should say, “Hello Glenn”!
Hello Glen,
In my career I’ve architected and launched Sun Microsystems’ Campus Dealer Channel, been a wireless start-up CMO and am now Founder/CEO entrepreneur of a tech+consumer oriented e-commerce play in Textiles for Thinkers, wearing all the hats.
I completely agree with your points.
1. What’s really happening with customers is the bottom line. I’ve experienced this in all my roles. At Sun, my first campus store managers banded together, after receiving Sun’s standard 20+ page, channel-consistent reseller agreement and, at an luncheon table of my top launch schools unexpectedly handed me their 1.5 page Apple reseller agreement and their group spokesperson said, “What we want you to do is wite-out the name Apple, write in the name Sun, and then and only then will we sign up.” I said OK, then drove it through internally and got them their agreement within 24 hours. In my entrepreneurial roles dealing with prospective investors, marketing to “get the order” has been king and the ultimate measure past TAM. Knowing exactly what retail customers want and need, in what timeframes and formats, and what the process and requirements are for their decision-making, purchasing and stocking, are critical to fulfilling this requirement.
2. Regarding executive support: At Sun corporate marketing, I orchestrated stakeholders worldwide for the education and research vertical, a traditionally deep-discounted, harder-sell market. A good strategy I found was to lay it right out to my management chain that I would wave my butt out on the flagpole and take the risks needed to “get it done”, but my proviso was that when I got into a jam I wanted to see their face right behind me backing me up. I received this support up the chain including from Scott and Andy, and it cleared all the paths I needed to accomplish the goals. To achieve this took clear (and simple) request for, and statements of, communication of commitment.
3. Regarding CMO as Marcom officer, whether as a permanent or contract CMO, or as a founding VP of Marketing, my functions and interactions have been at a management team level where I necessarily participated in every aspect of global strategy — including being the customers’ voice at, e.g., engineering product development meetings where I critiqued feature sets and explained to UI developers and coders how they would have to translate to messaging — and pointing out that those in attendance are also The Customer as might investors be. I’ve seen it in action repeatedly that such a “voice” and participation is necessary to add unique value based on skillset that is not engineering, finance or IT. Armed with current customer and market-driven data and information, a seasoned marketing leader can quickly establish differentiating expertise within such a team even where others might still assume initially that they “know” the marketer’s role.
Well, how should I address you … Mr. Toad?
Anyway, thanks for your comment.
Since you can’t get rid of the “armies of no”, you can ensure that the general (the CEO) can overrule them.
And the role of the CMO is to ensure the CEO plays that role.
Excellent post Glenn (I found you through Daily Fix)
I could not agree with you more.
The changes Web 2.0 have enabled in consumer behavior means the balance of power has shifted and marketing is not longer the province of the marketing department, but of every department.
And the CEO needs to lead the charge.
I wrote about something very similar on Daily Fix a few months back:
http://www.mpdailyfix.com/2007/11/defeating_the_armies_of_no.html