subject: What Drives Chief Marketing Officers? [print this page] Notwithstanding the fact that there are a million and one variables involved in this question (psychology, background, corporate culture, industry, personal relationships in the boardroom and so on) the role of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) in today's companies is coming into better focus. At the same time, it is possible to infer from their actions what motivates various CMOs to undertake the often-thankless job of ruling a growing but still immature specialty within their particular environments. We can speak only in broad strokes here, so have a few grains of salt ready. Still, the big picture should be recognizable.
CMOs are not always proactive, but have to react to the forces and opinions around them, in the boardroom, the departmental offices and the market place. One major concern is the fact that marketing's credibility has been undermined by the lack of quantifiable outcomes to justify marketing expenditures. Clearly, one of the big challenges is to communicate the effectiveness of marketing programs in the same language the accountants use, namely, dollars and cents. This is problematic, and just a starting point, because the vocabulary simply does not exist for accurately quantifying consumer perceptions and mindsets along with the financial data.
Breaking it down
There are three main difficulties that arise immediately in this discussion. First, it is difficult to relate marketing programs and activities to long-term outcomes. Then, too, it is hard to separate individual marketing activities from other programs (including sales efforts, publicity, PR, etc.). And, as mentioned above, it is still a dicey proposition to measure, and therefore justify, investments in marketing. This is all exacerbated by the fact that many CMOs are not in the decision-making loop. Another motivation of many marketing chiefs, therefore, is getting into that loop.
Another problem surfaces, however, when they do get into that rarefied environment. They find that it is difficult to explain marketing concepts, because they involve those pesky, unpredictable human beings with attitudes, biases, odd behaviors and often-fickle tastes and opinions. There can be a considerable effort expended just trying to explain all this, not to mention the time lag between marketing efforts and hoped-for outcomes. The explanations involve financial and not-so-financial measures. All in all, it is a daunting task for CMOs to convince executives that there is any way to accurately assign resources that will contribute to company growth and profitability.
Trying to define the terms
An additional problem is trying to explain how vital marketing is when many executives conflate the term with advertising, PR or sales. CMOs, therefore, are often motivated by a desire to clearly state the central (indeed, crucial) role of marketing for the firm. This means that CMOs must also be fluent in the other corporate dialects, that is, the terminology used by administrators, accountants and others. They must also be motivated to learn about the company as a whole and its other components to have an accurate so-called big picture of the firm, its tactics, strategies, strengths and limitations.
There is resistance to the marketing message at many firms, and the CMOs in those companies are constantly fighting a rear-guard action against naysayers and skeptics. This presents additional challenges, and offers more motivators for CMOs, who have to keep up with their own duties as well as understand what is happening in the economy, their industry, their company and their own department(s). CMOs become cheerleaders at times, too, because there is no one else in the firm who will hold that marketing flag high. It is their burden alone.
New media, new directions
The Internet has changed the corporate calculus about media and challenges many entrenched ways of doing business. At the same time, new technologies offer many amazing new advantages previously unavailable to companies of any size. CMOs are now quite motivated to use online metrics and their Web presence to structure communications and transactions in such a way as to help measure marketing variables. Software can help them track customer visits and the so-called stickiness of their site, meaning the time that customers stay there, how often they click through to ads, the effect of layouts and content optimizations, etc. With all this data, it can still be difficult to sift through and measure attitudes, behaviors and cause-and-effect relationships.
CMOs are emerging as the all-important connection that ties the boardroom, top management and customers together in a relationship that can be assessed in different ways. When companies offer CMOs the necessary standing (and actual authority) within the firm, there is better chance of creating the environment in which CMOs can integrate the almost-countless functions within company departments that affect marketing results. The success of more and more companies depend on the strengths of the marketing programs and the smarts of the CMO, which should provide marketing chiefs even more motivation to elevate marketing to a company's mission-critical activities.
