Just because you watched every episode of Mad Men does not make you a marketer. The role of the CMO is one of the most complex and challenging in a business. I'm unsure why but it's the one role in a company where everyone has an opinion. A CMO recently told me they were approached with 'feedback' on a piece of creative from a peer. That peer felt confident about sharing the feedback due to their experience 'making videos' on their phone. As they rightly said, it's like giving feedback to the CFO because you own a calculator. A job that often spans communications, pricing, positioning, brand, creative, analytics, research, consumer insights, media, competitive intelligence, sales pipeline and lots more, is complex and requires deep domain expertise. But over the past few years, the CMO has had to constantly prove their worth and the value of marketing to CEOs, Boards and other executives – notably during a time of significant change and uncertainty. And they’ve risen to the challenge and built financial fluency to secure their seat at the table. LinkedIn's data finds that 84% of CMOs have strengthened skills to demonstrate B2B marketing impact, and 3 in 4 say their relationship with the CFO is stronger than ever before. But is there is a larger perception issue that the CMO continues to battle? The Drum's ‘Great Marketing Makeover’ initiative that launched at Cannes Lions put a spotlight on the under valuation of the CMO role – with only 20% of marketers believing the CMO is viewed equally influential as other C-suite executives. Besides upskilling their teams to speak the language of the business and show marketing’s impact on the bottom line, what else can CMOs do to wield influence amongst other stakeholders? And how can other C-suite executives be better educated about the value of marketing and the expertise of the CMO? Luis, Dean, Amanda, Benjamin, Katie, Emily, Lisa, Rebecca, Nicole, Tracy.
Nicole M.
2mo
Follow the money and make sure you are the one making it and you will be more valuable than the CFO who only counts it.
James Hogan
2mo
These arguments in marketing circles always seem to assume that the CEO and CFO don’t get it and that the CMO just needs a bigger seat at the table. Maybe, just maybe, the CEO and CFO are correct in their views — they run the company after all and are responsible for performance. And even if they’re not right, assuming they are is probably a better place to start leading the change you want.
Sometimes marketing people at all levels can be so busy doing what needs to be done that insufficient time, effort and skill is put into articulating important messages to key stakeholders in ways they can clearly understand. In simple terms IMO, it's about matching marketing efforts with business strategies and explaining them clearly and concisely in ways that relate to results. That's not just in the boardroom, but in every planned and impromptu conversation. The water cooler should be a conversation oasis. In contrast , if marketing gets too theoretical, debatable, unrelated to top level performance results and if it appears to lack alignment then expect trouble.
John Lyons
2mo
So many roles come under the umbrella of “marketing” that many people even in our profession don’t understand what a CMO is or does. I was at an event this week where a panel of CMOs were asked about their use of AI. One said he only used it to expand the background of images in photoshop. If we can’t be clear about what a CMO does, we can’t expect what should be our C-suite peers to. We need to get our house in order. We need to learn to speak business to the business, and not marketing, and we need to banish subjectivity. Including our own.
Lisa Gilbert
2mo
Fantastic provocation Josh Graff ! IMHO what makes the CMO role different than many C-suite roles is that skill of Collaborative Influence. CMOs must rally all the key functions together to reach our goals. To be successful (different from other c-suite roles) is it’s a team sport. We must enroll others in our vision in a way that resonates with each individual function. Takes a very collaborative individual with very little ego to be successful in this role.
Linde Scheers
2mo
Spot on Josh Graff CMOs and their teams need to become better at articulating the business value of marketing. It's great to see that it's happening more and more. At the same time CEOs and CFOs need to more deeply understand marketing. Giving them evidence based insights on how marketing works helps. However the challenge remains that there's a lot of short termism with CEOs and CFOs. And for marketing to drive sustainable growth you need to invest in the long and the short.
Dianna Andrade
2mo
I agree meaningful marketing effectiveness is key yes, but also, I think (traditional) marketing could benefit from leaning into other spaces that might challenge how things have always been done, like customer experience (and partnering with Product teams), customer-centric practices vs brand-led only, valuing micro-interactions and the role content operations and martech have in enabling that, channels beyond paid media, agility and getting behind driving customer value in a cross-functional manner, and generally serving customers along their journey (vs a bias to just top up the funnel with shiny campaigns).
Andy Goldman
2mo
Well said, Josh! A significant part of my work with clients focuses on avoiding 'marketing speak.' Many CMOs and marketing teams fall into the trap of explaining the complexities of marketing rather than emphasizing the bottom-line impact in language CEOs and CFOs understand. I think more CMOs would benefit by practicing and presenting marketing strategies in ultra-clear, business-focused language that highlights value and results across revenue, profit, operations, and other marketplace indices. The irony is we are storytellers, and often fail in telling this most important of narratives well.
Chief Marketing Officer at Samsung Europe
2moJosh, your question is spot on. Management consultancies are looking at categories where they can apply their expertise (and charge a King’s ransom for it). They’ve decided to flex their muscles in media, digital and marketing. When someone like McKinsey is at the door to talk about marketing, it’s not the CMO who opens it. Instead, they’ll sit down with the CFO, CEO or Chairman and say something like: “Your marketing department doesn’t have a clue. We’ve crunched the numbers and you can get far more from your investment. CFOs and CEOs are generally evidence-led people, so this is music to their ears. They’ve likely always been a bit suspicious of marketers, and now, thanks to this meeting, they finally have a bit of leverage to call them out on their inefficiencies. We must recognise that this is in part the marketer’s own fault, because we have failed to prove our worth. If you ask a marketing team how many incremental products they sold after spending X amount on a campaign, the chances are they won’t be able to tell you. If, as a big spender of company money, you cannot prove your value, you start to come across as reckless. As marketers, we have left ourselves open to exposure. So what do we do about it?