This is the first in a series of posts about CMOs and the challenges they face.
Our team recently spent time pondering common threads pertaining to broken marketing departments, CMOs who fix (or try to fix) them, and how executives in other functions perceive their performance. Some blog posts and articles from GigaOM, Tippingpoint Labs, and Marketing Week fueled our discussion of this complex set of issues.
It’s no secret that the average CMO tenure is short relative to those of other executives. What accounts for this? That’s not an easy question to answer, but here are some of the usual suspects:
- poor sales performance
- perceived CMO’s contribution value is low in the overall profit-loss context
- inability to tie marketing investments to specific sales or improved productivity
- CMO’s emphasis on more abstract values (e.g., branding) instead of the concrete (e.g., metrics)
- dependence on technology instead of fixing behaviors and processes
Note that we’re not assigning blame. The list represents perceptions, which are usually more important than reality.
Forbes contributor John Ellett is writing a series of CMO profiles and recently interviewed Kimberly-Clark president Tony Palmer. (Palmer was promoted to that position after an outstanding six-year stint as CMO.) In that article, Ellet distilled his wisdom about CMO departures to four causes:
- They failed to meet expectations and were asked to leave.
- The boss failed and was replaced; and the new boss cleaned house.
- They attained their goals, became bored, and sought a new challenge.
- They had a dramatic positive impact on the business and earned a promotion to president, CEO or COO.
Here’s another interesting (if tangential) facet of this discussion: Adrian Ott, in a Fast Company blog post, reports on career expert Kathryn Ullrich’s new book that describes career paths to the CMO/VP Marketing position. It turns out that only 1/3 of individuals who arrived there did so by virtue of their marketing experience. Significant numbers of these folks had other backgrounds, e.g. domain expertise, sales, analytic/strategic. The analytical background might be a surprise, but it makes perfect sense with the current emphasis on search engine marketing and social media.
New CMOs typically face difficult challenges. If a predecessor was great, matching that level of performance will be the minimum expectation. And in some cases, the bar will be even higher. On the other hand, landing in a broken organization is fraught with peril. Meeting the “miracle worker” standard – always implied, if not stated explicitly – can be very tough.
Would an immediate investment in the latest marketing technologies and tools – if none are in use – yield significant improvements quickly?
We are (obviously) huge technology fans and believe in the power of automation and the Internet to dramatically improve marketing effectiveness. That said, we do not recommend undertaking a technology implementation without a thorough review of a new environment.
Where does one start?
We’ll explore that question in subsequent posts.
Related Posts:
I noted with interest that the linkage between responsibility and authority wasn’t mentioned. Too often CMO’s are brought in to fix a problem but aren’t given the authority. CMO’s need to interview the CEO and board before they join to be sure they will be given both the authority and responsibility. If not, they should keep walking.
The ‘usual suspects’ and ’causes’ listed above cover many reasons I’ve seen for churn as discussed in the Tippingpoint labs article, however my experience is heavily weighted around 2 items:
1) Poorly defined/articulated expectations – where the stated expectations and hiring requirements do not match the day-to-day requirements
2) Miracle worker expectations – where the expectations for the CMO require more luck and short-term timing than vision and applied discipline
Poorly defined/articulated expectations have become more common recently, as the expectations of CMOs have expanded from strategy, branding, and vision, to encompass metrics, analytics, and social media. Note that I did not say ‘replaced by’ the new responsibility coverage. There are few CMOs who have single domain successes in social media or analytics, but those skill-sets are becoming requirements for managing budget allocations and campaign direction. At the same time, you have to present a unified presentation of how a CMO’s spend on brand, social media, and vision can translate directly to dollars. That implies that the CMOs’ metrics encompass the contribution and ‘assist’ value of brand advertising and social media to sales lift — tools that most will not have.
Miracle worker expectations are an entirely different area, as the CMO will often face budget cutting constraints and ultra-short term impact anlaysis, both which can discourage long-term vision and strategy for short-term and sometimes narrow activities such as wild budget shifts to PPC or affiliate marketing. Those may be the best activities for the company, but in that case – is the right hire a CMO to implement and babysit such tactical programs?
I’m sure other have their experiences and biases, but this is a good topic to see what other see happening.
This is a beautifully succinct statement of the CMO challenge. I look forward to following these posts.
Actually, the analytical background makes perfect sense. In fact, I think that brilliant marketers often do travel unlikely paths.