Advice – 2
Nick Reynolds writes about the changes required from both the CMO and company boards
- CMOs need to broaden their skills outside of marketing into sales, operations, product, and strategy. ‘Pure marketing’ experienced CMOs need to move beyond marketing to be considered as a potential CEO.
- Corporate boards need to ensure that CEOs have strong digital skills and be able to navigate new online opportunities. This is especially important as AI, voice recognition and automation impacts the customer interaction and sales experience.
- To bring a growth mindset to life, boards should look to CMOs as being most capable to navigate digital disruption and capture growth through new online business models. This means hiring progressive CEOs, not traditionally styled CEOs. Traditional business models no longer ensure success.
- Marketing needs to change its image from the ‘MADMEN’ stereotype of marketing as a discrete function, into a broad capability empowered to widely act and create impact across the entire business, responsible for all customer touch-points in the customer journey online and offline.
Marketing Week has these recommendations:
- Own your customer: “Without seizing ownership of the end-to-end consumer experience and customer journey, a marketer’s ability to get on boards is limited, says …Andreas Athanassopoulos. “Many marketers make a mistake. They talk too much, too frequently and for too long with advertising agencies. And then they think, act and behave as if they were the long hand of the advertising agency within the company,” [he] argues.
- Build a holistic view of the business: [Athanassopoulos says,] “Successful marketing nowadays is not vertical marketing, it is horizontal marketing. [Vertical] marketing will never generate CEOs. Horizontal marketing generates CEOs.”
- Learn how to lead: ““Really the theme of this is that you build the capability around you, you really build strong teams…Being a leader is setting the vision and setting the direction, but doing it through others,” says [Katherine] Tulpa.
- Turn a crisis into an opportunity: ““If you want to position yourself for the future, participate in difficult projects. Now that there is crisis, there will be difficult and risky projects. Often people are risk averse for various reasons, but if you are risk averse at the moment of truth for your company, don’t expect to be first in line when promotions come forward,” says Athanassopoulos.”
Lena Petersen writes:
- Embrace growth: Marketers must embrace their ability to affect the bottom line vocally and tout this power throughout their organizations, for it’s not just theoretical.
- Take responsibility: CMOs should optimize holistically across every consumer touchpoint, especially those they do not directly control. This might include websites or apps, customer service, and merchant/trade partnerships, building a 360 vision to measure the impact of activities and offset costs appropriately vs. focusing on the ownership remit.
- Be the customer – and tout the value of the customer: CMOs need to think about how they can leverage the voice of the customer – through data and insights – in every meeting and conversation with the CEO and the board. Even when delivering news they may not want to hear.
- Speak CFO and CEO: [Modern CMOs] may not necessarily be experts in EBITDA, but the more they speak the same language as their CFO and CEO, the more they can position marketing as a growth driver.
Joellyn Ferguson writes:
- Become an ally to your CFO
- Increase your visibility, inside and outside the company.
- Think like the chairman (or woman)
- Take on non-marketing leadership roles
