Perhaps no corporate function is under more pressure than the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Business is more competitive than ever, technology is destroying market leadership and protection that once existed, and the consumer is rejecting mass marketing en masse. No wonder that headhunting firm Spencer Stuart reports that the average CMO is in her job for 26 months, and falling.
BusinessWeek has a nice article on the plight of today's CMO and how some are managing to succeed in a murky area by embracing the challenge of performance metrics.
In the old days the CMO had only a fraction of the challenge as we see today. As BusinessWeek puts it nicely:
"As recently as five years ago, the CMO's role was much simpler. Chief marketers devised a brand message, hired and advertising agency to create clever ads, managed promotions, and then waited for their bonus or pink slip."
Today the simple days are over. Consumer tastes have fragmented, the mass media market is shrinking, global competition is fierce, and marketing has been the easy department to blame and easiest to sack when the going gets tough.
But some of the latest generation of CMOs have brought with them a desire to build impartial measures of their results. For example, Anne MacDonald became CMO at Yahoo! in 2003, and worked with the company's CFO to build a return on investment model for her marketing department. Her success there allowed her to move to a more desirable position at Nintendo. And Ford Motor CMO, James Farley, asked CEO Alan Mulally to give him responsibility for U.S. sales results to ensure that he had accountability for real results.
By accepting the challenge of the tough global market, and embracing the pressure of hard performance metrics, CMOs have a better chance to create winning strategies - and have their work recognized by CEOs and shareholders.
It is somewhat unfortunate that the good old days of formulaic ads and three-martini lunches are gone forever. I personally never tasted that life either in the client or agency side. That's probably a good thing, because it would be much harder to embrace the challenge that is forcing all of us to produce better products, services, and marketing.
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