Redefining the CMO Leadership Role

CMOs Struggle in Their Role

The tenure of the chief marketer is shrinking each year, while the responsibilities grow. In a fast-changing world, CMOs need to work across their organization, so that they may advocate for the customer more effectively and deliver results.

The responsibilities of today’s CMOs are multiplying more rapidly than ever. These executives must simultaneously engage with an increasingly empowered consumer, manage the rise of digital communication and commerce, and demonstrate marketing’s business impact.

The turnover of CMOs is the highest it has been in more than a decade. Spencer Stuart’s latest data shows that average CMO tenure in the US dropped to 40.0 months in 2020, its shortest since 2009.

Meanwhile, median CMO tenure, at 25.5 months, is the shortest it has been since Spencer Stuart began tracking this metric in 2011.

Marketers Get Squeezed From All Sides

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, consumer needs shifted dramatically overnight, forcing companies to tighten their belts and shift operations online. CMOs, like so many others, had to adapt, and not all of them hit the mark. The health crisis, and the subsequent economic fallout, may have had a direct impact on some CMO jobs and further shortened the average tenure, but other factors can’t be ignored.

Consumers’ Expectations Raise the Stakes for Marketers

Today’s consumers expect brands to understand them, treat them as individuals, surprise and delight them, and share their values and social causes. Every positive interaction that consumers have with one brand heightens their expectations for all other brands as well. As one of the primary roles that interact with consumers, the CMO must grapple with understanding these rising standards and with orienting the business to meet them—an assignment that is easier said than done.

Divided attention hinders consumer engagement. Media consumption is highly fragmented, according to August 2021 research by GWI, published in our most recent “Global Media Intelligence Report.” On average, US internet users ages 16 and older spend:

• Almost 4 hours per day engaged with media on their desktop, laptop, or tablet
• More than 3 hours per day on their mobile devices
• Nearly 3 hours daily with broadcast TV

That’s not counting their time spent with streaming, gaming, or consuming online press.

For marketers, it’s hard enough to reach consumers across this splintered landscape, and divided attention further compounds the challenge. In a Q2 2021 survey by TiVo, 68% of adult internet users in North America indicated that their attention is split while watching content on a TV, as they simultaneously use other devices, especially smartphones.

Consumers punish companies that fail to meet their expectations. The balance of power has shifted to consumers, who can, with just a few taps on their phone, rate products and services, publicize their reviews, and influence opinion. According to July 2021 research by Alida, adult internet users worldwide would avoid a brand if they feel it offers a poor product or personal experience.

Even a negative experience of a friend or family member can be enough for many to abandon a brand.

External Developments Cause Disruption

Marketers play a key role in anticipating and navigating issues that arise outside the organization, working with colleagues to address potential problems, trends, and opportunities that could affect the business or their role.

Political and social issues require thoughtful management. In an increasingly polarized political environment, social issues have found their way onto brands’ agendas, and managing the messaging is far from easy. While some consumers expect brands to take a stand, others want them to stay out of those conversations. Brands have received both backlash and praise for publicly advocating for social causes, as well as for keeping mum on political issues.

Together with their board, CEO, and colleagues in public policy and investor relations, CMOs are increasingly called on to determine whether to embrace a cause, how to communicate that support—or avoidance—and how to manage the public’s reactions to their company’s stance.

Regulation is a moving target and resource drain. The patchwork of privacy legislation, in the US and globally, has forced marketers to dedicate resources to understanding and complying with the various requirements. Although privacy extends well beyond the marketer’s purview, marketing activity is often on the front lines of data capture, analysis, and application through customer communication.

Compliance requires technology investments, process change, and coordination with other internal functions including IT, legal, and customer service. Many organizations are not yet up to the thorny task: Less than half of UK marketers indicated they are observing current laws and regulations concerning data collection for digital communications, per a survey by YouGov and data company fifty-five published in November 2021.

Technology changes keep brands in a state of constant evolution. What were once junior-level topics—ad measurement effectiveness, identity management, and first-, second-, and third-party data collection—became C-level concerns in 2020, when Google and Apple announced they would deprecate their respective tracking tools (third-party cookies in Chrome and the Identifier for Advertisers, or IDFA). Given the anticipated impact, CMOs had no choice but to dive into the minutia, consider alternatives, and shift resources to adapt.

More Big Tech disruptions loom on the horizon, from the potential breakup of major platforms to the intense scrutiny of them by regulators worldwide. Preparing for these changes requires a technical savvy and forecasting know-how that many CMOs lack.

Internal Relationships Affect Success

When we asked CMOs what contributes to their success, they pointed to a variety of interdependent relationships with peers in their organization. But, depending on the organization, relationships may be complicated.

A swell of new C-level titles means functions may be distributed or shared. In recent years, many organizations have added roles at the upper echelons such as chief digital officer, chief customer officer, chief experience officer, chief revenue officer, and chief brand officer. While titles and responsibilities may be fungible from company to company, the emergence of these roles means, at a minimum, that CMOs must work with an increasing number of internal stakeholders to coordinate all aspects of marketing. And at worst, CMOs need to navigate more office politics and turf wars, as the expanded C-suite battles it out to own various aspects of the broader marketing function.

CFOs have become a key marketing ally. It’s no longer enough for marketers to bring home a Cannes Lion or point to intangible brand metrics without clearly demonstrating their contribution to the company’s bottom line. The CFO has become a key partner for today’s most successful CMOs, collaborating to measure marketing’s impact and guide future activity accordingly.

Chief information officers are a critical enabler of CMO success. Given the close working relationship between the CMO and chief information officer (CIO) today, it’s hard to believe the shockwaves that Gartner sent across the marketing and IT industries in 2012, when it predicted the CMO in many organizations would control a greater share of IT spending than the CIO in five years’ time. Since then, marketing technology budgets have continued to grow, and the relationship between the two roles has become critical to each other’s success.

The Expanding CMO Role Is Becoming Unwieldy

The remit of the CMOs we interviewed for this report ranges between strategic positioning, product innovation, revenue growth, customer experience, branding and creative, customer communication, data management and analytics, and so much more.

The breadth of responsibilities owned by CMOs is greater than that of any of their peers. Kimberly Whitler, the Frank M. Sands Sr. associate professor of business administration at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, analyzed CMOs’ job specifications and compared their functions with those of their C-level peers, including the CFO and CIO. She found much greater variance in the span of responsibilities that firms delegate to their CMOs.

“Part of the challenge is that there is no single definition of the role of a chief marketing officer,” Whitler said.

As the CMO role continues to expand, it grows increasingly difficult for any individual to be expert in all aspects of the job. Based on our interviews and research, these are the patterns of responsibilities that many CMOs share.

Represent the Voice of the Customer

Jeff Bezos, the founder and former CEO of Amazon, famously used to include an empty chair at the boardroom table when he hosted meetings. The empty chair was intended to represent the company’s most important constituent, the customer. It served as a reminder to attendees that every decision the business made should be to enhance the customer’s experience in some way. In most organizations, the CMO is responsible for representing the customer—from researching their expectations and preferences, to educating the organization on their needs and ways to meet them.

Understanding the customer starts with insights. When firms elevate the listening and insights functions to the CMO level, it helps them break through on multiple fronts:

• Discovering opportunities for new products or enhancements
• Identifying friction that is causing customer dissatisfaction
• Surfacing customer values that are not directly related to the brand

Heidi Browning, senior executive vice president and CMO at the NHL, explained how, each season, its Power Players program gives 28 young fans the chance to share their ideas about how the league can appeal to their generation.

Advocacy switches the focus to being a voice for the customer. It’s not enough for CMOs to capture and aggregate customer opinions, ideas, and aspirations. Great CMOs become champions for their customers inside the organization, seeking to influence policy decisions, back-end processes, and even financial decisions.

This advocacy is all the more important in times of turmoil. “A CFO may look only at the numbers, or just at the wallets of consumers,” Hamilton said. “But the CMO can provide an additional perspective and help the organization understand how to remain relevant to the consumer even as their problems are changing.”

Drive Revenue Growth

CMOs are increasingly tasked with looking across the whole customer experience, and not just at the traditional, narrow promotions funnel. They are being challenged to think strategically about opportunities for growth, including new products, new services, and tailored offerings for certain customer segments.

For many CMOs, performance is king. Leveraging robust measurement models, advanced CMOs identify marketing-driven sales and seek to increase the return on ad spend against that key metric. In performance-oriented organizations, the role of brand and creative has become subordinate—it’s less about the “big idea,” and more about understanding what creative might be working, then mobilizing quickly to develop more of it.

Strategic marketers—and growth officers—drive innovation. In some organizations, marketing leads strategic planning and annual operating planning processes. These organizations leverage consumer insights to be more forward-looking. They constantly transform their approach to customer engagement and portfolio planning by focusing on where the consumer is going and how the organization can best meet their needs.

Ultimately, Gajiwala said, the two perspectives “come back together as we start to infuse more of a growth-hacking mindset into the marketing itself.”

Shape Brand Strategy

Establishing a brand’s identity and boosting its recognition and reputation have always been core functions of marketers. While the role of the CMO places more emphasis on revenue growth than before, the importance of relating to consumers is greater today than it has ever been.

Creating an emotional connection with consumers remains a central goal of marketing. One sign of a great brand is its ability to create a space in a person’s heart and mind that connects them to something bigger than they are as an individual. Several of the marketers we interviewed emphasized the pandemic and how it has intensified consumers’ need to feel safe, heard, and understood.

That requires the CMO to navigate between the CEO, the business model itself, and the consumer, according to David Edelman, senior lecturer of business administration at Harvard Business School and former CMO of Aetna.

“There’s so much pressure to make business and marketing all ‘left brain.’ But emotion matters,” he said. “You have to have a voice and a position that matters emotionally, and you’ve got to bring your leadership team around to help them understand that that’s important.”

Marketers point to an increased focus on brand equity. Except in organizations that have a designated chief brand officer, CMOs typically own the responsibility of defining and shaping a company’s brand. With the mounting scrutiny on marketing performance, some of the brand conversation has turned toward brand equity, leading CMOs to focus on not just the financial value of their brand, but the social value as well.

Financial and social outcomes are intrinsically linked. William White, CMO of Walmart, explained that when it comes to building brand equity, his company is focused on becoming consumers’ favorite retailer. “That begins with building trust,” he said. “We have to ask whether we are building an emotional trust with the customer. So, the role that marketing plays in helping articulate and drive purpose is really important.”

Orchestrate Customer Engagement

CMOs we spoke with oversee various components of their company’s marketing communications, advertising, social media, public relations, events, and owned media platforms, such as the website and mobile applications. Often, organizations are structured in such a way that separate teams handle different touchpoints, which raises the likelihood of consumers having a disjointed experience when interacting with the brand. From their perch at the top of the marketing pyramid, CMOs can help cut across the silos and establish a more holistic approach to the customer journey.

In a multitouch world, marketers must coordinate customer communication. As consumers interact with brands in more places than ever, they expect brands to recognize them, know their history, and engage them in relevant and personal ways across every device and touchpoint. This presents a complex challenge for marketers, who, in order to capture and manage customer data, must knit together the disparate systems their company uses to engage with customers.

These systems can include customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, email service providers, and content management system (CMS) technologies for web personalization. The onus is on CMOs to coordinate across various teams and processes in order to orchestrate messaging and provide a consistent experience.

Elevating the customer experience requires cross-enterprise partnership. Some organizations have a chief customer officer, whose team is responsible for orienting the company around its customers’ needs. In many organizations, however, this responsibility falls to the CMO—particularly in those where the CMO plays the role of customer advocate.

These CMOs partner with other departments (including technology, customer service, supply chain, legal, and compliance) in a more formal capacity to identify areas of friction for customers and eliminate those pain points. White pointed to the importance of having a unified promise—in Walmart’s case, “helping our customers live better”—against which the company can continually evaluate its strategies, practices, and decisions.

Manage Technology and Data

Modern marketing is inherently technology- and insights-driven. Every CMO we interviewed spoke about the importance of understanding and affecting marketing, data, and intelligence decisions.

CMOs must keep pace with technology developments. While CMOs don’t need to be computer engineers, they do need to understand the marketing and advertising technology stack, including how the solutions interact with one another, and with other internal systems. But more importantly, they must also understand the impact that technology has on how they engage with customers.

Whatever their tech literacy, CMOs should stay on top of the fast-changing digital behaviors of consumers. This way, they can understand how consumers will likely react to new solutions as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), the metaverse, social media, and ecommerce evolve.

Harvard Business School’s Edelman agreed that CMOs must have at least some foothold in the marketing technology and operations world. “They may not be super [knowledgeable], but they should surround themselves with people who are, and learn from them,” he said. “They need to risk having people who are much smarter than they are on that [topic] and let them shine.”

Leveraging customer insights builds competitive advantage. CMOs frequently oversee the team responsible for capturing, integrating, and analyzing customer data to deliver insights that drive communication, product, and operational decisions. To keep pace with the variety, volume, or speed of customer data collection, CMOs need to understand their company’s approach, learn to ask the questions that data scientists can explore, and strive for a nimble approach to match the pace of their customers.

CMO Success Requires Better Business Alignment

It is virtually impossible for any individual to be an expert in the entire breadth of responsibilities that a CMO may be tasked with. To extend their longevity in the role and increase their odds of success, chief marketers should focus on three key initiatives:

Connecting the marketing strategy to the business strategy.

Adopting a leadership style that matches the organizational strategy.

Monitoring for stolen information online. Seeking roles in which their core strengths align with the needs of the specific opportunity.

CMOs need to tie themselves to the strategy of the business. To earn and retain a seat at the executive table, marketers must think of themselves as business executives first and foremost, with a clear understanding of the corporate strategy and an ability to demonstrate their contribution to it. Laura Curtis Ferrera, global CMO of Scotiabank, said, “It’s essential that I build a marketing strategy that ladders up to the bank strategy. It’s the No. 1 thing that I have to do. There can be no misunderstanding about what we’re doing.”

Establishing a strong working relationship with the CEO and CFO ensures alignment on objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs). Moreover, it helps change the perception of marketing as an expense center and provides the permission structure for CMOs, as customer advocate, to contribute to corporate strategy.

It’s increasingly important for marketers to develop their emotional quotient, which will enable them to be sympathetic leaders who can hear the needs of their teams and connect with them using vulnerability and empathy. It’s equally important that the marketer fit their style to the organizational culture. They should consider, for example, whether the organization requires a growth hacker, an empathetic leader with an abundance mindset, or an analytical data nerd focused on the numbers.

Understand CMO archetypes to match with the right role. When hiring a CMO, companies usually try to find a fit based on attributes such as the candidate’s organization’s business model, size, and industry. For example, companies are often deliberate about hiring either executives who have industry experience, or just the opposite, someone who will bring an outside perspective and new way of doing things.

But according to University of Virginia’s Whitler, most firms fail to hire CMOs who meet the needs of their business. Because companies fail to identify their needs, they create poorly defined CMO roles, which, unsurprisingly, they fill with a candidate who isn’t a fit.

To make better matches with companies, senior marketers should start with an honest assessment of their strengths and preferences for their role. Then they must probe as deeply as possible into the job opportunity. How? They can investigate what marketing functions may be dispersed across other internal roles, pinpoint the objectives and KPIs that will indicate success, and insist on a clearly defined role, which they can use to assess if it is a fit for their specific skill set.

We identify five archetypes of the CMO that senior marketers can use to clarify their strengths and match themselves with the right opportunities. Some archetypes have overlapping secondary functions, which are critical for prospective CMOs to consider when determining their fit for a role.

Strategy-Focused CMOs Set the Company’s Vision

• These practitioners define the company’s vision and positioning, based on deep analysis of consumer insights, competitive behavior, and social trends.

• They often own the organization’s planning initiatives and may set the direction for go-to-market strategies, pricing decisions, and product innovation.

• They frequently serve in a centralized function within multibrand organizations, in which marketing communications and operations are owned by business units. In some companies, these responsibilities may be owned by a chief strategy officer, brand manager, or chief product officer.

Revenue-Focused CMOs Drive Business Growth

• These practitioners are responsible for driving sales and view all their activity through this lens.

• When responsible for paid media initiatives, they focus heavily on test-and-learn strategies and rapid optimization. These CMOs often also oversee performance marketing activities such as affiliate and native advertising, as well as referral programs.

• In some organizations, they may own innovation and channel management, particularly in high-growth and challenger brands. At certain companies, a chief revenue officer may be responsible for both marketing and sales initiatives.

Brand-Focused CMOs Build Equity and Value

• These CMOs focus on what was once the prototypical marketing function: defining a brand’s creative strategy and overseeing all aspects of creative execution.

• Strategically, they set the positioning for the company and its products, while focusing on tactically executing campaigns that bring the brand to life through advertising and other forms of marketing content.

• Some firms employ a separate chief brand officer who bears responsibility for these initiatives.

Engagement-Focused CMOs Seek Customer Connections

• These CMOs focus on communication and ensuring they send the proverbial right message to the right customer at the right time. As such, they often oversee communication planning and campaign management.

• In many organizations, they own marketing technology and data functions, while in other firms they may be responsible for, or organized within, a loyalty function.

• This role differs significantly by industry and business type. For example, in retail and ecommerce companies, the CMO is less likely to have responsibility over the website or app than in industries such as automotive or consumer packaged goods (CPG). In certain organizations, responsibilities may be shared with, or owned by, other roles including the chief communications officer and chief media officer.

Experience-Focused CMOs Act as the Customer Advocate

• As companies increasingly compete to provide the best customer experience, these CMOs are on the front lines of listening to customer needs, distilling customer insights, and advocating for customer needs inside the organization.

• These CMOs identify opportunities for the company to transform around the customer and act as the connective tissue tying employees, partners, and vendors together to align on meeting the customer’s needs. They replace the empty chair in the Bezos boardroom and represent the needs of the customer at every turn.

• Many firms have introduced the chief customer officer or chief experience officer to the C-suite to oversee these responsibilities.

Sources

Insider Intelligence, eMarketer

Advertiser Perceptions

Alida

fifty-five

GWI

Merkle

Spencer Stuart

TiVo

YouGov