Dominique Turpin
President at IMD
The CMO position is dying for four reasons:
1] Most CMOs are not really immersed in marketing activities. Too many CMOs focus on PR and communications rather than products or pricing, so as not to invade the space of the Chief Innovation Officer or the CFO.
2] CFOs have become more powerful because of tough trading conditions and short-term pressure from financial markets. The CFO is also winning the race to the very top—most CEOs now have a finance or engineering background, and few come from sales and marketing.
3] Marketing impact is often hard to measure. And when a downturn comes, the marketing budget is often the first to be cut.
4] Nobody has a clear idea of what marketing is. By contrast, most people would agree on a definition of finance or production.
Instead of feeling sorry for themselves, CMOs can take the following practical steps to reclaim some of their lost power:
1] Get rid of the CMO title, because nobody understands it. Create the new title of CCO – Chief Customer Officer. This person must be the voice of the customer in the organization, taking views and messages from the market and spreading them internally. More and more companies have a CCO or a senior executive with a similar title, from salesforce.com to the Washington Post.
2] Get the CEO to be the CMO. Having the CEO as CMO also sends a strong message throughout the organization that the customer is front and center and that marketing is everybody’s job.
3] Get the CFO on board too. Doing this requires taking some of the fuzziness out of marketing. CCOs need to be financially literate and produce hard numbers that show the return on investment from marketing.
4] Use customer knowledge to build influence. With backing from the big two in the C-suite, CCOs can use their customer knowledge to influence discussions of product design and pricing, and make a company’s offerings more sensitive to the market.
Back in the 1950s, the management guru Peter Drucker wrote that a company has only two key functions – marketing and innovation – and that all other functions should support these. Sadly, paying attention to the customer is less and less common these days. The CCO can be the first step toward reversing this trend.
So – goodbye to the CMO, hello to the CCO.
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