10 things that make today’s cmo welcome at c-suite table
Most CEOs, COOs, Presidents, and CFOs, are aware of these facts:
It took the telephone 45 years to penetrate half the homes in America; radio, 20; color TV, 15; computers, 10; cellphones, eight; …Internet, a mere six. And most likely, the c-suite is already aware that:
- Five years ago Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Hulu and iPhone didn’t exist.
- Today Facebook has 350 million members; Twitter boasts 30 million.
- Hulu is the second biggest “channel” in America, having surpassed Time Warner Cable.
- Technology has an unrelenting impact on consumer behavior and brand loyalty.
- Democratization of information is resulting in commoditization (purchase decision via lowest price).
- Technology can alter the purchase cycle, give rise to powerful third-party influencers, counterbalance paid media’s ‘management’ of the purchase cycle.
But, in a recent Ad Age article, Avi Dan, of Avidan Strategies, argues that marketing departments barely adjusted their approach. “While investment in digital advertising has crept up some, roughly 90% of budgets is still spent on traditional channels,” Dan said. “The marketing narrative needs to be rebooted and the architecture of brand building re-engineered.”
Dan asks us to consider:
- Ten years ago, consumers spent 30 minutes online. Today it’s four hours, not including emailing.
- In this decade broadband expanded from 3% to 66% of American homes.
So, consider how the new human condition is a surging reality in the marketing-sales condition. And what it all means to your company’s own evolving customer base and prospect universe, whatever your brand, industry, category, and culture.
10 things that make today’s CMO welcome at today’s c-suite table:
1. CMO who recognizes that the speed and scope of change demands a dramatic, swift revamp of the marketing ecosystem.
2. CMO who injects value in all agencies, not just digital, being technologically savvy.
3. CMO who consults procurement in evolving its scoring of intellectual-property vendors to include technical expertise.
4. CMO who brings resolve to the c-suite for mutuality and non-partisanship in brand stewardship — to rethink ROI of marketing silos and move to integration.
5. CMO who brings savvy about migration of media agencies to play unique role at the intersection of creativity and technology.
6. CMO who inspires internal changes and recognizes that technology is no less a marketing tool than market research.
7. CMO who injects innovation vigor, pushing technology into all facets of company operations, to ensure brand’s “customer-facing” relevancy.
8. CMO who sees value of the human capital of the company, working closely with HR to hire people who are inclined toward technology and accept change as a given. Not necessarily IT experts, but curious, adapt easily, and inclined toward collaboration and social media.
9. CMO who sees counterintuitively: that the best technologies reinforce very old-fashioned values of brand building. Such as using Twitter to reinforce remarkable customer service.
10. CMO who is prescient about technology replacing the obsolete, and that a brand can hold its positioning while modifying the technological delivery platform.
The problem CMOs face with mastering technology, and with the Internet, is simple:
- There is so much going on simultaneously and things change so quickly that no one, absolutely no one, can know everything that’s going on.
- Ten years ago a marketer needed to know maybe 100 things to be effective: some aspects of positioning, some aspects of media, some media research, some pricing, some distribution.
- Now that number is in the thousands. And whereas technology used to advance incrementally, it now evolves exponentially.
This requires a CEO and c-suite to make a new-era CMO leadership leap
that may go against traditional left-brained tendencies. Brand leadership that requires a CMO who can think differently, think anew, make conceptual leaps beyond category experience (that is swiftly obsolete anyway) and commoditized data. A new-decade CMO who can do more, more powerfully, with less.
