The CMO’s job is simple—to drive growth,
right? As Lou Gerstner ex-IBM and American Express CEO once put it: the role of
Marketing is to build the brand and deliver a great customer experience. But is
it really that simple?
At the recent CMO Club Summit in San
Francisco, I was part of a panel discussion with Joe Ennen, SVP Consumer
Brands at Safeway and Scott Thurm, Management Bureau Chief of
The Wall Street Journal, titled "CMO's as Leaders of the Corporate
Growth Agenda.” Scott led off the discussion by reframing the topic, asking,
“What are the barriers to CMO’s
leading the corporate growth agenda?”
Barriers to CMO’s Leading the Corporate Growth Agenda
- CEO/CMO Alignment - The best CMO is a CEO who believes in
Marketing. The CMO's ability to lead the corporate growth agenda starts
with alignment with and support from the CEO. Not all business models and
CMO’s are created equal. The role of Marketing in an organization can vary
widely. And the CMO role can range from a narrow Marcom role all the way
to something like a Chief Growth Officer. The CEO and CMO must be aligned
on the role of Marketing in the organization for the CMO to effectively
lead the growth agenda.
2.
Growth
Means More Than Marketing - The
CMO has to think more broadly than Marketing. What are all of the potential
growth drivers - Marketing or otherwise ? Companies such as Zappos.com have
actually gone so far as to define a non-Marketing function like customer
service as Marketing. A critical part of the CMO's job is to understand the
business model and all potential drivers-whether inside Marketing or not. This
is becoming even more important as digital and social media blur the lines
between Marketing, Public Affairs and Customer Service.
For example, a
large, global financial services firm learned from Corporate Reputation
research that being “open and transparent” was a key driver of reputation, and
that reputation scores correlated
with “willingness to refer others” and other business growth metrics.
This led the Marketing function to explore programs to communicate to
stakeholders in more open and transparent ways.
- Voice of the Customer – Another key barrier to the CMO driving the
corporate growth agenda is customer neglect. The CMO needs to continually
advocate for keeping the customer front and center. All CMO’s could learn
from A.G. Lafley, ex CEO of Procter & Gamble, who continually reminded
employees that “the consumer is boss.”
Customer satisfaction surveys
not only measure satisfaction. They also measure the important factors
contributing to satisfaction and quantify the relationship between those
factors and satisfaction. Understanding these drivers enables
Marketing to define areas outside Marketing that are central to driving growth.
For example, a large financial
services firm learned that client contact frequency was an important
satisfaction driver—more was better up to a threshold where satisfaction
leveled off. Yet, the majority of client advisers were contacting clients well
below the threshold. This led to a concentrated effort to improve contact
frequency—and drive growth.
- Connecting Customer Needs with Enterprise Assets
– The CMO plays an important role in getting the
organization to think about the entirety of the enterprise’s assets and
capabilities. Connecting customer needs with assets from outside a
business unit is a great way to drive growth—and one that organizational
structure often stymies.
Example: Crest WhiteStrips. Consumers had an unmet
need for whiter teeth, and paste formulations simply didn’t do the job. A smart
R&D person connected this need with synthetic bleach technology from
laundry and substrate technology from paper making to create—voila--Crest
WhiteStrips.
Keys to CMO Success
CMO’s
clearly have a tough job, with an average lifespan of just 28 months. Lou
Gerstner’s formula for CMO success is a good starting point, but CMO’s need to
go further. Building the brand and
delivering a great customer experience plus driving
the corporate growth agenda can help CMO’s and their firms be more successful
in the future.
Courtesy: Randall Beard, Award Winning CMO
Sponsored By: The Brand Positioning Workshop
This is spot on! The role of CMO really is such a diverse, malleable one. Done properly, marketing is holistic, should touch on and does affect every area of a business, its brand and the relationship to its customers. I particularly like the example of integrating customer service as a marketing and branding function. Precisely what I did in my recent role as "virtual CMO" in a niche financial services firm. Differentiated the company from its competitors by building customer service, training the reps and motivating them to give their best in enhancing the company's brand perception and thus building customer loyalty. Voila CRM.
Posted by: Elli Strauss | December 22, 2009 at 04:51 PM