This is yet another milestone moment for marketing and brand management. Why? Because the pages of our business press report that many well-known brands are in trouble due to brand management mismarketing. There are multiple reasons for the marketing infractions. One serious issue is the state of the CMO role. And, the state of the CMO role is fraught. To exacerbate the CMO miasma, there is the sense that many CMO candidates have never been schooled in the basic, evergreen principles of brand and brand management. One does not always learn these essential constructs on the job.
If you want insight into the state of marketing affairs and the CMO role, there is a really sad, and seemingly unfortunate, description of how to “help” the CMO in Harvard Business Review online.
Here is the fundamental problem with the CMO.
Marketing, as we know it, faces challenges. Consumers continue to transform the way they interact with brands. This means that marketing and brand management must transform its approach to interacting with consumers.
The marketing world is constantly evolving. Technology has created multiple ways to communicate with customers and potential customers.
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There is a savvier, more intuitive consumer living in a world of immense choice, information, and personalization. This consumer wants the benefits of choice without the complexity of choice.
Customers are more informed, skeptical, demanding, prone to influence, and discriminating when it comes to defining value.
With the economic anxiety of our times, a growing generation of shoppers is embracing frugality again, making it fashionable. Every consumer is a value consumer, and no consumer in any category wants a poor value.
Customers’ value equations have changed. Now, customers evaluate value by assessing the total brand costs of money, time, and effort relative to the total brand experience of functional, emotional, and social rewards along with connections to personal values and the brand’s appealing, driving personality.
For customers, value is far more than just price. It is absurd to think that there is a segment of value-conscious people. Everyone is value-conscious; value is relative.
These customer changes are tailor-made for the talents of marketers!
But, please be concerned.
Be very concerned about the degradation of marketing, about which the pundits, academics, and sideline-watchers report. And, be very concerned about articles that provide brand management and marketing tactics to improve the “image” of the CMO. The CMO, marketing, and brand management, in general, need strategies, not skin-deep tactics such as title changes. The CMO went through the cute title changes a decade ago, and look where that got us. Names are what you make them, not vice versa.
The fact is that we must redefine marketing or be part of its radical decline. One primary symptom of the CMO decline is the raft of C-suite denizens fighting for their slice of the pie.
Here is an example: At a recent client marketing meeting, in addition to the Chief Marketing Officer, there was a chief insights officer, a chief concept officer, a chief innovation officer, a chief pricing officer, a chief technology information officer, a chief digital officer, a chief retail officer, and a chief merchandising officer sitting around the table.
This fractionalization of functions is fracturing the role of marketing and the CMO.
Marketing is sliced, diced, spliced, strangled, and mangled by specialists competing with one another for limited corporate resources and the attention of CEOs. The CMO’s role is often reduced to managing these competitive offices and attempting to force cooperation.
Additionally, the CMO job description has become very complex and confusing. The shifts in technology, data amassment, smart devices, channels, and personalization have upended the role of the CMO. Things are so confounding that in 2022, three different marketing/CMO reports from Deloitte, the global business services enterprise, provide fifteen different responsibilities, trends, or must-dos for CMO. We are still marginalizing marketing and trivializing the role of the CMO, turning this crucial position into a coordinator, mediator, and arbitrator.
Whether B2B or B2C, the CMO is now the chief referee, the ringmaster of the circus. The attrition of the CMO role within the C-suite and across the enterprise is highly detrimental to the enduring profitable growth of the business. This hurts the brand. Brand value is key. Without brand value, there is no shareholder value.
Of critical importance is that CMOs manage the myriad channels and technologies that deliver the brand to customers in ways that customers want. But, the more the CMO has to diversify away from building and maintaining great, powerful brands, the weaker marketing and the brand-business become.
Stop turning the CMO into a jack-of-all-trades. The fragmentation of marketing is forcing the Chief Marketing Officer to act as a coordinator of multi-media messages; a manager of mini-moguls who have staked out their spheres of influence.
Observers and academics lament the decline in the CMO’s power. Stop worrying about the title of the position and start worrying about how to generate enduring, profitable growth. Discussions focusing on tactical CMO changes are recommending patina rather than being purposeful. Defaulting to cosmetic changes ignores the crucial issues. Marketing is about managing the business and managing the business.
Managing a business is more than just managing messages and media. Peter Drucker, the most respected management guru ever, once said, “The purpose of business is to create a customer.” CMOS are so focused on managing the C-suite and their comrades that they forget to create and manage the customer
Instead of a profession, marketing is becoming a trade, the trade of managing and executing marketing communications. Effective marketing is not merely about message and media management; it is about business management. It is fundamentally about attracting and retaining customers. How you run your brand is how you run your business. Business management is brand management and vice versa.
The CMO must be the business leader responsible for generating, supporting, and implementing a customer-driven focus within the organization, whether the organization is B2B or B2C.
We can no longer distinguish between the business plan and the brand plan. There is only one plan: it is the brand-business plan.
The purpose of brand management is the enduring, profitable growth of the business. Brand management is all about “profitably satisfying customer needs.” The purpose of the business plan is the enduring, profitable growth of the brand.
The three functional responsibilities for building enduring profitable growth are Marketing, Operations, and Finance. The authors of the brand-business plan are the CMO, the COO, and the CFO. The owner of the plan is the CEO.
The CMO brings a distinctive perspective to this three-legged management stool. The CMO should be one of the more valued individuals within the organization. The CMO must be the leading C-Suite influencer encompassing the entire customer experience.
The CMO is responsible for:
Marketing is all about profitably managing customer-driven, top-line growth, which is the goal of the brand-business plan. Yet, organizations have hindered and continue to hinder the effectiveness of marketing, relegating marketing to managing the means of communication.
Meeting the challenges of today’s brand environment is exciting. The CMO is now charged with some of the most topical functions for steering brand within the enterprise. However, at the same time, the role of CMO is becoming the dumpster for an array of activities not focused on being the voice of the customer to the enterprise, nor on creating a customer-focused brand aimed at profitably satisfying customer needs and problems.
Let’s be clear: these new tasks are important for driving the business. But, an enlightened C-Suite knows that the CMO must not relinquish the responsibility of leading the understanding, articulating, and activating of great, trustworthy, quality brand promises for enduring profitable growth. Nothing valuable can happen without knowing what the brand stands for in the eyes of the customer. Nothing valuable can happen without growing customer-perceived trustworthy brand-business value.
Channel management and device management are distinct from brand management. Being the chief in charge of organizing marketing’s mess is deleterious to the role of the CMO and to the brand.
Enterprises and consultants need to come to their senses. Brands need more than brand management: they need brand leadership. The organization and its brands need the CMO to be more than the manager of a confusing marketing mess. Brands need the CMO to drive the strategic customer-focused agenda, leverage the power of scale, increase the effectiveness, efficiency, and agility of the brand, focus on brand priorities and innovation, leading towards enduring profitable growth. And, the CMO must do this with passion, persuasion, persistence, conviction, commitment, and diplomacy.
The CMO must return to being the business leader who generates, supports, and activates a customer-driven focus within the organization. It is time for the CMO to return to business and drive the development of high-quality customer-driven growth strategies.
Articles that reinforce CMO problems with tactics and title changes only serve to increase the decline of this key brand advocate within the enterprise. Brand management, as the CMO’s purview, must gain respectful and strategic changes.
Here is one meaningful way to revamp the CMO role and put brand management in the hands of those who know what to do: revamp the business school curriculum.
We should be very concerned that our business schools are not offering potential marketers any education in brand management to achieve enduring, profitable growth. There are no opportunities for potential marketers to learn the essentials of brand and brand management. If you are saying to yourself, “Well, brand management is just about image, ads, digital attractions, and AI,” you are part of the problem.
Look at the courses in your favorite business school. Yes, the school’s promise is to make you suitable for a position as a brand manager. But there are no courses in brand management. How can a business school promise to make you qualified for a brand-business management position when there are no brand management teachings?
The lack of education about brands is demeaning and devalues the role of the CMO. Customer creation is embedded in brand management. Brand affects your balance sheet. Business economics demands that you understand brands.
So, yes, the CMO role needs fixing. But please recommend strategic transformations because the CMO role needs a turnaround plan, not cosmetic tactics. Also, pressure your business school to add brand management education. Right now, many brands are sinking because the principles of brand management have not been taught.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Joan Kiddon, Partner, The Blake Project, Author of The Paradox Planet: Creating Brand Experiences For The Age Of I
At The Blake Project, we help clients worldwide, in all stages of development, define or redefine and articulate what makes them competitive at pivotal moments of change. This includes pricing strategies that propel their businesses and brands forward. Please email us to learn how we can help you compete differently.
Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Growth, and Brand Education
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