Congrats! You're a Marketing Exec - Now What???

Throughout your career, you've focused on becoming better and better at your job. You've deepened your technical skills, you've learned how to keep your boss happy and you've learned how to manage. But the game has now changed completely.

First, you’re going to get LOTS of advice and counsel about what marketing is and needs to do. You’ll get it from the CFO who fancies him- or herself a creative copywriter, the top sales person who is convinced that one more event will generate enough leads to meet his or her quota, the head of product development who just knows that if you can write that brochure describing every single one of the features of the new product customers will be beating down the door. And, of course, from the CEO and board.

Some of this will be well meaning, some will be self-serving, and some of it will be uninformed bordering on ignorant.

Unfortunately, you can't ignore it. You've got to listen and find ways to incorporate these suggestions into your programs, or risk alienating your constituents.

You've also got to establish your independence.

How do you walk this fine line?

Let’s look at some research. SpencerStuart, the executive search firm,

What Do CMOs Actually Do?

The stereotypical view of the CMO has been the Chief Advertising Officer, reinforced by the popular AMC series Mad Men (I admit to being addicted to the show…).

But the CMO’s remit from the CEO and management team is much broader than creating winning advertising campaigns, argues Joe Tripodi, chief marketing and commercial officer of The Coca-Cola Company. “They want the CMO to be the chief growth officer of the company. They want the CMO to drive cultural change, and they want the CMO to build capability with people.”*

Nigel Dessau, currently CMO of Stratus Technology and ex-CMO of both AMD and StorageTek, says “I spent 40% of my time marketing, 30% on corporate issues and 30% on the road, mostly with customers. It is surprising how little you get to do your nominal job as head of marketing.”

“There is a very unique strength that most leading CMOs have: helping to lead a group of professionals from marketing as sales support to strategic marketing,” says Suzanne Lowe, author of The Integration Imperative, a book written for professional services marketers. “Professional services marketing is a very young profession; construction management, for example, is RFP driven. All professional services marketers need to shift from being order-takers / responders to move to focusing on identifying the critical factors of competitive success for their firms. And they need to help their firms make this shift.”
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Next: Congrats! You're a Marketing Executive - Now What???

*"What do you want from me? How high-performing CMOs exceed expectations," Spencer Stuart, November 2010,

Surviving in the Marketing Jungle

Marketing is about survival in a jungle that has no mercy, particularly for members of one of the least understood clans in the corporate world.

If you play the game well, you’ll get additional opportunities. Many companies now have Chief Revenue Officers, which formally combine sales and marketing. You could eventually get IT: Gartner research VP Laura McLellan* predicts that by 2017 CMOs will spend more on IT than CIOs. And you might even have a shot at the top position, as did James White who become the CEO Jamba Juice.

Based on interviews and research, those who just focus on "marketing" are less likely to succeed. The successful CMO needs to think act like the CEO of a business – your business is the business of "understanding, attracting, and keeping valuable customers."** You need to become the CEO of Marketing™.

Forget Everything that Got You Here

You've just landed that CMO or executive marketing job you've wanted for years.

Congratulations! Bask in the glory.

For about a minute.

Now focus on this: 45 months* - or if you're in healthcare, automotive, restaurant or communications / media, 28 to 32 months.

That’s the average life of a CMO (and if you're not the CMO, you need to start thinking about his or her replacement...)

And that’s the good news – the lifespan is up from 23 months in 2006! But less than four years is hardly a career, and what you do during three critical time periods will determine your success, and your tenure:

Generating meaningful insights

with Liam Fahey

Intelligence that makes a difference – that creates insights – is almost always the result of collaboration between intelligence professionals and decision executives. Neither one alone can create and leverage intelligence. 

Executives influence the direction of intelligence work. They shape the context for the work: they identify the current and emerging issues and decisions, questions they want addressed, areas and topics they would like explored, and, the nature of the dialogue they desire with the intelligence professionals. 

Intelligence professionals create understanding and meaning out of disparate and always incomplete data, disconnected viewpoints and perspectives, and an ever-changing competitive environment. 

When they work in tandem, they co-create an understanding of change and its business implications. This understanding influences what the organization thinks about (e.g. which emerging opportunities or risks need attention), how it thinks (e.g. identifying, challenging and refining core assumptions), the decisions it makes (e.g. what strategic moves to make, what business unites to support) and the actions it takes (e.g. where to allocate resources).