CMO.com

There is no question that the chief marketing officer (CMO) role has been a crucible of corporate pressure since the job was first spawned in the mid-1990s.  Marketing is the most visible expression of company strategy, customer satisfaction and corporate spending.  With the accelerating changes in consumers’ media and buying habits, each of these areas is in flux.  As a result, many CMOs are hired in or promoted up into the role and immediately assigned as “change agents.”  The question is—Change what?

Unfortunately for CMOs, expectations for change lie all over the map.  Many CEOs set great expectations for their marketing chiefs to get digital, drive ROI, listen to customers, fix the value equation, improve innovation and manage dozens of specialty agencies.  One result of these broad expectations is that CMO turnover continues to hover just north of two years on average.  On the other hand, many companies still see the CMO role as insignificant in boardroom discussions.  A June 2009 study by Ernst & Young found that only 7% of Fortune 1000 companies bother to list a head marketer in public filings. 

I believe that the CMO is a needed change agent in the boardroom today—but not as a master of many responsibilities.  Rather, the Chief Marketer has but one critical task: To lead a company through a dramatic shift in society that is upending the traditional model of marketing that worked in a previous age but is increasingly ineffective today, and certainly endangered tomorrow.  This true leadership role is worthy of our best and brightest marketers and is required to return companies to growth in the new, new economy.

Even when they are in the throes of irrelevance, some marketing leaders still believe that the role as corporate change agent is all about shepherding through a shiny new TV campaign.  General Motors and Chrysler have both recently moved to release their long-term agency partners in hopes that new advertising will turn around their +20% sales declines.  And Yahoo! has chosen to counter lost search share and the launch of innovations like Microsoft Bing and Google Wave by sinking $100 million into colorful 60-second copy.  But changing up TV ads is far from what it takes to win today.

Sadly, somewhere along the way marketing as a profession shifted away from a critical role at the center of consumer understanding and business strategy and toward that of chief ad-maker.  Starting in the mass media days of Mad Men, the marketing function was bastardized to become mainly about herding the advertising agency into churning out the best 30-second interruption that a few hundred thousand dollars could buy, and ensuring that it was sprayed liberally across millions of eyeballs.  That model is now withering before our eyes, and successful CMOs realize the need to hit the reset button and plot an entirely new course of brand building.

The truly great marketers have always been students of human nature and cultural change.  They got into this profession for the chance to win by better delivering on consumers’ needs—both through products and through the marketing itself.  An understanding of cultural trends and passion for consumer advocacy has never been more critical than today.  Simply put, thanks to the rise of digital technology, we are in the middle of the largest change in human society since the Renaissance and invention of the printing press.  As brilliantly described by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody, “When new technology appears, previously impossible things start occurring.  If enough of those impossible things are important and happen in a bundle, quickly, the change becomes a revolution.”  Great CMOs see the change occurring, and adapt their companies to the new social order.

Digital technology is unlocking a radical change in how people communicate with each other and process information.  In many ways this is a revolution in which we are “revolving” back to a time when small towns and villages of a few hundred people operated in tight communication networks.  Here, social norms eclipse market exchange.  Then, as increasingly now, people go to their social networks for favors and advice; they take care of and look out for one another; and they put up walls against untrustworthy outside threats.

In this cultural shift, all of our beautiful TV copy and product claims are at best ignored as useless noise, and at worst despised as distrustful hucksterism.  If your brand is not adding value to society—even through the marketing itself—then people have little use for it.  The only solution, and the revolution that only Chief Marketing Officers can lead, is a shift to what I call Marketing with Meaning.  We must create marketing that people choose to engage with, and advertising that adds value to people’s lives.

Alternatives for Marketing with Meaning vary widely according to individual brands and consumer needs.  Examples range from Samsung’s laptop recharging stations in airports, to M&M’s personalized candy, to Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty.  In each case, the brand is bringing value to the table, and in these and more examples, profitability far outstrips that of traditional media buys.