Inspired CMOs see themselves as champions and drivers of growth who can anticipate customers, develop their organizations’ Marketing capabilities, and figure out how to demonstrate Marketing’s impact on the business in terms that matter to their C-Suite leadership team. In fact, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) should operate under another title: the Chief Value Officer (CVO) since it is the CMO’s job to guide and transform Marketing into a Center of Excellence that serves as a model across the organization.
What separates those who merely survive from those who manage to thrive? Surviving CMOs tend to focus on lead generation, pipeline management, branding, and customer acquisition. Thriving CMOs, on the other hand, think beyond this and instead increase their stake in growing customer lifetime value and developing long-term customer profitability. Typically, these CMOs lean toward the analytical end of the Marketing spectrum as opposed to the creative end.
Are You Perceived to Be a Champion and Driver of Growth?
Let’s dig down into what makes a CMO thrive. Generally, it begins with three characteristics:
- Thrivers close the gap between Marketing and the customer by creating customer-centric business strategies and models that allow them to serve as the “voice of the customer.”
- They embrace and leverage data to analyze market and customer trends and strengthen their knowledge of the customer and market to create customer-driven products, exceptional customer experiences, a culture dedicated to value creation. Their Marketing organizations use their data-to-insights business acumen. As a result, they are more credible and their data are more relevant.
- They take the helm in helping the company anticipate and respond rapidly to changing market and customer needs as well as lead the charge in establishing new Marketing capabilities.
Organizations thrive only if they can acquire and keep customers. To put it in a nutshell, we will defer to Peter Drucker who encapsulated the framework of a successful business by saying that the “purpose of business is to create customer.” So, if you subscribe to Peter Drucker’s philosophy and adopt Phil Kotler’s position that it is Marketing’s purpose to find, keep, and grow the value of customers, then Marketing must be at the center of the structure to drive your company’s value.
Learn more about how your Marketing organization can operate as a Center of Excellence and make Marketing more relevant to you and the C-Suite:
- Start by reading our How to Guides. We recommend What You Must Know About Marketing Centers of Excellence: A Why and How Primer.
- Listen to educational recordings. A good place to start is by tuning in to Creating Marketing Centers of Excellence: A Case Study and Driving Marketing Excellence | Virtual Roundtable – Board Room Events.
- Read case studies to learn how a new perspective helped companies make change happen. Take a peek at Case Study 38: Making Marketing Relevant to the C-Suite.
A version of this post was published on visionedgemarketing.com. and Integrated Marketing Association.