The Institute for Real Growth and Spencer Stuart’s Marketing, Sales and Communications Practice interviewed more than 500 leaders worldwide about leadership and performance, and identified a group of over-performing CMOs they call Da Vinci Growth CMOs.
The distinction the article draws is between experiences and attitudes. The ten experiences are a menu to be matched to the stakeholders and challenges of a particular business, while all five attitudes are described as essential for every CMO to master.
Key findings
- The high-performing group understand that unleashing the power of technology is critical to success and requires both data and human creativity.
- They also hold that sustained business growth requires the organization to create value for all stakeholders, and that human-centric growth strategies deliver superior shareholder returns.
- The crisis context is stated directly: the strongest companies and leaders are those that are purposeful and confident about their role in society, and the businesses exceeding expectations are winning because they prioritize understanding the needs of, and creating value for, all their stakeholders.
- The curriculum behind the work rests on interviews with around 500 senior business leaders, over 4,500 online survey contributions from 73 countries, an analysis of over 3,500 publications, and behavioral analysis of publicly available LinkedIn data from over 800 million connections across 3 million employees.
The ten experiences
Decoding the world comes first. Top CMOs build a growth strategy from underlying human insights, market developments, and the needs and wants of key stakeholders. Taking a human-centric perspective rather than relying only on a functional one produces more specific market definitions, as when Mars redefined its business scope from pet food to pet care.
Growth strategy is the second. It means balancing marketing-specific questions about how to win and how to leverage communication channels against the shared business challenge of identifying where to compete, and partnering with executive committee peers on strategy development to build shared language and influence.
Strategic brand development is the third. In consumer businesses marketing’s primary responsibility is to ensure the overall business strategy is supported by a synergistic portfolio of strong and purposeful brands, and the article notes that previous crises have typically led to a resurgence in demand for value propositions.
Product and service innovation is the fourth, on the basis that taking a broader view of where to play is crucial but not sufficient by itself. The example given is Adobe evolving over a decade from a software company into a marketing partner offering products and services for creating, managing, measuring and optimizing experiences, with revenues tripling as a result.
Breakthrough content and engagement is the fifth, illustrated by Restaurant Brands International, whose global CMO is credited with inspiring the best creative content in the brand’s history through augmented reality work, provocative campaigns and pioneering mobile programs.
Creative customer experience is the sixth, and the article says it is probably the area that benefits most from a human-centric, whole-brain approach. It cites Forrester Research lamenting the loss of creative differentiation and the prevalence of digital sameness in customer experience, and argues for infusing a traditionally technology-led discipline with human inspiration and creativity.
Integrated stakeholder engagement is the seventh. Where the CMO’s role was often limited to consumer engagement, the post-crisis reality demands that companies actively engage with all stakeholders, and the article states that the responsibilities of the CMO and the chief communications officer are converging.
Revenue and channel leadership is the eighth. In e-commerce the distinction between marketing and sales is becoming irrelevant, only a portion of CMOs have had full profit and loss responsibility in their career, and the article suggests this is why quite a few organizations have replaced the CMO title with chief growth, chief commercial or chief revenue officer.
Marketing capability is the ninth. Antonio Lucio credits his success as CMO in historically non-marketing-led companies to becoming an educator of his peers, and devoted significant time to upskilling marketers through a marketing academy running from brand positioning to mobile marketing metrics.
Media and performance is the tenth. Booking.com became the dominant hotel reservation player globally largely through performance marketing skills, and its global CMO is described as a whole-brained marketer who balances human sociology expertise with expertise on search, social and performance marketing.
The five attitudes
The article is explicit that the attitudes work differently from the experiences: not all the experiences are equally important or even necessary for every CMO role, but a CMO needs to demonstrate all five attitudes to succeed in driving human-centric business growth.
The first is curious and agile learner. The argument is that few functions have evolved as much as marketing over the last decade, which makes curiosity and willingness to learn crucial. Da Vinci himself is described as a voracious learner whose research, apprenticeships and thousands of sketched experiments illustrate the breadth of his interests.
The second is courageous and inspiring storyteller. A CMO who can bring purpose, vision and strategy alive by speaking to both head and heart can convince stakeholders to take the leap of faith that daring plans require, building on a receiving-end perspective for every audience and managing their own energy as well as the energy around them.
The third is connected and collaborative. With the explosion of expertise required, marketers have had to expand the number of agencies, consultancies and outside partners. The article notes that Da Vinci became a collaborator out of necessity: he was notoriously slow, rarely met deadlines, and only started excelling after opening a studio and engaging a team to help execute his ideas.
The fourth is servant leader. The key to success in a world of multi-stakeholder interests is drawing on the diversity in the room to generate new ideas, and the article states bluntly that CMOs with big egos will have a short tenure, quoting Da Vinci that nothing strengthens authority as much as silence.
The fifth is speed and impact obsessed. The days of endlessly debating the finer points of a positioning statement, finding a vanilla compromise media plan, and spending three months on an annual strategy are over. Da Vinci constantly ran experiments to test whether his ideas held up in real life, which the article says we now call agile, iterative improvement, and design thinking.
What the deck is for
The document itself is an implementation pack covering a resources brochure, content blocks, the design of the Humanizing Growth series, the newsletter, a growth study brochure, and the Da Vinci Growth CMO article.
The resources brochure sets out five options for partner companies: tailored humanized growth workshops with operating companies, a masterclass series, speaking engagements with the founders, nominating clients for the IRG100 leadership program, and offering the IRG1000 program to corporates at a discount with the option to participate alongside the client.
The masterclass series is described as three-hour topic deep dives, with sessions listed on humanizing commerce, winning in the ecosystem for growth, and unlocking the power of diversity.
Scope and limitations
This is a design and implementation pack rather than a publication. Several of its sections are explicitly not included, and parts of the layout carry placeholder text rather than final copy.
Source
This page summarises INSTITUTE FOR REAL GROWTH IMPLEMENTATION, by Frank van der Vorst, Marc de Swaan Arons, 25 March 2021.