This excerpt answers one question: what the Da Vinci CMO model is and where it came from. It begins from the interviewer’s diagnosis, that marketing has to be the core of an organization but lost its strategic view of the company and started attending to the fluff rather than the stuff.
De Swaan Arons does not defend the function’s territory. He concedes that many companies do the strategic work under other labels, and offers a test of whether that arrangement is working rather than an argument that marketing should own it.
Key findings
- The test he proposes is coherence, not ownership: whether all the pieces are consistent with each other and aligned to one strategy and one view of where the world is going.
- The customer-side version of the same test is what a person notices: that a company consistently outperforms against needs the customer did not know were unmet.
- The IRG growth study rests on over 750 in-depth conversations with CEOs, CFOs, and CMOs, and the first 20 minutes of each were spent establishing what the person meant by growth.
- The stakeholder definition used is the four C’s: colleagues, community, customers, and the capital markets that fund the business. Multi-stakeholder organizations outperformed shareholder-primacy ones on many metrics in the study.
- Humanized growth is defined with two conditions. The business grows its top line, which he treats as the honest signal that people value what it makes, and it also advances one of the United Nations sustainable development goals.
The land grab question, asked honestly
The concession comes first. Many companies do not do strategic marketing under that name, yet they do have product management, and the responsibilities are spread across several disciplines. De Swaan Arons treats the obvious objection as fair: is the argument for strategic marketing just a land grab.
His answer is that the coordinating function matters more than the label. Brand management has a coordinating characteristic, and a company can supply that coordination another way. A founder-led company where one person keeps everything aligned needs no brand manager to do it.
He extends the same fairness to people. Over the last fifteen years many entrants to marketing are not strategic marketers by his definition, and have gone deeper in their own specialisms than he ever will. He describes these as competing and possibly complementary models rather than right and wrong ones, and declines to rank them.
Why the study started with the company, not the marketer
The research was prompted by the same loss of standing: a sense of being marginalized and left out of the room when the big growth discussions happened. Rather than study the role directly, IRG first asked what characterizes growth-outperforming organizations, so it could then ask whether marketing works differently inside them.
The definitional work came before the data. Over 750 conversations with chief executives, finance chiefs, and marketing chiefs each opened with twenty minutes on what growth even means. The outperformers did not define it in Friedman’s terms, a doctrine de Swaan Arons says has dictated the last fifty years of business.
The reform attempts, and what finally moved
He credits Bill Gates with raising the question at Davos in 2008, warning that capitalism would be expelled if practice did not change, and Porter with introducing shared value. Both preceded any change in corporate behavior.
What moved was investor language, and he is careful about the credit. The Business Roundtable’s change of position followed BlackRock’s founder asking for more than profit projections, and de Swaan Arons says explicitly that it was that statement rather than his own research.
Why the work lands on marketing
Once a chief executive commits to creating value for every stakeholder, an unanswered question follows. What do those stakeholders want? What could credibly be offered that is valuable to them rather than to the company? HR has to ask it about employees and CSR about the community. De Swaan Arons argues marketing is the natural partner for both, because that is the discipline’s training.
The employee value proposition is his worked example. It asks about touchpoints, about unmet needs across short-term reward and long-term security and career progression, and about how far purpose explains why people come to work. The output is used for retention as much as recruitment.
The second finding closes the loop back to the interviewer’s opening complaint. Inside multi-stakeholder organizations, marketers were not losing influence. They were increasing it by partnering inside and outside the company, and those are the people the profile calls Da Vinci leaders.
Scope and limitations
This is an excerpt from a longer conversation, and it ends where the Da Vinci profile itself would be described. De Swaan Arons offers to explain how the profile was developed and defers it, so the components of the model are not covered here.
The study is described in speech and its method is not presented beyond the number and type of interviews. The speaker is careful about causation, declining to claim his research caused the Business Roundtable’s change of position. The source is an automatic caption track of speech, with no speaker labels and frequent mistranscription of names.
Source
This page summarises What is The Da Vinci CMO model? – The Super CMO Show, by Marc de Swaan Arons.