This talk was given to an agency leadership audience. Its subject is the transition marketing leaders are being asked to make: away from a sole focus on shareholder profit, toward creating value for all stakeholders rather than the capital markets alone. The speaker presents it as the largest current challenge in the role.
The argument rests on IRG’s growth research and a follow-up study with Oxford. The original work split respondents into over- and under-performers using their own account of three-year financial performance against competitors, then compared what each group said. The difference that mattered was how they defined growth.
Key findings
- Outperforming companies define growth in people terms as well as financial ones: growth for colleagues, customers, and the communities a business operates in. IRG named that humanizing growth.
- Outperforming companies treat purpose as the guiding principle and finance as what fuels it, rather than the reverse.
- About 90 percent of company value is now determined by intangible assets: culture, reputation, intellectual property, and brand. That is the ground on which marketing can argue it is an investment rather than a cost.
- Marketers report being paralyzed rather than emboldened. The research finds they fear being called out as too woke or as greenwashing, which suppresses communication about genuine work.
- The claimed payoff is professional as well as commercial. Marketing leaders who follow this path have raised their own influence.
Where the work started
The origin was a complaint. About 20 of the most influential marketing leaders gathered at an industry meeting and spoke frankly about losing influence, and about not knowing what the job was called any more. Around the same time the Harvard Business Review ran a special on the trouble with CMOs and their short tenure, with the role often gone after three years.
The community built from that now holds around 500 chief marketing officers, and the executive leadership course is called IRG 100. The people in it are described as high caliber and lonely at the top, making large decisions over large budgets with little peer contact.
Why the pressure has increased
The speaker sets the work against a hardening context. Six of the nine planetary boundaries have been crossed. Employees, customers, communities, and investors are all pressing louder and in different directions at once.
The effect on the function is caution rather than action. Marketers can be accused of doing too little or too much, so the safest choice becomes silence about real initiatives. The talk names that fear directly, of being labeled woke or of greenwashing, and identifies the resulting paralysis as the problem to solve.
Step one: ground yourself in the human reality
Every industry looks at the world through its own microscope, and mistakes that view for reality. Outperforming companies work to correct for it. One instrument named is a materiality matrix, which maps the issues that matter both to the business and to the stakeholders it depends on.
The worked example is a Scandinavian pharmaceutical company in a sector usually driven by research and patents. It convenes a disease expert panel of patients, doctors, hospitals, and analysts, and designs around what they say they need.
Step two: reimagine the future
Most companies plan one, three, or five years out and extrapolate from where they already are. The outperformers take a long-term perspective and describe a utopian or dystopian future, then ask what today’s steps must be to reach or avoid it.
Two examples show the technique. A carmaker turned a long-range vision into a strategy of zero crashes, zero emissions, and zero congestion. A Turkish appliance manufacturer went the other way and made the deadline visceral. It was already net zero in 2020, ahead of any 2030 or 2025 target, and it replaced the distant year with a countdown clock in every building reading 220 weeks to go.
Step three: focus, including on what to stop
Purpose is what connects today to that reimagined future, and in the outperforming companies it is the guiding principle rather than an add-on. Finance fuels the purpose instead of the other way around.
Focus can create a new business. A fruit company found that two-thirds of a pineapple’s weight, the leaves, was going to landfill, and turned it into a plant-based leather. Fashion brands came to them, and a fruit company became a fashion supplier.
Focus also means stopping things, which takes more courage. A drugstore chain repositioning itself as a health company concluded it could not sell cigarettes, a three billion dollar business, and stopped. On the day it told investors, the stock price rose. The speaker’s summary is that this was an act rather than an ad.
Steps four and five: organize, then unleash
The problems are too large for one company, so change does not happen in isolation. An Australian financial institution faced rising claims from extreme weather. It worked with architects, universities, and construction companies to design a more resilient home. It then took the blueprint to government rather than waiting for a change in the law.
The final step is personal. Unleashing means connecting a leader’s own purpose to the company’s, and it is the first session of the leadership program for that reason. The claim the talk closes on is that leaders who take this route increase their influence rather than trading it away.
Scope and limitations
The speaker is explicit about the strength of the evidence. The relationship found between serving all stakeholders and outperformance is a correlation and not a causal claim, and he says so on stage.
Performance groups were separated using respondents’ own assessment of how their company performed financially against competitors over three years, which is self-reported rather than audited. The follow-up study with Oxford was still gathering results when this talk was given.
This is a conference talk to an audience of agency leaders, so the examples are selected to illustrate rather than to test the argument. The source is an automatic caption track of speech, and names of companies and people are frequently mistranscribed in it.
Source
This page summarises Increasing CMO impact by driving Humanized Growth at WPP Leadership Event Amsterdam, Aljan de Boer, by Aljan de Boer, Institute for Real Growth.