This talk sets out the Da Vinci growth profile, built by IRG with the executive search firm Spencer Stuart. The question behind it was direct: what separates marketing and growth leaders at organizations outperforming their peers from those at declining ones. The answer is described as ten experiences and five attitudes.
The context is a growth problem rather than a marketing one. Traditional growth formulas are no longer working, and a company’s license to grow is being challenged. When growth is missing, the chief marketing officer is usually the first to go, and average tenure in the role is well below that of sales, strategy, or finance.
Key findings
- The profile separates two things that hiring usually conflates. The ten experiences are specific to a company’s situation and competitive challenge, so their relative importance changes. The five attitudes apply to every successful growth leader.
- Peers criticize marketing on two counts in IRG’s research: over-focusing on advertising, and being insufficiently commercial.
- A McKinsey study is cited for a specific correlation: a CMO’s tenure is directly related to the number of quality relationships they hold with their peers.
- 78 percent of chief marketing officers participating in IRG’s programs say their business strategy now reflects a more humanized spirit.
- Those leaders also report being invited into more rooms, more senior positions, and more business discussions than before.
What changed in the boardroom
De Swaan Arons dates a shift to the start of the pandemic. Before it, most boardrooms were focused on two stakeholders: customers and capital markets. Afterwards attention flipped to colleagues and the community, and companies that had been competing began collaborating on what society needed.
The companies that moved fastest were the ones already clear about their purpose, because they knew what they stood for. He connects that to the opportunity for the function: the chief executives who signed the stakeholder declaration now need help understanding what each stakeholder actually needs.
The ten experiences
Several are familiar and have widened. Marketers are the window on the world, and the work is decoding the world rather than only the customer, bringing the company one version of the truth about everything around it. Strategic brand development, product and service innovation, and breakthrough content remain on the list.
The changed items are the commercial ones. The remit is business growth strategy rather than brand or category strategy, and boardroom peers need to see genuine profit and loss sensitivity. Stakeholder engagement expands the job to connecting everything inside and outside the company into one story with one purpose. Revenue and channel leadership brings marketing alongside sales and e-commerce, because customers do not see internal silos.
Capability development has changed direction. It is no longer only about training marketers. Marketing capability has to spread across the organization so colleagues in other functions understand what marketing does and how they contribute to delivering the purpose.
The five attitudes
The first is curiosity and agility, expressed as permanent learning. De Swaan Arons contrasts marketing with medicine and accountancy, where practitioners keep studying, and argues the discipline assumes a degree is enough while the world keeps moving. The example he gives is a senior leader who books learning time into his diary every day, which signals to everyone junior that they should too.
The second is being connected and collaborative. Winning organizations build solutions that reach beyond what they themselves offer, as part of an ecosystem of partnerships. A company nobody wants to partner with misses those opportunities, and internally the same attitude is what makes other disciplines open up.
The third is servant leadership. The era of the celebrity chief marketing officer is over, and the leaders being described are humble ones who bring teams together and align peers. The McKinsey correlation between tenure and quality peer relationships is offered as evidence that this is not a matter of temperament alone.
The fourth is an obsession with speed and impact. Finance and sales peers need to see the same urgency they hold themselves to. Marketing metrics have their place, but what counts is the business metric and the impact the business makes in the world. A creative award is worth celebrating, and winning a differentiated position in a new market is worth more.
The fifth is courage, which he calls the most distinctly marketing attitude. All growth carries risk and asks colleagues to take a leap. The example is a pharmaceutical chief executive who reframed vaccine production. Against a base of about 150 million doses a year, asking for 300 million would have prompted an attempt to improve the existing system. Asking for two billion made people work in entirely different ways. Courage also means being the voice in the room that says what is actually true, and then the storyteller who makes the prospect exciting.
Why the influence is returning
The evidence offered for a turnaround is what participating leaders report. 78 percent say their business strategy now reflects a more humanized spirit. They also report being drawn into more rooms, more senior positions, and more business discussions than before.
The mechanism is that stakeholder thinking turns everyone into a marketer. Whether the stakeholder is an employee handled with HR, an investor handled with finance, or a partner handled with supply chain, the questions are the same three marketing has always asked. What are the underlying needs, where can value be created, and can it be delivered coherently and differently from competitors. His closing challenge is a question: if not now, when.
Scope and limitations
This is a conference presentation of a profile, delivered in about 20 minutes, and the speaker says he is going through it very quickly. The underlying study with Spencer Stuart is referenced rather than presented, and no sample size or method appears in the talk.
The evidence of renewed influence is self-reported by chief marketing officers taking part in IRG’s own programs, which is a selected group rather than a representative one. The tenure correlation is attributed to a third-party study and cited from memory. The source is an automatic caption track of speech, with no speaker labels and frequent mistranscription of names.
Source
This page summarises The Da Vinci Growth CMO – Marc de Swaan Arons, by Marc de Swaan Arons.