The CMO role has evolved to become more of a general management role, and the next logical promotion from it is chief executive. That is where Marc de Swaan Arons and Frank van den Driest land after a decade inside the world’s biggest marketing organizations. What earns the step is not campaign sophistication. Tomorrow’s CMOs, they write, must be fully conversant in the language of the CEO and CFO.
One title covers two different jobs. Mike Linton, formerly CMO of Best Buy and eBay, describes the role splintering into a global or super-CMO, a communications CMO who sells whatever the company produces, and an analytical CMO who manages the math. Only the first carries weight across the enterprise, and it is won early: no other job in the company mixes so high a range of influence with so low a span of control over resources.
Key findings
- Jim Stengel argues a CMO should be measured on four things, beginning with accountability for business results and ending with accountability for marketing talent.
- Rob Malcolm reports that over 90 percent of the top 50 leaders and marketers at Diageo had worked together for more than ten years.
- Greg Welch of Spencer Stuart describes the common DNA of the people doing the job well as a “high EQ, low ego” quality.
- Tim Wright of GSK says a successful marketer needs operational credibility, and that he has no place for people without it.
Holding a seat as an enterprise leader
The most common mistake marketers make on the way to the top is ignoring the importance of locking down their responsibilities with the CEO, and of building alignment with peers within the C-suite. Greg Welch of Spencer Stuart frames the opening months as a negotiation for the space a CMO needs, conducted with the chief executive and often with the sales and finance leaders. Lennard Hoornik of Sony Ericsson sets the standard in terms of light: there must be none between what the CMO says and what the CEO says, because marketing is often seen as the embodiment of company strategy.
Standing is then held through finance rather than around it. The strongest global brand leaders actively seek out collaboration with the CFO and the finance team to develop, monitor and act on sensible success metrics. Peter Vaughn of American Express puts understanding the fundamental drivers of profitability before implementing any global marketing strategy in a country. The evidence is a calendar: meeting new clients, the authors map how time was spent, and find CEOs and CFOs routinely under-represented in the mix.
What the best global marketing leaders actually do
The first requirement is character. A marketing leader, however senior, has to exhibit a fiery passion and curiosity about what precisely drives consumers, which leaves little room for technocratic leadership at the top. Stengel describes a constant energy to discover, and a habit of sharing whatever he learned. The illustration is the chairman of Dutch dairy company Campina, who opened a global marketing event not with revenue projections but with a half-hour portrait of one homemaker’s life. Alongside that sits a harder discipline: quantitative analysis, econometric modeling and real-time message monitoring are all elements of the toolset.
Ego is a liability. The logic is structural rather than moral, since there is no global market to conquer, only large local markets, so when the leaders of those markets win, the CMO wins. Silvia Lagnado, who shaped the first global leadership role on Dove, says a global brand leader has to “lead on vision and strategy, but serve on activation support and leveraging best practices.” That is humility as method. Nor does it force a choice between operator and creative: the exceptional ones manage to combine the farmer and the poet.
Building the case for CEO succession
The destination is already visible in the job description. CMOs need to focus on the return to shareowners, on building an effective global marketing machine, and on measuring and reallocating investments. The instruction attached is to appoint functional experts and let them do the marketing. What qualifies someone for the step up is operational credibility: Rob Malcolm moved from the craft of brands into general management roles carrying direct responsibility for distributors, joint ventures, supply, finance and human resources.
The second qualification is a network that cannot be bought by importing a famous CMO from another company. Credibility comes from a lifetime spent knee-deep in the trenches, and a major cause behind global marketers failing in their new roles is an absence of real in-depth relationships. Unilever’s appointment of Paul Polman shows the other route, since he had earned his stripes in Unilever’s two most important categories while working for its biggest competitors. What a leader is finally judged on is the capability left behind, which means defining its components and agreeing the remit to build it.
Scope and limitations
This is a practice-based account rather than a controlled study: best practices gleaned from studying and working with over 50 of the world’s biggest and best marketing organizations, in a decade that closed in 2010.
On measurement the authors settle nothing beyond the instruction to consistently measure one or more things over time and adapt to the results.
Source
This page summarises The Global Brand CEO: Building the Ultimate Marketing Machine, by Marc de Swaan Arons, Frank van den Driest, 2010.