We’re all familiar with the noxious concept of “shrinkflation.” Products get smaller or worse, but the price remains the same. I fear a similar phenomenon is taking place within the office of the chief marketing officer.
Don’t get me wrong. The right CMO is a force multiplier, helping crystallize an organization’s message and precision-delivering it to the target audience. They win hearts and minds. They create trends, move markets, and build revenue. With the power of branding and analytics, they can paint a human face (and thus the values typically ascribed to people, like creativity, imagination, or reliability) on a corporation.
CMOs are great. Or, at least, they were.
THE RAPIDLY SHRINKING CMO
This is where the shrinkflation bit comes in. In recent years, the unspoken understanding of a CMO has changed. They were—and still are—a vital cog in the C-suite machinery, but now they’re transient. According to research from Spencer Stuart, the average CMO tenure stands at just 40 months. This figure is the lowest for a decade, and is less than half the average tenure of a CEO, at 85 months.
It gets worse. While the demands upon CMOs have only increased in recent years, particularly with the emergence of new marketing channels, their confidence is at rock bottom, with less than half able to communicate the value of marketing within the business. This is, as Gartner’s Chris Ross pointed out, an abject failure of storytelling.
To add insult to injury, we’ve seen an overall lack of . . . competence, perhaps? Finesse? Admittedly, this point isn’t as quantifiable as the other two. Still, it’s hard to ignore major industry foul-ups (like the credulous embrace of the Metaverse, and the disastrously executed, though undeniably well-intentioned Bud Light debacle) and wonder whether they’re the product of a CMO class that’s lacking confidence and commitment.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing is that it doesn’t need to be this way. The annals of corporate history are filled with examples of visionary CMOs—or, as with the case of Burger King’s Fernando Machado and Apple’s Phil Schiller, CMOs by another name—that understood their businesses and their customers, and how to resonate with them. And there are incredible CMOs working today, although their examples are shrouded by countless stories of high-profile failures and mismanagement.
It’s entirely possible to revert back to the right track. I don’t, as Bank of America and Johnson & Johnson believe, the role of CMO is obsolete, or best subsumed by other job titles. But I am fervently convinced that it’s in desperate need of reform.
DIAGNOSING THE MODERN CMO
The problems that besiege the office of the CMO are…
