Professor, author and entrepreneur Scott Galloway is urging CMOs to transform themselves into chief intelligence officers, pivot their brands to subscription models and embrace algorithm commerce if they want to thrive.
Marketing departments need to become “intelligence units” that are plugged into the market and poised to add real value to the decision-making model in businesses, argues Professor Scott Galloway. Speaking at the Festival of Marketing, the academic, author and entrepreneur described the CMO as being like the second lieutenant in Vietnam. They have a life expectancy of around 18 months and if they fail to immediately establish credibility they’re usually gone within two years.
For this reason, Galloway urged marketing leaders to position themselves as the person who is responsible for informing every part of the supply chain and understanding how the business maintains margin and differentiation. In effect, the CMO should become the chief intelligence officer – the leader of intelligence units.
“I find there’s two CMOs. There’s the CMO that came from the world of Don Draper and wants to spend money on marketing, uses the term ‘brand’ every other sentence and wants a bigger budget for marketing and advertising. I don’t think those CMOs last,” said Galloway.
“The CMOs who are thriving and potentially become the next CEO are the ones who say, ‘I’m your link to the market, I understand strategy and I’m informing every piece of the supply chain. I understand where we’re getting products and services, where we can save money and lose money, I’ve got my finger on the pulse. I understand what hard decisions we need to make around product and the trade-off between feature and functionality. This is our distribution strategy.’ That sends a very strong signal.”
Galloway also argued that the majority of companies that have added “dramatic shareholder value” have one thing in common – they spend almost no money on traditional advertising.
“If you’re a CMO and you walk into your CEO’s office and start talking about how you need more money for advertising, you’re gone in 18 months. That shit is over,” he added.
Mark Zuckerberg has more control over your privacy than any individual in the world and you’ve got to decide, are we down with that?
Scott Galloway
The position of chief digital officer is under threat, warned Galloway, who argued that such jobs were created for companies that needed a “shot of adrenaline” when it came to innovation. Likewise, he believes the chief information officer and chief technology officer are also likely to lose some power as businesses realise they don’t need this position and the people in these roles are often “full of shit”.
Reflecting on the impact of Covid-19 on marketing, Galloway described the pandemic as more of an accelerant than a change agent, which has supercharged disruption already present in society. He advised leaders to expand every trend out by 10 years and ask if their business model, structure and culture is where it should be, because a decade’s worth of change has happened almost overnight.
“You’d rather be good in an industry that’s growing, than great in an industry that’s average. Industry dynamics trump industry performance. I try to think, where are the enormous waves that are being formed off-shore so that if you were to get in front of them you’d convince yourself you were a greater surfer?” he reflected.
One such area ripe for disruption thanks to the pandemic is the adoption of remote medicine, which has “expanded exponentially” since the onset of coronavirus. Galloway expects venture capital to flood into this market, causing as much money to be invested in the sector across the next two to three years as was previously estimated for the next two decades.
A second area to watch is education and the shift to online learning, allowing universities to dramatically expand their enrolments and “unbundle” the college degree into micro-certifications and vocational training.
Algorithmic commerce
Another important trend is…
