How One CMO Revamped Her Role
After a conversation with her firm’s CEO sparked by a 2017 HBR article, the chief marketing officer of a global financial services firm dramatically expanded her role and that of her marketing team. This firm traditionally had its CMO focus on downstream functions — advertising and promotion, and other marketing communication. At the CEO’s urging, marketing became much more involved in upstream decisions about strategy, and began collaborating much more closely with other C-suite functions.
When she first saw the email, she thought she was about to be fired. About 30 minutes prior to her weekly one-on-one with the CEO, the chief marketing officer at a multibillion global financial services firm received a cryptic email from him with the subject line “The Trouble with CMOs.” The email contained a link to a 2017 article one of us wrote for HBR, and suggested the CMO read it before their meeting. Uh-oh. She went into the meeting prepared for the worst. As she sat across from the CEO, he asked her whether she thought she had the right role to maximize marketing’s impact. With trepidation, she answered honestly and indicated that she didn’t.
What came next was a pleasant surprise. The CEO, grinning, agreed with her. He said he didn’t want to be the type of CEO who failed to design the CMO role correctly. The two executives quickly agreed the CMO role needed to be changed significantly, and they went on to discuss what success would look like. At one point, the CEO indicated that he would know that the right shift had occurred when the CFO, chief strategy officer, and other C-level leaders were seeking the CMO’s advice on strategic business problems. “He gave me not only the gift of alignment but also the barometer against which I could measure my own progress,” said the CMO, who asked that neither she nor her company be identified by name. “I needed to earn the right to be invited into key, firm-level strategic decisions.”
Like many of the CMOs described in the 2017 article, she was initially hired to focus on downstream commercialization roles, such as overseeing advertising. She and the CEO now agreed that she should play an upstream, strategic, enterprise-wide role. That sounds great in theory, but actually changing the role would be the hard part. The CMO knew that the transformation wasn’t just about her; it was about the entire department — 230 people, over whom she had limited desire to hire or fire large numbers to shift the mix of skills. This would require an action plan, time, and organizational commitment.
The first thing she did was define success. The shift in role would come from influence rather than authority. The type of work that her department focused on and the way in which the team engaged with other functions would have to evolve.
The CMO began by meeting with her direct reports. She explained the new vision for the marketing function: To drive the company toward more growth with more accountability. She then convened an all-department call, explaining that the CEO was inviting the department to step up and have greater impact.
In follow-up meetings with her direct reports, they identified high-impact work — and killed off less-important tasks to free up resources. Soon afterward, the CMO held an offsite for direct reports where each person talked about their primary priority. The goal was to get feedback and strengthen the thinking to maximize the potential impact on growth.
In the following months, the CMO began to look for opportunities where her team could proactively step “into the gap” — to take a leadership role on an opportunity that none of the other functions picked up. As an example, the CEO had been discussing the importance of driving more agile decision making. While addressing this opportunity wasn’t technically assigned to anybody in the C-suite, the CMO engaged her team and they stepped forward with recommendations on how to leverage internal communications to inform, educate, and lead the organization in agile thinking. As another example, the CMO directly challenged her team to identify disruptions that would deliver on the department’s and firm’s goals — to bring a more demand-centric perspective to key business challenges. What may seem like a small shift was significant. Neither of these examples was technically her team’s responsibility, and they represented a shift in thinking, in ownership (that transcended responsibility), and, ultimately, in impact.
She also began paying more attention to projects that would drive future growth. The firm had outdated segmentation frameworks and loyalty programs, weak customer contact management, and suboptimized client identity management, so she championed and launched a customer relationship management initiative to revamp them. Leaders from across the company are engaged and already benefiting from this effort, and soon the CMO will be able to run final cost savings and increased share-of-wallet calculations.
The CEO’s invitation to the CMO to expand her influence was primarily focused on strategic decisions. As the CEO observed the CMO and her team having greater influence, he began supporting the shift by setting the expectation that the CMO and her team participate in key strategic decisions — and offering opinions that went beyond marketing. In one example, the company pursued a “strategy refresh” project for the firm’s retail business, and the CEO ensured the CMO was deeply involved.
Finally, the CMO began insisting that marketing deliver greater financial accountability. Now, almost every project requires defined financial deliverables. The CMO says: “I now put marketing spend decisions on the same playing field as other spend decisions. We’re working on a model for the ROI of a technology dollar, versus a marketing dollar, versus a sales dollar, so we can make trade-off decisions. The language of finance and accountability has become a bit intoxicating, given the tools that marketers have today that we didn’t have 20+ years ago. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I talked about ‘advertising’ or showed creative to leaders.”
Nearly a year after the initial conversation between the CEO and the CMO, the role of the company’s marketing employees has changed. They have different strategic priorities; they are held accountable for new, shared metrics; they spend more time with cross-functional peers. And they have significantly more impact. For example, there are now regular meetings with the CFO to review firm growth and discuss the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing investment at a granular level.
The CMO indicated that the bigger impact that is occurring required three things to happen. First, the CEO’s vision and support were essential. Without his belief, coaching, and support where needed, the CMO’s actions could have been misinterpreted as “power grabbing.” Second, the shift required the marketing department’s leaders and associates to buy in. This wasn’t about the CMO changing as much as it was about the department changing. Finally, the other C-level functions needed to be supportive, which they were. They see that more impact from marketing benefits everybody.
This CMO’s story highlights that a bigger role doesn’t have to come from assigned responsibility. And while this is a win for the CMO and her team, it is a bigger win for the CEO and the firm. Net revenues are up 48%, client assets are up 39%, and earnings per share are up 80% from a year ago. It’s proof that right-sizing the role and impact of marketing can pay off.
Kimberly A. Whitler is an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, researching the role and contribution of the CMO. She is a Forbes contributor and has written for Ad Age, The CMO Council, and other publication outlets focusing on CMO and executive marketing issues. Prior to this, Ms. Whitler spent nearly 20 years in senior marketing and general management positions and is a 3-time CMO.
Ram Janakiraman is a professor of marketing at the University of South Carolina.
How One CMO Revamped Her Role
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