“Marketing is not anyone’s job… It’s everyone’s job!” – Jack Welch
The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) role is difficult even in the best of times. It has taken on new levels of strategic importance for organizations who are seeking growth in the midst of a challenging and disruptive VUCA environment.
An experienced CMO can deliver incredible value to any organization. Today’s Chief Marketing Officer typically has ownership of growth strategies and the customer experience across all brand touchpoints. By closely aligning with their sales counterpart, the CMO is a key component to sales enablement. They are also often a key partner to the CEO in defining the future vision of the organization, innovating new products and services, and then formulating strategic plans to get them to market.
Once a company leader makes the decision to add a CMO to the leadership team they should give careful thought to defining why type of CMO they need. Why is this so crucial?
Much like each organization is different, the CMO role and responsibilities can vary widely depending on the industry, company maturity, growth plans, and market traction. Each CMO will bring a unique mix of knowledge, experience, and leadership ability to the table – and to be successful this has to match what the organization needs.
Common Marketing Functions
A recurring theme when discussing the CMO role is that every organization is different. As a result, the marketing requirements and structure of the marketing organization will also be unique. With that in mind, here are the most common functions found within marketing organizations:
- Corporate marketing – including brand, creative, PR, and corporate communications
- Marketing operations – including analytics, optimization
- Content marketing – including copywriting, multimedia, design
- Product marketing – including market research
- Demand generation – including lead generation, sometimes inside sales
- Online marketing – SEO/SEM, social, website
- Partner/Channel marketing
- Field/Events marketing
- Customer marketing – including customer success, lifecycle
…with 3 Caveats…
There are three important caveats to the above:
- Every marketing group is different. You will not find many marketing organizations organized exactly along these lines. These functions are often combined and grouped in different ways. However, you will generally find most of the capabilities resident somewhere in the go-to-market organization.
- Nobody is an expert in everything. Most experienced CMOs will have significant experience and domain expertise in some of these areas and familiarity with many of them. However, it is unrealistic to think that any single CMO possesses expertise across all the functional areas…that would certainly be a “pink unicorn” candidate!
- Strategic marketing skills outweigh industry experience. Many company leaders and boards get overly fixated on finding a CMO who “comes from our industry.” In my experience, this attribute is often given too much weight. Why? While knowledge of industry dynamics and history are valuable, they can also be learned quickly. I have seen many examples of a CMO from outside the industry who quickly comes up to speed, brings a fresh “newcomer” perspective, and challenges old assumptions, which then accelerates company growth.
Common CMO Archetypes
When you begin to think through the different marketing functions, and combine that with the unique attributes of the business (such as industry, customer targets, life stage, growth plans, etc) you quickly realize that different business models and competitive situations will call for different types of CMO. It all comes down to determining what type of CMO the organization needs.
Here is a cheat-sheet…
Often referred to as CMO archetypes, or CMO personas, these are essentially the different types of Chief Marketing Officer. While there is no definitive list, here are the most common ones I have seen:
- Brand Steward – this CMO is both an architect and steward of the brand. They develop the brand look and personality. Creating and telling stories about the brand, and inviting customers to join in, is what drives their success.
- Growth Driver – this CMO plays a central role in creating and executing the go-to-market strategic plans that drive sustainable growth. They excel at creating and executing data-driven demand generation strategies.
- Product Marketer – this type of CMO is common in technology or complex service companies, where their technical fluency helps to connect the solution to the customer’s problems. They are often experts pricing, packaging, messaging, and building analyst relationships.
- Customer Champion – this CMO aligns the marketing group and the entire organization around the entire buyer’s journey. They leverage data analytics and insights to deliver exceptional and personalized customer experiences, resulting in business growth.
- Innovator – by leveraging different marketing approaches and technology platforms, this risk-taking CMO re-energizes the organization by creating innovative new products and services.
- Thought Leader – you will often find this CMO out in the field, speaking at conferences and evangelizing for their brand. Their superpower is creating new market categories and storytelling to engage new customers. They are also often prolific content creators.
- Strategist – this CMO builds a tight partnership with the CEO to define the company vision and build the strategic plan to get there. Their deep understanding of the market – both today and where it is going in the future – helps them to define product-market-fit.
- Culture Builder – this CMO is a natural leader of people, and excels at engaging service workers to deliver exceptional products or services to customers.
- Renaissance Marketer – this is the rare all-round marketing leader who can assume a number of different archetypes depending on the situation. This CMO is very valuable to have on the team as they can leverage their skills and experience to drive the company forward, can step in to lead business units or new initiatives, and can easily shift their focus as needs or market opportunities demand. If you find one of these, hire them!
Probably the best way to think of these CMO archetypes is like personality types. Most CMOs will be a mix of several, with one or two as dominant attributes and smaller degrees of others.
The CMO Secret Sauce to Success
At this point, it should be obvious that finding a Chief Marketing Officer for your organization can be extremely valuable. However, finding one with a strong competency across all the marketing skills and CMO archetypes is very unlikely.
That is okay, because the best CMOs recognize their strengths and weaknesses, and build teams around themselves to balance out the capability of the marketing group. This team building capability is truly the secret sauce of a successful CMO.
The ideal marketing leader for most organization is probably going to be a hybrid across several of the CMO archetypes presented in this article.
At the risk of striving for perfection, I would argue most organizations are better off finding a CMO who has demonstrated expertise in the one or two most important attributes. The bigger opportunity cost is not having a senior leader focused on company growth strategy and execution…
-Onward