Business Journal of the Triad, 11/19/04
A recent Booz Allen Hamilton/Association of National Advertisers study contains some very good - and very bad - news for America's chief marketing officers. The good news: The CMO role is gaining in popularity among corporations, and the proportion of CMOs occupying seats in executive suites is on the rise. The bad news: The CMO role is often poorly defined by corporations, and as a result many in that role are out of step with CEO objectives. The report points out the following: Marketing is seen as a more important component of corporate success, and "is best positioned to orchestrate across corporate functions to create and promote new products and ideas."
Tactical concerns like best practices and branding guidelines distract CMOs from the CEO agenda, which is focused on growth, change, customers, and innovation.
CMOs are expected to provide measurable outcomes, but marketing metrics are insufficient to provide a realistic appraisal of marketing effectiveness. BAH/ANA quotes one survey respondent: "There is no consistent definition of ROI."
I sent a synopsis of the report around my office, expecting to hear a chorus of comments from our marketing team. Surprisingly, the most emphatic response came from our senior director of information technology. He noted that CMOs face almost the exact same situation as many CTOs, or chief technology officers. Both are in critical but sometimes ill-defined positions, and struggle to justify their value and gain credibility among more traditional roles.
So, CMOs and CTOs of corporate America have good reason to commiserate with one another, but that's a minor point. More important, these are two key roles in the corporate hierarchy - roles that are uniquely positioned to drive innovation and growth - that are not always as keenly defined as they should be. Moreover, those roles might best serve the CEO agenda - the one that mandates growth, flexibility to change, innovation, and attention to customers - if they were more closely aligned.
My colleague and I, despite our respective roles as technologist and marketer, spend a fair amount of time straddling the fence that separates these two domains. Ownership of technology initiatives, including those that support the corporate marketing function (in the case of, for example, a customer-facing web site), is an ongoing issue in our workday discussions. Should technologists have sole ownership over IT projects, from the infrastructure to the desktop, or does marketing have a critical role to play? And should marketers be the lone drivers of activities that are ostensibly marketing-focused, even if they have a technological component?
The reality is that these two functions often intersect, but only at the surface level. Pardon the generalizations, but marketers and technologists often tend to view one another in these ways: Marketers, from the technologist perspective, see technology as a toolset to be selectively applied to reinforce existing practices. Technologists detect in marketers a fundamental misunderstanding of the capabilities technology provides, along some fear that those capabilities might be simply deployed as replacements for known activities.
Technologists, from the marketing viewpoint, relate better to tools than customers, and bring to their work the assumption that users - who aren't always seen as people, with all their quirks, flaws, and ingrained habits - will always recognize and adopt a brilliant tool, even with little prompting or training.
Both perspectives contain some truth, and they also collectively overlook the possibility that together their roles comprise a powerful answer to the CEO mandate. Marketers, as the BHA/ANA report notes, occupy a unique position in corporations, from which they can champion innovation and flexibility and serve as advocates for the customer. In particular, they can drive the development of technology that supports the real needs of both internal and external customers and uses adoption as the centerpiece of the deployment strategy.
Technologists hold the keys to tools that facilitate improved decision making, higher productivity, flexibility, innovation, and customer empowerment. Their role presents an opportunity to move beyond the deployment and maintenance of technology and into the more visionary position of advocating ways that technology can alter the competitive landscape.
Of course, this maturation of the CMO and CTO roles won't happen if each remains in a silo and only selectively calls on the other for support. What's needed is a deeper and more fundamental interconnection of their activities. This means marketing and technology leaders participating in creating a shared understanding of where and how their independent objectives mesh, and how they should depend on one another to implement initiatives across the marketing, technology, and corporate spectrums. Imagine that: Marketers caring about the technology that underlies improved decision-making and productivity, and technologists focusing on the adoption of the tools they develop. It sounds like the kind of shared commitment to growth, flexibility, change, and the customer that just might bring a smile to CEOs' faces.
