Chief marketing officers who own a specific set of activities like innovation road maps, customer experience and sales initiatives are more than twice as confident as the rest of their peers that they’re making an impact in the C-suite. That’s according to a new study by Deloitte and The CMO Club on the tasks that are best aligned with the CMO’s core competencies.
Growing expectations and evolving roles have changed the scope of the CMO. If CMO’s are going to be positioned for greater C-suite influence, the data suggest that the CMO role needs course correction given some are focused on owning the wrong things. For example, when asked which activities they wished to own, CMOs said business partnerships (69 percent), corporate strategy (67 percent) and public relations (56 percent). Yet the study found there’s a low correlation between ownership of these activities and CMO impact on organization.
CMOs who focus on the following four areas are twice as confident as the rest of their peers about impacting their company’s strategic direction: innovation road maps; company mission, vision and values; customer relationships and experiences; and sales processes and territories.
Although the study found that setting the innovation road map is strongly correlated with CMO impact, currently only 10 percent of respondents own this high-value activity, while just five percent want to own it in the future. One way CMOs can drive the innovation road map is to use their knowledge of the customer to create innovative offerings, design, partnerships and experimentation.
Crafting company mission, vision and values that are connected to a brand’s customers is another high-value activity correlated with CMO impact. Still, just seven percent of those surveyed wish to own this task.
While 41 percent of CMOs want to own customer experience, another brand building and growth-driving activity, in the future, only 21 percent of them own it today. The discrepancy is starker when it comes to owning customer relationships—16 percent of CMOs own the activity today and only five percent wish to add it to their purview.
Lastly, the study found that CMO impact and ownership of lower-funnel activities such as purchase behavior are strongly correlated. Despite this, few CMOs wish to own the sales process and sales territory, at four percent and three percent, respectively. Whereas currently, 50 percent of respondents are accountable for awareness as their core success metric.
To produce greater C-suite impact, the authors of the study suggest CMOs should lead discussions on the consumer, ensure the brand values and mission align with its messaging, collaborate with chief sales officers to define customer-oriented processes and focus on the results of their role instead of their title.
The findings are based on responses from 400 CMOs across the world with an average of nine years as CMO or head of marketing experience.
