The CMO of the future is the CDO, CGO, CCO all in one
200 years ago, John Keats wrote “Nothing ever becomes real 'til it is experienced” and if you believe the commentary, it’s the CDOs, CCOs and CGOs (rather than the CMOs) who see this to be true.
The conversation is rife internationally, companies dropping CMOs and expanding other C-suite roles to cover the vacant seat in an effort to project the company forward.
Recently our fearless scribe Paul McIntyre entertained the debate between CMOs and CGOs here. Rochelle Burberry looked at CCOs here and Priya Patel championed CMOs here.
While all of these roles have been around for a while, it is The Rise of the CGO by Singular (released earlier this year), that I believe is the catalyst for today’s debate.
Singular suggests that CGOs are the movers and shakers of larger companies. They have ambition, strategy and momentum. Better yet, they also promote themselves and their success in all these things. CGO led companies are:
- 36 per cent more likely to prioritise new skill training internally; and
- 65 per cent more likely to invest in new marketing technology.
According to the study, this investment by CGOs takes their companies on a path to ‘analytics mastery’ - delivering 3x improvement in the speed of business decision making, new product time-to-market, marketing ROI and efficiency, and customer insights.
This shouldn’t be a debate. We marketers just need to step up and be noticed.
The success statistics of CGOs speak for themselves, but why isn’t this drive coming from us, the marketers? My takeout is more a rally, a mobilisation of marketing best practice to surface the CMO of the future.
I want to see an empowerment of the c-suite collective, supported by passionate, inspired and insightful marketers. A company without alignment on its purpose, vision and goals will invariably see friction between departments, and if a marketing leader can’t pivot to new and emerging paths, while maintaining their ground on the fundamentals, then someone else in the business will.
In 2016, marketers were focused on using deep data to improve their brand’s customer experience. Betting, as the research by The Economist (The Path to 2020) suggested, ‘that personalised, efficient, and consistent customer experience would translate into customer loyalty and brand value’.
With increasing pressures on the bottom line stretching marketing budgets, some CMOs have been too focused on rebuilding their content and media skewed teams around data, analytics and performance marketing, to notice that their company peers are looking at the very thing the CMO should be most passionate about; the consumer’s next step, the consumer of the future, and therefore the role their company can play in that future.
If John Keats was around today, he might just be a marketer instead of a poet, because it’s his words that should define the marketing team’s mantra. We are not here merely to sell products in the current day. We are here to reimagine a life better lived. To make real a new experience unimagined before. It doesn’t take a fancy title to change what you already are.
The CMO of the future is the CDO, CGO, CCO all in one.