Not just the do, but the why of marketing

As a whole, CMO Awards judges rewarded examples where CMOs explain why marketing teams are doing what they are doing, not just how they’re doing it. This could include sharing the business or customer problem to be solved, how programs of work are capturing opportunities presented by broader macro trends, or utilisation of deep consumer insights and business motivators. A compelling narrative including the ‘why’ gains higher marks than just specifying what was done.

It’s of course important to also have an outcome – learnings, business progression, customer improvements, profitability, market share, revenue or other indicators of commercial impact. But understanding the full story of why marketers chose to do – and not to do – something is a big part of knowing what make them tick. And it’s a key way judges gauge the business-grade, decision-making rigour CMOs bring to the task at hand.

Brand Traction founder, Jon Bradshaw, described it as a strategy gap, noting submissions he scored higher exhibited more command of strategy and insight.

“ I do see a lot of this out in the wild: People leaping to designing the activity, rather than thinking first about what outcome they are trying to achieve and then choosing from a range of available tactics. The answer is advertising, now what’s the question? A better sequence of thinking is first, what am I trying to achieve, then is this the best tool?  Great CMOs are clear about the behaviour they want to change and then select the right tool for the job ,” he advises.  

Take the impact of the dour, volatile economic climate, which showed up as a raft of cost reduction, efficiency and productivity improvement activities across CMO Awards submissions this year.

“We saw a huge array of cost reduction examples in the submissions. But the cost-of-living, and the pressure that was putting on the brand’s customers or potential accessibilities: There wasn’t enough dot joining and that surprised me,” non-executive director, UN Women chair and former CMO, Georgina Williams, commented.

“Those macro-economic factors are driving political appointments. Even some of the changes in the way that people are using search and what they're looking for, and what have you; there are natural economic drivers that as a CMO, would and should be in in your opportunity scope.”

Founder of the 24-hour Business Plan and former agency leader, Andrew Baxter, agreed there’s room for improvement on the strategy piece. “There were a lot of entries where tactics – such as a campaign, an event, a partnership, a new website – were presented as a strategy. Some of the top strategic marketers really stood out,” he said.

Non-executive director and former CMO of Audi, Nikki Warburton was equally looking for the holy grail of results, profitability and why.

“We had the explanation of what we did it and that it worked, and here is the result, as opposed to setting up a starting point, which is this is why we're doing it, what we're hoping to achieve and then this is what we achieved,” she said.  

All agreed CMOs sharing what they chose not to do also provided a useful way of understanding their approach to effectiveness – and their ultimate ability to achieve it.

Marketing Mix Modelling

In his own summation of key themes across submissions this year, non-executive director and former CMO John Batistich, pointed to very strong focus on articulating an ROI. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the hefty number of marketing leaders playing, experimenting and optimising using marketing mix modelling (MMM). It proved a consistent standout across the breadth and diversity of submissions for the CMO Awards.

As a former CMO50 2022 judge, Batistich noted marketing leaders weren’t talking about MMM even three years ago, let alone five or 10 years ago. Overall, CMO Awards judges agree MMM adoption is a good thing: It indicates we’re finally capturing more of the right data we need to prove marketing’s worth and secondly, keep improving it. The fact it’s driving more test-and-learn, experimentation and optimisation programs was also evident in reading CMO Award submissions this year.

“I think part of the reason we're seeing the MMM growth is because the data is there and finally, CMOs actually have information about how much did I spend here, how much can I spend there, and can I attribute it?” said Zuni MD, Mike Zeederberg. “The data is finally there to be able to actually create the ROI, which we haven't had before.”

Zeederberg was also excited by larger numbers of marketing teams bringing customer journey progression and thinking into the mix. “It's making a difference,” he said. “I got pretty excited about the number of times customer journey mapping and centricity and data synchronisations across and through to customer service we read. There is a big shift away from the tactical CX or martech stuff and a bunch of people now saying, actually, we have put it all together.

“We've been seeing the emergence of martech for a while, but previously you’d have marketers saying ‘we started thinking about it’ or ‘we are spending a lot of money on it’. Now, we're seeing CMOs starting to be able to do that whole orchestration piece.”

Brand is back

Even as the technology and digital progression continues, a counter theme welcomed by judges was the volume of deliberate brand choices and conscious work done by CMOs to prove the value of longer-term brand investment. Judges agreed: There’s a decided recalibration back to brand after years of favouring performance executions and it made its way into many submissions in this year’s CMO Awards.

There were a plethora of references to evidence-based principles of marketing, Byron Sharp and Binet & Field and the need to get closer to optimum brand-to-performance ratios espoused by these industry luminaries. Submissions for example, showed marketing leaders willing to drop or dial back martech utilisation programs, putting focus back on content investment, and executing pilot programs of creative-led brand work to prove its effectiveness.

In other words, CMOs are doing their best to get back to brand over performance, and reacquainting ourselves with the principles of marketing. Judges agreed the fact we’re finally seeing not just belief in brand as a unit of value creation, but demonstrations of it, was fantastic. CMOs are fighting for it and creativity and we know both are essential to true cut-through and engagement.

Ruthless efficiency mentality

More broadly however, it’s clear CMOs are grappling with a relentless need to drive efficiency, productivity through simplification, and better alignment. Some submissions showed marketing teams applying AI tools for this purpose – although instances of AI weren’t anywhere near as common as judges had expected overall. One suggestion is marketers are still in an experimental phase and haven’t yet been able to articulate progression or improvements from early AI use cases. Where a submission did detail a brand harnessing AI for a net new business or customer benefit, it shone.

“What was interesting for me was almost a lack of emergence of AI from a generative search perspective; I was expecting a lot more people to be pushing into this as we're starting to see consumer behaviour pushing towards a new search paradigm. But it only came up twice,” commented Zeederberg.

The heavy emphasis on here-and-now efficiency and improving productivity fed into Batistich’s fourth theme: “I felt like there was more this year than in other years on new ways of working - resetting how we operate, which could include things like automation, or in-house capabilities, which came through quite a bit,” he noted. “To some extent, what we’re talking about here is CMOs noticing the environment is changing faster than their capability.”

One example is in-housing: While historically, this was more a matter of appointing search or social staff member internally, award submissions demonstrated how significant the shift to creative as an in-house job is.

“I appreciated a those who had fewer, bigger, better ways of thinking about things,” continued Leo Australia MD, Clare Pickens. In a nod to the breadth of submissions and types of organisations and remits reflected, she observed some CMOs dealing with huge amounts of complexity, whereas others clearly have simpler decision-making structures.

“There's such a huge focus on efficiency and not always a balance of effectiveness as well. There were lots of examples of how I'm cutting down operations and saving money here, there and everywhere. The next question is: Where are you reinvesting in future value, or what value are you delivering as a result of that?”

People and capability development needs work

The CMO Awards questionnaire also required CMOs to detail how they have been working to build people and team capability and skillsets – vital if they’re to keep up with the transformational changes to marketing, as well as finding both efficiencies and effectiveness.

A number of CMOs talked about proactive marketing competency programs, and several were specifically leveraging work the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) has done around its Skills and Competency framework.

“We saw a real mix of those who had thought about this and definitely have capability programs and frameworks in play, then a middle group either using AMI or another form of capability approach,” said Bradshaw. A bit further down, some were using Mark Ritson and the MiniMBA.  “Then there's the ones doing weekly WIPs and focused on some values and behaviours – the long tail of normal business practices.”  

AMI CEO and former FMCG and QSR marketing chief, Bronwyn Heys, was on the hunt for deliberate cultural and capability work across CMO Awards submissions.

“There were a few that stood out who were doing different and interesting things. But a lot didn't mention anything about competency upskilling and it felt a little bit to me like ticking the box on the people question,” she said.  “Where there were interesting examples around the culture piece which stood out for me, I thought wow, you're trying and doing something quite different.”

Commercial focus

Where things really come to the crunch with judges is how well marketing leaders can ladder up functional metrics and figures into a commercial impact narrative.

“Some clearly understood the sales drivers across their business, but a few too many were still highlighting vanity metrics like increases in social followers,” commented Baxter.

Bradshaw noted the lack of the ‘profit’ word. “Commercial acumen and lack of marketing profitability, dollar signs, and an overreliance on advertising ROI was prevalent,” he said.

The ability to build a narrative using data is another mark of distinction between good and great marketing chiefs. “For some people, data is just measurement. We’ve been doing that for 10 years, haven't we?” Pickens asked.  

“Data as insight is where you're getting to something a little bit juicier. How are you actually using that? How are you building that whole picture of customer? How are you using first-party data to create utility, innovation or communication off the back of that where you wouldn't be able to innovate that product or create that piece of work or messaging without that data?”

Areas of improvement aside, CMO Awards judges agreed the job of marketing leadership is the broadest, most diverse they have ever seen it. With that comes challenges, but it’s also a time of fruitful opportunity for the CMOs who are curious, brave and bold enough to embrace it.