Tag Archives: cmo

15 July, 2013 · 12:33 pm

Complexity is the New Clutter for CMOs

ImageTen years ago, the most pressing challenge facing CMOs was how to break through the clutter of mass advertising. So they partnered with agencies who developed a reputation for getting noticed in the noise. The Burger King work developed with Crispin Porter epitomized this world. Many found the plasticized King off-putting, but it definitely got noticed. In a world of advertising overload, that was no small feat.

The need to connect emotionally with people will always be fundamental to brand building, but clutter is no longer the CMO’s chief adversary. Today’s market is ruled more by complexity than clutter. Marketers face consumer expectations that are increasing exponentially. We now insist that companies respond instantly to us in the channels of our choosing. We don’t call or email their service department; we put a hashtag in front of their name and expect a prompt response.  We want sales and service to move easily between offline and online worlds.  At the same time, the means to meet these expectations are expanding. Established players like Twitter, Google and Facebook are introducing new features weekly, and players with new models arrive by the dozens every month. The infrastructure needed to support the effective use of these avenues That’s why Gartner predicted that CMOs would be spending more on IT than CIOs by 2017. 

Yet amid this exponential expansion, marketing budgets only increase linearly, if they increase at all. It’s little wonder that many CMOs feel they’re losing ground. Accenture reported earlier this year that the overall feeling among CMOs is that they are less prepared to compete in today’s marketplace than they were a year ago . About 4 in 10 CMOS said they lack the tools, people, and resources to meet their objectives. You know it’s tough going when you feel you’re moving backwards.

As a result, CMOs are looking for a new set of partners to help them manage a fundamental difference with the Complexity Challenge. Overcoming clutter meant figuring out how to use the same tools everybody else was using more creatively. Overcoming complexity means figuring out which tools to use and how to use them. This requires not just creative insight, but business, technical and channel insight. Today’s CMO needs partners who can:

  • Sort through the flood of new offerings to constantly update the right strategic portfolio of tools that will deliver the most impact
  • Orchestrate the use of those tools so they inform and reinforce each other
  • Harness the value of advanced analytics to generate the right feedback on where and how to win more hearts, minds, and business from the people who matter most to the business

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13 April, 2010 · 11:03 am

The Brand – Marketing Paradox

Over the past few years, there has been two converse trends that speak to an interesting shift in the marketing landscape. On the one hand, the benefits of a strong brand have become more discussed and desired than ever before. CEOs, politicians, athletes, and entertainers are obsessed with developing and shaping their respective brand.  Numerous self-help columns promise to help people develop their individual brands. Never before has branding been perceived as such a critical success factor by so many people in so many fields.

So these should be heady days for established branding experts. Marketers from brand managers to agency directors should be enjoying unprecedented status and influence. Yet the opposite situation seems to be the case. White papers for CMOs circulate around the struggle to get a seat at the decision-making table.  Agencies are increasingly treated as commodities, set out for bid in much the same way as office supply contracts.  Major consumer marketing companies have bypassed the professionals to embrace “user-generated content” and crowdsourcing to fuel their marketing campaigns.

One explanation for these contrasting trends is that branding has become too important to be left to the marketers. Supporters of this view argue that the limited toolset and mindset of traditional marketers has made them ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of the modern marketplace.  There is some isolated truth in this, but anyone who has dealt with a large sample of CMOs can attest that as whole they are as engaged, intelligent, and creative as anyone you could hope to meet.

The more credible explanation is that branding has become bigger than marketing.  The digital era has brought an unprecendented amount of information and transparency to products and the companies who make them. As a result, people are forming brand impressions from a far greater number of inputs than ever before.  A frustrating customer service experience becomes a viral video hit, a golf outing with clients sparks national outrage,  financing from an overseas bank results in a store boycott. So brand impressions are being formed less by the things marketers control and more by the corporate culture and its day-to-day operations. 

Branding used to cover a company like frosting on a cake. It was something you added at the end to make it look good. Now the branding is baked in. For branding experts to contribute, they have to make a positive impact on what goes into the cake, not on what comes out of the oven.

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