Confessions of Rockstar CMOs

by Barbara Bacci-Mirque

What an interesting week in the marketing world.  The same week that an Ad Age article reports that CMOs have minimal impact on sales (!), the ANA and Booz Allen Hamilton release our joint publication, CMO Thought Leaders: The Rise of the Strategic Marketer.

I would like to offer some inside information on the CMO report in Ad Age - the quick headline was CMOs have little impact, but a marketing scientist familiar with the study told me that what the research actually found was that there was little difference in the sales growth between companies with and without a Chief Marketing Officer.

So back to the CMO Thought Leaders reader, I was lucky enough to be part of this remarkable publication and attend several of the one-on-one conversations with the heads of marketing we profiled.  What an education that was!  There is no magic bullet to their success but the overarching traits I observed among these marketing leaders are insatiable intellectual curiosity, lack of complacency – they continually question what they could do better – and team building internally and externally.  They all realized they could not do it alone and so had close relationships with their colleagues who specialized in finance, analytics, and consumer insights.   Some  of the marketers we interviewed are more right brain and some are more left brain but they all are incredible.  If you read the book and absorb the lessons from these marketing giants, I bet you will have more tenure in your own senior marketing role.

Comments

[Stephen Denny]

I'm surprised that you were as kind to Ad Age and their reporting as you were, above.

This is a fairly shoddy piece of research backed by an inflamatory article. Only one of five companies surveyed even had a "CMO" title. Companies might or might not have centralized marketing. Industries are different. Etc.

Further, the author of the Ad Age piece is the same writer who penned the much maligned canard on Project (RED).

Poor work all around. Can we call this "debunked" and move on?