The Changing Role of CMOs in Organizations

Marketing as a corporate function is witnessing big changes which are not only impacting the core skills marketers need to possess, but also necessitating future CMOs to primarily be digital natives rather than retain their erstwhile traditional avatar. With the coming of age of digital, marketing has changed its face forever with customers demanding 24×7 product availability, product life cycles shrinking drastically, and traditionally entrenched products losing to new age service-oriented products. All these changes necessitate a change in the overall skills of the marketing function much of which will be increasingly attributed to the knowledge of digital marketing and its implementation.

Vivaldi Partners Group, a brand consulting firm in NewYork, in their recent study on ‘The Changing Role of the CMO’ have shared five core areas which are impacting marketing transformation, creating newer opportunities and changing the marketing landscape. These include:

1. Strategy: As per the report, marketing has moved far ahead of traditional push-based communications and is now more about co-creating products with customers. CMO’s key role involves shaping the strategy and identifying newer opportunities to integrate with functions like sales, innovation, customer service, and experience to develop experiences across platforms which are unbeatable. Marketing needs to orchestrate these company-wide changes by integrating traditional offerings with digital in a seamless fashion.
2. Customer: Engaging the customer through social listening and new digital technologies is becoming crucial as traditional ways of assessing marketing needs with just a round-table discussion in the office does not suffice in today’s time. Since consumers have taken control of the brand, it is important to know that the integrated customer path is becoming crucial to share the right customer story at the right moment. In a multi-channel world, it is becoming crucial to design consistent positive experiences for customers across the value chain to increase revenue and product adoption.
3. Operations: According to the report, CMOs are developing digital command centers to collect near real-time insights and data to manage highly advanced and efficient decision making. This can only happen through access to data-driven insights and use of digital analytics to identify who the actual customer is and what are the potential new customer profiles. Marketers might try to catch-up with all platforms and customer touchpoints but it is becoming increasingly important to deploy advanced statistical models and attribution analysis to decide which channels are more crucial and which investments would yield optimal rewards.
4. Organization: With rapid decision making becoming more and more crucial for the marketing function, cost is not as important as the ability to get various groups across the organization work together with the marketing team on multiple digital platforms to generate the impact a CMO is envisaging.Marketing needs to be much more integrated with customer care, innovation, R&D, CRM and experience management groups to deliver the right experiences. CMOs are being increasingly judged on the way they are able to integrate people, processes, and data across the organization to make an impact on the customer in a holistic manner.
5. Technology: Technology, which is the basis of differentiation for marketers strengthening their hold on digital platforms, is impacting the way CMOs are allocating their costs across all marketing functions. With a plethora of marketing tools available in the market including automation, analytics, social, inbound, customer experience management, etc., CMOs have to decipher the right outlay of technology which will bring desired output and impact. Digital platforms increasingly will have a large role to play in these decisions.

With a look at the above five key impact areas for CMOs, we now understand the impact digital marketing and related technologies will have on the marketing landscape going forward. In the subsequent sections, we shall look at the career opportunities emerging in the market through these shifts for which an aspiring digital marketer can develop skills to make a digital career. Though most of these skills look simple to grasp, the complex part for budding marketers will be to understand how to create the right impact with these digital skills.