31 Things Every CMO Must Know

Being a marketer is hard.

Marketing is one of the few industries that affords smart and ambitious people the opportunity to rise to executive positions faster than in many other professions. This creates wonderful opportunities for driven people to climb the career ladder faster, but it also creates problems when many of those executives make bad decisions because they haven’t got enough experience or lack formal qualifications.

I know this from first-hand experience since I have quite a good job but I have no marketing qualifications whatsoever. This wasn’t intentional. I originally studied to become a stock broker, but I fell into the marketing industry by accident after working with Unilever. I soon discovered how quickly the industry, trends and consumer behavior changed, and how that rapid rate of change rendered many traditional marketing strategies and theories redundant, even if they were only a few months or years old.

As the marketing industry continues to evolve, and as I spend significant amounts of time with CMOs and senior marketers, there is one thing that I notice more than anything else. The majority of marketing executives are overwhelmed and under-prepared for the challenges that their businesses and brands are likely to face over the next few years. Some CMOs acknowledge this publicly. Others only admit it privately after a few cocktails.

CMOs are facing all kinds of challenges:

• Social media campaigns don't deliver the kind of results that they used to, being used most effectively for most brands as a customer service channel.
• In a recent survey I was involved in 88% of enterprise brands didn't share their own customer data with their own sales and marketing departments.
• Social commerce offered the promise of "scale" but after heavy investment between 2010-2013 - many brands are still struggling to see any kind of meaningful return.
• Over the last few years CMOs have invested time, money and resources in AR, VR, apps, big data, blockchain and new social channels, but often without making sure that their basic sales, commerce and customer service channels are all working properly first.
• The combat dropping engagement figures and struggling KPIs, CMOs are investing more in digital marketing than ever, despite the fact that many of the best (and most meaningful returns) often still come from TV, radio, billboard, PR, print and direct mail.
• Dark social is a big challenge as the majority of customers switch to private messaging apps away from public social networks, rendering many social listening platforms and the impressive command centres that CMOs love redundant...

Being a CMO is tough. It's hard to keep up...

So, to help alleviate that fear and to encourage the next generation of CMOs looking to lead brands in the future, I thought I would offer up thirty-one facts and stats that all CMOs must know, taken from books and research that I have stumbled across over recent years. This is by no means an extensive list, but it might serve as a useful resource of links and a spring board to help CMOs learn new stuff and keep up-to-speed.

1. Coca-Cola made their CMO role redundant because they thought it no longer served in the best interests of their brand. They replaced it with a Chief Growth Officer and a Chief Innovation Officer. One focused on the commercial aspects of building the brand and one focused on creating new things. Peter Drucker once said that business has only two functions: marketing and innovation. If so, this is probably a smart move. Other major brands likely to follow suit. [Marketing Week]
2. CMOs in 2017 need to be "dual-brained", understanding the art and science of marketing. [Forbes]
3. 80% of CEOs don't trust (or are unimpressed) with their CMO. (This is probably due to them over-investing in shiny new technologies over previous years which under-delivered or proved no economic value). [Harvard Business]
4. Every CMO should know (and understand) the Gartner Hype-Cycle of digital marketing and advertising technologies. It's difficult (and expensive) to get your paws on, but I promise you it's worth every penny. The "most hyped" technology most likely to impact marketers over the next 5-10 years is "AI in marketing". [Gartner]
5. The one book that should be in every CMOs bag is Byron Sharp's "How Brands Grow".
6. Whether you agree with him or not, Mark Ritson will constantly challenge your marketing beliefs and force you to have a stronger (or different) perspective on your job and the industry. [Marketing Week]
7. Many CMOs struggle with understanding marketing technology. A quick and dirty way to get up-to-speed is by reading Scott Brinker's (FREE!) e-book on the 5 disruptive forces reshaping marketing. For a longer read, check out his book Hacking Marketing.
8. The one show that all CMOs should watch is Bloomberg Technology. It's a superb daily roundup (split into bite-sized chunks) that covers all the tech developments that affect marketers. You can watch online or on any connected TV but the iPad app is particularly good. [@Technology]
9. If CMOs only subscribe to receive one email newsletter each week, it should be Benedict Evan's from a16z. (Speaking of a16z they also have an outstanding podcast here). [Newsletter signup]
10. Seth Godin should be every CMOs best friend. Every single thing he has ever written is relevant to your job. [Seth's Blog]
11. Mitch Joel has a weekly podcast where he interviews the worlds most influential marketers. It's awesome. [Six Pixels]
12. IBM produce a CMO Study every year, based upon feedback from over 5,000 CXOs and 28,000 interviews. It's pretty good. [CMO Study]
13. Professor Scott Galloway has a brilliant YouTube channel. He talks about changes in consumer trends and presents the kind of slides which you'll want to steal. [L2inc YouTube]
14. Javier Sanchez Lamelas wrote a brilliant book called Martketing about the heart and brain of branding. Every CMO ("Chief Magic Officer") should read it. [mARTketing]
15. Many CMOs are no longer in charge of the things that they should be in charge of (pricing, product development and sales strategies). they are increasingly only responsible for brand, PR and ad campaigns. [Harvard Business Review]
16. The 10 biggest challenges that CMOs faced in 2016 hasn't changed much in 2017. (Attribution, Single Customer View and respect in the boardroom) [Forbes]
17. CMOs are seeing significant cuts to their budgets (especially around media spend) and must become more creative with their marketing spend. [Gartner]
18. There are two marketing technology blogs that every CMO must read. Especially if they are not "technical". [Chiefmartec] + [David Raab]
19. I've started to post videos where I try to help CMOs by making some complicated marketing technologies simple. [Vimeo]
20. 74% of CMOs believe that their jobs don't allow them to deliver any sufficient business impact [Harvard]
21. The one analyst every CMO should follow is Rusty Warner. He's a brilliant chap and a genuinely nice guy who publishes blogs and authors the "Wave" reports for Forrester. [Forrester]
22. As 30% of browsing behaviour will happen without a screen by 2020 voice technology will probably disrupt brands more than any other technology over the next few years. [Gartner]
23. 1 in 5 major retailers are abandoning their apps with CMOs investing more in mobile responsive technology due to rising development and maintenance costs [Gartner]
24. The future CMO could be called the "Customer Journey Officer". Stupid title. But a valid role. [Ad Age]
25. The majority of CMOs are looking to invest heavily in cognitive technologies (with 50% of their developer team embedding some kind of cognitive technology into their digital assets by 2018) [IBV]
26. Every CMO needs a solid strategy. And their strategy needs a strategy. If in doubt, they should read this article [Harvard Businesses Review] and then read Richard Rumelt's book [Good Strategy Bad Strategy]. Everything CMOs need to know about strategy exists in that post and that book.
27. One of the people I respect most in the marketing industry is Brian Solis. He's a good egg. And he's like a CMOs CMO. You should get to know him if you don't already. [@BrianSolis]
28. Building trust is one of the biggest challenges facing any marketer, but especially CMOs. Trust in the boardroom. With employees. With customers and prospects. Seth Godin said that people only buy from you for two reasons. They know you and they trust you. For this reason ,every CMO should be very familiar with the brilliant Trust Barometer Report published by PR firm Edelman at the beginning of each year.
29. The best marketing book ever written is 81 years old. It is Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People. It's as relevant today as it was when it was first written in 1936. All CMOs should have a copy. Better still, they should own an early edition.
30. All CMOs are evangelists and storytellers. Even if those terms don't appear in their job title, the best CMOs know how to tell interesting stories and share big ideas, using small words and short sentences. Everything you need to know about being a great evangelist can be learned from Guy Kawasaki in [this post].
31. Lastly, and somewhat selfishly, I must mention that IBM currently has a bunch of interesting cognitive and AI technologies that no other technology vendor has. These can not only help CMOs deliver all kinds of interesting and new customer experiences, but can help to build the trust and respect that many CMOs are lacking. Many of these new technologies and APIs and be accessed or demonstrated for free at IBM.com/Watson. Especially useful are Watson's Personality Insights API.

I hope that was useful. There's certainly a bunch of interesting links and people on that list.

Being a marketer is hard.

But it's also the most exciting job of any business (IMHO). The success of any brand or organisation can often be tracked back to something the CMO suggested, built, strategised or invested in.

It's true, making sense of all this stuff is hard work. But this is why I'm not surprised when I hear that the best CMOs are usually voracious readers who regularly lock themselves away from the world, with just a notebook and pen to help them process everything they read, see and hear each week.

I write a lot more about the more personal aspects of some of this stuff in my new book Ten Words. I'll publish the link to buy when it launches on 1st September. In the meantime, let me know in the comments what facts I've missed, and what else CMOs should read, watch or follow.