The CMO’s New Remit: The Entire Freakin’ Experience

Marisa Thalberg, the CMO of Lowe’s, penned a goodbye post on LinkedIn a few weeks ago. Apart from thanking her colleagues, mentors and family, she also listed her notable accomplishments as the retailer’s CMO for 2.5 years. And in this recounting, she perfectly illustrates the multi-faceted and cross-functional complexities of being a modern marketing officer:

Together, we went on to do things like bolster the brand’s style perception by partnering with New York Fashion Week. We chose to celebrate Lowe’s 100th centennial by giving back to the communities of this country through renovating “100 Hometowns,” which in turn became the basis of the HGTV show “Build it Forward.” We launched a whole new loyalty and rewards program for Lowe’s Pro customers that has taken off in all the ways we planned. We launched the fastest-growing Retail Media Network in the industry last year. We made customers smile in new ways, from reimagining spring into Springfest, mirroring it during the holidays with Winterfest, offering fans a “night of Lowemance” or a covid chance to Curbside Trick or Treat. We offered a new “Lowe’s Price Promise” for value. We launched livestreamed workshops so anyone can DIY. And so much more. It was a source of great pride that our work for Lowe’s during the pandemic led us to be named AdAge’s #3 Marketer of the Year – the only retailer to make the list – and the first time Lowe’s had EVER been on this list!

This list of accolades has plenty to unpack. This CMO led business and brand efforts that run the gamut of brand and customer experience, as well as innovation and incremental revenue workstreams. Here are some of the duties of the modern CMO (in relative order to Ms. Thalberg’s): sponsorship activation, purpose marketing and CSR, original branded content, loyalty and rewards marketing, media innovation, experiential marketing, retailtainment, pricing strategy and value creation, new media and technology adoption, shareholder relations, corporate communications, talent recruitment and retention….and so much more.

As Thalberg described her challenge, she pointed out that her remit was “to transform the marketing function – as well as the marketing and the brand itself.” She is not alone. The modern CMO who survived and learned from the pandemic is today charged with transforming the marketing function and the brands under her purview.

Experience Matters

In shorthand, the CMO’s new remit is the entire brand experience, both inside the organization and at the thousands of touchpoints outside of it. Perhaps this is why many companies are replacing (or eschewing) the CMO title for a more modern moniker of CXO – chief experience officer. Regardless of the title, the function now beyond just “marketing” and now encompasses the entire brand and customer experience stack.

Brand experience (BX) and customer experience (CX) is expected to be an increasingly hotter topic in the C-suite. Why? Because experience really matters to people. And that makes it matter to marketers, too. Here are some figures in support:

According to Salesforce’s State of the Marketing Report from last year, 80 percent of customers say that the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services. According to the same study, an equal 80% of marketers say customer experience is a key competitive differentiator.

Pandemic notwithstanding, spending on experience-related services has grown at a rate 1.5x compared to personal consumption and 4x than spending on goods, according to McKinsey .

And 80 percent of US buyers will pay extra for a better brand experience, says PwC. That same report says that a better brand experience can carry a price premium of an average 16 percent.

That’s the upside. The downside is what keeps CMOs up at night: according to PwC’s Future of Customer Experience Survey , 32 percent of consumer who love a brand or product would stop buying that brand or product after one bad experience.

One.

One bad experience.

Parenthetically, if you are a CMO in LATAM, you are practically an insomniac: 53 percent of consumers would ditch a brand after one bad experience. It’s no wonder that no other C-suite role other than CMO gets the headlines about decreasing longevity and increasing turnover.

Salesforce’s report says that 86 percent of high performance marketers say their organization leads customer experience initiatives across the business. (The number drops to 72 percent for underperformers.) The operative word in this insight is “across” – the modern CMO needs to work across multiple silos within an organization to ensure seamless and value-driving brand and customer experiences. The customer doesn’t care how many departments need to be aligned within an organization to ensure a convenient check-out, great product service or a delightful marketing experience.

But this is now the job of the CMO: cross-functional, multi-siloed, ever-shifting and always-on creator of the brand experience and the champion of the customer experience. The CMO must ensure that it’s easy to be a customer of her brand and that it stands for something meaningful to its employees as much as its customers.

The CMO is doing more with less. This is not news. What is new is the expanded functionality and focus on experience that is now her remit. But wait, there’s more. She now has web3 and things like the metaverse and NFTs with which to contend.

Metaverse or Bust?

According to McKinsey , the metaverse alone will account for an additional $144 to $206 billion in the advertising market by 2030. That’s just less than eight years from now. Imagine the deluge of brand experiences, e-commerce opportunities, AR/VR build-outs and other BX and CX activities now available for incremental revenue generation in the metaverse. The CMO – along with the CFO and CRO -- need to strategize around net new revenue potential of web3 apps and communities. She will need to be a direct translator of BX and CX in entirely new ecosystems and new tech stacks – in effect, learning a new language from which to do the translating – as she navigates the experiences of her customers in URL and IRL worlds.

It is not improbable to see the same customer shopping in radically different ways in-store versus the metaverse. Or that customer will have very different experience expectations for the brand, depending on various platforms and unique customer behaviors on them. It is not inconceivable that one customer will have multiple identities and will shop, transact, communicate and engage with brands in each own distinct way.

The metaverse will add and amplify hundreds if not thousands of touchpoints for brand and customer experience. And just recall that for one-third of people in the US, one bad experience will mean a lost customer for the brand. The CMO role isn’t in peril at all. In fact, it is more important than ever.