The Coming CMO Extinction

CMOs are the houseflies of the C-Suite. They buzz around incessantly, irritating everyone, until they suddenly drop dead.  

Not literally dead, just metaphorically dead. According to Spencer Stuart, the average CMO tenure is 27.5 months. The big recruiting firms thrive on all this death, while the rest of us deal with the chaotic consequences.   

But that’s OK, because this is all going to end shortly. The CMO position, I predict, will go extinct over the next few years.  

We usually feel bad when things go extinct. We secretly miss the dinosaurs. We feel guilty about the Dodo. But nobody is going to cry when the CMO disappears--nobody other than today's SVPs of marketing, anyway.  

The CMO job is going to go away because the buyers and sellers of this position will eventually admit what they already know: The position is doomed to fail. 

Unrealistic Expectations

Mary Barra, GM’s CEO, recently announced the hiring of the company’s new CMO with the following statement.

“By aligning marketing across GM under Deborah’s leadership, we will build stronger brands while ensuring more effective, efficient and agile customer engagement.”

How very nice. Hopefully, that’s actually what Mary is thinking. However, if Ms. Barra is anything like most CEOs, she’s probably saying something else to herself, something like. . .

Man, Cadillac continues to be a train wreck--403 straight months of sales declines! If only we had some snappy advertising! One or two good spots would turn this thing around. I’m not sure what it needs to be, exactly, but maybe something like those Christmas spots Lexus runs with the big red bow on top of the car. Such a creative idea--wish we had thought of that. Maybe we could do something similar for Easter, but with a pastel bow! 

And Buick! I don’t understand why we can’t catch a break on that brand. The research people recently told me that the average Buick buyer is now 83 years-old! Our marketing team just doesn’t seem to get it. We need some of that machine learning, neural network, digital algorithm magic on Instagram or some other social media platform I don’t use. The Millennials love that kind of stuff. Like I’m always saying, we need more young people to love the Buick brand!  

I am only picking on Ms. Barra because we all know that GM’s problems on Cadillac and Buick can’t be fixed with better advertising. These brands are in such dire straits because of poor product performance in the past, or because of bad product planning more recently (i.e. Cadillac now builds world-class cars but didn’t react quickly enough to consumers’ SUV obsession.)

Most CEOs (and their boards of directors) don’t like to confront the truth: Today’s sales performance is almost always a function of much larger forces than advertising. Those forces were unleashed by historical decisions, and they will require time, resources, and luck to overcome. However, nobody wants to hear that.

Better to instead declare that a shiny new CMO will make it all better.  

We all know how the story ends--exactly 27.5 months later. 

The Rarest Combination of Skills

With the advent of digital marketing, CMOs and senior marketers of all kinds need to be good at three very different things: 

• Strategy development
• Creative idea generation
• Data analytics

The problem, of course, is that there are exactly seven people in the entire country who have this combination of skills. CMOs, knowing they’re weak in at least one of these areas, are forced to pretend. 

Back in the Don Draper era, a great marketer needed only to be good at developing strategy. The agency of record came up with the ideas, often presented as a smorgasbord of three options. The marketer picked one, made a few unhelpful comments, and then suggested that everyone retire early to a dinner of martinis, medium-rare steak, and strawberry cheesecake.

Now, the thirst of ideas is much greater, in part because there are so many channels of possible distribution. A single agency can’t keep up. Instead, CMOs have a fleet of specialist agencies and, for some strange reason, are expected to fill in any idea gaps with their own brilliant creations.  

In addition to being a Sia of creativity, today’s CMOs are supposed to have Nate Silver-like analytical powers, able to optimize their marketing budget across hundreds of digital channels. As I’ve written before, this new “sciency” pursuit is sucking the soul out of marketing and destroying long-term value, but companies continue to want it, believing that digital voodoo will somehow relieve them of their obligation to provide products or services their customers want. 

Don’t Shed Any Tears

How will life go on without CMOs? Don’t worry--everything is going to be fine.

Some organizations will replace their CMO with another important-sounding, repackaged, C-Level role like Chief Customer Officer and Chief Revenue Officer. Unless these roles are materially different from today’s CMO, the outcomes will likely be the same.

Smarter companies will bust the CMO position up into three roles:

1. Strategy: CMOs often are responsible for the most important elements of strategy (e.g. segmenting the market, selecting a target customer, developing a differentiated position, etc.) while the strategy officers, if they exist, concentrate on things like M&A or strategic planning. Why keep these separate? These responsibilities should be consolidated into a single strategy leadership role, and it should have a seat at the big table.
2. Creative/Brand: For a consumer business, one relatively powerful aesthete should be responsible for maintaining the brand’s visual identity and generating attention-grabbing ideas for distribution across all of today’s media channels.
3. Optimization and analytics: Somebody needs to do all the math and pretend that it reveals the ground truth. Contrary to today’s headhunter conventional wisdom, this role is tactical, not strategic. As such, it can sit at a director or VP level and it can report into any number of functions, including strategy, finance, or even operations. 

Three roles for the price of one? That almost sounds like an idea a CMO would come up with.