The evolving role of the CMO in a data-driven world

It's been an exciting month engaging with the world's leading CMOs, first at an event where Forbes and BCG unveiled the 2021 World’s Most Influential CMOs list and subsequently in smaller group roundtable and 1:1 discussions as my team and I help CMOs shape their agenda.

In a fireside chat hosted by Forbes’ Diane Brady recently, I had the opportunity to speak to the twin tsunamis of change bearing down on CMOs everywhere: the massive changes in consumer spending and the astronomical rise of first-party data.

Much has been written about the first of these changes. But the second of these trends is often underappreciated. Our team of over 1,000 data scientists and engineers are working with dozens of the world's largest brands and I asked them to estimate the growth in customer identifiable data. The result was surprising: fully 90% of the customer identifiable data leading brands now have brought together to activate against either didn’t exist or was stored in siloed systems in an unusable fashion just two years ago – meaning that marketers have incredible information at their fingertips today. With the rise of digital channels that capture enormous amounts of customer data, the growth of Amazon and direct to consumer brands and the deployment of customer data platforms to stitch the data together, brands have a better 360 view of their customers than ever before.

In both our fireside chat and subsequent discussions, the conversation turns to how CMOs have been dealing with these changes. BCG’s research finds four out of five marketing chiefs stepping up, leading cross-functional initiatives in partnerships with their CXO peers that would have been all but impossible to undertake before the pandemic. These are exciting changes for CMOs, earning them enormous trust and, in more and more cases, enabling them to take on broader roles in their organizations, e.g. P&L responsibility for the online channel, broader customer/commercial responsibilities or pioneering data-driven / enterprise analytics approaches. I predicted that these exciting growth opportunities would result in more CMOs staying longer at their companies (albeit perhaps moving onto new roles), a welcome trend given the notoriously short tenure of CMOs.

Amidst this change, Diane Brady and I also discussed the bedrock elements of the CMO’s job: having an authentic brand story; tending to customer relationships; and personalizing content at scale as much as possible. At the end of the day, it’s still about the people and the processes – not just the data. In fact, our BCG research finds that 70% of customer-centric transformations that fail do so because of an inadequate focus on people & processes, not the data & tech.

Putting it another way: it’s still about combining head and heart – remembering that at the end of the day it is all about how you make customers feel and the brands that weave that focus into their operations and strategy will be the winners.?