How often have you been given the time in a senior B2B marketing role to outlive your 3-year strategy?

I’ve launched a consultancy called Choueke Creative.

Last week I asked Linkedin a question it seemingly couldn’t answer. I asked if anyone had hard data on the average tenure of B2B marketing directors and CMOs.

Nobody could point me towards a definitive answer (though my gratitude goes to the infinitely helpful Linkedin Man James Potter for taking time with me to explore the question).

With all the research available on the average tenure of marketing roles in B2C, it feels strange that nobody seems to have similar data for ‘B2B-World’.?

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It used to be an often-quoted rule of thumb that marketing directors had average tenures of 18-24 months. As editor of Marketing Week magazine (now more than a decade ago) it used to be a secret quest of mine to see if my team and I could do anything to help extend that average tenure.?

More recently, in April 2022, executive search consultancy Spencer Stuart ’s CMO survey found average CMO tenure “remained remarkably low” at 40 months with median tenure at just 28 months. Spencer Stuart reported the gap between CMO tenure and CEO tenure was widening with CEOs now in their roles more than twice as long as CMOs.?

This data though, is for all marketers. I’m interested in what’s happening in B2B, where the best of us come into a role and develop solid and potent three year plans - (for me the minimum duration needed to build truly ‘marketing-driven’ success).?

Rare are the bosses and owners in B2B with the patience to see those plans through.

They don’t see the world through our marketing lens so wouldn’t necessarily adopt the outlook that marketing and business strategy are often one and the same thing - recently articulated perfectly by Roger Martin in his interview by the B2B Institute’s CEO Jann Martin Schwarz here in a 40 minute video (see link in comments).

So barely a smattering of senior B2B marketers are given the chance to see a full marketing strategy through to the end.

The chances of doing so tends to reduce further for B2B marketers awake to the value of building strong brands.

At least that has been the case. I think there’s a step change occurring among B2B marketers’ desire to influence; to produce better, more effective and more enduring work.

B2B marketers are becoming qualified.?

The active alumni community of Mark Ritson ’s Mini-MBA in Marketing Week grows at about 3,000 marketers per quarter.?

Around 45% of those are in B2B according to the Mini-MBA’s fabulous community manager Vivien Underwood .

And beyond Ritson’s two celebrated Mini-MBA courses, we’re signing up to explore countless other educational programmes to advance our development, both as marketers and business-people.

B2B marketers want to start winning arguments and asserting their expertise. We no longer want to imagine the results we could achieve if only we had the correct buy-in and resources.?

As part of the step change I mentioned, various pieces of research that topple widely held assumptions are fast being adopted as their implications ripple through the marketing arena.

In 2019, Les Binet and Peter Field applied the methodology of their long-standing ‘The Long and Short Of It ‘ findings to B2B. They shared empirical proof that the correct balance for B2B of top-of-funnel brand building and sales activation was much closer to the B2C formula than that preached by conventional wisdom.

Binet’s and Field’s work sparked a scramble among B2B marketers to understand not just how to add brand awareness and advertising to their mix, but how to justify it internally.

More recently, further studies have hit the headlines. Research commissioned by Meta last year was conducted by three different companies – Nielsen, Nepa and GfK – and analysed 3,500 campaigns across multiple media channels in five European countries between 2016 and 2021.?

As well as evidence that digital media such as Facebook and Instagram can be just as effective for long-term brand building as they are for short-term activation, it found that on average, ‘60% of ROI is achieved over the long term’.?

Just as counterintuitive and contrary to the wider understanding of how B2B marketing works was a recent finding by System1 Group, a global marketing research and effectiveness company that’s developed a powerful model for predicting success of innovation and ad campaigns.?

System1 can now prove that Brand-building ads boost short-term sales. Its research shows while sales-driven ads deliver few long-term effects, brand advertising achieves both.

These represent huge learnings for B2B marketing that we must figure out to articulate effectively to our CFOs, CEOs, boards and colleagues.

Schwarz and his colleagues at the B2B Institute as well as others - notably Joel Harrison and his teams at B2B Marketing and community Propolis - promote new research and case studies very effectively. The responsibility is on the rest of us as the B2B community to take these findings and turn them from theory to practical and happy reality.?

Speaking purely anecdotally, I’d say that currently, the braver you are as a B2B marketer in pushing the elements of our influence and expertise that make a transformative (and long term) difference, the shorter your average tenure in role is likely to be.

The opposite should be the case.

A focus on short-termism and ‘sales now at all costs’ means that doing the right thing as a B2B marketer in B2B is likely to see you looking for your next role sooner than if you quietly get on with a more widely-understood but less effective interpretation of marketing.

We need to change that. My hypothesis is more of us want to challenge the status quo for the better and help grow rich long-term futures for our businesses, than those that don’t.??

So I’m doing a couple of things:

1. I've launched Choueke Creative, a (poorly-named but very good) consultancy for B2B businesses that are ready to assert - or even explore for the first time - their potential as strong brands. I mean, proper money-making brands - brands that are tangible, commercial assets, as opposed to just homogenous products and services. I’m working with some incredible companies in a number of different ways. There’s a link to the Choueke Creative website in the comments. Go have a look. Even better, sign up to the newsletter and I’ll send you a weekly video of no more than five minutes (I promise) of me ranting on a newsy topic, sharing something brilliant that I’ve seen or pointing you towards someone super smart saying clever stuff.
2. I’m turning my bestselling book ‘Boring2Brave: the bravery-as-a-strategy mindset that’s transforming B2B marketing’ into a set of online video and audio courses. I’ve partnered with the estimable Floww Digital founder Andrew L. in a plan to launch the Boring2Brave Academy in July. If we make it happen by then, it’ll be down to Andrew. If we slip and have to move the launch date it’s going to be down to me.?

We’re currently building the content and it feels valuable and different to anything else out there. It’s less ‘digital skills training’ or ‘how to build a better email marketing campaign’; and more ‘how to build a brand’; employ creativity; use braver marketing to grow market share; find and nurture internal champions and how to ‘win’ conversations with your CFO. We’re thinking of it as the leadership development training B2B marketers need even before they get into leadership roles.

As I said, the best of us come to our roles and develop solid three year strategies with plans we can flex and adapt in the face of unforeseen circumstances. Many of us have to leave our businesses prematurely (in many cases, even though the strategy is on track and working).?

We’ve clearly not done a good enough job of articulating a strong or expert enough marketing perspective for our internal stakeholders to back us.?

That’s the problem I’d like to attack.?

I don’t know the average length of a B2B marketing director’s tenure. But whatever it is, I want to double it.?

Give me a shout if you want to talk.