Mar meets tech: the fallout

Much has transpired since I first began writing this newsletter will be a gross understatement by orders of magnitude. Marketing has arguably been the most disrupted since the world encountered ChatGPT and some of the other foundation Large Language Models (LLMs). The reason isn’t obvious at all, though, far from it, and LLMs may have little to do with the metamorphosis underway of marketing, as we all learned in B-schools. It may have something to do with the diminishing agency that CMOs today exert over the 5Ps a la Kotler, i.e., Product, Price, Place, Promotion, and People. Before I delve deeper into the “why” of this diminishing agency, I want to shout out an excellent conversation in the context I chanced upon. In the latest episode of “Two by Two,” a new podcast curated by The Ken.

While some specifics and examples in this conversation between a renowned marketing professor and a practicing CMO may have been uniquely Indian, most of the issues are relevant for marketers globally. As the discussion explored the secular trends that have led to the splintering of marketing into “brand marketing”, supposedly an esoteric indulgence with little return, and “growth” that represents the KPI-driven world of driving topline outcomes, I realized that we need a broader discourse to correct some of the underlying misconceptions. Hence, I chose to revive this newsletter.

Your audience doesn’t have an attention problem. You have a relevance problem - Blake Emal

The podcast led me to reflect deeply on what has made me a successful CMO thus far, even as I continue to overhaul my playbook. Here are the four most important superpowers that have worked for nearly two decades in sales-led and product-led growth businesses across professional services, fintech, SaaS, and, more recently, web3 or blockchain ecosystems.

• Transdisciplinary enricher of context: I have always prided my ability to bring deep and rich insights into diverse cohorts of human beings and what they truly care about. Bringing in tools that cut across ethnography, cultural anthropology, human-centered design, and, more recently, data science has been perhaps the most crucial attribute for me as a successful marketing leader, and I truly believe this trait will continue to set apart awesome CMOs, especially in the post-GenAI world. Professor Murthi from IIM Bangalore validated my chain of thought: “One of the most important roles the old-school marketer played was functioning as a conduit—bringing stories about customers to companies and taking stories about companies to customers. The anthropologist and the ethnographer are missing (in this numbers-obsessed shift in marketing). The ability to connect disparate dots to surface profound insights about the customer is central to a CMO’s role.
• Futurist and Tinkerer-in-chief: As an avid science fiction fan since childhood, I could vividly conjure up holographic computing interfaces, robots, and flying cars in my mind’s eye. This helped me dive into the latest in marketing automation that has shaped the modern marketing stack. A CMO needs to be comfortable looking through hype cycles, algorithmic filter bubbles, echo chambers, and increasingly multimodal troves of customer data and be able to sift signals from the noise. Signals that are meaningful markers of what is important for your customers and your product and what needs to be done today to stay relevant and ahead of your completion tomorrow. The hype around GenAI tools in content development is a great example. You might be ‘reviewing more than doing’ with copilots around content, but staying relevant and creating long-term value for your customers with content that educates or entertains is paramount. CMOs must be comfortable tinkering or running pilots, failing fast, and scaling what works, be it tools, platforms, tactics, agencies, or vendors.
• Storyteller: Cliched as it might sound, this attribute has been at the core of my experience as a CMO. A marketing leader needs to deeply appreciate the founder and the company’s vision and place in the world, almost to the point of embodying and living it 24/7. Then comes the painful austerity of breaking down that vision into a roadmap, an overarching storyline, episodic nuggets that need to be then crafted into narratives, omnichannel messaging adapted to your owned-earned-paid media continuum, hyper-customized to the language of your prospective customers. This is non-negotiable, and while the GenAI models and custom wrappers can help with the last mile execution, the CMO’s craft as the storyteller-in-chief (at times in the shadows with the founder or CEO as the face and voice telling the story) is the lynchpin that brings a vision to life and gives it meaning.

• Symphony conductor: There is no formal training for this last but crucial one! Imagine a 45-piece chamber orchestra, an ensemble of instruments, and a diverse group of skilled musicians who specialize in playing their respective instruments. Here is an example from the revered musical Phantom of the Opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber.
• 45-piece orchestra: 2 x Flute (Piccolo), 2 x Oboe (Cor Anglais), 2 x Clarinet (Bass Clarinet), Bassoon, 3 x Horn, 3 x Trumpet, 3 x Trombone, Tuba, 2 x Percussion, 2 x Keyboard and Strings (Players: 8 x Violin 1, 5 x Violin 2, 4 x Viola, 4 x Cello and 3 x Double Bass)
• A typical marketing function: PR and communications, brand marketing, field marketing, performance marketing, product marketing, social media, and a complex web of vendors, agencies, freelancers, and partners specializing in one or two elements of marketing's promise, besides having to manage internal stakeholders.
• Just as the conductor does, a CMO brings together this diverse and talented group of artists and encourages them to bring their best craft to deliver on the bigger picture, the big promise, and the vision. This one is a constant struggle to zoom out, not to be caught up with the narrow briefs and campaigns but to always be the one ensuring every obstacle that constrains this group from delivering their best performance is out of the way, to cushion them from the pressure, the noise and be the nurturing force.

And obviously, we all still may need to hustle, pull in all-nighters, and work weekends deep in the trenches, writing press releases or working on product launches. So, these four attributes only go as far.

Try offering your CFO advice on investment strategies to earn a passive yield on the corporate treasury; I bet you wouldn't dare to! However, everyone in the organization seems to be strongly opinionated about everything to do with marketing and is very liberal with their recommendations (sigh!).

I wanted to keep this issue abstract before diving deeper into some other reasons why a CMO’s role has been disrupted, one "P" at a time. And we are days away from OpenAI’s launch of Sora, which will further fuel this disruption! Watch this space…