Up in smoke or on fire?

The evolution of the CMO, CGO and CCO

When I was in 3rd grade I entered a contest for the best “fire prevention” poster. I was pretty proud of what I created and I took it outside to show my dad, who was burning leaves in a trashcan. Even then I was a writer so I was focused on the copy. But my dad, who worked on Madison Avenue, took the poster from me, held it over the fire and burned all the edges, smoking up the center where my copy was situated. In that moment my dad taught me everything I ever needed to know about advertising. (I won the contest by the way).

I always understood what advertising was and the role it played in supporting marketing campaigns. And until recently, I always understood what marketing was: creative or educational customer communication, based in part on market research, with the goal of engaging and interacting with the customer in ways that motivate them to buy product.

But the definition—and role—of marketing is shape shifting. Marketing communications has been obfuscated by “brand” communications; brands are pushed to tell stories, though I can’t remember the last time a bottle of soda spoke to me. Market research has become subsumed by data analytics, which fail to give us the big picture. Customer engagement has come to mean counting retweets and likes. Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are fading away, being replaced by Chief Growth Officers (CGOs) and Chief Customer Officers (CCOs).

Evolution is fine but we’re at the point where even those of us engaged in the practice of marketing are having a hard time understanding what it is anymore.

So, what is it?

In a smart HBR article about innovation and marketing, the author writes, “The search, content, and loyalty campaigns that most managers call marketing these days are common downstream tactics for generating or maintaining awareness or repeat purchase; the full, business-growing power of the marketing function comes way upstream â€” from creating markets. Understanding people’s fundamental needs and drivers, identifying customers, and developing the entire go-to-market and usage ecosystem are the essential aspects of marketing.”

At a time when many organizations are moving the roles of CMO, CGO and CCO around the board like chess pieces, it’s helpful to step back and re-read the above sentence. Marketing ties together the elements of growth, customer understanding and relationship building, and strategy. The functions of the CGO and CCO flow up into the overall CMO function. The data, the identification of customers and touchpoints, the creative that fuels a successful customer conversation—all functions of marketing. And in my opinion, so is sales (even though I’ve worked in both areas and have long experienced the antipathy between marketing and sales) because who to sell and where to sell it is part of the go-to-market strategy.

Achieving some industry-wide clarity on the definition of marketing is important because in order to do our jobs well, we need to understand what we’re doing and what the other people on our team are doing. Effective collaboration stems from communications and transparency. Because at the end of the day what we’re trying to do is have a conversation with the customer. And in conversation, language matters.