The role of chief marketing officers (CMOs) is evolving rapidly. They face higher expectations than ever before. CMOs are tasked with building strong brands, delivering growth, and maximizing marketing efficiency.
A survey of over 100 C-level executives revealed significant gaps in maturity in many areas critical to building future-proof organizations. Only a minority of growth leaders believe they have fit-for-purpose operating models to achieve their growth ambitions. In the current expansive and complicated world of marketing, achieving growth requires defining a new holistic model.
This model should encompass a strong organizational structure, clear processes, and reinvigorated capabilities under a coherent strategic direction. Marketing leaders must deliver across four pillars of marketing excellence:
1. Marketing Strategy and Insight-Led Growth: Strong brands remain a core focus.
Furthermore, today’s marketing leaders are expected to scout growth opportunities actively, develop robust partnership ecosystems, and build immersive brand experiences. 2. Marketing Performance: Marketers must adopt an investor mindset through real-time, ROI-based budget allocation, balancing short-term goals with long-term transformational priorities.
3. Tech-Enabled Marketing: The biggest gap exists in tech-enabled marketing. While its potential is enormous, manual processes still dominate.
Marketing programs now need to use technology for data-driven personalized campaigns, boosting productivity and speed. 4.
Cmos confronting evolving marketing challenges
Marketing Operating Model: Teams often incorporate new functional areas into existing structures, reinforcing organizational silos and impeding agility. Future-proofing marketing involves plans that enable seamless collaboration across the organization, fostering agile and flexible ways of working. As demands become greater and more complex, the marketing operating model is the foundational element needed to propel growth.
Building an effective marketing operating model will involve creating agile structures, integrating new capabilities, and fostering robust partnerships. The Chief Marketing Officer of Northwestern Mutual, Teo, has gone a long way to address these issues by embracing value creation as the north star. Over the first 18 months of her tenure as CMO, Teo actively transformed and rebuilt the structure, composition, and capabilities of the marketing function at Northwestern Mutual.
Teo’s success was creating a bespoke organization structure that powers Northwestern Mutual’s marketing strategy and business model. “Our marketing strategy needs to be aligned to the business to create value,” Teo says. “In the context of our business model, value is created by getting a return on our investments in support of the company’s B2B business model.”
Budgetary constraints are among the top challenges cited by CMOs today.
The role is contending with a widening remit but a lack of resources and structural support. Internal silos, lack of desired budgets, insufficient in-house talent, and incoherent strategic vision are key barriers to success. The research highlights ongoing pressures within organizations and the challenges posed by new technology.
Brand building, traditionally within the purview of CMOs, remains a top focus, despite an overswing toward performance marketing in recent years. However, the role of CMOs is expanding amidst the rise of channels like retail media and a fragmented consumer landscape. Shopper insights, promotions, pricing, design, sales and e-commerce, product innovation, and generative AI are now under the CMO’s responsibilities.
While the promise of generative AI and other new technologies is significant, CMOs continue to face familiar constraints such as budgetary support, talent scarcity, and cross-functional collaboration. Addressing these longstanding issues is crucial for organizations looking to leverage emerging marketing opportunities effectively.
