McDonald’s is the latest company to ditch the Chief Marketing Officer role, with news that Silvia Lagnado is leaving the company and her role absorbed by restructuring. The CMO role similarly disappeared in recent years at Johnson & Johnson, Kimberly Clark, Mars, Uber, Lyft, Taco Bell, Beam Suntory, Hyatt, and Coca-Cola.
While 70% of the Fortune 500 still have a CMO role, that percentage is dropping, and new titles of flourishing, most popularly the Chief Growth Officer. In a telling example, Alison Lewis recently left J&J as CMO to join Kimberly Clark as Chief Growth Officer. Two years earlier, Alison had called the rise of the Chief Growth Officer role “symbolic”. At the time, Alison Lewis said:
“To me it’s a positioning thing because of course my role is to drive growth. I always say I want more people to use our products more often. It’s that simple. If you interpret marketing as a fluff word and think it’s just all the over the top stuff, I think you’re absolutely wrong.”
J&J is backfilling her role with a CGO, not a CMO.
The Chief Growth Officer role does have a larger remit than the traditional Chief Marketing Officer. Often the role includes direct responsibility for other functional groups usually kept separate, like innovation, R&D and sales. Importantly it has full P&L authority. It addresses one of the curses of the traditional CMO role — that it was sometimes saddled with high expectations, yet with limited levers to actually deliver on those expectations.
Yet, I think the loss of the CMO in the C-suite also reflects a crisis of confidence in marketing in general. As Alison Lewis referenced, marketing is too often perceived as merely a “fluff word”. As Forrester analyst Keith Johnston put it, “We’re at that tipping point where we’re trying to decide what marketing even means in this era.”
I think addressing that confidence gap should be a goal of every marketer, at every level, not just the C-Suite. Titles aside, marketers of all stripes need to understand the full P&L, drive growth, impact the full customer journey, and think about the whole organization, not just marketing as a standalone silo.
We have to continually earn our seat at the table.
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
“Marketing Seat at the Table” May 2015
“Growth Hacking” March 2014
“The Marketing Role” September 2017
A Jobain says
Love the Marketoonist. This one is tongue in cheek but perhaps a wee bit skewed. Makes it seem like head of marketing exclusively has a say in what title s/he receives; and can’t make up their minds. That confusion rests equally among them, CEOs and heads of HR.
David Allen says
Tom, Having followed your bits when you still worked for the Fortune 500 company I retired from in 2015, I love your constant informational posts about the evolution (and flaws) of Marketing. I was an Engineer tasked with executing system improvements, new products, and capacity executions, based on the expected needs of growth and new product capacities. Excellent foresight in your cartoons and posts. Thank you for the insights.
Caroline says
You are so very right. Renaming to Chief Growth Officer is just window dressing. The fundamentals haven’t changed. Understand the market, the value proposition, the customer, the means to build a respected brand, loyalty and repeat business. What has changed is the ability to measure how the marketing dollar works. Marketers have somehow failed to get the message across in the c-suite that these are the fundamentals of an enduring business.
Ayoshmita says
Ok, interesting read, but this has left me with more questions. Notably few are:
1. I am a marketer who ardently believes in working towards the organisational goal and looking at numbers, revenue, performance, brand reach, reputation and build actionables basis those reports. My marketing plan changes or rather adapts to times and i believe in being nimble.
Challenge is – that this creates insecurities and i end up getting cornered – stick to marketing. Now how is that beneficial for anyone?
2. Most people dont understand what marketing really is (atleast in the BFSI world) and the benefits. Am stil struggling to make people see marketing and comms can’t be managed in isolation, and the world has already moved to growth (CGO instead of CMO). How to bridge this internally, forget actually delivering it, coz that will only happen on acceptance!)
Les says
Marketing has become too concerned with marcomms and new technology.
Marketing starts and ends with the customer and that requires strategy and planning across all 4 P’s.
Marketing needs to get back to its fundamentals otherwise it will continue in some corners to be seen as a cost overhead with a loss of confidence by the organisation in any value add.
Responsibility will become fragmented across the organisation on job titles that bear no resemblance to the customer, their needs or wants.