“A sign of success by any marketer is if they get sponsorship around the boardroom table.”
I like this observation from Abigail Comber, former CMO at Debenhams. It’s a reminder of how much of the marketing role is an inside job — the ability of marketers to influence the rest of the organization.
MarketingWeek reported earlier this month that more than a third of companies don’t have a marketer at all on the leadership team. For smaller businesses with fewer than 250 employees, that figure climbs to nearly half.
And even for organizations with a marketing seat at the leadership table, the marketing function is often poorly understood and respected.
McKinsey reported last fall that companies that placed marketing at the center of their growth strategy are twice as likely to have greater than 5% annual growth.
Yet they also found the impact of marketing was often hampered by the murkiness of the role, how the role was perceived by the rest of the organization, and how the role is measured.
When McKinsey asked CEOs and CMOs of the same companies what their top three marketing metrics were, they only agreed half the time. CEOs tended to point at business outcomes like year-over-year revenue growth and margin improvements. CMOs often reported operational metrics like brand awareness.
Abigail Comber suggested marketers remember to think like general managers:
“Understand the P&L in your business. Understand what sales really mean to the business and the bottom line. Because too often you look at a marketeer and think all they talk about is the customer. I am very customer-centered but you have to be commercial too.”
Here are a few related cartoons I’ve drawn over the years:
