Marketing is the function responsible for the creation, maintenance and growth of the value an organization. Unfortunately, many of the old (& new BTW) CMOs are good at the tactics of marketing. The new CMO is much more savvy at understanding and leveraging new media which as a side benefit has also brought in the idea of making decisions based upon measurement. We still find that many young CMOs also lack three critical foundations that make a CMO great.

First, many CEO’s and CMO’s have missed the most fundamental rule of business. The CEO is the #1 marketing executive in the company responsible for vision. The CMO is the #2 marketing executive responsible for translating the vision and value proposition of the company into an insightful, actionable and measurable plan that delivers results and alignment. In our quest to find brilliant CMOs, my firm has found that many of these very bright executives fail to understand the need and responsibility to answer the core fundamental marketing questions prior to launching into the execution of marketing (even though the execution can be measured).

Second, your article addresses this point well. Most current CMOs are unqualified to be a CMO. I asked Walmart’s CMO, Stephen Quinn, how he chose his senior team. He hires business people first, marketers second. CMOs have a bad rap because most of them do not have business and financial acumen. They do not know how their marketing budget impacts both the income statement and the balance sheet. Forget a marketing class, how about finance and operations?

Finally, CMOs fail because they do not have skin in the game. Why is sales the only function forced to live and die based upon results. If you want a great CMO, ask them to put their money where their mouth is. We do.

The Chief Marketing Outsider

They are outsourcing the CMO role. They only hire CMOs that have proven track records and KNOW all facets of the marketing function – as well as the financial and operational functions. And their fees are mainly results based.

This might just be the next generation of the CMO. And entirely more profitable for a company.

Harper

First, to clear up a definitional issue, Wikipedia actually defines Gen Y and Millenials as the same age group, whereas I separated the Gen Ys as those born pre-2000 and Millenials as post-2000, so I may have caused some confusion there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millenials. In either case, the GenY/Millenials/GenZ group was born, at earliest, 1982 or later, which makes them 27 years old or younger. The Gen Xers are currently between the ages of 28 and 48.

From the point of the blog, at Covario, we tend to work with Fortune 500 and Global 2000 clients and Internet Top 100 clients. Large companies like those are just now promoting people in their 30’s and 40’s (Gen Xers) into the CMO role- when the average age used to be 50 and above. They are still getting used to the idea that an executive in their 30’s could have the maturity, experience, presence and leadership to influence a global marketing organization. Additionally, while those same clients like us to think 5 and sometimes 10 years out for them, they are generally more concerned with next quarter and next year’s revenues and profits.

Further, I would still argue that the shift from a Baby Boomer CMO (focused on traditional media, creative, and outsourcing to agencies) to a Gen X CMO (focused more on digital media, metrics and accountability and insourcing using software) will be the most profound in the history of marketing- even more than the future shift from Gen X CMOs to future generations.

Your point stands, however, that future generation CMOs– the Gen Z/Gen i/whatever you want to call them http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Z%20-%20kids%20under%2016 will be exposed to media types we haven’t even conceived of yet, and up and coming marketers will need to be able to address those.

Only time (and great execution on all of our parts) will hopefully prove us both right!