CMO Memo: The First 100 Days

Congratulations! You have been appointed Chief Marketing Officer. This is the highpoint of your career in marketing so far, and a great personal validation.

Statistics show that the tenure of a CMO is typically short – often less than 2 years. The reasons are fairly clear: it’s a relatively new job title and the accountabilities are often poorly defined, and the expectations of the stakeholders are frequently unaligned with the resources and responsibilities of the role.
You have 100 days to eliminate any ambiguity about your CMO role and the performance measures for which you will be accountable. Here’s what to do.

Define Your Accountabilities

No doubt, when you were hired, the CEO or COO to whom you report defined the expectations for the job. But if you look back on the interviews, and if you read the job description, you will probably find that those accountabilities are not as clear cut as they need to be. You must define your accountabilities with precision so that you can deliver on them with both accuracy and excellence.
There are three areas for which the CMO should be clearly accountable. In order, those are:

Generating Customer Insights

Customer insights are the life-blood of marketing. They are the inputs which fuel the key processes of innovation, communications and the customer experience. As CMO, you are responsible for the enterprise capability to define insights, place a value on them, and translate them into product and service innovations, stronger brands and a more satisfied customer. You must be able to define how the capability will be measured, the targets that are reasonable and the reporting on progress.

Building Brand Equity

Different industries define brands differently, and some don’t even like the term. But the basic principle applies to all CMO’s in all industries. You are responsible for the attitudinal commitment of customers to your brand of product or service. This attitudinal commitment can be measured in many different ways but, by whatever measure, it must reflect the emotional value added that marketing brings in order to create the opportunity for customer loyalty. Customers love your brand, or trust your service, recommend you to others, rely on you in a crisis – whatever the emotional bond, it is marketing’s job to create it, nurture it, monitor it and strengthen it.

Building Marketing Capability

You’ve just been made CMO, but you won’t be in the job forever. Your duty to the shareholders is to leave behind a stronger marketing capability than when you arrived. You will need to define the components of this capability and how to measure strength and improvement.
You must go to your CEO with a charter which defines your role in terms of these three responsibilities, with a plan and a timeline of how to get from where the company is today to where it will be in three years time, and the set of measures by which you will both monitor progress.

Assess Your Support Structure

The CMO's job typically has a high span of influence and a low span of control over resources. Some CMO’s have control of a large marketing budget for advertising and communications, and you will be focused on using it effectively and efficiently. More often, budget control rests with the operating units and your direct control of resources is low. Many global CMO’s have to influence country and business unit structures to get them to devote resources to a brand-building campaign by diverting them away from narrower product and geography promotions. Generally, the CMO works via thought leadership, process building and lateral mechanisms such as a Global Marketing Council and an Insights Council.

These high span of influence tasks – you must interact with many business units and functions without having authority over them – require highly specific support structures. You must have the clear, visible and active support of the CEO, the board of directors, and the heads of the operating units. Your second priority in these 100 days, after defining your accountabilities, is to assess the support structure you have in place, and the strength of the lateral mechanisms available to you. A global marketing council is no use (and in fact will be a detriment) if people turn up to meetings but can’t commit to action by their business unit or function and can’t deliver resources.

In the first 30 days, you must interview all of your key stakeholders, including business unit heads, regional and country heads, and functional heads. Make sure they agree with your charter and accountabilities. Understand their needs and expectations. Ask for a declaration of support. If there is any ambiguity, you may need to insist on a visible declaration of support from one or more of the stakeholders at the top of the support pyramid (CEO, Board, Business Unit heads). Do it while you have the power of your newly minted position.

Capability Assessment

What do you have to work with at the outset? It’s best to know and it’s best to be brutally honest. A good way to find out is the marketing capability assessment, which both assesses the internal current state and benchmarks your organization against external best practice. The word “organization” is easily misunderstood. It must encompass these elements:

Processes

These are the mechanisms that transform marketing inputs into the outputs that have value for customers and therefore create the brand equity that is one of your three accountabilities. In the end-to-end view, the first input is insights and the output is brand equity that generates revenue growth. Within this end-to-end framework, there are sub-processes, from the insights process itself, to the brand equity management process, long and short term planning, and functional excellence in advertising, promotion, PR and all the marketing functions. Without process you have chaos and are unable to deliver a predictable, repeatable, scalable marketing performance. You must assess whether process is in place, how it compares to best practice and where it needs strengthening.

People

You must define the skills and capabilities required to operate the marketing processes and measure the marketing community against the competency model. You must know whether recruitment, on-the-job experience, training, career pathing and review are robust and effective. You must know whether all the levels and types of skills are provided. Is the reward system aligned with your capability goals? Is there a community of practice among marketers that shares knowledge and develops pride in professional achievement?
External Services: traditionally, the marketing function has outsourced many services, from creative communications to data collection. In today’s world, the number and range of external services (website development, database management, call centers, customer service providers, etc.) create an enormous complexity for your organization in integrating all of them into a cogent customer experience. Is your organization good at selecting, managing and integrating the external services? Can you export the complexity and let the service providers perform the integration task? Are you getting value from your service provider infrastructure?

Technology

The biggest change in marketing in the next five years versus the previous 50 will be the application of technology. It will take many forms. Enterprise marketing management software will capture and support your processes and put them at every marketer’s fingertips. Integrated data systems will provide dashboards and ever more sophisticated monitoring systems. Internet communications and services will link you to the addressable customer in a way that encourages real time response. You must understand how these technologies will impact your capabilities and how you are going to leverage them.

Measurement

The second highest impact of change in marketing is the shift from an unmeasured creative art to a measured discipline. Do you have the right set of metrics? Are they reliable, actionable, transparent, and timely? Will they provide you and your stakeholders with the shared data you need to agree on whether and how marketing has delivered on its responsibilities? Marketing ROI is only one element of the marketing accountability data set. It’s an efficiency measure with a company-centric view. You need to establish a balanced metrics suite comprising both effectiveness and efficiency measures, and a customer-centric view as well as a company-centric view. Make sure you have the minimum critical set of data – collecting too many data, especially if they are redundant, is costly and a waste of time.
Use an assessment service that can provide you with a numeric measure of your capability (such as EMM Group’s Marketing Capability Assessment Score) on all five of these dimensions, and a benchmark against best practice companies.

Define The Future State

You are a leader, and you must provide an inspiring vision that everyone in the marketing community and its stakeholder group can pursue with enthusiasm and purpose. Spend some time crafting this future vision. Capture it in a PowerPoint presentation that you can give at special meetings. Simultaneously, capture it in an elevator speech you can give to anyone who asks or provides an appropriate opportunity in those interstitial snippets of conversation between meetings and agenda items. Be brave and expansive in defining the future vision, and make sure that everyone understands what’s in it for them personally, as marketers, employees in other functions, board members or shareholders.

The Plan and The Roadmap

You now have all the ingredients to set out your stall. You have an agreed set of accountabilities. You have your support structure and lateral mechanisms of influence in place. You have assessed the organization’s capabilities, given it the right measurement framework, and defined the desired future state.
You can now set out your plan and milestones. Be choiceful – there is only so much time and only so many resources. You know what is most important. A three-year plan with appropriate targets will be sufficient, even if you have goals that are longer term. Spell out the plan as a manifesto, but only after you are certain that all your stakeholders are bought in and feel the appropriate level of ownership.

Based on the work you have done up to this point, your plan will:

• Link to your accountabilities – so that your stakeholders know you are committed to delivering.
• Link to your capabilities assessment, so that people understand there was input to the plan, and where that input came from.
• Build on process, people, technology, and measurement.
• Depict the outcomes you are seeking.
• Be built collaboratively with your leadership team as they work with you to implement your vision.
• Indicate the core set of initiatives you intend to launch, and how these will be sequenced.

Deliver it at a meeting of your marketing community on the 100th day.