The CMO Survey Blog

In Search of Marketing Excellence: Ten Differences Between High-Performing and Low-Performing Companies

January 16th, 2013

Marketing excellence—marketing leaders strive to attain it and marketing professors try to dissect it. For the first time, The CMO Survey-August 2012 asked top marketers “How would you rate your company’s marketing excellence?” on a 7-point scale where 7=one of the best in the world, 6=a leader but not one of the best, 5=strong, 4=good, 3=fair, 2=weak, 1=very weak. The mean score was 4.4 (standard deviation=1.4). Figure 1 contains the full distribution of responses.

Figure 1. Marketing Excellence Ratings in Companies

Over time, The CMO Survey will develop a longitudinal database and provide more definitive answers to the questions surrounding marketing excellence. However, using only the August 2012 data, I can share some of the performance, spending, strategy, leadership, and organizational choices/outcomes that are and are not correlated with marketing excellence.

To generate these insights, I classified companies participating in The CMO Survey according to whether they performed above or below the mean on the marketing excellence question. The high-performing group (n=184 firms) has a mean marketing excellence score of 5.52 (s.d.=0.66) and the low-performing group (n=170 firms) has a mean marketing excellence score of 3.22 (s.d.=0.88).
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Keywords: big data, Marketing Excellence, marketing responsbility, marketing spending, social media; marketing analytics

Six Reasons Marketing Budgets are on the Rise

November 1st, 2012

Marketing budgets as a percent of overall firm budgets and as a percent of firm revenues are both on the rise as noted in my prior post. Why are firms spending more on marketing? Here are six reasons I see in The CMO Survey™ data and in my research.

New jobs: Marketing appears to be taking a leadership role in managing social media activities in companies. Given social media spending as a percent of marketing budgets is expected to rise from 7.6% to 18.8% over the next 5 years, this means new funds are flowing toward marketing.
New skills: Companies plan to increase marketing training by 3.7% in February 2012 to 7.2% in August 2012. In particular, I see many companies in investing in programs to build marketing capabilities. A good example is GE’s Experienced Commercial Leadership Program, which develops cohorts of young marketers for the company. Another example is Becton Dickinson’s Marketing Excellence Initiative, which provides non-marketers with a big dose of training in key marketing tools and processes.
New knowledge: Big Data has captured the imaginations of leaders in companies big and small. The ability to leverage information about customers in order to deliver and demonstrate value opens the door for marketers to fill the role as analysts and “data whisperers” as McKinsey calls them. As noted by McKinsey in its Chief Marketing and Sales Officer forum, “Data whisperers are those analysts who can coax meaning and insights from the increasingly sophisticated and massive data sets available today.” (more…)

Keywords: growth, marketing analytics, marketing budgets, social media, Spending, The CMO Survey

Marketing Spend on the Rise – Three Trends Worth Watching

October 19th, 2012

Results from The CMO Survey™ (August 2012) contain three indicators that marketing spend is on the rise in companies.

First and the weakest, CMOs reported that marketing spend is expected to grow by 6.4% in the next year. This number is positive, supporting my thesis, but the number is actually down from expected growth of 9.1% from August 2011. Given continued depressed firm growth and slow economic growth, this decrease is not altogether unexpected. It is positive nonetheless.

Second and more telling is the fact that marketing budgets as a percent of firm budgets increased 40% from 8.1% in February 2011 to 11.4% in August 2012. The Figure shows that this percentage has increased steadily over the last 18 months, pointing to the fact that companies are placing a greater emphasis on marketing spend relative to other types of strategic spend.

Figure. Marketing Budgets as a Percent of Firm Budgets

Third, marketing spending as a percent of firm revenues increased 30% from 8.5% in February 2012, the first time The CMO Survey™ asked the question, to 11% in August 2012.
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Keywords: budget, marketing, Spending, The CMO Survey

Why Apple is a Great Marketer

July 13th, 2012

Apple was voted the overall winner of the 2012 CMO Survey Award for Marketing Excellence… yet again. Apple has been selected as the winner or co-winner for five consecutive years by the sample of top marketers. So why is Apple a great marketer?

When Apple, Inc. (then Apple Computer, Inc.) incorporated in January 1977, its investor/advisor, Mike Markkula, assembled a 3-point marketing philosophy. Amazingly, thirty-five years later, this philosophy remains at the core of what makes Apple so effective at creating and profiting from loyal customers. This, in my view, is the definition of a strong marketing capability. Here are Apple’s original three points:

Empathy – We will truly understand their [customer] needs better than any other company.
Focus – In order to do a good job of the things we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.
Impute – People DO judge a book by its cover. We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software, etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.

Apple has used these principles to become the world’s most valuable company (measured by market capitalization) and one of world’s most valuable brands. Here are ten strategies Apple has used to become one of the world’s greatest marketers:

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Keywords: Apple, Apple Stores, customers, design, innovation, iPad, iPod, marketing, moat, Steve Jobs

Marketing Analytics: What Gets Evaluated, Gets Used

May 25th, 2012

“What gets measured, gets managed” is a well-known management maxim. However, for marketing analytics, results from The CMO Survey suggest a slight twist on this adage to “what gets evaluated, gets used” (see cmosurvey.org/results/ for a complete set of reports).

To look into this topic, I asked top marketers two questions. The first was “In what percent of your projects does your company use available or requested market analytics* before a decision is made?” The average score was 37.2% of the time. The more important point is that 62.8% of the time managers are not using marketing analytics that are available or that have been requested!

To understand how the use of marketing analytics is related to the quality of marketing analytics, we could ask managers to rate the quality of marketing analytics and examine whether this is correlated with use of marketing analytics. However, if most managers are not using marketing analytics, measuring quality impressions is problematic—specifically, we would only be examining users of marketing analytics, which is not a representative view of what all potential users think about the quality of marketing analytics.

Given this, I took a different approach and asked top marketers to answer a second question, “Does your company formally evaluate the quality of marketing analytics?” 67% of top marketers answered “no.” To examine the relationship between the evaluation and use of marketing analytics, I calculated the mean marketing analytics’ usage level for companies that do and do not evaluate marketing analytics. As shown in the Figure 1, this difference is substantial, with marketing analytics used only 32% of time in companies that do not evaluate marketing analytics and rising to 49% of the time in companies that do evaluate marketing analytics. This difference is also statistically significant. There is no way, of course, to determine the causality of these two indicators—greater use is likely to affect the propensity to evaluate marketing analytics and greater evaluation of marketing analytics is likely to improve its use. Regardless, what gets evaluated, gets used.
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Keywords: evaluation, marketing analytics, marketing metrics

Using Marketing Analytics: I Do, Therefore, I Think

May 19th, 2012

I recently reported that The CMO Survey found companies expect to increase the marketing analytics portion of their marketing budgets by 60% from 5.7% to 9.1% in the next three years. This is a monumental increase especially given that marketing budgets overall have grown only 8.3% over the last two years. While impressive, the true mark of whether marketing analytics is going live up to its expected role as a critical strategic asset cannot be measured by spending. Instead, we have to consider how marketing analytics affects what managers do and think and how well they perform.

To gauge this impact, the February 2012 CMO Survey asked top marketers to answer this question: “In what percent of your projects does your company use available or requested market analytics before a decision is made?” The average score was 37.2% (95% confidence interval: 31.5%-43%). This means that 62.8% of the time, managers are not using marketing analytics! By this measure, marketing analytics must do more. If not, its funders will place bets on other strategic weapons they believe will allow the company to serve customers better and to pull ahead of competitors.

Company Use of Marketing Analytics in Decision Making

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Keywords: marketing analytics, marketing metrics

CMOs on Economic Recovery: A Look at the Long Climb Out

March 20th, 2012

While going through my students’ resumes before class, I read one that listed “stair climbing” as a competitive sport. I had never heard of this, so I looked it up and found a well-established world-wide network of races. You can, for example, climb the Empire State Building and Gran Hotel Bali. Doing well requires strength, sprint, and endurance. If you are really good and perform well in the 100+ races around the world, you could win the Towerrunning World Cup.

All this talk of climbing made me think it would be interesting to plot the economic recovery using data from The CMO Survey. I plotted several key financial metrics as reported by The CMO Survey between August 2009 and February 2012 in Figure 1. What a beautiful sight! Steady and significant improvement over the course of 2.5 years to where we are today. These numbers are in response to the question, “Rate your firm’s performance during the last 12 months.”
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Top Marketers See U.S. Economy on the Rebound

February 28th, 2012

The results from The CMO Survey are in and one fact is very clear: Chief Marketing Officers are overwhelmingly optimistic about the U.S. economy’s outlook. When asked if they were more or less optimistic about the overall U.S. economy compared to last quarter, optimists outweighed pessimists 8 to 1. (more…)

Investing in Marketing Knowledge

February 21st, 2012

The CMO Survey tracks investments companies make in different kinds of marketing knowledge. In the August 2011 survey, companies reported the following average investments: marketing training (+3.1%), marketing consulting (+3.5%), integrating what we know about marketing (+6.0%), market research and intelligence (+6.2%), and developing knowledge about how to do marketing (+6.4%). (more…)

Keywords: learning, marketing investments, marketing knowledge, marketing spending, The CMO Survey

Outsourcing Marketing

January 24th, 2012

I asked top marketers to report how much they expected their companies to outsource marketing in the next 12 months. This percentage has grown over time as shown in Figure 1. In fact the last measurement, taken in August 2011, grew by over 100% over the prior year! (more…)

Keywords: benefits, costs, expertise, jobs, make vs. buy, marketing, novel insights, Oliver Williamson, organization, outsourcing, path dependencies, Ronald Coase, The CMO Survey, transaction costs

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