The CMO Survey Blog

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

Holding on to Marketing Leaders

January 17th, 2012

When times get tough, do marketing leaders get fired? Three years of results from The CMO Survey indicate the answer is “No.” Looking at Figure 1, we can see that the number of years a top marketer is in his or her current role in a company averages 4.4 years and that this number has not changed dramatically over the last three years: 2009 (4.3 years), 2010 (4.6 years), and 2011 (4.3 years). (more…)

Keywords: C-suite, CMO experience, CMO power, CMO retention, CMO value, leaders, leadership, metrics, Spencer Stuart, The CMO Survey

Investing in Social Media

January 10th, 2012

The August 2011 CMO Survey reported that companies are increasing spend on social media (from current levels of 7.1 percent of marketing budget to 10.1 percent over the next year and to 17.5 percent in the next five years). These are big numbers and they have been waved around a lot on the internet. What’s striking to me is these same companies report that they employ, on average, only two people dedicated to actually doing social media (standard deviation 4.8). Houston, we have a problem—well, maybe three problems. (more…)

Keywords: financial investments, human capital investments, skills, social media, social media capability, social media spending, strategy integration, The CMO Survey

What Customers Want

December 20th, 2011

The CMO Survey asks top marketers to rank order the following factors in terms of their importance to customers: low price, superior product quality, superior innovation, trusting relationship, excellent service, and brand. The specific question is “For your largest market, rank your customers’ top three priorities over the next 12 months” where 1 is most important. I charted these responses over the last three years to get a sense of how priorities have shifted, especially during these tough economic times. (more…)

Keywords: brand, competition, customers, innovation, marketplace dynamics, price, product quality, recession, service, The CMO Survey, trusting relationship

The Marketing Goals-Marketing Performance Gap

December 13th, 2011

The CMO Survey asks marketers to share their actual performance and future goals for each administration of the survey across a range of metrics: market share, sales revenue, profits, marketing ROI, customer acquisition, customer retention, and brand value. I took a look at what is happening with these metrics during this rough economic period. (more…)

Keywords: brand value, customer acquisition, customer retention, gap, goals, market share, metrics, performance, profits, recession, sales, The CMO Survey, trends

The Lure of Disintermediation

December 6th, 2011

Disintermediation refers to companies going directly to customers with products and services. No channel partners are used to move offerings or to manage interactions with customers. The CMO Survey has asked managers to report whether their companies will increase their level of disintermediation in the next 12 months. The percentage responding “yes” has increased over the last three years as shown in the figure. In fact, there has been an increase of over 100% between August 2009 and August 2011! Because internet sales and the use of social media have also soared during this period, I think it is a good bet that disintermediation does not mean bricks and mortar for most companies. (more…)

Keywords: American Airlines, channels, disintermediation, distribution, Expedia, Marketing Imagination, Marketing Myopia, online, Orbitz, Proctor and Gamble, Southwest, The CMO Survey, Theodore Levitt

Economic Downturn and Company Truths

November 30th, 2011

I wrote a book last year entitled Strategy from the Outside In: Profiting from Customer Value. The central premise of the book is that companies are often managed with a focus on priorities other than customers. A range of reasons rooted in “insight-out thinking” include satisfying the stock market, lowering costs, or extracting all the value from existing capabilities. Companies that approach strategy from the outside in begin and end with the customer. In the words of Stephen Haeckel, these companies manage using “sense and respond,” not “make and sell.” (more…)

Keywords: customer information, information acquisition, information sharing, information use, leadership, marketplace dynamics, metrics, recession, Stephen Haeckel, strategy, Strategy from the Outside In

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