Giving CMOs Their Due

Posted on | July 23, 2008 |

by Andrea Learned

It turns out that the average tenure of a chief marketing officer (CMO) is 22 months. What are brands expecting from these poor people that they’d replace them so quickly? (The moon is not an option, by the way.)

According to Richard Guha, the president of Marketing Executives Networking Group (MENG), brands aren’t giving marketing pros enough time to prove their worth. As quoted in a MediaPost article by Laurie Sullivan, :

…marketing professionals get the least amount of time to learn a company business, and in many ways they need the most to fully understand the brand’s position. Too often, he says, companies bring on competent staff and don’t give them the time to figure out the business.

This rush to react is sad but true, and even more common in a bad economy, I’d imagine. But, in the case of hiring/firing high level marketing professionals, it is amazingly short-sighted. After all, most marketers who are considered “successful” have been allowed the time and budget to invest in the consumer “courting” process. (Note: the elusion to dating in this context is not a gender stereotype, but a pointed description of how brands should see their efforts to reach all consumers.)

Thus, brands need to be ready to invest in the people heading that all important consumer investment process. Those companies that embrace the long term, deliberate and incremental steps of proving trustworthiness to customers will grow . Those that re-organize a marketing department for lightweight, short-term reasons may actually interrupt that very delicate growth momentum.

And yet, this sort of immediate (or, frantic?) response is fairly typical human behavior. We all want it now - increased sales, awards, media attention! There are marketing professionals lining up to get those jobs, after all, so why not run through a few and see how it goes? Sigh. I find it telling that the brand leaders who fire their CMOs so quickly, as per the MENG research, would seem to have second guessed their own hiring process. Hmmm. Thus, in a flash of “that last campaign didn’t work,” out goes all the due diligence, time and budget on the initial CMO hire.

Why even discuss this lack of CMO investment? Because, there is a real connection between continuity in marketing decision-makers, messaging and how women may see and trust a brand. Subtle? Yes. But, discerning and savvy consumers all expect to see investment, not reactionary moves, throughout a brand’s internal and external actions.

The art and science of great marketing campaigns can only be delivered by people who have the talent and the experience. Of course, there will be cases where firing a CMO quickly is the best move. I simply propose a little extra caution before acting.

Everything is interconnected - often moreso from a woman’s perspective - so it makes good sense to invest in CMOs as much as customers, doesn’t it?

It is clearly an unstable and uncomfortable time in the marketplace. However, the idea is to resist reactionary fires and hires, and allow marketing leaders more time to prove themselves trustworthy (and effective). It might feel productive or smart to rush to fire a CMO, but the long-term harm in both consumer and general business perception may well not be worth it.

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