CMOs overlooked for top job as boards favour executives with finance background
Companies are continuing to bypass chief marketers when they look for a new leader with board directors preferring executives with a finance background to run the company, according to a career mentor.
Sherilyn Shackell, founder and chief executive of UK-based mentoring business The Marketing Academy, said only “a handful” of CEO’s among the UK’s FTSE 100 companies have risen through the marketing ranks.
In an even more damning statistic on how chief marketers are regarded, only five CMOs sit on the board of FTSE 100 firms, she told the Australian Association of National Advertisers conference in Sydney yesterday.
Are we surprised that marketing people are not chosen for the top job? By the time companies are big enough to appear on the Top 100, the chances are they have responsibilities to shareholders, who demand reliable profits.
Marketers are creative and risk-taking by nature whereas accounts are steady and reliable. Put a marketer at the top and every shareholder is scared they’ll allocate a disproportionate amount of the budget to fund those creative, expansionist visions. That’s a scary prospect for a shareholder or a board member. With an accountant in the top job, keeping a lid on spending, the ship will sail straight and slow, ever onward. Reliable and safe.
Think that’s unfair? Try having the power to grant your own budget and then justify to yourself why it should remain the same each year when you *know* that with just another 10% in the marketing budget for some proper activation you could do so much more…
Actually, look at the amount of engineers that are CEO’s of non-engineering companies or sit on the boards.
These are the people that have both the technical/scientific skills of an accountant, while also being more creative. Making products that are quality that people want, for a reasonable price, is what engineering is about.
I think this trend is not good. Thats why you have a highly skilled CFO. Let the person doing the top job get on running the business and day to day operations instead of focussing on the numbers and letting the product / execution suffer.
Point in case is Southern Cross Austereo. CEO is great with numbers just cant get the product or vison right with content… As bad as Kyle and Jackie O were – SCA made a personal decision that has now resulted in 2day in Sydney going from 1st to last and the share price go from $1.90 a year ago and now its 0.80c…Personalities should of been put aside and the coirrect business decision should of been made… Thoughts?
@Cyber,
You and I must know different engineers because the engineers I know have no idea how humanity works. Maths, sure, they are tops, but how about user experience? Nah.
No CEO can afford to be weak on the numbers. It is that simple. But the great ones understand the client and the product in terms of value and purpose. Lots of marketers miss the value piece and avoid the purpose in favour of some sort of personality idea.
It says so much about us marketers that the discussion always tends to revolve around why boards pick financial types rather than taking a good hard look at our own profession. Look at the portion of financial people who do MBAs vs. marketers, the portion who work globally, the portion who move across business units etc. In my experience senior marketers are more likely to stay in their silo, less likely to study etc.
@Anonymous “Marketers are creative and risk-taking by nature “. Hahaha, classic.
CMO’s are ‘too creative’?
I nearly choked ‘category busting’ campaign that has been killed by a million micromanaged, risk averse, tiny changes that have helped both my staff and the agency’s creative and account staff resign.
I’ve had one good CMO before, he’s now well on his was to CEO. The rest have always left me asking ‘why are they here’?