How CMOs lost their mojo
With agencies becoming increasing enfeebled and brands stagnating, Michael Farmer argues it’s time for marketers to reassert their authority and find a way to mend their wilting discipline.
Marketing is not fully represented by the career-stressed chief marketing officer. Marketing is not the digital/social specialist or the advertising manager. Marketing is not the head of promotions or the brand manager.
Marketing is the network of corporate executives, loosely connected by money, expertise and objectives to achieve improvements in shareholder value, presumably from higher product growth rates. Marketing is the CMO, the heads of business profit centres, the head of indirect procurement, the CFO, the CEO and their media, creative and other ad agencies.
Once upon a time, this marketing network operated like a fine Olympic crew, pulling on the oars in unison and winning competitive races, slicing through the water with nary a splash. This is no longer the case. The marketing team is broken.
Cost reductions have replaced investments in marketing, and there is a loss of confidence in how to spend marketing dollars effectively. Embarrassingly, chief marketing officers brag about their muscular cost reductions, as if cutbacks in marketing spend were heroic accomplishments rather than symbols of failure in expertise and execution.
According to Michael Farmer, everyone has done a poor job in growing brands in the last decade. Creative agencies, media agencies, CMOs, media owner salespeople, industry bodies.. the whole lot.
The only solution appears to be to to engage him and his consulting firms to fix the mess we are all in. Thank god for Michael Farmer.
Farmer does make some valid points – the primary one being what are agencies doing that delivers product growth? What are the metrics these are measured by? Generally speaking, I would suggest agencies and brands need to be on the same page in terms of metrics and KPI deliverables as this is where I think there is a serious misalignment.
Creative agencies need to understand brand CEO’s and CMO’s do not really care about creativity their KPI’s are focused on delivering product/sales growth which delivers to the brands bottom line.
For alignment to occur, brands also need to come to the table and integrate agencies into there operations in a more inclusive and productive manner – so agencies have an indepth understanding of business drivers. Hiring agencies to outsource risk and use them as the marketing punching bag generally ends in tears.
Outsourcing to the lowest bidder as a strategy, generally leads to a lowering of quality output wheather that be in service delivered, product quality sold, or both. The managment consultancy move into marketing land is a logical step to where everything is moving. It enables brands to ensure marketing is wholisticaly integrated with corporate growth strategy.