The Most Dangerous Job in Business

There is an interesting article in leading B2B marketing expert, Mac MacIntosh's blog. In Fast Company there is a great article about the tenure of marketing managers in organisation. it seems that while CEO's have a typical tenure of 54 months, Chief Marketing Officers (CMO) have only 23 months. This number in the technology industry is only 15 months.

It seems to me that the CMO has become a scapegoat position. When something goes wrong and CEOs should accept responsibility, they often pass the buck to the next person. And who is the next person?

You can't lay of the CFO because it draws the attention of both Wall Street and the marketplace. You can't lay of the CIO (CTO) because you need technology. You can't mess with the COO because the whole company comes to a standstill. But someone must be blamed fro the CEO's crime. Well, then get rid of the CMO.
Since this offers a quick Band-Aid solution of patching up the symptoms more and more companies use this approach. It's too painful to address the real problem, so let's piss around with the symptoms, find a scapegoat and sacrifice him/her.

Next to this article, there is another one, Ambushed about some of the successful, nevertheless laid off marketing top dogs.

Luckily the situation is a bit better at privately held companies but just about. Getting the bloody nose from public company CEOs, more and more private company CEOs demand "instant" and "significant" results from their new CMOs.

Demanding to double sales within only 4-6 months are fairly typical demands of CEOs. Especially from CEOs who have never done any marketing only forced selling. And when any ethical CMO tell the CEO that a good marketing programme takes about 18 months to kick into full throttle, then most CEO s throw these CMO candidates out of their offices and hire more peddlers to do cold calling and door knocking because the silly bugger CEO believes that this will create instant sales.

Anyway, read the articles. You'll love them.