What Causes This High Turnover Among CMOs?
Why typical CEOs last for 44 months, on the job, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are replaced every 26 months?
David Meerman Scott has a very interesting entry on his blog entitled, "Why most CMOs get fired." It seems one of the reasons is that many CMOs waste far too much time and money on image marketing and brand awareness, instead of running tried and tested direct response marketing campaigns to generate revenue by supporting the sales folks.
The other problem is that in some 50% of the cases, CMOs are hired as proverbial silver bullets to fix collapsed marketing campaigns (usually ruined by top management) but are not allowed to participate in the company's operation on a strategic level.
And what I've seen a big problem is when top management says. "We don't like it."
Then the CMO says, "But it really works and we're" not the market that buys our stuff. The market has to like it not us."
And at this point of the battle, many CMOs just get fired.
Anyway, read the article, "Why most CMOs get fired", and see what you think.
posted by Bald Dog @ 6:40 PM
2 Comments:
Bald Dog,
I personally think that the short average tenure of top marketers is because they are now being held accountable for the results of their marketing.
Senior executives in all other departments have had to show the direct impact of their efforts on costs, revenue and profits. Why should marketers be exempt?
There was a lot of discussion about the short tenure of CMOs last year after an article on the subject appeared the June 2007 issue of Fast Company.
As an aside, I think it is interesting that Investors Business Daily is only getting around to writing about it now, a full year later. One of the reasons I like Fast Company so much is it is always ahead of the pack with its content.
M. H. (Mac) McIntosh
The Business-to-Business Sales Lead Expert(tm)
Thanks for your thoughts, Mac.
The good news is that more and more companies focus on results not the “brand awareness” thing. And this is bringing the wider acceptance of direct response marketing. After all, this is how they can track responses and results.
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