How Executives Need to Rethink Brand Strategy To Win With The CEO, The Board And The Market

Narrative is driving a revolution in brand strategy and brand management.

By John Connors

Boathouse Founder/CEO

The Problem

We need to rethink how we do brand strategy and brand management. 

The traditional brand strategy model can rarely keep pace in today's always-volatile business environment that is being driven simultaneously by financial markets, news media, special interests, elected officials, regulators, employees, celebrities, and consumers. 

By dogmatically relying on classic brand strategy and management, too many executives look like aging athletes who are not able to keep up. We too often lean on the classic brand management model that was created in 1931 for the purpose of differentiating Ivory Soap from Camay (American Business, 1920-2000). The hard truth is that we are too blindly loyal to a 91-year-old model. Our adherence to this dated framework is resulting in CMOs having the highest turnover in the C-Suite (Spencer Stuart), not being invited to board meetings (Google), having roles re-titled and to marketing and communications departments being reorganized.

It is time to revisit our beliefs and to find new brand strategy and management models that will change the trajectory of marketing. We need to uncover new ideas that embrace the complexity our companies face to help marketers regain their credibility in the marketplace.

Practical Advice On How To Rethink + Apply In Your Organization

Analyze Your Marketing Belief System. Which brand strategy model do you use? Which marketing guru do you follow? Is it Kotler, Trout & Ries, Aaker or maybe you use the brand management model? There is too little discussion on branding schools of thought. It is critical to make sure you have examined your philosophy and evaluated if your model is still relevant today. For example, if you use a model created for soap in the 1930s and you work in a global asset management, healthcare, or technology firm…you may want to reconsider…or at least ask yourself why you believe what you do.

Know Your Company’s Marketing Situation. Be clear minded about finding the right model for your company and your industry. Different industries, competitive situations and budget levels demand different models. If you are a Top 30 advertiser and you have more than a billion to spend then you can likely win through brute force (e.g., P&G spent $8.1 billion in 2021, Statista). Unfortunately, too many marketers follow the big budget philosophy without having the dollars to match. If you do not have enough money to reach much of the market through paid advertising, then you should evaluate new models.

Study Your CEO And Your Company’s Strategy. To effectively rethink marketing strategy, CMOs must first commit to studying their company and their CEO. We need to embrace their complexity and not think marketing first. Today, only 49% of CMOs have the personal trust of their CEO (Boathouse Quant Study). Trust is a requirement for operating success. We have found two shortcuts to building this trust. The first is to study the CEOs calendar. It is the single biggest indicator of what they care about. Study how they spend their time, build pie charts of the audiences and issues that take up their time. If they meet with investors, news media, special interests, elected officials, regulators, employees, and consumers then you need a broader model. If they spend most of their time studying the market data, store traffic and the consumer then a consumer-centric approach may be right. Second, visualize your company’s strategy. Get your company’s strategy on a single page. We use Michael Porter’s Activity Map framework (HBR, What Is Strategy) as a tool to bring strategy to life. Armed with the CEO’s priorities and the company’s strategy, marketers can then consider the appropriate model. The challenge for many marketers is that they bring the same model to each company and spend too little time studying the new battlefield. This quickly erodes trust.  

Identify A Model to Succeed with the CEO/Board + the Market. The challenge with finding new marketing models is that there simply are not many out there. As marketers, we like to experiment with new channels and new technology more than we like to evaluate new strategic models. There are very few academics creating new models. Consider for a moment who you consider to be the greatest marketing thinkers of our time, or better yet do a search on the topic. There are no longer any marketing academics of any stature. Your search results will likely be filled with entrepreneurs (Jobs, Musk, Oprah, Huffington) rather than academics. You are going to have to look outside the marketing departments of major universities and business schools. In our work, we have focused on a model that emanates from the thinking of Nobel prize economist Robert Shiller who introduced the concept of “Narrative Economics” in 2018. We believe narratives are the new vectors for change in our economy, our politics, our social movements, and our companies.

Test Narrative vs. Brand. Try a simple experiment. Walk or Zoom into your next meeting with the CEO or board and replace the word “Brand” with the word “Narrative”. Narrative will give you the power to think and execute across investors, news media, special interests, elected officials, regulators, employees, and consumers. The narrative model will give you far greater flexibility across your paid, owned and earned media. You will find that narrative is a much more dynamic model that enables you to leverage today's media and consumer social behaviors vs. brand management which is more static in nature and built for the slower moving media and the blunt force of traditional media. 

The best entrepreneurs manage narratives intuitively. Jeff Bezos can talk about rockets, the cloud, e-commerce, distribution centers, climate pledges, digital advertising, streaming and himself…all as a part of their umbrella narrative - Be the earth’s most customer centric company. And please know that narrative is not some trendy new framework. This is how countries and religions have been built. Countries and religions, the original brands, are in fact a collection of narratives that add up to a whole story and belief system. Consider the narratives of the United States. We have narratives around the constitution, the branches of government, the states, the founding fathers, the people, the democratic political model, elections, the economic model, the military model. Narratives guided us long before we needed to differentiate Ivory from Camay. 

Embrace New Data. Tracking narratives requires new data sources. Many marketing departments have by now built out tech stacks and are in a race to measure ROI at a granular level to justify and protect their existence. In the process, we have lost the big picture. In those stacks we can measure ad impressions, digital impressions, social followers, ROI, CPA, MQLs, SQLs, etc. The challenge is that these tools are hyper vertical and micro. Marketing has become increasingly subspecialized, and the data has followed that specialization. This hurts our credibility when we walk into the C-Suite or the boardroom. We have a hard time linking singular metrics like Google CPA or Facebook to the company's transformation strategy. The good news is that there is now new data that can empower marketers. AI companies like NBQ and Signal AI are using machine learning to index every piece of content on the web, every 15 minutes in 120 languages. We can now hold up a mirror to any company and show them what they stand for, what their CEO stands for and what their employees think. The data is undeniable. It is every mention in the world, not a quant study with a sample that can be challenged. As we all know, every consulting firm in the world is selling transformation. Well now marketers can tell a CEO and a board if their narrative matches their transformation strategy. This data puts the marketer back in the driver’s seat. 

Conclusion

As McKinsey stated in 2015, it is in fact “the dawn of marketing’s new golden age”, it just took a few more years to get here. Interestingly, it is not just targeting and digital or social or mobile that got us to that new age. When we look back it will be the advent of new strategic models and new A.I. data sources that have given us the ability to look at our companies differently and to execute more successfully. 

Today we can leverage narrative to embrace the complexity of communicating to investors, news media, special interests, elected officials, regulators, employees, and consumers. We can use AI tools in combination with our tech stacks to look at the macro view and the micro views of our companies and our campaigns. Narrative + AI data will lift us up as marketers and provide us with the opportunity to be change agents, to bring marketing back to prominence and most importantly drive results.

More Insights

In-Housing Could Be The Answer For CMOs Working With Reduced Budgets

By Eve Asbury

Co-leader Director Creative & Production

Originally published in The Drum

A recent study suggests marketers are dissatisfied with common in-housing set-ups, but Boathouse’s Eve Asbury argues that the strategy will become more relevant in straitened economic circumstances.

Over the last year plus, marketing budgets have dropped and left CMOs scrambling to make the numbers work. Several factors caused the reduction: the pandemic, supply chain issues, inflation and the great resignation, to name a few. So, as CMOs navigate the new post-pandemic world of stretched marketing budgets, how will in-housing fare? Will we see shuttered in-house agencies or will in-housing benefit from the belt-tightening and deliver solutions that can’t be found externally?

Overall data points to in-housing continuing to increase and for good reason. In 2021, a Gartner survey found that 29% of external agency work shifted to internal marketing teams. Some might see this as purely a cost-saving strategy, but the in-house agency, when staffed and managed appropriately, has a deeper knowledge of the brand and has the potential to deliver better results. After all, the in-house agency is part of the brand and by default the brand custodian.

However, to ensure longevity every in-house needs to continually evolve. Spending more time on higher-value content and automating the development of lower value content will future-proof the in-house. There are several ways to optimize content development and creating self-service options for lower-value content is one example that solves the problem without draining in-house resources. The goal is to get the lower-value content automated and templatized so that the in-house delivers value by spending time on the higher-value work.

For many brands, or other complex categories such as pharma or financial services, getting an external agency up to speed can take time. This is where an in-house agency can outshine an external agency. Having a deep understanding of the business and alignment with senior leadership cannot be underestimated. The one critical partnership for the in-house is with the CMO. As CMOs are under extreme pressure to perform and exceed company objectives, it’s essential that the in-house is closely aligned with the CMO and the marketing strategy.

One marketing trend that fits well with the in-housing model is the centralization of marketing functions. Centralization has been a popular shift in organizational models as it delivers better results. A connected team is more effective, can scale and, in the new hybrid environment, is more easily managed. The majority of in-house agencies are already centralized and therefore primed to connect with a centralized marketing team.

In the past, one stumbling block for in-housing was securing good talent. In the 2000s, in-house agencies were at a disadvantage as mid to experienced agency talent did not want to go client-side. Shifting from an external agency to an in-house was seen as somewhere you’d go to retire and not have to work too hard. But this has changed and there has been a steady flow of senior talent going client-side.

Today, there’s an additional catalyst that’s causing an increase in the migration of talent to the in-house agencies. Many external agencies are not listening to their employees or embracing the hybrid working models and are laying down the law when it comes to office attendance. I have heard of external agencies telling their employees that they have to come into the office on specific days every week or that they have to be back in the office full-time by the fall, while another agency requires a proven local residential address within commuting distance from the office. If you have moved and can’t prove that you’re living locally, your services are no longer required.

The companies that are listening to their employees and coming up with a win/win hybrid working solution know that if employees are given the flexibility they need to balance their lives they will be rewarded with better work and longevity. It’s these savvy corporations that will be the clear winners as landing great talent and being able to keep people happy equals better work.

Today, everything points to in-housing continuing to increase and, as with everything, some in-house agencies will be more successful than others. The ones that keep on pushing the envelope, evolving, course correcting and carefully managing the in-house team’s brand fatigue will sprint ahead and have better work to show for it. This doesn’t mean that all is lost for external agencies if an in-house team exists, but it does mean that they will need to consciously fill a needed gap and partner well with the in-house team.

Eve Asbury is co-lead of Boathouse’s creative team.

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Recent Insights

5 Ways CMOs Can Build Back Trust in the Boardroom

The CMO role is under fire, but there are ways they can earn respect and trust in the C-suite

CMOs are facing doubt within their organizations that they can drive growth. Time is increasingly committed to counseling CEOs who believe they have a marketing challenge. And they're not alone—other C-suite executives are expressing the same concerns about their CMOs, indicating an industrywide dilemma about the perception of chief marketers.

The data is startling. According to research by Deloitte, only 26% of CMOs are being regularly invited to attend board meetings, and Spencer Stuart has reported that CMOs continue to have the shortest tenure on average of any member of the C-suite at 40 months. The profession is increasingly under fire. 

As the alarming realities of declining tenure and lack of trustworthiness dawn for CMOs, there is also a drought of resources to diagnose and solve these issues. Without a more substantial understanding of the obstacles facing their position, CMOs won't be able to generate effective strategies to reassert themselves as valued members of the company.

In hopes of driving more conversation, research and dialogue to restore the value of a CMO, here are five strategies that can have an immediate impact:

Fall in love fast 

Focus on the CEO and connect with the strategy. What are the CEO's top three priorities? Are they the same as your top three priorities? Can you show a direct connection to your key initiatives and budget allocation?

Build the company 

Don't be selfish. Marketing cannot change companies alone, so start thinking about how all members of leadership can own and deliver collectively in terms of company narrative. 

Question if brand management is dead

The CEO looks to the CMO to integrate new models of thinking and defy the status quo. The CMO must decide if brand management is the theory they want to live by, as it's often seen as a one-dimensional, old-fashioned concept. The disciplines of economics, finance, technology and manufacturing have reinvented themselves repeatedly.

Speak the language of business 

CMOs must be fluent in the language of business. Oftentimes, CMOs and their departments "speak marketing," but this can be too difficult to parse for department leads who are not as experienced in this space. The marketing language can often get lost in translations across the C-suite and in the boardroom.

Instead, speak in terms of growth, revenue, value creation and share price.  A profit and loss statement is the best teacher of all. Marketers who have created profit and loss statements can streamline communication for maximum efficiency and understanding.

Earn real trust 

Extend a hand and build trustworthiness, as this is the foundation of performance. Trust is a quality that cannot be bought; it must be earned by being vulnerable, and it is the single most important attribute of leadership. By forging valuable relationships with CEOs and fellow board members, CMOs will be able to build a more credible reputation with peers and showcase their value.

It's time to make changes and bring value, respect and longevity back to the CMO role. There are no easy fixes, but minor changes can leave lasting impressions and completely change the C-suite dynamic in a positive way.

It's essential to reflect and examine actions, initiatives, thinking and the foundations of the marketing profession. Let's rethink and rebuild brand management and the role of the CMO for a stronger tomorrow.

Originally published by John Connors in Adweek, September 19, 2021

How Can CMOs Rebuild Trust with CEOs?

Over the past decade, chief marketing officers have experienced a regression of trust, appreciation, and longevity. With average tenure of CMOs falling below 40 months and the median tenure at 25.5 months, corporate marketing leaders are searching for answers as the value and recognition of their work is minimized and marginalized.

Despite a near universal acknowledgement that marketing contributes to the growth and wellness of a business, there is a simultaneous decline of respect for marketing experts within an organization. What prompted this negative sentiment? More importantly, how have the best chief marketing officers combat and reverse this trend to ensure long-term stability and success in their c-suite role?

Many practitioners, researchers, and academics blame the tenure trend on outside forces – the board, the CEO, the changing market, the proliferation of new channels and technologies. Over the last two years, Boathouse Group has conducted research with CEOs and studied what separates the best CMOs from the rest. Our data suggests that the problem originates from inside the marketing department.

If chief marketing officers are to reverse the downward trend, they must first acknowledge a basic, but essential truth: the chief marketing officer isn't measured solely by the success of their ideas or marketing campaigns, but additionally by the sense of loyalty to and from the CEO. Below we outline the three practices of successful CMOs:

Study the CEO Like You Study the Consumer

The CEO's job is more complex than ever, and the best CMOs attack this insight. The complexity demonstrates itself in two ways. First, the CEO must manage more internal and external issues than ever before – pandemics, racism, climate, shareholder value, workforce, inflation, politics, supply chain, data security. Second, the CEO must manage more audiences than ever before –consumers, investors, employees, media, analysts, community, government, partners, to name a few. The best CMOs view this complexity as a marketing opportunity. The best CMOs study the audiences and issues that are impacting their CEO so they can use marketing to help the CEO. The worst CMOs believe it is not their responsibility.

Don't Expect CEO Trust, Earn CEO Trust

There are subtle things the CEO cannot put in a formal CMO job description. They can't ask you to "have their back." Our data highlights, however, that CMOs are overlooking the CEO-CMO trust factor. As a result, only 32 percent of CEOs trust their CMOs. This is an alarming number, and the low trust is becoming a filter through which the CEO judges all other CMO actions.

And while trust is no doubt fickle factor, there is a science to trust. The academic study of trust has identified three core building blocks: technical trust, relational trust, and institutional trust. Too many CMOs are competing in the technical category and ignoring the relational trust, while the best CMOs win on relationship and technical trust.

Don't Adhere to the CPG Model of Marketing

The CPG playbook is not the right marketing model for most companies today. The CPG model is built for companies where marketing is the core competency. At companies like P&G and Coca-Cola, marketing is the core competency.

Inside these marketing driven companies, CMOs live and die on technical skills. You are judged like an investment manager: You either make money or lose money — and there is a daily scoreboard of your performance. But in most companies today, marketing is a support function. Most companies that drive our GDP – finance, technology, real estate, professional services, healthcare, education – are not marketing-first companies. They require a balance of relationship and technical skills that frustrate many CMOs who have been trained in the CPG model of marketing (a 75-year-old model).

The best CMOs of today are following a new playbook. They have intuitively embraced a more multi-dimensional model, a more narrative-focused model, and a more relationship and technical skill focused model. They have decided to look inside their group to drive change rather than blame the CMO tenure problem on outside forces. If we can get more CMOs to follow their lead, we can increase trust, appreciation, and longevity.

Originally published on ANA.net on March 8, 2022

Similarly, while 46% of Gen-Z view video content online, only 13.7% of Boomers do, creating a clear divide in generational preferences.

When considering the rise of CTV and streaming online, these viewing habits were likely completely different a decade ago compared to now. It’s not that traditional strategies don’t “work,” but there are definitely technological advancements and more modern approaches that we’re seeing to be infinitely more efficient, especially when data shows such strong generational differences.

Drenik: How can modern day CMOs work to build trustworthiness and strong relationships with their CEOs and C-suite colleagues? Are there any other changes CMOs can make to improve the overall perception of the role?

Connors: The CMO problem is definitely one that is fixable. In our study, CEOs largely believe that the main role of the CMO is to grow the business and 86% of them think the CMO has the power to influence the C-suite, so clearly, the position of the CMO is still viewed as one that has quite a significant amount of power. Modern day CMOs can easily repair and strengthen their relationships with the CEO and other members of the C-suite by taking a look at their own strategies and method of communication. By ensuring these are aligned with the rest of the business and are being communicated in a way that is easily understood by the rest of the C-suite, many of the challenges can be alleviated. If CMOs work to make sure their strategies and “language” are more in line with the typical business-oriented language, they’ll be able to communicate their marketing goals more clearly and improve their overall perception.

Drenik: Overall, how is your work at Boathouse relating to the C-suite and how does the agency’s work help to revitalize the role of the CMO?

Connors: Although we’re a marketing agency, our team engages with every part of the business through our work. Before we even create a marketing strategy, we spend a lot of time as a team studying the company itself, its revenue, it’s strong points and challenges as well as the industry in which the company resides. Our team believes that better strategy helps drive better performance and also helps the CEO and CMO be more aligned. Through our work, we help foster alignment within the C-suite by creating business-oriented strategies that are easily communicated across the C-suite and align seamlessly with overall business goals.

Drenik: Thanks for your insight, John! The survey's findings definitely illustrate the nuances of the relationship between the CMO, and CEO and it will be interesting to see if CMO tenure improves. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you.

Originally Published in Forbes on Feb 9, 2022.

Why Has CMO Tenure Been Declining Since 2009? A New Study Reveals Root Cause

CMO tenure is at its lowest point in a decade, a statistic that calls into question the role of the CMO in general. How, and why is their tenure on the decline, and what does that mean for the C-suite as a whole?

I recently had the opportunity to speak with John Connors, CEO of Boathouse Inc., a forward-thinking marketing agency focused on connecting strategy, execution, and championing narrative marketing strategy. John is a trailblazer in the industry, committed to peeling back the curtain on the role of the CMO and the CMO’s relationship with the C-suite.

Boathouse recently conducted a CMO Study, designed to reveal why CMOs suffer such short tenures and struggle to align with other members of the C-suite. He shared more about these ideas during our conversation. John also highlighted data from Prosper Insights & Analytics, revealing varying generational preferences when it comes to engaging with content.

Gary Drenik: Before we get started, I’d love for you to provide some background about Boathouse and what drove the team to create this unique study analyzing the relationship between CEOs and CMOs.

John Connors: Thanks Gary, great to connect with you and happy to share more about Boathouse and what sparked this idea. At Boathouse, we’re a marketing agency, but our team goes far beyond that to do a full audit of every business we work with in order to understand every nuance of that company. From there, we create tactics that are unique and successful to each client we work with.

We also spend a lot of time analyzing the C-suite because the relationships, leadership and strategies that are established and initiated in the C-suite trickle down to affect the entire company. The role of the CMO is particularly pertinent to us as a marketing agency, but it’s also playing an important role within the organization as a hub that fuels brand purpose, customer engagement and revenues. We realized that across all industries, there was a disconnect between the CMO and the rest of the C-suite, fueling much higher turnover, comparatively. This led us to survey CEOs in order to understand their perceptions of their CMO coworkers and get to the bottom of these issues. The survey polled 150 CEOs at US companies with revenues between $250,000 to over $1 billion, across 13 industries including healthcare, technology, banking, and retail.

Drenik: Do CEOs still believe the CMO role matters/is important for the future growth of the business? Do CEOs believe the tenure problem is due to CMOs being in high demand or the result of CMO failure?

Connors: While CEOs do believe the role of the CMO is important to the business, our survey found that only 34% of CEOs have great confidence in their CMOs and only 32% trust them. CMO tenure is at the lowest point in a decade and 80% of CEOs believe this is happening because CMOs are failing, which is a staggering statistic. Unfortunately, we found that the level of trust between the CEO and CMO is very low, and CEOs think that CMOs are more committed to themselves than overall company goals and are not aligned with the long-term goals of the business. We discovered that CEOs perceive their CMOs as having completely different priorities than the company, which has led to this lack of trust.

Drenik: Where Is the CMO failing…where is the problem? Is it just trust? Are there other challenges?

Connors: The interesting thing is… the CMO isn’t failing. CEOs believe their CMOs are failing, but so much of it comes down to communication, which is fascinating that something as simple as miscommunication can happen even among C-suite members! Trust and communication are certainly the two largest issues, but we also saw the trend of CEOs viewing their CMOs and the marketing arm of their business as a bit behind, which is something we’re seeing all over the industry. CMOs are using traditional methods rather than adapting their techniques and using technology to their advantage.

Technology has revolutionized the marketing world from how marketers create content to how consumers engage with it, so it’s interesting that when it comes down to how marketers tend to execute their strategies, they’re so traditional and outdated. Consumer preferences by generation are constantly changing, and it’s crucial for marketing strategies to adapt in similar ways. For example, a Prosper Insights & Analytics Survey recently found that while 43.4% of Gen-Z views video or TV content on their mobile devices, only 7.6% of Boomers consume content this way.

Similarly, while 46% of Gen-Z view video content online, only 13.7% of Boomers do, creating a clear divide in generational preferences.

When considering the rise of CTV and streaming online, these viewing habits were likely completely different a decade ago compared to now. It’s not that traditional strategies don’t “work,” but there are definitely technological advancements and more modern approaches that we’re seeing to be infinitely more efficient, especially when data shows such strong generational differences.

Drenik: How can modern day CMOs work to build trustworthiness and strong relationships with their CEOs and C-suite colleagues? Are there any other changes CMOs can make to improve the overall perception of the role?

Connors: The CMO problem is definitely one that is fixable. In our study, CEOs largely believe that the main role of the CMO is to grow the business and 86% of them think the CMO has the power to influence the C-suite, so clearly, the position of the CMO is still viewed as one that has quite a significant amount of power. Modern day CMOs can easily repair and strengthen their relationships with the CEO and other members of the C-suite by taking a look at their own strategies and method of communication. By ensuring these are aligned with the rest of the business and are being communicated in a way that is easily understood by the rest of the C-suite, many of the challenges can be alleviated. If CMOs work to make sure their strategies and “language” are more in line with the typical business-oriented language, they’ll be able to communicate their marketing goals more clearly and improve their overall perception.

Drenik: Overall, how is your work at Boathouse relating to the C-suite and how does the agency’s work help to revitalize the role of the CMO?

Connors: Although we’re a marketing agency, our team engages with every part of the business through our work. Before we even create a marketing strategy, we spend a lot of time as a team studying the company itself, its revenue, it’s strong points and challenges as well as the industry in which the company resides. Our team believes that better strategy helps drive better performance and also helps the CEO and CMO be more aligned. Through our work, we help foster alignment within the C-suite by creating business-oriented strategies that are easily communicated across the C-suite and align seamlessly with overall business goals.

Drenik: Thanks for your insight, John! The survey's findings definitely illustrate the nuances of the relationship between the CMO, and CEO and it will be interesting to see if CMO tenure improves. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you.

Originally Published in Forbes on Feb 9, 2022.

The True Cost of CMO Turnover

By Chris Boland and Maurya Overall

Short CMO tenures and increased turnover have captured the attention of many in the business world. However, while studies have quantified just how short these tenures are getting, there’s been little discussion of the real costs that come with turnover.

There’s the cost of the CMO search itself, of course—the time of the management team, headhunters fees, and more. But there’s much more to CMO turnover costs than these P&L expenses.

To fully account for the risks associated with the rapid change affecting today’s boardrooms, we dove into the past dynamics of CMO churn and analyzed what’s at stake today.

Healthy Churn Is a Thing of the Past

Up through the early days of digital, the CMO’s primary objectives were closely tied to the campaigns they were to lead. In this campaign-driven world and operating model, there were some benefits that came along with regular CMO turnover, even though tenures may have been shortened. 

At many businesses, the prevailing dynamic could lead to a sort of “healthy churn.” A changing of the guard in the marketing department meant that fresh approaches were on the way, and the business might expect to see a bump in performance given this inflow of new ideas.

Plus, regardless of whether or not success was actually realized, the focus on campaigns came with a clear picture of what success looked like. Once another few years had passed and the dust had settled on campaigns, a brand would be able to make a relatively straightforward assessment on whether the reinvigoration led by the CMO was successful. The business might judge itself ready for a new marketing leader, or the CMO might have been ready for a new challenge. In other words, turnover didn’t present any sort of dire challenge—it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.   

Of course, this model of marketing is a thing of the past, and so are the days of the healthy churn that might have come with it.  

A New CMO Means a New System

Now, CMOs are expected to lead so much more than repositioning. We’ve moved from a focus on campaigns to a focus on systems, and just as the role of CMO has become more complex, so has the task of replacing them. CMOs no longer merely lead campaigns; they sit atop a brand’s complex platforms and technology stacks whose reach extends well beyond marketing, throughout the whole of the operation.

That’s why hiring a CMO today typically means investing in a whole new marketing system, greatly increasing the potential cost and stakes of turnover, as a positive ROI has to be calculated against a larger and larger “I.” To make matters worse, these new investments often aren’t new at all: they’re purchases and expenses that were made only a short time ago, when the last CMO was brought in. 

The Invisible Opportunity Costs 

Still, the concrete dollar cost of these marketing systems is just one dimension of what turnover truly costs a brand. 

What’s more costly to businesses experiencing churn in the C-suite is all the time spent on retooling and tinkering instead of moving their organization forward. After all, the competition doesn’t hit pause while your new CMO gets their CRM upgrade up and running. 

These opportunity costs might not be seen on the balance sheet, but they’re certainly felt within a marketplace: When you don’t have a proper message, or you aren’t growing awareness and engaging with customers to the fullest, someone else is. 

And in today’s system-driven world of digital marketing, that lag time between hiring a CMO—even the very best one for the job—and fully operationalizing a system in their vision can take quite some time. It’s not as simple as developing a new message and taking it to market. Driving profitable outcomes in digital requires learning from initial outputs through measurement and analysis. Like implementing a new system, it requires time. And time is money.

Yet, as complex as that is, it doesn’t capture all that’s involved in onboarding a CMO. While much of the marketing world today is hardwired, marketing leaders still need a deep set of soft skills to be successful. They need, for example, to be effective and active listeners. They need to be able to understand the needs of multiple constituencies and translate that into action. And they need to be able to create a productive relationship and rapport with their CEO. Putting skills like these into play for the good of the business also takes time. After all, even an experienced executive will have to install efficient structures and navigate new relationships.

Combating the Costs of CMO Turnover

Faced with all these potential costs, what’s a business to do? 

For one, enlisting outside help can be invaluable. A trusted agency partner can help provide that same system-level perspective that’s required of today’s CMOs and help smooth over transitions between CMOs. In doing so, agencies can also directly mitigate the costs outlined above, providing continuity for marketing systems, shortening the onboarding time of a new CMO, and even helping to refer potential candidates. Ultimately, even if issues of tenure can’t be fully alleviated for reasons outside a business’s control, the right agency partner can help them successfully navigate them.  

Beyond that, though, to fully prepare for and address issues of CMO tenure, decision makers need to understand what’s driving them. Our recent CMO Insights report digs into the root causes of CMO turnover issues. It also includes a guide to building back trust in the boardroom.