Comments on: The Sacrificial CMO

By: ebook

ebook — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 08:54:23 +0000

I like reading Tom Peters’ thoughts, it’s terrific.

PS: some of his writings, you can download here:
http://www.5s5f.net/index.php?s=%22Tom+Peters%22

By: Amelia Torode

Amelia Torode — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 14:08:22 +0000

The fact that all these sacrifical CMOs were women really worries me – is it easier to get rid of senior women than men, do they leave with less of a fight?

By: George Parker

George Parker — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 22:56:03 +0000

The comment that Wal-Mart should have known better is wrong… Julie Roehm should have known better. By their nature “Change Agents” are doomed to failure… No single person can change a company. Not even as the CEO as Carly Fiorina learned. Yes she did change a lot and the company suffered for it. You MUST understand the culture, particularly if it is a large well established company that has been doing things a certain way for a long time. Certainly, it cannot be done by a CMO of a public company that is destined to be driven by quarterly numbers… So that long term objectives are never given a chance to be effective. As for Julie pushing the envelope in terms of sex etc… No CMO worth their salt actually pushes the envelope. They leave that to their ad agency. Then if it fails they can blame the agency… It it succeeds, they can take the credit. If they had the creativity to originate brilliant advertising, they wouldn’t be the client, they’d be the agency. It’s a bigger stage for egomaniacs. That’s the way it’s always worked.
George Parker

By: Tom Asacker

Tom Asacker — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 20:55:44 +0000

Sorry. I dont’ buy any of it. Change agents are internally driven by a vision of what things can be. Let’s watch and see if any of these “change angents” venture out and use their knowledge, passion et al to actually create something new.

By: ac

ac — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 16:16:15 +0000

Sounds to me like most CMOs brought on board are expected to be change agents because as pointed out their longevity is on average rather short. So, unless they were brough it to keep the status quo (how often does that happen?) then of course they are expected to shake things up a bit. But I’m a little troubled with some of the terms and ideas floating around in this stream of comments. Looks like we are making that grand mistake of equating marketing with advertising with sales. Tightly related? Yes. The same? No. Each function has unique processes that should be viewed clearly for what they are, and what they are not.

When new ad campaigns aim to redefine a brand into something that customers don’t associate with a company or product is a recipe for disaster. Not saying it can’t be done, but changing customer expectations and habits (the push argument) is always exponentially harder than identifying and responding to new or emerging customer expectations and habits (the pull argument).

Are there any good case studies of successful CMOs that have enjoyed nice long tenures and understand the differences between marketing, sales and advertisement?

By: jens

jens — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 05:15:52 +0000

well spoken as the truly sacrificial cmo!

- hey, what can i say… the way i see it, it is cristal clear!

By: jens

jens — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 05:02:44 +0000

What to do with marketing, that inconvenient interface…?
not much.

first of all the cmo is not be the only one who takes risks in aesthetical matters as positioning and such.
in the new organization creativity is not kept out by the marketing guy – which actually i one aspect of his role as an interface – to deal with the funny guys and to translate emotions into numbers and vice versa.

in the new organization an aesthetical discourse does not only take place in the advertising briefings but much earlier in the value chain – in product development for example.
the new organization fundamentally invites risk and creativity into the heart of the corporation… and that calls for leadership. – the kind of leadership only the very big boss – omly the ceo – can provide.

without any doubt the role of the cmo is changing fundamentally. as marketing loses its role as an exclusive interface, it will also lose some of the absurd pressure and expectainons layed upon this funny discipline.
who believes that today you still can sell a bad product or crappy service through great and super precise or hyper creative marketing? too many probably… – but hey, enough others already know that this is not the case. and they are leading the markets today.

i would go so far as to say: the need for organisational change enters through the old marketing interface. but you cannot deal with the new pressure through the old thinking “thank god we have got the marketing guys”. the cmo may break, marketing may break and fundamental change is inevitable.

By: steve

steve — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 03:44:57 +0000

There was a pretty recent article in the WSJ about the woman who runs Microsoft’s advertising sales force. It was a remarkable description of how she, as a complete outsider to Microsoft, had to learn to speak the corporate language to get them to give her the staff levels she needed to do her job. For a couple of years she was laughed off when she tried to get MS to take ad sales seriously. She came in as a “change agent” and was failing (but was ignored rather than fired).

Eventually, she figured out that she had to quantify the payoff to each additional ad rep. Without that, the engineers and geeks would simply ignore her opinion. Once she had a model for revenues per person, she did very well at the annual budget meeting and got staffed up. Selling ads is still pretty alien to Microsoft’s culture, but al least they have a fighting chance now.