Of all the executives in the C-Suite, the Chief Marketing Officer is frequently the one found to have the shortest job tenure. From the graph below one can see that although the average tenure of the CMO has lengthened significantly from what it was in the early 2000s, it is still only a little longer than 3 years. This is among the shortest of tenures when compared to the other C-suite positions.
Why CMOs don’t last longer is a topic of debate that has not been resolved. One often cited reason is that the role has changed so drastically over the past decade – growing in both scope and complexity – that it has become more difficult to match the skillsets and aptitudes needed to fit an organization’s needs.
Average Tenure of the CMO in the U.S. (In Months)
Source: Statista.com
Whatever the reasons for high CMO turnover, it comes with a price. Losing marketing leadership can slow or derail initiatives, reduce marketing team productivity, diminish morale, fuel cynicism, and increase expenditures as firms must expeditiously fill a critical vacancy.What will the organization do to assure that the new CMO will be better suited to the organization’s needs than their predecessor?
We’ve come up with a concept on how to improve hiring to make job-fit and retention more likely. It starts with developing an approach that matches the organization’s needs with a CMO well-suited to fulfill those needs. It focuses on the nature of the marketing organization and the anticipated role(s) of the CMO.
Fitting the Role by starting with the 5 different types of marketing organizations
Pick up and read something from just a few years back about the role of the “typical” Chief Marketing Officer and you’ll be struck by how much things have changed. It wasn’t that long ago that being a CMO meant spending much of your time on tactics related to marketing campaign management. Since those times, advancements in artificial intelligence/machine learning, data access and analysis, digital marketing technologies, and insight into the customer experience have combined to change the way both the organization and the CMO think about the role.
The one CMO constant is that they continue to be growth driven – their chief focus remains driving revenue growth, market share, or both. The way they choose to drive growth can change the roles they fill within the marketing function depending on the organization’s go-to-market strategy and how that strategy dovetails with their individual strengths and interests. One approach to thinking about this identifies five basic types of marketing organizations: segment-centric, product-centric, channel-centric, geography-centric, or function-centric. Here is a brief description of each type:
- Segment-Centric – customer segments are differentiated by their distinct needs.
- Product-Centric – business units are primarily focused on the product offering.
- Channel-Centric – sales channels drive the organization’s structure.
- Function-Centric – the organization has only one brand and requires broad marketing functional expertise.
- Geography-Centric – customers highly value quick and localized response.
The type will be reflected in where various marketing functions fall and the reporting relationships within the marketing organization.
The major role types of CMOs
We’ve taken how the role of the CMO has changed and identified 4 major types of CMOs by role. These roles as described are not intended to imply that a CMO won’t employ strategies and tactics that cross roles – but that most CMOs can generally be described as more focused or adept in those activities within one of these roles:
- The Innovation Driver – emphasizes digital marketing and aggressively deploys and relies on data analytics for decision-making and reporting.
- The Brand Builder – highlights all things brand.
- The CX Focused – strives to attain an in-depth understanding of the customer experience and how to leverage that knowledge effectively.
- The Creative Crackerjack – embraces a more “traditional” CMO role that concentrates around legacy communications tactics.
This is a non-judgmental categorization in that no role is superior to another, but in many instances, the organization will be better served if the type of CMO aligns with the type of marketing organization.
How the organization type and CMO role can complement each other
For most organizations, the role of the CMO requires a mix of strategic and tactical strengths. Our point is that for those instances when the organization’s go-to-market approach doesn’t align with the CMO’s self-selected role, marketing strategy and tactics might skew to fit the role type. When this happens, business performance as measured by ROI, market share, etc., might suffer.The matching of the CMO role type to the organization’s marketing organization is another way of thinking about the type of person who might fit well into a hiring organization’s approach to filling an open CMO slot. For instance, a Product-Centric organization might need an Innovation Driver CMO who is focused on digital marketing and able to leverage data and analytics to better identify and understand the impact of tactics on the product line as well as monitor competitors’ changing product strategies.
In matching the CMO role to the marketing organization, the table below summarizes how they might best align.
