Chief marketing officer
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The Chief Marketing Officer, or CMO, is a job title for an executive responsible for various marketing-related activities within an organization. Most often the position reports to the chief executive officer.
Origin, Current Use, and Future of the CMO Title
As a discipline, marketing itself is a reasonably recent phenomenon in comparison to other functional areas and fields of study, such as accounting, finance, and economics, which were well-established by the turn of the twentieth century. Indeed, in his [History of Marketing Thought], Bartles notes that even in the early 1900's, "there was no clear concept of the justification of marketing as a productive activity or as a contribution to economic production".
Similarly, the title of Chief Marketing Officer is also a relatively new development. Sergio Zyman was the first person to ever hold the title Chief Marketing Officer, a role that he held at The Coca-Cola Company from 1993-1998. Today, the use of the CMO title has become more common place, but is still not as widely used as the Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer monikers. As the economic power shift from producers of products and services to consumers continues, the executives most responsible for leading their organizations to higher degrees of market orientation and customer intimacy will undoubtedly be conferred with the CMO title in increasing numbers.
The Role of a Chief Marketing Officer
With primary or shared responsibility for areas such as strategy development and execution, sales management, product development, distribution channel management, public relations, marketing communications (including advertising and promotions), pricing, market research, and customer service, CMOs are faced with a diverse range of specialized disciplines in which they are forced to be knowledgeable. This challenge is compounded by the fact that the day-to-day activities of these functions, which range from the highly analytical (eg. – pricing and market research) to highly creative (advertising and promotions), are carried out by subordinates possessing learning and cognitive styles to which the CMO must adapt his or her own leadership style.
Beyond the challenges of leading their own subordinates, the CMO is invariably reliant upon resources beyond their direct control. That is to say, the priorities and/or resources of functional areas outside of marketing such as production, information technology, legal, and finance have a direct impact on the achievement of marketing objectives. Consequently, more than any other senior executive, the CMO must influence peers in order to achieve their own goals. Clearly, this necessity to lead peers compounds the complexity of challenge faced by the CMO.
External links
- Articles & Research on CMOs
- [CMO tenure: Slowing down the revolving door]
- [The Role & Leadership Challenges of the Chief Marketing Officer: A Study of High-Tech CMOs]
- [Study: Marketing execs still lack boardroom clout]
See also
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