CMOs struggling with data-driven expectations of their role

Nearly 70% of more than 200 participants in the international study said there is a clear mandate or high level of expectation among their senior management teams and board members for marketing to be the growth driver and business value creator in their organisations.

But many CMOs surveyed appear to be struggling to embrace integrated data-driven analytics in order to embark on a relentless pursuit of revenue, better returns, and more profitable and enduring customer relationships.

Respondents also said they are less involved in the development of new products, markets, customer experiences and business conversions. Only 6% said they are defining routes to revenue across all facets of their business globally; 10% are embracing customer-direct ecommerce channels; and only 8% admit to auditing, assessing and continually improving the customer experience.

Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council, said: “CMOs now have to show they are impacting business growth right from the outset, or they are likely to be short-lived on the job.”

He argued that CMOs need to embrace a new crop of revenue-centric analytics platforms (in an emerging RevTech category) to make this happen.

The research by the CMO Council and Deloitte was conducted in the third quarter of 2016. More than 200 marketing decision makers were surveyed online across all industry sectors and geographies, supplemented by qualitative interviews with 16 global CMOs.