The compelling case for a chief marketing officer

Isolation: that’s the problem highlighted in our report on marketing in consulting firms, launched last week.

Part of the problem lies with the nature of consulting. It’s perhaps not surprising (though still quite scary from a marketing perspective) that fewer than 5% of marketing people in big consulting firms believe they have complete control over the four Ps of marketing (product, place, price and promotion). After all, most consulting services aren’t developed in sterile labs by white-coated engineers, but are the result of working on real-world problems.  But a lot of the problem lies with consulting firms. Fewer than a third of people in big firms felt that their marketing department played a big or very big role in executing their firm’s strategy. As the chart below shows, very few marketeers ever have the chance to spend time on client sites.

The result of this is that 70% of people say that finding something different to say is their biggest marketing challenge and 50% say that their products aren’t sufficiently different from those of their competitors.

But the solution is remarkably simple.

First, appoint a chief marketing officer (or at least a senior, experienced marketing professional who has a seat at the firm’s top table). When we compared firms which did have a CMO against those that don’t – and again here we’re focusing on larger firms – we found that they were almost twice as likely to say marketing and strategy were aligned and five times less likely to see differentiation as a problem. They were also significantly more positive about the ability of the marketing department to overcome internal challenges. Those that could keep their CMO for more than five years (and the average tenure of a CMO across all industries is around two years) reaped additional benefits: the marketing team’s ability to influence, execute strategy and differentiate the firm all rose. However, the ability to overcome barriers and measure the return on marketing activities actually falls, the longer a CMO is in place, perhaps because they end up going native.

Second, centralise more marketing activities. Please note that we’re not saying centralise everything. The organisation of the marketing function is a continuum between complete decentralisation and total centralisation and neither extreme is particularly satisfactory. Most firms with partnership structures veer heavily towards the former; systems integration firms, which typically have a more corporate structure, are more likely to veer towards the latter. It perhaps wasn’t unexpected to learn that firms with a more centralised approach tended to have marketing teams that were more attuned to strategy, but these firms scored more highly on every area. It’s not realistic or even desirable for centralise everything – the culture and politics particularly in partnerships are just too complicated – but taking a more centralised approach will, our research suggests, reap dividends.