The executive suite has always had its own quiet hierarchies, and for chief marketing officers with ambitions beyond the corner of the floor where the brand films get reviewed, the path upward remains, as it has for some time, narrow and not entirely well lit.
A new analysis from Adweek, the first in a series examining what separates marketers who advance from those who do not, suggests that the difference often comes down to something that sounds simple but apparently is not: the ability to speak about money in ways that make chief financial officers feel less alone in the room.
The rise of the chief growth officer — a title that has proliferated across holding companies and consumer goods conglomerates alike — is described in the piece as "a polite corporate way of saying: 'We still need growth, but we are not entirely sure marketing can lead it.'" (One imagines the org chart being redrawn with a certain institutional delicacy.)
The CMOs who do make the leap, according to the analysis, tend to be those who can explain what the article calls "the growth algorithm" — not merely whether sales increased, but whether value grew faster than volume, whether profit grew faster than sales, and whether the whole enterprise is becoming more durable or simply more active.
This is, of course, the kind of fluency that business schools have been promising to instill for decades, with mixed results.
The piece also notes that marketing strategies, however elegant in the conference room, have a tendency to meet the factory eventually — where flavor proliferation creates shelf visibility but also stockouts, and where aged cognac looks wonderful in a brand film but sits on the balance sheet as capital employed, earning nothing while it waits in the barrel.
For CMOs who wish to be CEOs, the message is not new, but it is delivered here with a certain clarity: the brand is not the business, but it had better understand the business, or someone else will be asked to lead the growth it was supposed to create.
Original story published in Adweek: "5 Things CEO-Ready CMOs Know That Others Don't"