With the average CMO tenure being 27 month, you wonder why there are not more companies and chief marketing officers trying to reinvent the role of the CMO. It seems like the time for the CMO 2.0 has come...
As I have written before, by developing a deep understanding of marketing 2.0 and by being able to operationalize its components in meaningful and scalable ways CMO's could transform their own role significantly.
Marketing 2.0 means externalizing all of your marketing processes - doing marketing with all your employees, customers, partners, prospects and detractors instead of at them. Marketing success is all about co-marketing these days - co-market, co-sell, co-develop, co-invent, co-support, etc.
If done properly, marketing will work again - predictably and with decreasing costs. By executing a Marketing 2.0 strategy successfully, a CMO will not only be able to take the credit for the success of the marketing department, he or she could also regain a strategic seat at the executive table - that of chief representative of the voice of the customer within the company. Because unlike with advertising where you do some research upfront on your target audience and then "target" them, when you co-market with your audience you develop a two way conversation and a continuous market learning environment.
So how are marketers doing with that? I think it's safe to say that there are three classes of CMO dabbling with Marketing 2.0 strategies - and a fourth category that does not believe in all this new stuff and is still slugging it out the old ways.
First is the CMO who does not get it, the one who sees how other companies gain benefits from Marketing 2.0 programs - but has no idea what the underlying forces are that make this all work. They may commission their agency to build them a "community," not really understanding how that is different from a pretty web site, and then use the community as another vehicle through which to do marketing campaigns. Thankfully those CMO's fail fast - but not before muddying up the waters for their peers and successors.
Then there is the CMO who sort of gets it but then again not enough. They are those people who realize the benefits that can be derived from those programs but are not yet ready to make a big bet on them. They may encourage some of their staffers to dabble with Marketing 2.0 programs, but continuously underfund those efforts so that it does not make it on their day-to-day dashboards and so that it doesn't move the needle for their company in terms of results. They convince themselves that this is a good learning environment for the future, not realizing that the fundamentals of small scale Marketing 2.0 programs are drastically different from large scale efforts.
And then there are the bold CMO's who realize that this is a make or break it time for marketing and are willing to go big on Marketing 2.0. They are the game-changers who will force anyone else to jump on the bandwagon or get left behind.
I will try to get some CMO 2.0 types to do open mic interviews with us in the Marketing 2.0 group soon. If you have a candidate who might be interested in doing this with us, let me know by emailing me at francois[at]marketingtwo.com. Maybe we can interview them together!
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