Why CMOs are the most persuasive leaders in the C-suite

In my early days marketing at Johnson & Johnson, I always remember the story about a former Navy officer from upstate New York. His name was Jim Burke and he served as one of J&J's Product Managers in the 1950s. One day he was summoned to the office of the chairman, General Robert Wood Johnson. The problem: one of Burke's first attempts at new product innovation, a children's chest rub, had been a big failure. Burke was sure he was about to be fired. When Burke walked in, General Johnson asked, ''Are you the one who just cost us all that money?'' Burke nodded. The General said, ''Well, I just want to congratulate you. If you are making mistakes, that means you are making decisions and taking risks. And we won't grow unless you take risks.'' Jim Burke as we know went on to be not only CEO of J&J but revered as one of the most iconic CEOs of all time for his courage and decisiveness during the Tylenol crisis.

Burke's unrelenting focus on the customer drove his words, his actions and his humanity. His marketing prowess and commitment to the Credo propelled him to CEO greatness. Having closely followed the legacy of historic marketing icons like Burke and also having served as a marketing leader at Fortune 500 brands (J&J, P&G, Time Warner Cable, Accenture), I firmly believe that the chief marketer has to be the most persuasive leader in the C-suite to deliver long-term profitable growth for their organizations.

CMOs are in the persuasion business

More than any other function in the C-suite CMOs have the most to prove — does their choice of marketing investment deliver tangible business results? Unlike the CFO or COO, who are well established voices in the C-suite focused on operational efficiency, financial stability and risk management, the CMO brand has been continually evolving in recent years -- from Chief Brand Officer (P&G's Marc Pritchard) to Chief Growth Officer (Coke's Francisco Crespo) to Chief Customer Officer (Janey Whiteside at Walmart). However what has remained constant is their mandate to deliver profitable growth and justify the marketing investments that are needed to achieve it.

Invariably, in many leadership discussions the CMO has to play the role of the "Great Persuader": The results achieved were due to stellar marketing or proposed upcoming marketing investments will deliver stellar results.

A Spencer Stuart study indicated that CMOs believe that quickly proving the value of marketing is critical in gaining buy-in across the organization for larger initiatives. By strategically choosing a few initial projects, that are smaller and more tactical by nature, they are more likely to make an impact and win over key allies in the C-suite.

In addition, the CMO can play a unique role in enhancing the expertise of other C-level leaders in the fine art of persuasion and storytelling - from partnering with their CFO in courting a potential M&A target to working with their CHRO in employer branding strategies to attract high-potential talent.

Importantly, if we believe CMOs are in the persuasion business then we need to shake-up the composition of the players in this business to ensure greater diversity across demographics, experience and thought process. Based on a ANA study, while female CMOs make up 45% of all the top CMO spots at 747 client-side marketing company members, only 13% of the head marketing executives at those companies are black, Hispanic/Latin or Asian. There is clearly much work still to be done to ensure that marketing leadership reflects the diversity of the consumers it serves. With representation will come great persuasive agility and impact.

CMOs are custodians of the brand

In a CMO study by Egon Zehnder, the authors found the word “trust” was a critical “quality that underscores many of the concepts C-suite executives associate with the CMO and the marketing function”. Trust is the most critical currency in marketing. In fact, consumers are becoming more discerning than ever and demanding brands live up to their stated higher purpose. The 2018 Edelman Earned Brand study revealed that 64% of consumers globally now buy based on what a brand stands for, a significant increase of 13 points since 2017. According to the study, "these belief-driven buyers will choose, switch, avoid or boycott a brand based on where it stands on the political or social issues they care about".

This is a critical responsibility for the CMO as custodian of the brand, who not only has to engage consumers on the authenticity behind their brand purpose but also needs to convince their C-suite peers that the brand purpose amplifies growth over the long term. This brings us to the next reason persuasion skills are a key capability for the chief marketer.

CMOs have to fight quarterly short-termism

The mandate for any public company centers around delivering value to shareholders and communicating this at the quintessential report card forum: the quarterly earnings call. This call is typically led by the IR team with the CEO and CFO as the featured scorecard raconteurs. It’s all about the quarterly results and growth versus YA.

Any multiyear brand building initiative will require a long term lens — a lens that the chief marketer needs to convince the rest of the leadership team to adopt. That’s a tough call. There are a number of ways CMOs can overcome this. One is by being persuasive using evidence of their own track record of building long-term brand value in past companies and their ability to communicate the predictive short-term markers that precede sustainable growth. Evidence of past success can serve as the currency that buys time for the CMO. Keith Weed achieved that at Unilever. He has been recognized as CMO of the Year for the last two years and was inducted into this year's Marketing Hall of Fame -- he focused on long-term growth and sustainability of Unilever's brands, while he also addressed short-term challenges on the transparency of digital marketing and influencer campaigns through the "3V's" lens: value, viewability and verification. Weed is retiring this month and he will leave a profound global legacy of elevating marketing to a higher purpose of accountability, transparency and consumer trust.

CMOs know customers best

At the heart of a great marketing organization is the ability to not just to be customer-centric but customer-obsessed -- à la Bezos at Amazon. In fact that customer obsession resulted in Amazon having only a handful of profitable quarters over the last 20 years, as it risked big on bets like Amazon Prime, cloud-computing business, a movie studio and a consumer electronics business. It even started an ocean shipping company and an airline. Today it's the fourth-largest public company at almost $470 billion in market capitalization. 

Customer-obsessed companies uncover the customer journey from multiple perspectives of awareness, recall, consideration, intent, and ultimate purchase -- but most critical of all is their ability to unearth the unmet need or pain point before it is visible to others. These customer experience insights become the pivotal prerequisite for crafting a winning marketing platform or developing a new offering. CMOs control the flow of these insights which they can use as significant leverage in voicing their opinions on other strategic and operational decisions led by their C-Suite peers. The CMO needs to make consumer experience (Cx) central to all decisions.

According to Gartner, 89% of companies now compete primarily on customer experience. Indeed, it continues to state, “the world’s most influential CMOs recognize that customer experience is the new brand.”

Customer experience combined with customer centricity are a potent force for growth -- and the CMO is in the control tower for both. According to the Korn Ferry CMO Pulse study,“Customer centricity is the top priority for CMOs, but it is a significantly lower priority for the C-suite, which may speak to the challenges CMOs face when trying to align a company behind a customer-centric agenda."

CMOs have the data

The customer knowledge advantage that CMOs have is amplified by the ultimate power source: continual access to rich data and insights.

However, CMOs are often not keen to be seen as “selling” their knowledge or impact and according to a Egon Zehnder study it is the biggest factor that inhibits sharing marketing data across the C-Suite. The study also revealed that CMOs think their biggest problem is controlling the interpretation of the data. CMOs need to take a lead role in guiding the rest of the C-suite on interpreting, valuing and acting on the marketing data. This will no doubt result in healthy debate, contention and even conflict. That's a good thing as it is a sign of engagement and acknowledgement by the C-suite on the importance of data and insights in driving growth.

The CMO has to make critical decisions on data ethics as well as actionable data insights, privacy versus personalization and the most efficient use of AI powered by machine learning and neural networks, while at the same time unifying data from disparate sources. Ultimately the CMO working with the CTO need to decide on intelligent technology investments that make data-driven marketing smarter and easier to execute across marketing outreach, customer support and other key touch-points that enrich the overall customer experience.

CMOs drive digital transformation

Harnessing the power of digital across the marketing ecosystem is very much the remit of the CMO and partnering with both the CTO and CFO is paramount. That partnership needs to be based on unlocking the value of digital transformation across all corporate functions centered on the customer — and it is the customer’s voice that is the most persuasive in directing resources, attention and strategic effort. The CMO is guided by that voice and needs to be the evangelist for customer-centricity (or customer obsession if you're at Amazon) not only in marketing but across all the C-Suite functions.

The digital acceleration journey requires commitment from all parts of the business -- from technology to operations, sales, HR, marketing, legal and regulatory affairs—to ensure exceptional customer experiences and operational excellence. Heidrick & Struggles have found that as "organizations move further up the digital acceleration curve, their digital and innovation priorities evolve, and new digitally dexterous leadership capabilities become critical."

And according to Forbes Insights the CMO is best suited to spark this wider digital revolution. 

The CMO journey ahead

More than any other role in the C-suite, the office of the CMO has faced the most significant disruption in recent times: more demanding customers, richer and more disparate data, the rise of privacy and data security concerns and the rapid pace of technological innovation. Against this tsunami of challenges, the CMO's success continues to be driven by the profitable growth of the brand in the face of competitive pressure and activist investors. Despite this, according to a recent Russell Reynolds report, current CMOs are moving into general manager, president and CEO roles at higher rates than ever before, pointing to their critical commercial and strategic impact within the organization.

The most successful CMOs are also the leaders who are the most persuasive in their ability to communicate a higher order brand purpose and take the entire organization on a brand journey where the customer is always the hero of the story.

Above all, the most persuasive CMOs are trusted -- people want to follow them. As Jim Burke eloquently stated in a 2003 profile by Harvard Business School: "Nothing good happens without trust. With it you can overcome all sorts of obstacles. You can build companies that everyone can be proud of."

Go forth in trust and build persuasively!

Raquelle M. Zuzarte is a global marketing leader and brand strategist and has led global marketing campaigns for Fortune 500 brands across the CPG and Media & Entertainment industries, including Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Accenture, Time Warner Cable and CBS Corporation.  She has been recognized with multiple awards including the Ad Age Business Advertising Award and leadership awards from Johnson & Johnson, Procter & Gamble, McKinsey & Co and KPMG. She is the Founder of Equity Project For All, a social impact venture focused on persuasive leadership and equality. Follow her @RaquelleZuzarte.