The New Remit of the CMO
Introducing the Six Lenses of a Brand
In early April, I watched in surprise as more than five of my most celebrated CMOs lost their jobs. Sure, covid toppled marketing budgets and times are tough. But when I looked more closely, something had been brewing long before the pandemic – a pandemic of another kind.
I call it the pandemic of brand soul.
Today, more and more marketing budget is being allocated to growth channels – measurable and AI-driven machinery that “guarantees” leads at optimized conversion. This game has become not much more than putting the right tech stack in place, turning knobs and pressing buttons. It builds one’s brand through the sheer grit of maximizing pieces and parts of messaging, eyeballs and clicks.
Sound dull and boring?
That’s because it is.
And the days of building brands by whitewashing emotive 30 second “made-for-TV-Hallmark movies” are also gone. Did you see the barrage of well-intended yet sorely lacking TV campaigns that hit during covid? Yes. A travesty. Brand awareness is hard to measure, difficult to prove and lacks the traction and high EQ support needed from most CEOs to realize its true potential and game changing impact. We just don’t have many CEO heroes left that advocate for true brand advertising.
For marketers like me who went into marketing because it offered something more creative than more traditional roles in business, this all feels like sad news. Most companies are being ruled by “what can be counted” and less by “connection, heart and meaning.” The days of Coca Cola’s “I’d like to teach the world to sing” anthem seem to be long gone.
CMOs are no longer running the brand as we knew it and they are likely not running Growth either, which is shifting under the CRO. This leaves “corporate marketing” - which is a fancy way of saying the oversight of executing fliers, brochures and event collateral - PR & Communications and Content. Oh content! The poorly define breeding ground for everything and nothing at all. Maybe there is some smattering of social in there too.
But is that enough to keep the most business-driven, strategic, driven change agent CMOs in the C-Suite?
From personal experience, I can tell you that answer is likely no.
In May, I transitioned out of my most recent CMO role, a casualty of covid. As I pondered my next move, I found myself questioning my career path and the future of marketing.
My day-to-day work life, once rich with mission-based storytelling, customer intelligence and empathy, creative go-to-market ideas and yes, even SEO and paid acquisition, had become contaminated with the drudgery of “proving” marketing to the guys in the board room who love to count things.
In the same way my career had lost its luster, so too were brands. Without the CMO to spearhead and guide the company vision into something more than just a transaction, the playing field felt dead. Lifeless. Uninspired.
So, what does this mean for the countless CMOs in my position? What is the role of the CMO these days and where do I fit? If brand marketing is dead, how do companies stand for more than just an exchange of money for goods? Where is the lifeforce that keeps us “loyal beyond reason” to borrow a Saatchi & Saatchi ideal? And what the heck does the CMO even do anymore?
It was the reason most of my heroes were losing their jobs. The place of inspiration- the place of a true brand soul - has left the building.
Enter the Six Lenses of the Brand…A New Way To Think
About Brand Strategy
When I was interviewing for my role as CMO of Unison, I began to think about new ways brands could be built. Could a brand move from being just a “fluffy story” of how a company positions itself to a lived and breathed operational structure inside the company – “brand as operations?” So I built a model. I call this model The Six Lenses of a Brand.
“In this scenario, the CMO is more like the Chief Navigation Officer” said my dear colleague Mary Gilbert. “Their role is less about a silo owning the brand and more about the brand as a living, shared operational underpinning to the six lenses.”
Under this notion, the skill set of a CMO is rewritten. Leaders need to be adept in cross-functional operational interdependence versus ownership. And customer experience sits as the strategic hub. In this remit, CMOs would need to be highly skilled at Customer Experience Design as business strategy, and operationally proficient enough to ensure the organization marches to that hub, which will then equal the brand story.
It is about being versus telling. It still requires the core skills of a genius marketer – to know your product inside and out; to deeply listen and empathize with your customer; and to translate that into an experience – but in this case, the experience is the operating model of the company. The heartbeat of how we behave, build, innovate, show up, speak – this becomes our brand. It is our brand soul.
And sure, there might be the wanton opportunity to do an anthemic video now and again or an emotional moment of storytelling, but that becomes a splash and not the undercurrent.
It still stands true that every great CMO in the new remit needs to help drive the vision, tell the stories of the customers and the company, and built the right media mix to drive the numbers. But the brand soul becomes about the sum of the whole experience. And this is a marked mandate that will require the C-Suite to rethink its composition and roles, entirely.
