Fast Company (via WSJ, 5/16/07 page B17)
May 15, 2007, 3:50 pm
Memo to Marketing Chiefs: Watch Your Backs
Chief marketing officers serve many roles, but scapegoat might be the most familiar, says Ellen McGirt in Fast Company’s June issue (no link available). The past 12 months have seen such departures of marketing heads at big consumer companies as Javier Benito from Starwood Hotels, Michael Linton’s from Best Buy or Mary Minnick’s from Coca-Cola. They all have their own stories, but a survey by executive-search firm SpencerStuart shows that at 100 leading consumer-branded firms over the past three years, CMOs have held their jobs for 23 months on average, compared with 54 months for CEOs. In the food industry, the average CMO stint is about a year.
One danger to marketing chiefs is their wide span of responsibilities. Problems in finance, manufacturing and customer service can trip them up as much as issues with advertising and promotional campaigns. Plus, everyone has an opinion on marketing. “People will come up to you and say anything, like, ‘Your advertising blows’,” says Mr. Linton, now a senior vice president at eBay. “No one comes up to the [chief information officer] and says, ‘Hey, I was just thinking about your data architecture and how much better things are somewhere else.”
CMOs also seem more easily expendable in moments when someone needs to take the fall for a slump: “Getting rid of the CFO might spook Wall Street, while changing a COO or a CIO could disrupt operations.”
The truth is, however, that ditching the CMO can be just as unsettling, says Ms. McGirt. A revolving door at the top can harm a marketing department’s efficiency as it would any other, especially since “the new CMO [usually] gets rid of everything the previous guy championed,” Katherine Stone, who survived five CMOs during her seven years in Coca-Cola’s marketing department, complained on an industry blog.
To slow CMO turnover, chief executives could do more to give CMOs clearer goals. Russell Klein says he has lasted four years as Burger King’s CMO because he has been given the power to have a say in behind-the-scenes operations that might affect his marketing campaigns, such as supply-chain operations. Still, he adds, “clearly there is no better tonic than top-line sales.”–
Robin Moroney
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