A recent poll by Korn/Ferry among senior executives indicates that 53% of them believe their companies should allocate budget to explore new marketing channels through a “test and learn” approach in order to remain competitive. But half of the respondents feel that their marketing departments do not receive enough budget to do so.
Can CMOs transform the way they market by simply employing a test-and-learn philosophy? There is more to it than that according to Caren Fleit, the CMO practice leader for Korn/Ferry. I recently had a discussion with her on the topic of marketing transformation. Here are the highlights.
Caren Fleit: Everything seems more competitive. Growth is hard to come by. Customers are more educated, are more particular about what they want and are expecting more customization. And that’s not just about the product; it’s about the whole experience and their interactions with a business and a brand. There’s a lot of pressure on businesses to grow and to gain share. What we hear over and over again is the need to reinvent — reinvent the business model, reinvent the way we go to market, reinvent the way the customer or consumer engages with us. And often that “reinvention” is sitting on the shoulders of the CMO and his or her team. We call it “creating the new and the different” which is actually a leadership competency that we can measure, in order to drive activity across a whole host of different facets within an organization.
John Ellett: So my focus on marketing change agents aligns nicely with this theme of reinvention.
Caren Fleit: Yes. CMOs are increasingly being brought on to transform something — market strategy, the brand, the customer experience. They are expected to come with breakthrough thinking. Our snapshot data talked about “test and learn,” which is something that CMOs need to do to prove out their thoughts. But we also find that transformation is where that whole left and right brain, art and science thing, is at the forefront. Because it’s not all about testing. In order to be able to reinvent, there needs to be vision.
Now the vision needs to be based on analytic insights, on market insights, on customer/consumer insights. But innovation doesn’t only come from analytics; it comes from taking analytics and using that to leverage creative thinking and vision to see what’s next. So that’s where art and science come together.
John Ellett: One of the reasons that I’ve been attracted to marketing as a career is it is a both-brained discipline. And my experience with great CMOs is they are inherently both-brained thinkers. Is that your experience?
Caren Fleit: Absolutely. And I think they use different parts of their brains at different times. The challenge now with the enormousness and the available data is to get so sucked into it that as you’re looking at every single piece of data you’re forgetting that there needs to be vision.
One of our CMOs was talking about starting with a holistic view of the consumers and their lives. Not just how they consume snacks, if that’s what your company does, but how they live. And that leads to the kind of transformative thinking. Often we hear, “We need to think about how we can expand our brand and where’s the white space?”
A really interesting example is our recent placement, the Chief Commercial Strategist at Brinks, known for its secure transportation of cash. This person was brought in to help the senior management team take a look at reinventing their business model. Because if you think about the way payments are going…
John Ellett: They don’t need a truck.
Caren Fleit: They probably won’t need a truck. Exactly. They are really well known for moving money around securely. How do they become the go-to place for “secure” solutions and what does that mean? How do they leverage what they already have within their organization? And there are many far-flung places around the globe. So this person was looking at the legacy business and thinking “how do we reinvent this?”
John Ellett: You recently released a snapshot survey that says CMOs believe that they should be doing more testing and learning. Inherent with testing and learning is realizing that tests don’t always work, that there are times when you test and fail. In this high pressure environment, do you find CMOs have the courage to test and fail?
Caren Fleit: That's a good question. I think they test and learn because of how much everything costs. It’s test on somewhat of a smaller scale, perhaps learn something and then adapt it as you go to a bigger scale before you throw all the money behind it.
As for whether they have the ability to test and fail, a lot of that depends on the culture of the organization. One of the primary reasons CMOs fail is because they’ve been brought in to be change agents and are expected to drive change, but they’re not really empowered to do so. And it turns out the rest of the culture is not aligned and they’re risk averse. So the CEO and the board need to have an aligned vision of change in order for the CMO to be able to do it. By the same token the CMO needs to create an inspired and aligned team behind a vision of change.
John Ellett: It sounds like you’re playing back Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 of my book, The CMO Manifesto — aligning on expectations for change and declaring an agenda to do so.
Caren Fleit: The best CMOs have a vision and a passion around the vision. And they have the ability to bring people along between the current reality that everybody sees and the envisioned future that only a few see. To show them where they are, where they’re going and to help people close that gap with a sense of possibility, and therefore ignite the passion that connects the team to the vision.
