The Modern CMO Mandate.

The Modern CMO Mandate

This report highlights CMOs’ expanding mandate to drive growth and change in response to the challenging and changing landscape outlined in the Global C-suite Study with over 2,000 CMOs.

Platform Play: 

Intrepid Enterprises in every industry are venturing onto platform models which orchestrate direct interactions between consumers and producers. 28 percent of the C-suite executives surveyed report their enterprises are reallocating some portion of capital to build out platforms. These Industry Leaders are design thinkers modeling a new path to insight who leverage data as well. They excel at two activities – customer co-creation and detailed journey mapping which generate insights in abundance and propagate trust within the enterprise and outside enabling a platform model to emerge.

Changing Mandate for CMOs

As organizations are evolving from product-led to experience-led businesses, the role of the CMO is evolving into ‘Chief Experience Officer’. CMOs need to strategically address how to help their organizations compete by increasing value; creating exceptional, personalized customer experiences. The new responsibilities of CMO who is closest to the customer’s needs and desires   are:

Value:  As strategic influencers in the C-suite, CMOs should assess needs, predict trends and act on data-driven and community feedback from their digital platforms.

Experience:  As customer champions, CMOs should identify their customers’ unmet needs. Using customer journey models, data and technology, they should deliver exceptional, personalized experiences across channels. AI systems can be trained to take data-driven personalized experiences to a whole new level.

Culture: CMOs need to own the client experience from beginning to end, across the organization by transforming corporate cultures to operate in truly customer-centric ways. A collaborative workplace for employees should be leveraged to foster a customer-centric culture.

CMO Archetypes

From a cluster analysis to identify distinct segments of organizations among more than 12,500 participants in the Global C-suite Study, three archetypes emerged – Reinventors, Practitioners and Aspirationals.

The Reinventors are the standouts whose organizations have their IT and business strategies well aligned. The Reinventors have redirected their resources to extract new value from ecosystems for co-creation and close collaboration with customers and partners

More Practitioners than Reinventors are considering one of the more radical of the new business models – the platform business model. Practitioners haven’t yet developed the capabilities to match their ambitions to launch new business models.

The Aspirationals, as their name implies, have a ways to go in both their digital transformation and their ability to move quickly to seize new opportunities.

Key Action Points for CMOs

CMO have to drive proactive strategies in response to innovative competitors or disruptive threats. 77 percent of reinventors have well-defined strategies already in place, but nearly half of Practitioner CMOs and more than two-thirds of Aspirational CMOs do not.

The first action points for all three CMOs archetypes is to define customer oriented metrics to understand customers as individuals and deliver personalized experiences by exploiting the power of AI. The next action point for CMOs would be to build customer-centricity through alignment and collaboration across ecosystem partners.