What Is Chief Marketing Officer?

A chief marketing officer (CMO) is a corporate executive responsible for marketing activities in an organization. Most often the position reports to the chief executive officer.

With primary or shared responsibility for areas such as sales management, product development, distribution channel management, marketing communications (including advertising and promotions), pricing, market research, and customer service, CMOs are faced with a diverse range of specialized disciplines in which they are required to be knowledgeable. This challenge is compounded by the fact that the day-to-day activities of these functions, which range from the highly analytical (e.g. – pricing and market research) to highly creative (advertising and promotions), are carried out by subordinates possessing learning and cognitive styles to which the CMO must adapt his or her own leadership style.

Beyond the challenges of leading their own subordinates, the CMO is invariably reliant upon resources beyond their direct control. That is to say, the priorities and/or resources of functional areas not reporting to marketing such as production, information technology, corporate communications and public affairs, legal, human resources and finance have a direct impact on the achievement of marketing objectives. Consequently, more than any other senior executive, the CMO must influence peers in order to achieve their own goals. Clearly, this necessity to lead peers compounds the complexity of challenges faced by the CMO.


The CMO; Chief Marketing Officer, is typically a member of the executive team and typically reports to the CEO or COO. Peers to the CMO include Chief Human Resources Officer, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Communications/Public Affairs Officer, Chief Supply Chain Officer, General Counsel.

The CMO’s changing role

As companies confront changing consumer behavior, increasingly important third-party scrutiny, and more diverse target markets and segments, they must broaden the roles of marketing and the CMO. Today, many chief marketers focus mainly on building brands, making advertising more effective, and perhaps market research. Although these responsibilities aren’t going away, CMOs must address several other areas as well: leading company-wide change in response to evolving buying patterns, stepping up efforts to shape a company’s public profile, managing complexity, and building new marketing capabilities throughout the company as a whole. The relative importance of these new priorities will of course vary by company and industry, but the broad importance of reinventing the CMO’s role as a strategic activist is similar across them.

Changing to reflect new consumer buying behavior

Consumers knowledgeable about and comfortable with online research and sales will make many companies change their business models. Pharmaceutical companies, for example, must rethink the way the field force calls on physicians, who are becoming a less important influence on the consumer’s health care choices. Retailers need to design stores that integrate the Internet’s broader selection with the brick-and-mortar approach (as some are now doing with in-store kiosks). In general, there’s a need for tighter integration between corporate marketing and sales as Web-based channels expand their role in advertising, sales, and marketing.

The resulting business changes will extend far beyond traditional marketing: a company won’t succeed without heeding the voice of customers and their evolving habits in buying goods and services and in interacting with companies and brands. The CMO is a natural candidate to help lead the company as a whole toward business changes that reflect evolving customer needs. It is, for example, the marketing department that is likely to develop (as Toyota Motor has done) programs to position a company in online communities such as Second Life, the leading virtual marketplace, which provides low-cost opportunities to learn how role-playing consumers would design and use new products.

This tight relationship between marketing and critical business changes extends to emerging markets, whose growing importance will place exacting demands on the entire organization to develop, produce, and deliver lower-cost goods and services. A deep understanding of the needs of consumers in these markets and the trade-offs they make will be critical in designing products and retail formats that strike the right balance between price and quality. Since engineers and store design teams in developed markets probably won’t have the needed insight, CMOs will have to develop partners and capabilities to tap into high-quality local sources of customer information. Nokia’s development of low-cost mobile phones for India and P&G’s success with toothpaste in China show how companies can translate insights about local consumers into growth in emerging markets.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org
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