Marketing with Purpose: The CMO Has Outgrown Marketing

SPEAKER_1 (0:04)

The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

Tullio Siragusa (0:17)

Welcome back to the Marketing With Purpose series of The Bliss Business Podcast. I am Tullio, and today I want to talk directly to CMOs, marketing executives, CEOs, founders, and anyone trying to figure out what the role of marketing leadership should actually look like or should be today. Because I think something fundamental has happened to the CMO role. The CMO has outgrown marketing. Now, I'm not saying marketing is no longer important. Quite the opposite. Brand matters, demand generation matters, customer acquisition matters, communication matters, content matters, positioning matters, marketing technology matters. All of it matters. But if that is where the CMO's responsibility ends, I think we're defining the role far too narrowly. The modern CMO operates in an environment where almost everything is connected. Customer experience affects marketing, sales affects marketing, product affects marketing, operation affects marketing, technology affects marketing, culture affects marketing, and marketing affects every one of those things in return. So the CMO cannot afford to think only like the leader of a marketing department. The CMO has to think like a business leader. And I believe there are five shifts redefining the role. From marketing leader to business leader, from campaign owner to growth architect, from brand steward to customer advocate, and from department leader to organizational integrator, and from technology adopter to judgment leader. So, let's start with the first one. From marketing leader to business leader. The CMO has to understand the business. And I mean really understand the business. Not simply the marketing budget. Not just cost per lead. Not simply marketing performance. The business. How does the company make money? Where does margin come from? What creates retention? What causes churn? What increases sales velocity? Where does the buying process slow down? What does customer acquisition really cost? What is the lifetime value of a customer? Which customers are the most profitable? What operational constraints are preventing growth? What happens after marketing creates demand? Those are business questions. And modern CMOs need to be comfortable asking them. One of the greatest limitations a marketing leader can place on themselves is saying, that's not marketing. If revenue is affected by it, the CMO should understand it. If customer experience is affected by it, the CMO should understand it. If brand trust is affected by it, the CMO should understand that too. If it changes whether customers buy, stay, refer or leave, it matters to marketing leadership.

That does not mean the CMO owns every function. It means the CMO understands how the system works. There's a big difference. When a CMO walks into an executive meeting talking about impressions, clicks, campaigns and marketing activity, marketing can quickly become marginalized. But when the CMO connects customer behavior to revenue, market opportunity, retention, profitability and growth, marketing becomes part of the business conversation. That is where it belongs. Now let's talk about number two, from campaign owner to growth architect. The second shift is from campaign owner to growth architect. I use the word architect intentionally because growth is not a department. Growth is a system. The market has to understand what you stand for. The brand has to create trust. Marketing has to generate interest. The offer has to be relevant.

Sales has to convert that demand. The customer experience has to fulfill the promise. And operations has to deliver. Customer success has to create value. And the organization has to learn from what customers are telling it. That is a growth system. Marketing sits right in the middle of it. Yet many organizations still measure marketing almost entirely around lead production. How many leads do we create? How many MQLs? What was the cost per lead? How much pipeline did marketing influence? Those are metrics and they do matter. But they're not the whole picture. The CMO should also be asking, where is growth getting stuck? Is awareness the problem? Is trust the problem? Is our positioning unclear? Are we attracting the wrong customer? Is sales follow up too slow? Is the offer weak? Is customer experience inconsistent? Are we promising something the organization cannot deliver? That is the growth architect. You stop asking only, how do we create more leads? And you start asking, how does the entire system create sustainable growth? Sometimes the answer is not another campaign. Sometimes the business needs better conversion. Sometimes it needs stronger positioning. Sometimes it needs higher retention. And sometimes it needs a better sales enablement. And sometimes it needs an improved customer experience. And sometimes, the most important marketing decision is fixing something outside the marketing department itself. That is what happens when the CMO starts thinking like a growth architect. Let's talk about the third shift, from brand steward to customer advocate. The third shift from brand steward to customer advocate really speaks to, most CMOs have traditionally been described as stewards of the brand.