Chief Marketing Officers Need To Know The Business As Well As Anyone in the Company

There is an interesting article in Ad Age about the need for CMOs to understand how their businesses work, For CMOs to Be Visionary Leaders, They Must Have a P&L Mind-set.  This seems overly intuitive, but you would be surprised.  A true marketer needs to understand all the drivers of the business, the profitability of each customer type, the cost of each product. And many do not.  

When I started at Georgetown University, I was coming from financial services.  The first question I asked was "what is the business model?"  I wanted to know how the university made its money.  Academia doesn't really talk this way, but it has a business model nonetheless.  Turns out that tuition and philanthropy are key to staying in business. 

I have always believed that a marketing strategy really is the same thing as the business strategy.  Many people don't really understand what marketing is.  Some think it is PR.  Others think it is sales.  The truth is, marketing is the strategy for selling your product, ie, the business.  Marketing is the starting point, not the end point.  In other  words, if you are doing it correctly, you begin the entire strategic process by asking: Who are our customers?  What do they want or need?  Does our product or service meet those needs?  That is where the strategic process begins....and that is marketing.

Check out the article:

Chief Marketing Officers Must Have a P&L Mind-set - Advertising Age - CMO Strategy

GM Will Miss Bob Lutz

So I have ranted about Detroit car makers. Here was my basic point: the reason they are in terrible shape is that they are run by the wrong parts of the company. Management has been totally focused on running a huge organization and oh, yeah, every few minutes a car rolls off the assembly line.

Bob Lutz did an interview with Ad Age last week in which he says exactly this. His big accomplishment, according to him, was getting GM to focus on the product and to build cars people want to drive. Kind of scary, but he's right. That is an enormous accomplishment.

I don't think they are there yet, but perhaps closer than they have been in decades.

Hip? Or Creepy Old Guys

So I have a facebook profile. I started it when I got to Georgetown after I realized that most undergraduates don't really use email any more and spend hours poking and posting on walls. My wife is suspect...she thinks I am not age appropriate. Which is probably right.

Greg Anderson writes an excellent article on this for Ad Age this week in the CMO Strategy section -- "Marketers, Don't Just Blindly Follow Latest Media Trends"

Give it a read. He makes several great points. The social networking space is moving really quickly. It is still too early to tell what will last and what will be fad. And, just because people are on these sites, in these networks, doesn't mean that every marketer and company needs to be there or should be there.

Authenticity is so important to a brand these days. Trying too hard, trying to be cool or hip when your brand really isn't, is a sure fire way to look like an old dude who doesn't get it. It would be weird for a 40 year old guy to go a high school party full of teenagers he didn't know. That is how your brand will perceived if it really isn't relevant to the audience. Marketers beware.