Marketing Steps into the Spotlight to Drive Growth and Innovation, Reveals New Book from Booz Allen Hamilton and the ANA

NEW YORK--(EON:Enhanced Online News)--

Corporate marketing organizations are undergoing major transformations and are increasingly fulfilling a significant role in driving business performance. Leading Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) are tightly integrating marketing with other corporate functions as they get closer to customers, capture the benefits of new media, and demand more from their agency partners. A new book commissioned by management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton and the ANA (Association of National Advertisers) and published by strategy+business Books, uncovers why, as the firms’ ongoing joint research shows, revenue growth and profitability are strongest among companies that elevate the role of marketing to the highest possible level.

“They need to go digital. Those that are making those changes are turning away business. Those that haven’t adjusted are struggling.”

“In any company, the CMO has to be not only the consumer-insights champion, but also the person who is really valuing what the enterprise is working on,” says Procter & Gamble’s CMO Jim Stengel.

CMO Thought Leaders: The Rise of the Strategic Marketer, edited by Geoffrey Precourt with an introduction by Gregor Harter, Edward Landry and Andrew Tipping, features interviews with 15 of the world’s most influential and effective marketing leaders who are redefining the practice of marketing as they help drive their companies’ growth agendas. Across industries, from Jim Stengel at Procter & Gamble to Beth Comstock at GE’s NBC Universal and John Hayes at American Express, marketing chiefs are aligning their marketing strategies with management goals, and working more closely than ever with manufacturing, distribution, sales and finance to deliver results.

“Today, the role of the CMO demands openness to experimentation, an inclination towards pioneering, and an ability to integrate marketing with strategy as never before,” says Edward Landry, vice president at Booz Allen. “The stakes are high for CMOs today; Spencer Stuart’s latest research showed that average tenure at 100 leading consumer goods companies is now just over two years – and the number of vacancies in the role has doubled since last year. To be successful ‘Growth Champions’ for their organizations, CMOs must be empowered to be curious, to take risks, to learn, and to sometimes fail, but always to grow.”

Six important themes emerged from the series of interviews with leading CMOs, revealing that the business of making powerful connections with customers is in the midst of unprecedented change:

Put the Customer at the Heart of Marketing. Adopting a customer-centric perspective is an integral part of every successful marketing organization, and it no longer relies on intuition. CMOs are pushing their organizations on every front to gain sustained exposure to what their customers are thinking and doing. “The customer influences almost everything that happens in marketing today, from research, to engagement with innovation and product development, to the vehicles companies use to communicate with their customers,” says Bob Liodice, president and CEO of the ANA.

Make Marketing Accountable. Finding ways to accurately measure return on investment remains a thorny issue for CMOs, and is the leading factor that brings marketing under pressure from management. Research from Booz Allen and the ANA finds that 90 percent of marketers across nine industries see measurement as a major challenge. The most successful CMOs have convinced colleagues that marketing accountability takes place on two levels: the specific return on marketing programs, and the overall health of the business and brands. “I find that my colleagues will support me if they see the results of our successes and…the discipline of our efforts, and quite frankly, the transparency of our failures,” says John Hayes, CMO of American Express.

Embrace the Challenges of New Media. Booz Allen’s and the ANA’s ongoing research suggests that traditional advertising still accounts for 80 to 90 percent of the marketing expenditures at consumer companies. Still, every CMO featured in the book has an appetite to go out on a limb and try new ways to connect with customers. “Consumers are telling us that they want to be in control of the storytelling, and as part of that desire, they want to engage in advertising in different ways,” says Beth Comstock, president of Integrated Media at NBC Universal.

Recognize the New Organizational Imperative. Successful CMOs are driving marketing forward as an integral part of the enterprise that nurtures the overall health of the business and its brands. For Pepsi–Cola North America’s CMO Cie Nicholson, the bridge between marketing and innovation is critical to her team’s performance; at Diageo, CMO Rob Malcolm’s responsibilities include marketing, sales and product innovation. To foster growth, CMOs are cultivating the creative and analytical strengths of their people, encouraging specialized skills, and emphasizing training. “In marketing, you need to use both halves of your brain,” says Diageo’s Malcolm.

Live a New Agency Paradigm. CMOs expect a new level of partnership from their advertising agencies and the ancillary companies that work with them. They are assembling multi-agency groups, getting them to collaborate, and in some cases to compete – all in the name of a better product. To survive, agencies need to be in lockstep with their marketing counterparts in finding new ways to get the message out. “They need to get more integrated,” says P&G’s Stengel. “They need to go digital. Those that are making those changes are turning away business. Those that haven’t adjusted are struggling.”

Remain Adaptable. “In the face of competition, new technologies, and acquisitions, leading marketers are taking on change and keeping the marketing agenda moving in pace with their management colleagues,” says Andrew Tipping, vice president at Booz Allen. “Adaptability has become inherent in the way CMOs respond to new media, hire and train their people, and bring a marketing mindset to other parts of the business. Successful CMOs live these principles every day.”

CMO Thought Leaders: The Rise of the Strategic Marketer may be ordered at www.strategy-business.com/cmoreader.

About Booz Allen Hamilton

Booz Allen Hamilton has been at the forefront of management consulting for businesses and governments for more than 90 years. Providing consulting services in strategy, operations, organization and change, and information technology, Booz Allen is the one firm that helps clients solve their toughest problems, working by their side to help them achieve their missions. Booz Allen is committed to delivering results that endure.

With 19,000 employees on six continents, the firm generates annual sales of $4 billion. Booz Allen has been recognized as a consultant and an employer of choice. In 2007, for the third consecutive year, Fortune magazine named Booz Allen one of “The 100 Best Companies to Work For,” and for the past eight years, Working Mother has ranked the firm among its “100 Best Companies for Working Mothers.”

To learn more about the firm, visit the Booz Allen Web site at www.boozallen.com. To learn more about the best ideas in business, visit www.strategy-business.com, the Web site for strategy+business, a quarterly journal sponsored by Booz Allen.

About the ANA

The Association of National Advertisers leads the marketing community by providing its members insights, collaboration and advocacy. ANA’s membership includes 400 companies with 9,000 brands that collectively spend over $100 billion in marketing communications and advertising. The ANA strives to communicate marketing best practices, lead industry initiatives, influence industry practices, manage industry affairs and advance, promote and protect all advertisers and marketers.

To learn more about the Association of National Advertisers, visit www.ana.net.

Excerpts from CMO Thought Leaders: The Rise of the Strategic Marketer

Put the Consumer at the Heart of Marketing

“The consumer is moving faster than most companies.”

John Hayes, CMO, American Express

“The consumer was not at the heart of all our businesses even 10 years ago. Even today, A.G. [Lafley] still can point to one of our businesses and say, ‘The machine is the boss, not the consumer.’ So you can’t ever be complacent about that. You’ve got to always be on your toes.”

Jim Stengel, CMO, Procter & Gamble Company

“HP knows the top 10 factors that drive customer loyalty, and it measures them constantly. Corporate Marketing can then go back to each business and say, ‘Here’s where you’re falling behind in terms of the customer experience you’re providing, and here’s how it relates to market share and margin growth.’”

Cathy Lyons, former executive vice president and CMO, Hewlett-Packard Company

Make Marketing Accountable

“The most important thing that’s changed in the past 10 years is the measurability of what we do. New channels are regularly emerging that allow us to understand what it is we’re doing as it relates to acceptability within the marketplace. And we can do it with much faster turnaround.”

John Hayes, CMO, American Express

“When I first came to Yahoo, I realized how easy it was to lose the forest for the trees. I saw people being very accountable for return on a specific piece of e-mail, for example, but not as knowledgeable as they should have been about how that effort contributed to the overall health of the business.”

Cammie Dunaway, CMO, Yahoo

Embrace the Challenges of New Media

“You can’t learn everything you need to learn with research…You need to experiment….Experimenting requires both a great deal of creativity and a great deal of discipline to ensure that the learning is reapplied in the next set of activities that you might institutionalize.”

John Hayes, CMO, American Express

“Our people are evolving along with this changing media model. We do a lot more grassroots work now.”

Cie Nicholson, CMO, Pepsi-Cola North America

“To be a great marketer, you must be a great student. You asked what the most important capability was for the new marketer. My answer is simple: Number one on the list is intellectual curiosity.”

Cammie Dunaway, CMO, Yahoo

Recognize the New Organizational Imperative

“Some of our people come to us with technology backgrounds and others with agency backgrounds. They might be stronger in one area than another, but we look for people with both creative and analytical strength.”

Cie Nicholson, CMO, Pepsi-Cola North America

“If you’re not training – especially at a company that’s promoting from within – you can’t expect to grow. We need to be outstanding trainers and never be complacent about that.”

Jim Stengel, CMO, Procter & Gamble Company

“I often find that people do not have a grasp of what it means to be a borderless company, to operate successfully in multiple channels, or to understand profit pools and cost structure….For many years I’ve been advocating the need to organize horizontally around the value chain, as opposed to thinking vertically or within functions.”

Neville Fielke, former senior director of marketing, Foster’s Australia

Live a New Agency Paradigm

“We are moving from technology push to consumer pull, from push marketing to co-creation, from idea manufacturers to consumer experiences. If you have to push advertising to consumers, you are out of business. Advertising has to be context-relevant. And whatever you do, add value to popular culture and do not patronize the audience.”

Keith Pardy, senior vice president of strategic marketing, Nokia Corporation

Remain Adaptable

“I’ve never worked at the same company for more than two years in a row, because FedEx keeps changing. We have new marketing challenges every day.”

Mike Glenn, executive vice president, Market Development & Corporate Communications, FedEx

[On the inseparable relationship between P&G’s R&D lab and marketing team in tackling innovative approaches to diaper fit and feel] “Babies wear a diaper 24/7 for almost three years…But when you ask, ‘How do we know we’re better for a baby’s development than our competitors?’ – that means your competitive set changes, your market share changes, what you’re looking for in your equity changes.”

Jim Stengel, CMO, Procter & Gamble Company

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