Marketing chiefs more challenged than ever before

"They face huge challenges, with two of the most important issues being connecting marketing across the entire enterprise and improving the alignment between the enterprise and marketing strategies.

"This sounds easier than it is and disappointingly, many marketers feel that they have not been 100% effective in managing their most pressing marketing issues," says Van Melle Kamp.

He adds that the marketing function also continues to rely on traditional marketing metrics, such as customer satisfaction and revenue, despite the fact that expectations of the role have evolved to include overall business enterprise metrics.

Skilled in several areas

"Successful CMOs of the future will have to be skilled in several areas. They will have to be able to lead the changes necessary to contend with a declining historical marketing model. They will also have to get much better at aligning the marketing with other key market-facing functions such as sales and customer service," he says.

He points out that marketing also needs to get better at demonstrating its value by connecting marketing investments to crucial financial outcomes.

"Marketing must be able to substantiate its case. There are so many activities that are lumped together under the marketing function but nobody really knows if they contribute positively or negatively. Companies know they have a need for marketing but they don't always understand why," he explains.

He says that marketers in general also have a very weak understanding of how to apply technology and, as a result, technology is underutilised.

"Unfortunately, there has been no real push to improve understanding of how marketing can capture the data and communicate it in effective ways to better demonstrate the value or non-vale of marketing efforts.

Technology a necessity

"Using technology to enable continuous improvement in marketing effectiveness and efficiency is fast becoming a necessity for modern-day marketers," he says.

To top it off, Van Melle Kamp believes that CMOs will also have to be skilled at leading and driving marketing-led innovations.

It seems like a tall order, but Van Melle Kamp says that properly defining what the CMO does would be invaluable in effectively managing expectations because at the moment, people don't have a uniform definition for the CMO function across companies.

"In the meantime, we expect the growth in senior-level CMO searches will continue to be driven by the ever-increasing role of the marketing function across the enterprise, combined with a widening confidence gap in marketing's ability to address these challenges.

"The profile of almost every marketing search includes someone with enterprise-wide leadership capabilities, someone who is instinctively results-orientated and skilled in adopting new technology. Above all else, someone who can execute," Van Melle Kamp concludes.