It’s Time to Reimagine Brand Leadership

Chief Marketing Officers, by any measure, are crucial to the world of business. They map business futures. They look at the meaning behind the numbers to reveal how consumers identify, perceive, and search for value—connecting the dots between user experience and fiscal performance. So why aren’t more of them in the boardroom?

CMOs know audience—what drives them to engage and what keeps brand messaging from getting through. They understand how to introduce new ideas and technologies over time to produce the greatest benefits to their organizations and consumers. That’s valuable for strategy, but their voices are not often heard in the boardroom.This isn’t due to a failure of imagination or a lack of commitment. It’s an access problem. There are thousands of seats on public boards. Current CMOs hold fewer than 40 of them.

That’s unfortunate — not just for the CMOs, but for the companies who need their perspective. CMOs help make data-driven corporate policy possible. They identify patterns in how consumers experience brands, and they curate those interactions around audience needs. CMOs create solutions long before they’re needed, designing strategies for content, branding, and user experience that are intuitive, data-driven, and agile. 

Because CMOs understand user experience, they ask the right questions about strategy in the boardroom. They can help improve the way decisions are made by connecting the abstract of long-term business goals to the tangible – the real-world impacts on stakeholders. CMOs are problem solvers who can translate the complex – like the expression of brand purpose through digital transformation – into products and services that consumers want.

When CMOs are left out of the boardroom, their insights  — and the business risks and opportunities that their expertise might identify — are lost. Here are three ways that organizations benefit from CMOs in the boardroom.

CMOs translate business purpose into consumer value

When CMOs sit on public boards, they make business purpose — the “big picture” behind brand stories — tangible. They transform business strategy and company culture into value that consumers can see and feel: better online user experiences, streamlined customer service access, and marketing campaigns that resonate with diverse audiences. CMOs ensure that brand promises are visible, true, and demonstrable. In other words, they hold the key to the authenticity that makes consumers want to engage.

Marketers think like creators, focusing on end-value delivered to their audience. That’s an invaluable skill in strategy

There’s no one better suited to making business purpose relevant and actionable in the boardroom than a CMO, according to Paul Alexander, director Johnson Outdoors and CMO, Questrom School of Business, Boston University. “We’re the ones who are charged with bringing the purpose of our companies to life,” he says. “I believe that CMOs can help board members and companies refine or define their purpose. But I think equally important is you have to do it in an authentic, empathetic, and logical way.” 

Customer obsession becomes a catalyst for growth

Boards focus on long-term growth and risk management, but neither of those is possible without a deep understanding of what motivates consumers to choose and remain loyal to a brand. While many organizations boast that “customer obsession” is at the heart of their business model, what customers want in the moment is never static (and is often conflicting). 

Businesses must be ready to adapt to their audiences’ changing needs, to quickly deliver the right mix of customer experience and brand messaging that keeps customers engaged. CMOs are uniquely suited to lead growth strategy. They think about the trajectory of consumer behaviors and preferences from the ideation stage of every marketing campaign. 

From social media platform strategy to customer experience strategy, CMOs ensure that consumers’ preferences are prioritized, refocusing their organization’s efforts to adopt new technologies and reach new audiences around what actually matters to consumers. That kind of insight can be transformative for brands in the boardroom. 

But customer obsession isn’t just about delivering the right messaging and user experience at the right time. It also means seeing consumers as stakeholders and making clear the alignment of business purpose and policymaking with audience values and passions, such as ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) and DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion). 

According to Cammie Dunaway, director at Planet Fitness and Red Robin as well as CMO for Duolingo, CMOs help boards actively transform customer obsession into policies that keep consumers loyal and enthused about their brand. “CMOs are naturally wired to think about consumer and customer behavior, how it is changing and how that impacts business strategy,” Dunaway says. “I think we have all really come to understand that a healthy brand is a brand that really understands the needs of multiple stakeholders, that takes action, doesn’t just create ads about purpose.” 

Digital transformation becomes a permanent state

CMOs are digital transformation natives. From the dawn of ad tech to the emergence of the VR metaverse, they’ve balanced their adoption of new technologies with long-term business objectives, choosing innovations that enhance, rather than interrupt, consumer experience. 

CMOs’ work as customer-obsessed, purpose-driven adopters of technology makes them an exceptional asset in the boardroom. While they understand the importance of technology, they also know what works and what doesn’t for the unique needs of their audience. 

Being user-first means becoming digital-first, and the CMO perspective is essential to developing a long-term digital transformation policy, according to Zena Arnold, director, EZCORP, and Chief Digital and Marketing Officer of Kimberly-Clark. “I’ve found in my experience that boards of non-tech companies aren’t always thinking about how they can be digital-first and what the right consumer trends are to focus on,” she says. “Many of the new companies that are disrupting older ones are the ones that understand how behaviors have changed in people — and how digital is crucial to everything that we do right now.”

CMOs can offer boards much more than powerful brand messaging–they’re proactive problem solvers focused on anticipating and removing barriers to positive consumer experiences. CMOs’ insights about consumer behavior serve as the basis for successful long-term growth strategies. But judging by their rare appearance in the boardroom, the business world hasn’t learned that lesson yet.

About the author: Margaret Molloy is Global CMO at Siegel+Gale, the global brand strategy, design and experience firm behind the “simple is smart” ethos, and the host of the “How CMOs Commit” podcast. Recently Margaret was named one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices in Marketing & Advertising.