Top marketers say they are too busy running a business to spend their whole time on communications. As marketers rise through the ranks to become chief marketing officers they stop doing marketing, according to the former CMO at Homebase Jo Kendrick.
Speaking at IAB’s Engage conference in London today (13 October) Kendrick told delegates that throughout their careers marketers spend time learning how to be better at marketing, try to understand channels and the development of digital but once at the top of the marketing team they “stop doing marketing”.
She said: “We do have a day job as a CMO but I’m afraid to tell you that it isn’t comms.”
The former marketing chief recalled her tenure at the home improvement brand and told the audience that the majority of that time was spent trying to run a business.
As one of six on the board at Homebase, Kendrick was “running a business employing 17,000 people, with margins and profit that were paper thin” and therefore the senior marketer spent a lot of her time in meetings “trying to figure out how to balance the books to make some money”.
She said: “There is very little time left and in small fractions of moments we get to be the CMO.”
Kendrick, who is currently the chairman of Global Radio’s Make Some Noise charity, was joined on stage by Amanda Metcalfe, marketing and customer experience director at serviced apartments brand Go Native to present a talk about the top things clients won’t tell agencies.
Metcalfe echoed the view that although CMOs are at “the top of the tree in the marketing organisation” they are actually “doing very little marketing”. She said: “We’d love to [do more marketing] but actually we are busy running the business.”
Her advice to agencies was to acknowledge the fact that the CMO role is not just communications and that understanding the business will help them to work better with brand leaders. “Recognise that that is what our life is like and acknowledge it and you will be half way there,” said Metcalfe.
Bron en volledig bericht: MarketingWeek