In only a quarter of a century, marketing has changed almost beyond recognition. This has largely been due to the exponential growth of tools built on the foundation of the internet.
Of course, the internet has profoundly changed the world in innumerable ways, which makes it a challenge to limit the scope of an article on how it’s changed marketing per se.
So, rather than wander off into the immeasurable undergrowth of a near-infinite marketing jungle, I’ll stick with what has changed (and continues to change) the most: the role of the chief marketing officer (CMO).
Changing World, Changing Role
Not so long ago, before cyberspace existed (at least to the layperson), marketing was a 20th-century professional discipline that relied on channels such as print, television and radio. However, you could make a case for something resembling marketing as far back as there were markets, which have existed for centuries.
Back then, before the more scholarly types began to examine what compelled someone to purchase a product, marketing was simply called “buying and selling.” All you needed was good word of mouth to spread through the land, and your product would be a winner.
Word of mouth is still a bedrock marketing platform. It’s just that it will now spread faster and further—and possibly more honestly—by digital means than it ever could before.
While traditional media still hold marketing sway to a large degree, their impact is being eroded rapidly by digital channels, and it is this that has forced a new generation of marketing professionals to recalibrate and retool their marketing instruments.
While email marketing, SEO, social media networks and other digital channels are the new normal, CMOs still must have a pretty broad background. Good marketing is still good marketing. And good judgment is still a premium quality in a marketing officer. In fact, soft skills like that are possibly of more value to C-suite executives than ever before. Someone has to make sense of the firestorm of data by which most decisions are now made for product positioning or messaging.
The issue is that there is a lot more data, and it arrives almost instantaneously. Consider the legendary Pony Express horseback mail delivery service of the Old West. To send a letter from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California, nearly 2,000 miles apart, required 10 days of almost non-stop riding. To cover the same distance today with an email or social post takes two-tenths of a second and costs nothing except the time invested in crafting it, but that’s highly valuable time, and CMOs shouldn’t place less value on such platforms or they could see their job title changing very quickly.
In fact, even calling them a CMO has become something of a misnomer, because the role is changing dramatically.
Prioritizing Good Instincts And Judgment
Interestingly, the evolution of the CMO is largely the result of the increasing value placed by senior-level business executives on their senior marketing and sales communicators’ soft skills ( i.e., instincts and judgment). Albeit guided by massive volumes of data about an audience, the ability to understand and “feel” what makes an audience tick is what makes CMOs invaluable.
However, that level of responsibility also makes marketers more accountable for their decisions and actions, which by default drives them more to the center of an organization’s responsibility structure, but in a different way than before. The “buck” used to stop a little higher. Today, the “buck” lands firmly on the marketer’s desk, and with CMOs having the shortest average executive tenure in the U.S., they need to sharply refine their soft skills.
Whether the title of CMO remains for a while longer or not, many feel that the role will ascend in status and importance in most corporate boardrooms.
As aspects such as privacy and data protection, data integration, video marketing, mobile-first, and artificial intelligence and automation continue to gain currency, the value of human judgment, perhaps ironically, will grow in importance alongside. That’s because the real-world experience of marketing professionals—their secret sauce, if you will—is the ability to provide contextual and situational thinking that is still the preserve of the human mind.
Focusing On Agility Amid The Rise Of AI
Other skills that experienced marketing professionals are—or should be—good at are leadership and motivation. The advent of AI is, by its nature, uncharted territory, and it’s often a wilderness for the indecisive and weak-willed. Good marketers know their market and know their minds, through experience, instinct or, ideally, a combination of both.
However, that means keeping up with AI, which tends to learn fast. Matching that pace will be no small feat. Misinformation can now spread much, much faster than it ever could in the day of whispers and market-square gossip, so it can be a challenge to ensure the right marketing message reaches, and remains, with the right audience. That suggests that while instinct and intelligence are still the weapons of choice for modern marketers, a renewed and improved focus on agility to combat the equally agile opposition will be the differentiator in human versus machine marketing.
What Does All This Mean For CMOs?
As intimidating as the emergence of AI-driven marketing may seem, it is vital for CMOs to understand that humans still have the upper hand and can use AI data analysis as a tool to augment and improve the efficiency, accuracy and ultimate decision making of a marketing campaign.
Despite the rapid changes AI has brought to the role of CMO, there is no need to panic. Smart organizations will be running trials and tests to keep up to speed with the latest AI technology, and understand the benefits for their particular situation: their audience, market and products or services. Each successful trial will drive changes in the way the marketing function operates, and this iterative approach will prove to be the most agile way of taking advantage of AI without getting carried away by the hype.
See this article on Forbes