When I speak at conferences or in classes, people often ask me why I do what I do and, especially, why I’m evangelizing the Renaissance Marketer Mindset so hard.
After reading Simon Sinek’s Start With Why (see TED Talk) for why companies need to understand why they exist and after spending so many of my marketing years teaching and reminding marketers to understand why the customers need or want the things they do… I turned that question inward.
Why do I care to tell others about the Renaissance Marketer Mindset? Why not just hold it to myself and my networks? Why not save it as my ‘secret sauce’ for success? Why not just keep ‘killing it’ at work vs. spending countless hours talking to marketers 1-on-1, 1-on-100, and 1-on-1000? Why try to convince functions like Finance and Product/Engineering and CEOs that marketing matters?
The answer to all that is: “it’s important.”
I came from a Finance background where I was one of those people who looked down upon marketing, thinking (wrongfully, I’ll learn later) that marketing was something that everyone could do… How easy it must be to come up with the ‘Just Do It’ slogan for Nike or the amazing ‘Think Different’ Apple commercial, I thought to myself.
It wasn’t until I got into marketing that I saw how much thought goes into every little thing—every touchpoint and every interaction—and how much interconnection there are between all the other functions and marketing. Marketing has to come up with one idea after numerous parameters that should resonate with as many people as possible: It has to convey XYZ emotions but not too much. It has to be functional but not so much that it becomes commoditized. It has to solve this customer problem but be so easy to understand that it’s a no-brainer for customers. It has to mean something to someone who’s like this or like that or like this and that. Marketing, truly, is about connecting with customers so they choose this brand/product/service over another, even if they can’t pinpoint why. Thus, the best marketing is when customers don’t realize it happened.
The more I became exposed to great marketing, the more I obsessed over it—what it used to be, what it would become, why it mattered, who was the best, how to replicate success, etc. The more I learned, the more I fell in love with the function and discipline. It was the perfect balance of left brain and right brain. I could delve into the art of understanding people and influencing behavior and couple that with the science of experimenting, measuring, and automating.
Something to know about me: when I love something, I can’t help but share it with everyone around me. I annoyed the crap out of my friends and family when I kept telling them about the amazing marketing behind every product they wore, used, tasted, smelled, heard, and even felt. It got so bad I had friends asking me before I spoke with them whether they needed to prepare for a marketing news update from me. Overtime, I turned it off… but not on the inside. On the inside, I was living and breathing marketing.
Then, I noticed something. I loved marketing because I saw the craft behind it and the power it wielded overtime. (I was a history major in college so thinking long-term was a strong suit.) Yet, my excitement was oftentimes met with disregard and derision from others, especially those from Finance and Product/Engineering backgrounds.
I knew why. I had been one of them. Marketing felt like a fluffy skill because measurement was hard. This was also why so many of my peers and marketing leaders shied away from connecting what we did with business impact. I mean, how do you measure how a brand or product makes a customer feel when the best marketing means customers don’t even realize they were marketed to?
Because marketers have disconnected from major business metrics like revenues and started using industry jargon like ‘impressions’ and ‘share-of-voice’, our perceived impact has diminished overtime. We once drove all the growth of a business and mattered most in a company, and now, we are an afterthought.
In a 2021 survey by Raines International, 23% of surveyed Fortune 500 CMOs were unsure their CEO understood their job and 21% were unsure they were aligned with the CEO on key performance indicators. In addition, Raines found only 4% of Fortune 500 CEOs saw their CMO as the ‘most trusted member’ of their leadership team and 34% of CEOs had confidence in their CMOs. Those are low numbers.
With CMOs further away from the decision table (73% of Fortune 250 companies had a Global CMO but only 44% of them were in the C-suite; source: Raines International) and not being trusted by the CEO, no wonder marketers were having a hard time convincing leaders of our value. This has also translated to compensation. Looking at the salary of the CMO (top marketer in a company) vs. other C-Suite executives, CMOs get paid almost 2X less than the average of other C-Suite executives like CEO, COO, CFO, and CTO [source: Salary.com].
Another thing I noticed, 60% of marketers were women in 2020-2021 [source: Statista]. I believe the disparity we see with the function is also due to some of the challenges women face.
- Women make less. Women make $0.84 for every $1.00 men make in the same job [source: Lean In].
- Women don’t raise their hands for that job or promotion. Linda Babcock, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University and the author of Women Don’t Ask, has found, in studies of business-school students, that men initiated salary negotiations 4X more often than women did, and when women negotiated, they asked for 30% less money than men did. She also found that the women were much more likely to turn down an opportunity, as seen through a competition signup used as a proxy (49% of women signed up vs. 71% of the men) [source: The Atlantic]. Separately, in a review of HP personnel records, women applied for a promotion only when they believed they met 100% of the criteria listed for the job while men applied when they thought they could meet 60% of the requirements [source: The Atlantic].
- Women are in less business decision-making positions. There were less than 8% of female CEOs (39) leading Fortune 500 companies in 2021, even though 87% of those companies led by a female decision-maker reported above-average profits, compared to just 78% of companies without a female CEO [source: HR News].
- Women get funded less. According to Pitchbook, sole female founder companies got only less than 2% of VC funding in the U.S. in 2022, but if paired with a male cofounder, that funding amount went up to 16% [source: MorningStar].
Nowadays, marketers must wear many hats, performing a variety of functions that were once the sole responsibility of other departments. We must now act as therapists, understanding the deepest needs and wants of our customers; as customer service representatives, fielding complaints and addressing them through communication; as data scientists, connecting our own learnings to revenues; as financiers, calculating our return on investment and building financial forecasts; and as product owners or engineers, determining what tools to use, buy, or build. We do all these jobs but we don’t get paid for all that. We are valuable, and yet others can’t see our value.
Seeing all this made me so frustrated. Not only were we dinged marketers, many of us who are female marketers, are also dinged as women.
That’s why I want to change things. No, I need to change things.
My mission is to make marketing the most valuable function in a business, as defined by being the right hand (wo)man to the CEO and being the best paid function.
Working backwards from that ultimate goal, I know I have to start by changing perceptions. I need to get leadership to acknowledge marketing as the most important function by talking their talk and getting in those conversation. This reminded me of when I started The Techseries Company where we forced industry leaders and startup founders to come together to discuss about how tech disrupted their industries. At that point in time, industry leaders only talked to themselves and same with startups.
As in that instance, marketers are talking to one another, lamenting on our own fates… that’s no use. We need to talk to other functions. We need to market marketing to everyone else. That’s why we need to talk the talk with our leadership and other major functions.
What is ‘the talk’? It’s money—revenues and profits.
Trevor Noah made a joke at the 2023 Meltwater Summit that the only thing that businesses won’t back down from is making money. That’s so true. A business, by definition, needs to make money to keep itself sustainable. Therefore, if marketers want to become valuable, we need to talk about money. Why is finance so important? They talk about money all day, every day. On the other hand, we are constantly working with and thinking about the customer and the market, changing how we talk to our customers based on their changing needs… but we don’t talk about how our actions influence customers to choose us over others, which in turn brings in the revenues.
If someone tells you they don’t need marketing because they can rely on ‘organic’ growth, that’s a lie. Organic growth comes from the period of time before a customer made the purchase decision… and in those times, it was marketing who deftly guided the customers to our products and services because we knew what they needed and when.
Though we drive growth directly, we oftentimes can’t directly attribute our actions to revenues.
That’s why I developed the Renaissance Marketer Mindset—a new framework for marketers to think differently… like that famous Apple commercial who reminded us of all the innovators who thought differently. It has three pillars: (1) be multi-disciplined—both in terms of educational disciplines as well as business functions; (2) think long-term with investment in mind; and (3) balance the art & science of marketing. Each of the three pillars help push marketers one step closer to how CEOs think and one step closer to connecting what we do to what matters most in business.
Once marketers shift their own belief system and adopt the Renaissance Marketer Mindset, the next part is to show results. I plan on giving these Renaissance Marketers a platform to showcase their innovations and how they connect and drive revenues.
At the same time, I need to change how compensation is determined. Many businesses hire compensation consulting firms to benchmark a job function and job level with the rest of the market. So, if I really want to change compensation (a factor in calculating ‘value’), then I need to change how marketing compensation is calculated.
This journey is going to be tough and long, but I’m unafraid. If anything, I feel energized!
If you got through to the bottom of this post, then come join me in making marketing matter. Our function will need all the help we can get. How can you help? Here’s a list of thought starters.
Let’s make marketing valuable again!
~Rose
