What does the CEO want from marketing?

If you are a marketer, you know you don’t need any more problems. The river of bad news from the marketplace doesn’t seem to stop – customers cutting their spending, delaying decisions, and even when they are ready to buy, squeezing margins. Within our own companies the news is not much better with layoffs and tight budgets all around. Even for the optimists amongst us, it would be a lot easier to get out there and make things happen, if we are clear what our own team, starting with the CEO, expects from marketing.

Harvard University professor John Quelch in a recent post titled “How CMOs Should Function in a Recession” discusses the increased relevance of CMOs and marketing. In his article, he states the expectations of a CEO, from his marketing team as:

• Understand customers & profitability better as customer expectations and behavior change, CEOs are looking to marketers who understand the company’s products to re-segment and reposition, if required, the company’s offerings.  
• Manage price & value perception Even while retaining the core value of the company brands, marketers need to create product derivatives & variants, that meet customers expectations of lower pricing in a recession
• Stretch their shrinking marketing dollars Do more with less – doesn’t need much more explanation. Greater accountability with the dollars spent, and fewer dollars to deliver same or better results.
• Go digital – a greater use of the internet Whether selling welding services or medical equipment, how can your company make better use of the Internet and the digital medium as a marketing channel and engage with your customers and build communities?

The full  post is available here. 

The best way to do determine what the CEO wants from marketing, is to put all that we have learnt about marketing, positioning and selling to customers, to work in communicating with our own teams first. Zebu’s PAIR (Plan, Ask, Innovate & Refine) method is one way to accomplish such alignment.