7 Quotes From 7 CMOs About Building a Modern Marketing Organization

Not sure if I buy into the whole 7 is the luckiest of all numbers thing. According to the Daily Mail, however, 7 is the most significant number across religions and cultures, it also appears in some of the world's favorite fictional works and a poll of 30,000 people revealed 7 is overwhelmingly our favorite number.

Regardless of where you fall on the Lucky 7 scale, it is by complete happenstance that I present to you today 7 Quotes From 7 CMOs About Building a Modern Marketing Organization. These all are culled directly from The CMO Solution Guide For Building A Modern Marketing Organization — our recently-released eBook which was developed in partnership with The CMO Club.

In bold is the topic for which each quote is referring to specifically.

1. Consumer Insights

"I think in an ideal state there is a dedicated consumer insights team, but a team that doesn’t work in its own little silo. A team that is interactive not only with the marketing team but also the product team, as well as with others who touch the customer technology. They have to understand the full circle of customers’ curiosities so they can put together a real, robust view for those who need it." — Patrick Adams, CMO, PayPal

2. Integrated Engagement Planning

"Ultimately [integrated planning] is a function that’s run through the marketing team. We establish the brand voice and try to create and implement consistency across all of our efforts, all of our communications channels and all of our internal divisions/business units." — Evan Greene, CMO, The Recording Academy (The GRAMMYs)

3. Content Development

"We have a dedicated team that’s focused on content strategy and on creating what I call the content supply chain, mapping out where all the sources of content come from. Do we have the content already? How do we create new content? Who creates the content? It may be internal, it may be external. What format does that content take? Then, how do we work with the appropriate teams to get that content in market? — Rishi Dave, CMO, Dun & Bradstreet

4. Evaluative Analytics

"We set up this analytics center of excellence. At the same time we did the same thing in sales and the same thing in finance so that we could create more integrated capabilities in order to drive much more consistency and connections of our data. Not too long ago we launched a marketing analytic workbench. Now we can take all this information from various platforms and put it in one place and analyze it and make real-time decisions about how our multichannel customer engagements are performing and make adjustments. — Karen Quintos, CMO, Dell

5. Customer Data Management

"We’re building a centralized marketing profile that is at the customer level and becomes the common definition used by marketing teams across the organization to drive their campaigns. Getting the data house in order, making it real time and managing it at the attribute level is what’s important. As is making sure that the experts who are really close to the products have the ability to control what’s most important to them in that profile. This allows
us to federate it out and take a much more efficient view across the organization, rather than be a big centralized behemoth that is too slow and ultimately doesn’t work. — Steve Ireland, SVP/MD, JPMorgan Chase

6. Alignment

"Alignment happens at multiple levels. First, you’ve got to align on what your model is and then be true to it. Pick one and do it properly and continue to talk about how to improve that model versus pretending you’re picking one yet trying to do another. Align the top 25 people in your organization with that and have them talk consistently about it. The second level of alignment is the foundation tools. Let’s get aligned on what the brand stands for and how to express it at a high level. The third level of alignment is strategic alignment. Let’s agree on what the strategic plan is, and as a consequence of P&L, what the KPIs are for the brands and the business units globally. The fourth level of alignment is what the brand plan looks like and what the programs are going to be in each market for each brand. The last level of alignment is how our teams are going to work together as one team to execute on that plan. You can imagine if you are off at any one of these levels the further you are into the organization, the greater the gap is. So we try to talk as an organization about the impact of what we are doing, even as to how that impacts you four levels into the organization. — Clive Sirkin, CMO, Kimberly-Clark

7. Accountability

"n order to be effective, marketers need to have credibility. Because they have to do a lot of leading by influence, they have to do a lot of aligning and engaging and evangelizing, and that only works when people trust you. They only trust you if you deliver the goods and are accountable; you do what you say and you say what you mean.
— Peter Horst, CMO, The Hershey Company

To get more incredible insights and thoughts like these, download The CMO Solution Guide For Building A Modern Marketing Organization.