Discussion Point: What’s the Core Function of a CMO?
By Dom Nicastro | Apr 6, 2015 via @CMSWIRE
The Question
What’s the most important function of a CMO?
The Answers
Edouard Beaslay, CEO, Intelligent Brand Extension
Beaslay is responsible for his New York City-based company’s strategic development, operations and management. Intelligent Brand Extension is a brand development advisory company targeting SMEs. Before his current role, he served as global marketing and communications director for Pernod Ricard Winemakers in Australia. Tweet to Edouard Beaslay.
The CMO has a role both internally and externally. Let’s start with the external part of it. In the end the CMO needs to be the person who has a true vision for his brand and what the brand can do for the people outside.
The CMO needs to be very open and curious. There’s a tendency sometimes to be much too inward-focused and too much thinking of how to defend your ideas internally.
But the first thing you need to do is be very cognizant of what’s happening outside so that you can actually identify those opportunities.
Those opportunities today have to come through a real understanding of insight. If you don’t have that perspective — and that’s where we’ll probably come back to technology — it will be very difficult for you to really add value and you will just become, you know, sort of a reference point when it comes to doing some nice communication or whatever.
The CMO is not just about creating great messages and communicating what your product is. He is really about uncovering opportunities for the company and therefore having a role in terms of driving revenue.
That has been one of the key issues of CEOs with their CMO — they’re more into creativity, doing beautiful commercials, etc. But actually it’s about doing business and driving sales and helping drive sales and supporting sales processes.
That’s what CMO today has to be doing — driving revenue and driving sales.
And there are ways to do it in the short-term and also ways to do it in the long-term, which is the brand-building part of it, but a lot of tactical activation in the short-term to actually drive those revenues.
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