WFA’s Post

Transcript

I think CMOS need to be aligned with business objectives. We cannot afford anymore to operate in a bubble where we have our own KPIs that are simply not sufficiently correlated to the CEO agenda. So we've got a number of companies and a number of CMOS that have been able to demonstrate how marketing actually helps deliver on business objectives and not have a totally different type of relationship. With the seal at at a board level. So I'm profoundly convinced that this is about aligning marketing objectives with business objectives. I'd also like to ask to add one more thing is we're facing an environment that is seeing systemic changes. Yeah. So there's a lot of uncertainty, a lot of lack of visibility going forward. Marketing is helping us identify where the future lies and so are they time where companies have little visibility. Being able to work with the CMO and with the marketing team that are able to project themselves into the future and that are able to preempt the future aspirations of consumers is going to be an indispensable part of a successful company strategy. OK. I think to have an influence in the boardroom you have to have empathy for your colleagues and partners and what is in their minds such that sometimes your technical. Conversations, it's really funnel through that language. So you could be talking about media performance in a way that is extremely specific and perhaps technically challenging for those who are not practitioners of that area, but yet you can find ways of having that be translatable to anybody's understanding. And it's a fascinating topic. So why wouldn't there be interested and engaged in that conversation and actually be part of a joint outcome? That is having more effective media investment, greater media investment for greater performance of those brands, et cetera. Yes. I think marketing innovation is Business Innovation and Business Innovation is marketing innovation in the sense that it starts first with understanding what people need and importantly creating the business case and the business value behind that. And when you do that and show the opportunity and create the business case, it is unifying. It lines up the CEO, the CFO and all of your stakeholders, which creates the influence that's important in the boardroom. And my personal experience, that's how I've tried to lead from creating the case for diversity, showing the demographic changes in the world and the need to deliver against a diverse population of people, gender, age, size, etcetera, is a unifier and that marketing can uniquely provide and create that impact in the boardroom. So it's a. It's a tricky one, right? You want to influence horizontal influence without treading on other vertical superpowers that are your peer group. And I think by raising the conversation of what does good growth for the company mean across as a shared agenda, we will probably have more collaborative interactions, we will have more real conversations, we will have more authentic partnerships across the board rather than trying to do somebody elses job. Where we ourselves aren't doing ours that well. Yeah, I think, you know, the marketing function used to be seen as all those guys who have the, have the parties with the consumers. You know, I've come from a background in food and beverage. So it's always like they're, they're the guys that have fun. They're they're spending money. So they're, they're the cost center versus the value driver. But I think the power of marketing's influence is to say, listen, we can drive effectiveness and efficiency and be sort of equally responsible for. Both so demonstrating the return on investment of things we want to go into that really touch the consumer, but but you know, we can prove it that drives growth to the to the bottom line. So I think that it's it's really being accountable for both effectiveness and efficiency is how we have more presence in the in the C-Suite. So to exert an increasing influence of marketing in the boardroom. My advice would be. Threefold #1. Don't show up with some colorful charts and cool videos. How we brought that experience to life. But combine that right away will return an investment. And that requires quite some effort. Different tools research. Correlated with different data sets to really find out what is the impact. Beyond. Highlighting very clearly the return on investment of each marketing initiative. Major one, obviously. I would advise to pre align the peers or other members of the boardroom ahead of time. Get the input, get their doubts. Beforehand. And address it in your speech. You know you get the biggest. Um. Headwind. Already addressed, yeah. And that that really helps. And the third thing is talk in a very simple. Business language. We marketeers, we tend to love to use acronyms for all the fancy marketing jargon. Avoid that. Yeah, impressions and views and all this fancy terms about brand equity. But talk about growth, talk about impact, talk about. PNL yeah. And these three pieces of advice I I think at least in my case, it worked very nicely in my reality.