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Chief Marketing Officers at Work
This book contains interviews with 29 of the top marketers alive today. Most interviews lasted 60 minutes and are presented here verbatim with minor editing to ensure clarity and readability.
As CMOs increasingly graduate to the CEO role, the stories told by marketers like Brian Kenny of the Harvard Business School, Trish Mueller of The Home Depot, and Seth Farbman of Spotify, are a roadmap for driven marketing executives looking to maximize the potential of their organizations.
This book will help C-level executives and others who interface and collaborate with marketing departments to understand how marketing drives growth at both startup and enterprise levels, and how marketing has moved from art to science. Trends in digital marketing, analytics, and marketing automation have pushed marketing to adopt data-driven approaches that would make a CFO’s head swim. Marketing increasingly overlaps with business functions that were previously viewed as separate and distinct like sales, HR and recruiting, customer service, operations, and technology. This change in the status quo requires individuals in these roles to better understand how marketing works and how it can help them achieve their objectives, and the interviews in this book deliver those insights.
Who Should Read This Book?
• CMOs, other marketing executives, and aspiring marketing executives
• C-level executives
• Advertising execs, media planners, public relations professionals, digital marketers, and other marketing professionals
• Advertising agencies and marketing and PR firms
• Entrepreneurs
• All others who interface with marketing functions in their own roles
What the Reader Will Learn
• How chief marketing officers from leading corporations, nonprofits, government entities, and startups got to where they are today, what their job entails, and the skills they use to thrive in the CMO role
• How top marketing executives adapt to changes impacting their jobs in the areas of technology, language, and culture
• How the CMO works in an environment of ever-increasing collaboration where the roles of CEO, CTO, COO, and CMO are blurring
• How the CMO role is now dominated by data rather than gut decisions
Sample Questions
• The interviews in this book all started with the same question, asking how the marketer being interview began his or her journey and the path that led to the role they now hold. Here is a sampling of other questions that formed the basis for these interviews:
• Give us an overview of your career. How did you get your start and what were the steps that led to where you are today?
• Who are your customers?
• How has social media, mobile, and digital marketing generally impacted your company?
• What does it mean to build customer loyalty with your target audience?
• What does the structure of your marketing team look like?
• What is your philosophy on building and managing a marketing team?
• How do you attract and retain top marketing talent?
• What do you look for in hires?
• How do you make sure your team can produce the best results?
• How do you manage relationships with other teams? What challenges have you faced? What are some wins you’ve seen?
• Do you have any experience breaking down silos, and how can a CMO facilitate that?
• How do you make sure your goals are aligned with the overall organization?
• What kind of metrics do you focus on?
• I know there’s no such thing as a typical day, but can you describe a recent work day from start to finish?
• How is globalization affecting marketing for you?
• What do you see as future growth markets?
• How do you communicate value through your marketing?
• How do you make sure you’re in touch with your customers and understand their needs and wants?
• Do you have any favorite books that have helped you be a better CMO?
• What organizations are you a member of and what value do you receive from them?
• What advice would you give to yourself if you could go back in time to when you first accepted the CMO position?
• What trends are happening in your industry or with your customers that are affecting you?
• How has your role changed since you came into the position?
• How is mobile impacting your marketing?
• Is there anything in your background that is not directly tied to marketing, but which you feel has been beneficial to your role as a marketing professional?
• What does it take to run a successful marketing campaign?
• How is the digital world affecting your marketing initiatives?
• What kind of data do you have access to and how do you use data in your role?
• What tools, such as social networks or CRM systems, have been the most helpful to you?
• What channels are you using to connect with your customers?
• What types of marketing have been most successful for you?
• Are there new forms of marketing or trends in marketing you’re excited to experiment with?
• How do you keep up with all the different marketing vendors...
As CMOs increasingly graduate to the CEO role, the stories told by marketers like Brian Kenny of the Harvard Business School, Trish Mueller of The Home Depot, and Seth Farbman of Spotify, are a roadmap for driven marketing executives looking to maximize the potential of their organizations.
This book will help C-level executives and others who interface and collaborate with marketing departments to understand how marketing drives growth at both startup and enterprise levels, and how marketing has moved from art to science. Trends in digital marketing, analytics, and marketing automation have pushed marketing to adopt data-driven approaches that would make a CFO’s head swim. Marketing increasingly overlaps with business functions that were previously viewed as separate and distinct like sales, HR and recruiting, customer service, operations, and technology. This change in the status quo requires individuals in these roles to better understand how marketing works and how it can help them achieve their objectives, and the interviews in this book deliver those insights.
Who Should Read This Book?
• CMOs, other marketing executives, and aspiring marketing executives
• C-level executives
• Advertising execs, media planners, public relations professionals, digital marketers, and other marketing professionals
• Advertising agencies and marketing and PR firms
• Entrepreneurs
• All others who interface with marketing functions in their own roles
What the Reader Will Learn
• How chief marketing officers from leading corporations, nonprofits, government entities, and startups got to where they are today, what their job entails, and the skills they use to thrive in the CMO role
• How top marketing executives adapt to changes impacting their jobs in the areas of technology, language, and culture
• How the CMO works in an environment of ever-increasing collaboration where the roles of CEO, CTO, COO, and CMO are blurring
• How the CMO role is now dominated by data rather than gut decisions
Sample Questions
• The interviews in this book all started with the same question, asking how the marketer being interview began his or her journey and the path that led to the role they now hold. Here is a sampling of other questions that formed the basis for these interviews:
• Give us an overview of your career. How did you get your start and what were the steps that led to where you are today?
• Who are your customers?
• How has social media, mobile, and digital marketing generally impacted your company?
• What does it mean to build customer loyalty with your target audience?
• What does the structure of your marketing team look like?
• What is your philosophy on building and managing a marketing team?
• How do you attract and retain top marketing talent?
• What do you look for in hires?
• How do you make sure your team can produce the best results?
• How do you manage relationships with other teams? What challenges have you faced? What are some wins you’ve seen?
• Do you have any experience breaking down silos, and how can a CMO facilitate that?
• How do you make sure your goals are aligned with the overall organization?
• What kind of metrics do you focus on?
• I know there’s no such thing as a typical day, but can you describe a recent work day from start to finish?
• How is globalization affecting marketing for you?
• What do you see as future growth markets?
• How do you communicate value through your marketing?
• How do you make sure you’re in touch with your customers and understand their needs and wants?
• Do you have any favorite books that have helped you be a better CMO?
• What organizations are you a member of and what value do you receive from them?
• What advice would you give to yourself if you could go back in time to when you first accepted the CMO position?
• What trends are happening in your industry or with your customers that are affecting you?
• How has your role changed since you came into the position?
• How is mobile impacting your marketing?
• Is there anything in your background that is not directly tied to marketing, but which you feel has been beneficial to your role as a marketing professional?
• What does it take to run a successful marketing campaign?
• How is the digital world affecting your marketing initiatives?
• What kind of data do you have access to and how do you use data in your role?
• What tools, such as social networks or CRM systems, have been the most helpful to you?
• What channels are you using to connect with your customers?
• What types of marketing have been most successful for you?
• Are there new forms of marketing or trends in marketing you’re excited to experiment with?
• How do you keep up with all the different marketing vendors...
346 pages, Paperback
Published August 5, 2016
54 people are currently reading
287 people want to read
About the author
Josh Steimle
3 books313 followersA Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author and TEDx speaker, Josh Steimle generated over $10M in revenue for his businesses by building a thought leadership system that includes books, speaking appearances, and over 300 articles in publications like Fortune, Time, Forbes, Inc., Mashable, TechCrunch, and Entrepreneur.
Josh is the creator of The 7 Systems of Influence framework used by entrepreneurs, educators, parents, and community leaders to build influence and increase impact.
He's also the founder of Published Author, a company that assists entrepreneurs to publish nonfiction, how-to books they can leverage to grow their businesses, and he's the host of the Published Author Podcast.
Josh is the creator of The 7 Systems of Influence framework used by entrepreneurs, educators, parents, and community leaders to build influence and increase impact.
He's also the founder of Published Author, a company that assists entrepreneurs to publish nonfiction, how-to books they can leverage to grow their businesses, and he's the host of the Published Author Podcast.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 11, 2017
Great book! Personally, I love the way questions are repeated, because it allows you to see similarities or common tendencies throughout all interviews. As CMO myself found it very thought provoking and inspiring.
September 10, 2018
This book needed to exist, and so I'm very thankful for it. I learned a lot from reading it, but wish the author hadn't used a "standard questions" approach. There were opportunities for follow-up questions to take topics into greater detail that weren't taken advantage of, as well as natural opportunities to follow threads out of superficial depths. Compare this book to Gig: Americans Talking about Their Jobs and the contrast is huge. In Gig, we get to much better, more insightful content and better stories.
September 11, 2021
A decent reference for those interested in becoming a CMO or even those already in the role, but could have used further trimming. It's basically a question-and-answer transcription book, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but almost every interview has a section that is skippable and sometimes isn't really marketing related. E.g., the question about globalization in almost every interview usually results in more or less the same answer.
Farbman (Spotify) is an interesting opening interview and he seems to have a genuine passion for delivering helpful content to his audience using insights from data; he provides some good examples of that. I also liked that he acknowledged the importance of having processes in place, something many companies (especially smaller ones) miss. It was amusing to see that almost every exec had nothing much to say when asked about "big data". Everyone seems to acknowledge that it's a buzzword and rarely translates into anything practical that can or should be implemented.
There is, at times, a bit too much self-congratulatory number slinging going on in this book from many of these CMOs, such as Gagnon bragging about how he apparently scaled Monster from $10M to $65M in revenue. That's nice, but HOW? What marketing steps did you take, specifically, to accomplish that? He doesn't elaborate. He does later provide some decent insight on what he accomplished at Audible re: brand awareness tactics on social media, to be fair.
A lot of these execs' observations on social media were surprisingly thin and basic. "I think digital is extremely important," says Zynczak (Domo). Really? Gee, that's a helpful insight. I know that CMOs don't necessarily need a lot of technical knowledge re: digital tech and social media to get their jobs. But some nuanced observations/opinions here would have been more helpful. Some of the more nuanced observations in the book were from Chen Rekhi (SurveyMonkey), Peter Horst (Hershey) and David Doctorow (Expedia).
There was a lot of name-dropping of "M50/Marketing 50" throughout the book, and when I looked it up, I saw that it's an uber-exclusive clique with a $50,000 USD annual fee. Yeah, not sure it's that useful to mention this group so much in a book that is marketed to consumers. This annual fee is simply impractical for 99% of small businesses and marketing professionals.
Looking at the LinkedIn resumes of many of these CMOs, I would estimate that most only stay as CMO of each organization for a short time, say two years or so. I do question the utility of this. No matter how solid the performance, realistically, there is only so much that can be accomplished in two years. IMO, longer tenures are necessary to not just provide strategic direction but also to effectively follow through on implementation and results.
Farbman (Spotify) is an interesting opening interview and he seems to have a genuine passion for delivering helpful content to his audience using insights from data; he provides some good examples of that. I also liked that he acknowledged the importance of having processes in place, something many companies (especially smaller ones) miss. It was amusing to see that almost every exec had nothing much to say when asked about "big data". Everyone seems to acknowledge that it's a buzzword and rarely translates into anything practical that can or should be implemented.
There is, at times, a bit too much self-congratulatory number slinging going on in this book from many of these CMOs, such as Gagnon bragging about how he apparently scaled Monster from $10M to $65M in revenue. That's nice, but HOW? What marketing steps did you take, specifically, to accomplish that? He doesn't elaborate. He does later provide some decent insight on what he accomplished at Audible re: brand awareness tactics on social media, to be fair.
A lot of these execs' observations on social media were surprisingly thin and basic. "I think digital is extremely important," says Zynczak (Domo). Really? Gee, that's a helpful insight. I know that CMOs don't necessarily need a lot of technical knowledge re: digital tech and social media to get their jobs. But some nuanced observations/opinions here would have been more helpful. Some of the more nuanced observations in the book were from Chen Rekhi (SurveyMonkey), Peter Horst (Hershey) and David Doctorow (Expedia).
There was a lot of name-dropping of "M50/Marketing 50" throughout the book, and when I looked it up, I saw that it's an uber-exclusive clique with a $50,000 USD annual fee. Yeah, not sure it's that useful to mention this group so much in a book that is marketed to consumers. This annual fee is simply impractical for 99% of small businesses and marketing professionals.
Looking at the LinkedIn resumes of many of these CMOs, I would estimate that most only stay as CMO of each organization for a short time, say two years or so. I do question the utility of this. No matter how solid the performance, realistically, there is only so much that can be accomplished in two years. IMO, longer tenures are necessary to not just provide strategic direction but also to effectively follow through on implementation and results.
March 11, 2021
I really liked this book. Honestly was a little longer / had more interviews than there needed to be for me to get the gist but I got a lot out of it
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews