The Marketing Fish Rots from the Head Down

There’s an old Sicilian saying, “the fish rots from the head down”, and that’s nowhere more evident when it comes to proper marketing focus and discipline.  If your  CEO doesn’t get it, as a marketing professional, you’re screwed.   Maybe that’s why the average tenure of a CMO is 23 months (I’ll hit 24 in about two weeks, so stay tuned). 

A 2004 study by Stuart Spenser indicated most Fortune 500 CEOs rose in their ranks via finance, operations, and marketing, with finance being the most prevalent for the past 15 years.  Most CEO’s in the study earned engineering degrees.   And according to a study published by two professors at the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas, companies with higher advertising budgets were more likely to have CEO’s with marketing backgrounds. 

Here’s a link to the study written by Raji Srinivasan and Robert Parrino:  http://www.mccombs.utexas.edu/faculty/robert.parrino/SP.pdf 

I’m a full supporter of the natural tension of divergent opinions.  I appreciate the debates among operations, marketing, sales, finance, IT, human resources, legal, dealers/distribution, et al that result in well-considered corporate decisions. Yet ultimately, the CEO is, in the words of a former US president, “the decider.”  And unless your CEO understands the end user, and the discipline/art/science of marketing, the company’s strategic and tactical marketing will be compromised.

In the past week, there have been stories in the WSJ of high-profile CEO’s behaving badly when it comes to understanding consumers or market conditions:

·         In a 2009 board meeting of a Big 4 auto maker in which an executive was presenting commercials promoting their fuel economy, the CEO was reported to have said, “nobody cares about fuel economy. When it’s empty, you fill it, period.  Why are we advertising something nobody cares about?”  Remember 2008, when gas hit $4 a gallon?

·         The now-former CEO of AMD (as of last Monday) “pooh-poohed the potential of mobile devices.”  The result is that other chip manufacturers have captured market share in this area, and AMD hasn’t.

I’m not writing this as an indictment of CEO’s, because many I’ve worked with listen, create consensus, and support product and service initiatives that result in better choices for consumers, new revenue streams, and margin dollars.  But to achieve these goals, it is incumbent on effective marketing professionals to present the facts—the realities of today’s market; the possibilities of tomorrow’s market; and the metrics that support the decisions in the middle.

If the fish rots from the head down, then at least marketing professionals can act as reality formaldehyde.