Gone are the good old days when marketing was straight-forward and simple.  A marketing director used to be able to plan out his or her budget for the year and then spend to that budget.  The job was highly visible and seen as a major contributor to company success. However, the more hyper-connected and hyper-speed society has become, the lower the tenure of the CMO. Is this related? Some report that the average tenure of the Chief Marketing Officer today is little more than 18 months. Why is that?

I postulate that one reason for this is that marketing directors have unwittingly become myopic…siloed into a functional role. Cata¹ argues that “CMO's must move away from thinking like functional executives embedded in their own siloed departments and instead think instead like operational executives." 

Another possible reason is that marketers are still marketing in silos—in multiple, individual and siloed channels without a comprehensive view of the customer's needs and interaction with the company. "Integrated Marketing" requires more complex data analysis and marketers need to catch up.

A third explanation could be because CMO’s do not fully understand that they are now, as Thomas Davenport² says, “Competing on Analytics”. Everything, including mass media, has become measureable. Marketing is now about Business Intelligence along the full marketing continuum. Those who don’t adopt a metrics mindset, cannot optimize their companies’ marketing spend. I recently heard Hanssens³ make this point clearly.

CMO’s should be the voice of the customer, driving the company toward customer-centricity. Christensen and Raynor⁴ assert that “What customers really want is for you to do their jobs for them”. I agree.  Marketers must focus on the customer and must focus the entire company on the customer if they want to last.<sup>5

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1</sup>Carlos Cata, "CMOs, Stop Obsessing over the Tenure Stat." Advertising Age 79, no. 20 (2008). 
²Thomas H. Davenport, "Competing on Analytics," Harvard Business Review 84, no. 1 (2006).
³Dominique M. Hanssens, Daniel Thorpe, and Carl Finkbeiner, "Marketing When Customer Equity Matters," Harvard Business Review 86, no. 5 (2008).
⁴Clayton M. Christensen and Michael E. Raynor, "What Customers Really Want Is for You to Do Their Jobs ; to Make Innovative Products That Drive Growth, Companies Must Forget About Demographics, Product Attributes and Market Size Data, and Focus on the Specific Jobs Customers Need to Get Done," CIO 17, no. 4 (2003).
⁵Jennifer Rooney, "Marty Homlish Knows Why CMOs Don't Last," Advertising Age 79, no. 14 (2008).