Confessions of a CMO with Mark Ritson

0:06Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. Now, last year, I got together with my good friends at Worldwide Partners International, a collection of 95 independent agencies across 50 countries, to commission a brand new piece of research called Confessions of a CMO. We want to find out what do CMOs really think when they're not on camera. Now, this research has got so much great insight in it. And we thought, how could we explore some of the insights and learnings from it? And there is no one on this planet better to have a conversation about this with than the one and only Mark Ritson, who we all know is the most opinionated marketing professor on the planet.

0:43So I thought, wouldn't it be fun to talk to Mark about what we discovered about CMOs and what they're not prepared to say in public? This episode was so much fun. You're going to love it. Here it is. Mark, welcome back to OnSense CMO. Here I am, John. How are you? I'm good, mate. I'm very good. This is quite an exciting discussion we're about to have. I'm intrigued by this. I know. Me too, mate. I'll tell you what it was. This almost goes back to why I set the podcast up. So when I, in the dim and distant past, when I used to be an actual CMO, I couldn't say anything in public, right? Because I was media trained within an inch of my life.

1:17I had to stick to the party line. Doesn't matter what question I got asked, I'd bridge to the party line, that kind of thing. You were a good boy back then. I used to be, yes, exactly. And the reason I called this Uncensored CMO is I want to have proper conversations about what's really happening in marketing, right? But you've told the story about Cannes before. I have. It's where this all comes from. People are aware of that. Were you drunk when they interviewed you that day? I must have been. How come you were so uncensored in that moment? Do you remember? Well, it was the only thing I had to do all week.

1:43So I was unemployed at the time. Oh, you'd stopped being a CMO then? I'd stopped being a CMO. So I was completely unemployed. You got fired, didn't you? That was the thing. Second time that year. Yeah. So I was on my second firing. Terrific at this point. You'd been fired twice. you were drunken at Cannes. That's right. On the beach. And basically I'm on the beach and I'd done the one thing that week was some panel. I think I was doing a panel with Sir John Hegarty or something like that. And then afterwards, this journalist comes up to me from CNBC and says, oh, can I interview you about what you think about Cannes?

2:11And I made one comment, which was there's one person not in Cannes, the customer. Very good. And basically I went on a rant for about four minutes about like why are we celebrating each other's work and we're not celebrating what works in the real world. Very good. And that became the thing they covered. And he stops the camera, he looks around, he goes, you, sir, are the first uncensored CMO I've met all week. And I thought, there it is. There's the idea. Isn't it funny, eh? Those little moments of fate. It is, isn't it? Serendipity, you know, like chance, like, you know, right place, right time, and then it all comes together.

2:42But the guys at Worldwide Partners approached me last year and they said, well, you obviously have some great conversations on the podcast with CMOs, but what if you could ask them anonymously? because the conversations you have before you start recording and after recording, they're probably the hottest takes, right? That's right. So they came up with this idea called Confessions of a CMO. What would CMOs say under the cloak of anonymous... I can't even say that word. A cloak of what? That's easy for you to say. Exactly, yeah. That's easy for you to say, John. But what if they could say things anonymously about how they really felt and the challenges they faced and they weren't quoted?

3:17And it is, you know, we both know this, it's very, very different the minute you're having a beer, particularly with very big CMOs, the difference in their opinions is striking, right? Striking, exactly. So the idea was, how do you get all those opinions out there? You know, without putting names, it's a great idea. So Confessions of a CMO was born, and I thought it'd be great to kind of pick on some of those confessions and get your reaction to them. But before we do that, I thought, one of the debates that always happens in marketing is, Is the CMO role dead? Is the CMO tenure getting shorter?

3:52Here we go. You know what I mean? It's the same old thing. Every year we have the same debate. I actually thought I'd get some data. Very good. Which I'll run past you. And by the way, thank God you've done this because it echoes through the world of marketing. It's the reason we don't spend enough on brand management. It's the reason why marketing isn't doing well. It comes by the CMO tenure. So I'm genuinely fascinated by what you're about to say. So here we go. And I'm breaking it down into decades, right? So pre-2000s. So this is literally when I was a boy. The average tenure was actually quite short, three years.

4:24Yeah, no, I have to say here, remember, the average marketer has one testicle, right? And what I mean by that is averages really hide the presence of diversity, yeah? So in that average figure are some very good CMOs doing eight, nine years, sil-salah sort of style tenures. And there's a whole bunch of plonkers that get in and everyone goes, hang on a minute, we've made a terrible mistake. So we have to point out that, you know, that binominal distribution is my$20 word. Now, we then get some good news. So in the early 2000s, the tenure increases to 3.5 years. So starting to get some momentum, which is great.

4:59Yeah. Until, guess what happens in 2009? The financial crisis. The financial crisis hits globally, and it drops to 2.9 years. Now, so obviously, it's a reaction, therefore, to global cost cutting, economies going down. and one of the first roles that gets cut, the CMO role, right? But you would argue that probably was across the board we saw that cutting back. So it isn't a marketing phenomenon. It's a company's reaction crisis. And this theme continues, right? So what happens in the 2010s? Then the tenure grows to 3.7 years. So it actually gets longer. Which, by the way, if you looked at tenures of CFO, it's not that different.

5:37It's quite similar. And then, of course, what happens in 2019? COVID hits. And so the tenure drops to 3.3. and since then, this is the interesting thing, since then it's up to 4.3. Wow. It's actually now the highest it's been since Reckles began. I think there's two points there, right? So again, if you put my average point in, okay, average is 4.4 years. If we take the sort of the lower tier out that are a bad choice and they get rid of quickly about a year, which are really pulling the average down, we're up to six, seven years, which is as long as you would want for any senior management role.

6:12So I think you've effectively destroyed the myth that these short CMO tenures are causing any kind of problem. They don't exist for the most part, right? And I think the point I think you've made before as well is we always make the assumption, like me, they get fired. But actually, they sometimes get promoted. There are other outcomes available. Yeah. I mean, when you put it side by side with CFOs, it ain't that different. And I wish we could stop talking about it. So let's get into confessions of CMOs. So in the report, what they did quite neatly after listening to all the CMOs talk honestly about the pressures they face, what they said, the CMO role is not dead.

6:46It's just changing. It changes with the environment. It changes with the challenges they face today. And so what they came up with is this lovely construct of changing the M in CMOs. So the first one they came up with, chief mutiny officer. Chief mutiny officer. Which I love that. I love that as a kind of phrase. So this is one of the themes that comes out of these. This is one of the themes that comes through. So what they say, what they're saying in the report is the CMO has to wear many hats. One of the hats he has to wear is mutiny. So a couple of quotes here that I quite enjoyed. My job isn't to steady the ship.

7:14My job is to stir us out of stagnation. Very good. Which I thought was good. I shake the machine to create disorder so ideas emerge. I force change before the company makes itself irrelevant. All great quotes, right? Which is good. They've obviously got some good CMOs. They have, yes. And this kind of reminds me of, I think, one of my favourite quotes of yours that you made, I think, on the first podcast that we got together, which is your primary job is to represent the customer where decisions get made. Yeah. And organizations get very staid and very internal. The customer in most people's customer in most big organizations is inside the company.

7:48And it's super dangerous, right? I mean, it's a point that really bears repeating, right? If you understand marketing properly, it isn't advertising. That's a tiny slice of it. Our prime directive is to represent the consumer, the person that pays for everything inside the company, because nobody else is thinking about her, literally not thinking about her. And most marketers aren't either, thinking about their ads, right? So, you know, during COVID, the job wasn't to produce amazing ads. It was to, in the boardroom, get everyone to realize this is what's happening in the consumer's world right now, bringing that voice in.

8:25So for me, this mutiny point is brilliant because we're the ones that bring in that change and that perspective. And I tell you, I've seen this happen I would say dozens of times, companies will sit looking at a sales line over quarters or years and imputing all of this stuff about what's going on. It's like, dudes, it's just literally, it's just a single line of revenue, right? It doesn't tell you anything. You need to bring the consumer in. And to the mutiny point, that's a very volatile thing to do. But the volatility is real. You know what I mean? Like, you know, it's not that the company wants stability.

9:04It's that that stability is false stability. We make our money from the market, whatever the market is doing, we have to bring that in. And to one of those quotes there, shake it up a bit. I mean, the other kind of mutiny I found as well is the timeframe in which you want to create change. I remember doing a job very early in my career, I created this unit of, we called them seed brands. I took all the innovation and I managed them as a separate a business unit because what I realized is that the way we manage big brands on kind of monthly cycles of promotion we'd launch a new brand in one month and the next month is something else so I actually created a structure that looked over three to five years and kept focus on those brands rather than just launch and leave we kind of launched and nurtured and grew and it reminded me of that amazing Carl Mellor and Len Lodish quote of like if brands are built in years why are they managing quarters and I think some of the mutiny that actually CMOs have to do is actually looking ahead to where the organization's going and also make decisions based on the long term.

10:01I like that point. And the other element of this, when you get back to the mutiny thing, it's just that the company doesn't want change. But if the consumer is signaling it, you ever look at a conversation with an ops guy, the last thing they want is any form of change. You know, we literally want to keep everything the same. And the market moves and shifts around and evolves, right? And competitors make them change as well. So I think that mutiny point and disturbing the stability is a super important point. And it's only going to come from a good CMO. The CFO isn't going to shake the ship. Do you know what I mean?

10:37That's not what they do. Maybe the CEO in some cases, but the CMO's job is to say, hey, we're moving, you know? Well, there's a lovely nuance here that brings me back to MiniNBA actually, because people assume that mutiny is chaos, but actually it's not. Mutiny is planned, right? And I think the best thing that teams and CMO can do is come armed with the evidence to kind of create that change. Super important. And that's a really important point because people think mutually, they think chaos, destruction. It's not true. It's not true at all. Well, look, there's a key point. And we do talk about a lot in the NBA.

11:07Marketers use data to build their strategy. Great. But there's a second role for data, which is rhetorical, which is this is how I convince and influence. This is how I show everyone the evidence. Yeah. and you find a lot of marketers are great at generating data and using it to build their approach, but they don't realize when you bring it to an argument, it's like having the ace of spades in your deck because it's not like, here's my point of view, now the CFO disagrees, it's like, wumph, here's what our market is telling us. It doesn't matter what you or I think, here's the data. And not enough marketers use data to support the mutiny.

11:42And to our very first point about the customer in the room, like you can argue with me all you want, but you can't argue with the customer, right? The customer is the one point of view that no one can argue with and should unite everyone around the table. And if your data is properly collected, which is important, right? That's to be representative. Then you've got the evidence to convince anyone. Exactly. Now, I've got a little pet theory that I roll out every now and then about the real four Ps of the CMO. I always joke about the fact that, I mean, in fact, you said this to me once, the CMO is rarely the best marketer in the team.

12:14And they'll admit that. They'll admit that straight away, right? It's true, isn't it? And I always think the four Ps of the CMO are kind of people, planning, politics, and persuasion. You have to create the conditions for great marketing to happen. And that involves kind of picking the right people. It involves having the right plan. It involves persuading the organization what to do. But it also requires navigating organizational politics. More than anything else. I put it a different way. I say there's a lot more C than M in CMO, right? Yes, definitely. And that comes nicely onto the second point, which is now in the report, it's called chief missing officer, which I think is to describe the fact that actually the CMO's influence can sometimes go through an organization unnoticed, under the radar.

12:53Invisible. Yeah, in a way. But I think, although this word may not be popular, but I think it's about manipulation in the positive sense. I like that. Or you could have Chief Machiavellian officer as well. Yeah, even better. But it all means the same thing. It does. The political dimension of getting the consumer and marketing agenda through the company so we can do it. I mean, this plays out most commonly with what I call the question, which is asked of me wherever I go at every event. I'll do a talk tonight. This question will definitely come up, right? And the question is always paraphrasing it.

13:25I get it. I know we need to invest more money on brand building. How do I get the bozos in my leadership team to get it? And the answer is the CMO here, the chief manipulation officer, how do I get the rest of the organization to get it through the dark arts of politics and Machiavelli and manipulation? It is. Now, there's some amazing quotes here. I'll read a few of these out because I enjoyed this one. They channel influence under the cover of alignment. Very nice. Which I thought was very good. Very nice. Marketing priorities move through disguise as somebody else's strategy. Again, I've got a specific – I used to have a mate who was the chief branding officer at Deutsche Bank.

14:01And he would say, I don't even use the B word of brand because it turns people off. I just work out what their language is and that's what brand will be. If I'm having a meeting with the HR team, it's their HR agenda. I'm just, you know, I'm basically just changing the words. It's perfect. You just reverse, exactly, reverse into the language and thinking a strategy of who you're presenting to. I only succeeded if everyone else believed the idea was theirs. That's a huge one. I've got to tell you, my favourite example of this is I used to work for Michael Burke, who was the CEO at Louis Vuitton, but prior when I worked for him was the CEO at Fendi.

14:36And I used to do a lot of training for LVMH, and he'd been at one of my training courses. About three years later, I'm in Rome, and he's basically shouting at me, telling me something that I taught him three years earlier in the Art of Luxury Branding course. I always said to my MBA students, what do you think I did? Did I say, actually, Michael, I think you'll find I taught you that? Or did I go, you're blowing my mind with this information, right? I think it's a key point that the only way you're going to get these kind of people, particularly senior people, to do what you want is for them to think it's what they want.

15:09100%. And you have to suck up your own ego on this one. You just have to let go of all that frustration, don't you? Look, the way I describe it to junior executives is there's two games of chess. There's the game on the top of the table that no one smart is playing and then there's a game underneath that everyone's playing. So lose the game on the top of the table, right? The one underneath is the key one, right? Be convinced by someone of their argument that's really your argument to do what you want them to do, right? And this is a skill, I have to tell you, I see it in many French managers.

15:40The Irish are fantastic at it. The British tend to be useless at it. They are. You know? I discovered the Japanese are masters at this. The meeting, I learned this, the meeting is never the meeting. No, no, no, no, no. The meeting is a pure performance. That's right. You get the call afterwards. Yes, exactly. I learned this too late. Well, I have a Japanese sister-in-law, And I can tell you, yeah, you want to see how to manage relationships? Just study someone who's smart in Japanese. Oh, I see what you're up to here, you know. Exactly. I like these couple of quotes as well. The more fingerprints on an idea, the safer it is.

16:16And in nature, what is less identifiable is harder to attack. It's good, isn't it? Good stuff there. Now, I learned this on Lucoz. This is the first of my two firings in a year, just to get back to the scene of the crime. but we had reformulated because of sugar tax and I remember as an exec team we all literally voted in an exec team together to make the change literally holding hands we're going to do this together it's the right thing to do right side of history you can imagine the kind of bravado the moment it went south like the moment I mean it was like within seconds of it going south it's a marketing problem I'm like hey whoa whoa whoa do you remember we had that meeting we're all kind of hugging and going, it's the right thing for our future and our children and generations to come.

17:03And then, zoop, we have a marketing problem and John's going to fix it. It's so typical. I mean, and our remit, if you notice, when things are going well, the marketing remit is tiny. But when the shit hits the fan, we're pretty much responsible for everything. Exactly. Success has many fathers and failures and orphans, as they say. Another lovely little comment that came out of this section as well, which I know is close to your heart because you talked about it in Cannes, is consistency over time is what will keep the brand alive, which is an interesting quote, actually. But we know from the data that actually that's surprisingly true.

17:35No, the data supports it. And I think there's a couple of elements to that quote that I love. So, yeah, first of all, not changing too quickly because the market, you know, we want to change, as we said, but not changing for the sake of change. There's also a bigger one, which is over time, the paradox of branding is you have to change tactics to stay consistent to your brand and you only see it in my experience with a brand that's 30 40 years i was in switzerland this week with a brand that i won't name that's just about to turn 40 and it is around that time with humans and brands where if you've done the same thing weirdly you start to become slightly contradictory to your own position because what sexy and cool and you know sporty meant 25, 30 years ago is now often the inverse opposite.

18:24Do you know what I mean? Bread used to be healthy, and now it's like the last thing anyone wants to do is eat bread, you know what I mean? So I think there's that consistency point where the paradox of time and brands is that to stay consistent, you do have to change eventually what you do. You know what I mean? I love watching that play out with brands of a certain age. Yeah, I love Dove actually. Dove have done that really well. You know, they were groundbreaking 20 years ago with Real Beauty, but how they deliver it today with AR. Completely different. Totally different, but actually on. Still on the money.

18:56It's a beautiful example. Really good example. Okay, the next profile is the chief mood officer. Mood. Yes, so basically balancing facts and feelings. Now, two quotes here that sound a little bit contradictory, but kind of play two points here. Sometimes the room doesn't need more numbers. It needs to believe. And you only earn permission for the magic when you've done the maths. Yeah, I like it. I mean, we talk a lot about this when it comes to talking to consumers, right? We know about the power of emotion with consumers. All we're saying here is the same logic of persuasion and impact works internally as well, that if we don't make the rest of the executive feel, they're probably not going to be interested either, right?

19:35Yeah. And I think it's a powerful point. And we get this with B2B, actually, because one criticism I often get is, oh, that's great for B2C brands, John, but obviously in B2B, that's completely different. You know, we act completely rationally in B2B when we make decisions, don't we? You know, it's like, well, actually, the wiring of our human brains hasn't changed in many millions of years. I come down hard on it now. Mini-NBA, every B2B guy is going to say to me, oh, yeah, but, you know, these examples are from B2C. B2B is different. I'm like, listen, first of all, it's not. Second, the minute you go B2C is like that, but B2B is different.

20:08I go, just look what you've done. You've just put everything in B2C together as if it's the same. we're selling insurance, cars, ice cream, sex toys, banjos, you know what I mean? They're all different and so is B2B. You know what I mean? We can look across the similarities. So, yeah, I think, and what we've seen from the data is exactly your point, that in B2B, emotion is a gigantic, I mean, we rationalise it later, right? You don't get a chief, you know, technology officer saying, yeah, I bought it because it felt like the right choice. I'll make up some bullshit reasons to rationalise the choice.

20:41But yeah, the mood is, the internal mood, I think, is key. It is very, very key. This is one of my favourite quotes, actually, the entire report here. Marketing is the lightning rod for every irrational thing a company does. Everyone has a view on the logo. Yeah, no, everyone's a marketer, right? No one's a CFO, right? Even the CFO doesn't really want to get involved in it. But everyone's got a marketing point of view. And I mean, I tell you how I see this, especially in Australia. there's a certain is a real tragedy where you get a really good marketing team that have built a good strategy and a good set of tactics and they have one of those bozo CEOs that thinks he's an expert and it always is he and he comes down and says well I don't want that I saw this yesterday I want that and what's sad about it is really crap marketing teams don't care they go okay yeah we'll do that those really good marketing teams that have a bozo CEO are the ones that realize it's stupid and realize it won't work, but are kind of forced to do it.

21:38You know what I mean? So that lightning rod thing, yeah, absolutely. Everyone thinks they're a marketing genius. It does. And it plays out in some of the biggest stories from last year. I mean, you look at Jaguar, the Sydney Sweeney American Eagle backlash, even Cracker Barrel when they changed the logo. Like, President Trump gets involved in that one. I mean, it's like... Everyone feels like they have a comment. Everyone's got a stake in the marketing. Yeah. And the marketing, you know, the CMO has to respond to that or not, as the case may be, Right. So I think we talked about it before, but there's always been, I think, a response required.

22:10But I think we're seeing more and more smart brands going the right responses. Let's just let the storm pass. You know, it may be that it may be the wisest course. Right. The next one is chief meaning officer. Yeah. Now, this interesting one, because there's a role because marketing is so broad, it covers so many disciplines. There's a role for marketing to align the organization around why it exists and its purpose and then designing the organization. as well to deliver that. And this touches as well on the fact that I know you often point out marketing is often seen as one of the four Ps, not the whole four Ps.

22:42And there's a role for us to influence the organisation at scale and remind of its purpose. And more broadly, when we look at what brand positioning is meant to be, it's primarily meant to be what do I want the consumer to think? But there is a role in good positioning, which we can overdo, about this is what we stand for, this is why we're here, these are our values, right? I mean, you know, we talked about the work that was done with Starbucks a few months ago. And it's good work because it's very clear on this is the customer promise. But there's also four or five brand values for this is what we do.

23:17This is who we are. This is our meaning, right? And I think that without marketing, you don't get that. You sometimes get it from a strong founder organically to begin with. But at some point with scale, marketing has to kind of articulate it and give the company its meaning. And I think that's a legitimate role. And the CMO's got to do it. You know what I mean? And it's a bit of a sad one because I worked for Benefit Cosmetics for a very long period of time in San Francisco. And when the two twins, the founders, Gene and Jane Ford, were running it, they provided the meaning because it was running through their bodies.