This role originally appeared on Business Insider.
Last December, UPS eliminated the role of chief marketing officer, replacing it with a chief commercial and strategic officer who would oversee product management and business transformation.
The news fueled articles and reflections on the end of the CMO. The topic sparks big feelings and chatter in the industry, including a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos on whether marketing is a viable career choice.
Now news that Starbucks is reorganizing to replace the CMO role with regional leadership is sure to launch a new round of speculation.
Vineet Mehra, CMO at Chime, told Business Insider that he believes CMOs have never been more relevant. He talked about how the rise of DTC has created a new perception of value and how marketers need to be strategic in planning their careers.
The following Q&A with Mehra has been edited for clarity.
There have been some high-profile examples of companies eliminating the chief marketing officer position. But don’t you see it as a growing trend?
Every time a CMO gets fired, or leaves, it’s like, ‘Here’s yet another company doing this.'”
It’s almost become fodder for clickbait. I’m really concerned that over the last decade we’ve become divided within our industry. And that we did this to ourselves. We’re the ones clicking on all this stuff, talking about it, and spreading the myth.
I don’t think any of this is true and my headline is that we are entering a new golden age of marketing. All the tools CMOs have always wanted now exist, in ways I’ve dreamed of throughout my career. CMOs are needed more than ever. And I don’t think marketing has ever been in a better position in terms of impacting business.
What has changed in the last 10 years to fuel this pessimism about the role of marketing and the CMO – is it a byproduct of the rise of performance marketing?
Traditional marketing tactics are no less important. Areas such as brand management, media buying, consumer insights, measurement and integrated marketing are all very important and will continue to be.
Many of these skills have been honed, refined and expanded by CPG’s original brand builders and growth marketers. Going back over 20 years, CPG companies were the academic firms and Ivy League education for any aspiring future CMO.
Then, in the late 2000s, DTC brands entered the scene, tackling growth, brand building, and go-to-market in totally new ways. DTC coincided with the rise of Facebook, which democratized access to an unlimited total addressable market and lowered the barriers to entry for new brands to challenge industry leaders with pay-as-you-go media budgets.
This ushered in the rise of performance marketing, although I prefer to call it direct response, as all marketing should be performative.
When performance marketing began to expand with DTC brands, it brought with it the proliferation of marketing technology, high-velocity creativity, a focus on lifetime value, customer acquisition costs, and short-term attribution, all of which have won a lot of favor among investors as the preferred and highest ROI way to drive new brand growth.
Brand marketing has almost become taboo, a shame for those responsible marketers who have focused on customer acquisition cost as the primary metric.
As a result of all this success, the CMOs of these DTC brands have been rewarded with even larger budgets, fueled by the long era of zero interest rate policy, which has continued this wave of growth, prominence and focus on performance marketing. .
It was almost as if CPG marketers, original rock star celebrity CMOs, and DTC marketing leaders lived on different planets – East Coast and West Coast – and eventually brand/performance became an important narrative in the industry .
So how do these disparate marketing paths come together? Can a CMO still strategically lead all parts of this fragmented universe?
The truth is, brand marketing and direct response marketing are all marketing – there is no competition.
All marketing spend should drive performance, just in different parts of the funnel that ultimately support each other. I call it “performance storytelling.” The more we, as CMOs and as an industry, can intentionally develop our individual and collective skills across today’s entire marketing ecosystem, the more our industry will thrive.
This debate about brand versus performance marketing is just one aspect. CMOs are now technologists, analysts, content creators, storytellers, leaders, editors, strategists and scientists. We build brands, curate goals, drive growth and build for both the short and long term.
We are firmly in the spotlight, every day, in every decision we make. We must also be technologists and early adopters of many new technology platforms that drive growth in our organizations. Just look at the rise and value we created as CMOs in the marketing technology industry over the past decade: We were the capital allocators of that renaissance.
I firmly believe that we will also be the first to widely adopt AI in our organizations, the next systemic change that awaits us as CMOs.
It’s up to us to restore the CMO’s reputation in C-suite and boardrooms around the world. You can’t blame anything external for tarnishing the CMO’s reputation: we did it to ourselves. Let’s resume the narrative, that’s what I say!
How have you managed your career to avoid being pigeonholed?
I believe we are living in the golden age of marketing. But to embrace this moment of extraordinary evolution in our profession, a career full of horizontal experiences, not traditional career ladders and job titles, is key to staying relevant.
I took a lot of risks and even took a few pay cuts along the way to learn as much as I could. Curiosity and the humility to admit what you still need to learn are key.
I spent the first half of my career in the more traditional world of CPG and have spent the last decade in Silicon Valley on the technology and consumer DTC parts of the ecosystem. As I watched the world fracture and divide, I knew I didn’t want to get stuck on one side or the other.
My first “risky move,” at least according to others, was when I was in my early 30s. I thought I had made it and achieved my dreams as global president of a multibillion-dollar division of Johnson & Johnson Consumer. And then, I got a call to move to Silicon Valley and join this company called Ancestry that was thinking about bringing this thing called consumer genetics and DNA to the world through a DTC business model.
Pay cut number two: I was the global CMO of Walgreens Boots with thousands of people in my organization and I left for a Series C startup with an 80% pay cut.
But things happen for a reason, and through the experiences I had curated for myself, I found the right fit here at Chime. It was one of the most rewarding and fulfilling times of my career.
Today, I’m a board member of a very hot AI marketing company and a couple of public boards, including a phenomenal data science ad tech company and a DTC brand, where I’m also a board member. ‘audit Committee.
This is all an effort to stay relevant as long as possible in my career. Being “dangerous” in the entire modern marketing ecosystem is very important to me, especially in a time of such fundamental changes in our craft and profession. I want to be part of the solution.
What advice do you have for those aspiring to become CMOs? What should they do to move their career in the right direction?
I’m talking about managing your career like a jungle gym instead of a career ladder. Horizontal careers are the new lateral careers.
I never think of myself as just a marketer. You have to be a P&L leader who plays a role in the marketing team, and ultimately, the team is about shareholder value creation, whether it’s private or public value creation. Don’t just call yourself a marketer if you want to be a CMO one day.
There’s also nothing wrong with focusing on the specialized careers we’ll need.
At Chime we are creating paths where you can pursue a career as a specialist and ultimately earn the same money as a manager. You once needed to manage people. But for some people, we want you to be the best on the planet with Google’s algorithm.
This is one way to eliminate this malaise in our sector: respecting all the different paths.