“The campaign launched yesterday”

“Ok, what’s our ROI?”

Sound familiar? Our current world of digital has brought wonderful and powerful opportunities to marketing, while at the same time creating urgency for results that at times are simply unreasonable. And, creating undue stress on many CMOs in the process.

In an article posted by Adam Kleinberg, he references a study published by Russell Reynolds Associates. The study shows CMO turnover is higher than ever, including retail, where 48% of the top 30 retailers in the U.S. have had a change in marketing leadership in the past 12 months.

“In interviews with a dozen CMOs and CEOs, Russell Reynolds concluded that there were eight distinct factors – but if I were pressed to summarize them, it would be digital, digital, digital, digital, digital, digital, digital, and CEOs making scapegoats out of CMOs to buy more time to deal with digital.”

This is certainly not the case with all brands but significant enough to catch our attention.

We can’t lose sight of the balance between sales and building the brand. It’s more than click-through conversions. Within this research, some categories had up to 90% of sales influenced by the web, yet 80% of purchases are in a brick-and-mortar store. That insight confirms it’s the combined effort that gets the job done and setting realistic expectations and making sure that from CEO to CMO to agency, we’re all on the same page.

Things happen at the “speed of retail.” Just not instantly.

What’s your story? We’ll make time to Listen, and learn how digital is driving your overall brand strategy.

John Gielow, VP, Account Services