Marketing Directors and CMO's - a waste of space?

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane [you aren't alone]
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft a-gley, [often go awry]
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promised joy.

Robert Burns 1786

In this short verse, Robert Burns was pointing out what we all know only too well from personal experience - sometimes life doesn't quite work out how we want it to and unforseen circumstances or unintended consequences arise. Not that they need always be bad of course - Burns was just being a dour Scot.

I came across a great example of the law of unintended consequences only last week. As we all know the British Government and the Bank of England have been undertaking measures to try and get banks lending to both businesses and individuals in a desperate attempt to kick-start the UK economy. The irony is of course that since 2008 banks such as RBS and Lloyds are majority owned by the British Taxpayer. 

Have these banks been increasing their lending? Of course they haven't, they've been too busy frantically repairing their fragile balance sheets and looking after number one. But don't despair quite yet, because it turns out they've been handing out big fat cheques to their customers and they don't even want the money back. 

The mis-selling of Payment Protection Insurance and the ensuing scandal has led to the banks paying out huge sums of compensation direct to their customers. In the case of Lloyds Bank for example it's an astonishing £5.3 billion to date; in fact in the last few days all the major banks have said they will be setting aside billions more to cover PPI claims. The average cheque paid out is £5000 and economists are now beginning to believe that the glorious unintended consequence of this nightmare for the banks is that it 's actually doing what the Government and the Bank of England couldn't - getting money in to consumers hands via the banks. What's even more promising for the economy is that people are spending this unexpected windfall on cars, sofas, house extensions and all the things which will pull the economy out of the doldrums.

Two economists, Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner,  have turned looking at unforseen circumstances and unintended consequences in to a science. If you've never read their book Freakonomics, A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything or looked at www.freakonomics.com, it's well worth a glance.  A good example from the book would be the chapter about the extraordinary drop in crime in New York City in the 90's, much of the credit for which was claimed by Mayor Giuliani and his 'zero tolerance' policy, however, Levitt and Dubner argue that in fact it had more to do with the 1973 landmark decision by the US Supreme Court, Roe v Wade, which opened the way to legalised abortion. New York was one of the first states to legalise abortion and the drop in crime in NYC directly coincided with when unwanted children would have been coming in to their prime offending juvenile years.

So what does this all have to do with marketing directors (CMO's)? 

Well sometimes a company finds itself without a CMO for all sorts of reasons - they simply depart abruptly to pastures new, or they're away through long-term ill health, or they get seconded away to another part of the company, or they fall out of favour with the CEO and are quietly 'let go'.  In the last thirty years I've come across a whole host of reasons why the CMO is in absentia but on at least five occasions I found it led to one single unforseen circumstance and unintended consequence - better advertising.

Now let me try and look at this in a rationale way and consider why it would be the case. 

When the CMO is absent you usually end up dealing with the CEO on major new work and the first thing to say is that he or she has usually been with the company a lot longer than the CMO. There are various stats out there and they vary slightly between the UK and US but the CMO tenure can average as little as 22 months and the CEO tenure is between 8.4 and 10 years. I think this means a lot of things, not least they have a greater in-depth understanding of their business and a long term perspective, so important when judging good advertising.

They are also usually better at making decisions that matter - that's why they made it to CEO of course. After all they're making them everyday and they recognise that indecision is the cancer of business. Good ad campaigns are killed by committee, prevarication and being researched to death - dealing with the CEO means this doesn't happen.

CEO's also have a confidence to believe in and listen to their professional advisers and when presented with their advertising agency they treat them no differently, whereas many CMO's can't resist meddling and knowing better than the people they are paying to advise them.

Of course I've met some great CMO's who have been responsible for signing off some outstanding advertising campaigns, nevertheless I do believe that there are some important lessons to be learnt from the unintended consequence of better advertising when the CMO is away!