Chief marketing officer

A chief marketing officer (CMO) or marketing director is a corporate executive responsible for marketing activities in an organization. Most often the position reports to the Chief executive officer. The CMO is also the Chief Influence Officer of the firm. He or she must bring the company together as one voice.

The CMO leads Brand management, Marketing communications (including advertising, promotions and Public relations), market research, sales management, product development, distribution channel management, pricing, and customer service. The CMO is a member of the executive team and typically reports to the CEO.

The day-to-day tasks are often categorically different from one another, due to the fluid nature of the CMO's skill set: language is needed to stitch together all aspects of the company. Thus, in a given day the CMO completes tasks that fall into many different categories:

The CMO must quickly react to changing circumstances in the firm, and must shape the company's understanding of a particular product, sales strategy, or marketing idea. Each of these products comes from a different department, so the CMO must be a nexus of information: it is a highly receptive role, with involvement in departments such as production, information technology, corporate communications, documentation, public relations, law, human resources, and finance.

In the 21st century, Digitalization and the rise of consumer-centric marketing has changed the role of the CMO. They are now typically finding themselves handling customer-facing technology implementations in addition to the above tasks. Gartner analyst Laura McLellan recently predicted that by 2017, CMOs will spend more on IT than their counterpart CIOs. According to analyst firm McKinsey, few senior-executive positions will be subject to as much change over the next few years as that of the chief marketing officer.

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