Even as chief marketing officers suffer from an overwhelming lack of confidence in their work, for the most part, their fellow C-level executives respect and rely on their expertise.
Through surveys of 575 executives from Fortune 500 companies, a group of Deloitte researchers gathered several key insights about how marketing chiefs fit into the C-suite. Here, as described in the Harvard Business Review, are the surveys' findings on how each executive office feels about the chief marketing officer role, from most to least confident.
- CEO: Chief executives have the highest approval rating for marketers, with nearly 50 percent rating their CMOs as "highly effective."
- CIO/CTO: Information and technology chiefs are also largely supportive of marketing executives, who they wish would be more willing to initiate collaborative efforts, but respect for their consumer-driven expertise.
- CFO: Finance officers, too, desire better collaboration with CMOs — they were the least likely in the C-suite to see their peers in marketing as effective collaborators, with only 23 percent of surveyed CFOs doing so.
- COO: On the whole, operations executives were among the least confident in CMOs' abilities to perform at a high level, and would particularly like to see them demonstrate a greater financial impact.
- CSO: Chief sales officers' ratings of marketing leaders were significantly lower than those of CMOs' other executive peers, demonstrating the most skepticism in marketers' capacity to make a financial impact and drum up support for their initiatives.
- CMO: The lowest confidence ratings for marketing chiefs, however, came from within. Only 5 percent of CMOs expressed a high level of confidence in their own ability to impact business strategy and decision-making and to accumulate support for their initiatives; other C-level executives' self-rankings average about 35 percent.
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