Wearing the Many Hats of a Modern Chief Marketing Officer

Editor’s note: This post is part of the LinkedIn Collective, which is designed to inspire excellence and success for all B2B marketers. The Collective will offer groundbreaking thought leadership and content resources informed by LinkedIn data and insights, our team of experts, and leaders across the B2B marketing industry.

The Chief Marketing Officer has grown in importance and influence in the C-suite over the last few years, including in organizations primarily focused on B2B products and services. 

According to the LinkedIn B2B Marketing Benchmark report, roughly two-thirds of C-suite members agree that marketing plays a powerful role in driving revenue and growth. Even as Fortune Magazine suggests that the CMO role is losing clout in the Fortune 500, they admit that the functions of marketing have always been preserved – and some companies that did away with the role (such as McDonalds) have since reinstated it. 

Marketing is as important as ever, if not more so. CMOs are now wearing multiplying hats. In addition to striving for creative excellence, CMOs are required to be experts in technology, people management, and finance and operations. In 2024, I believe there are huge opportunities for CMOs to be chief growth officers, chief customer officers (both customer listeners and customer whisperers), brand guardians, data leaders, inspirational team leaders, and frontier pioneers. 

But how can we ensure we’re wearing the hats and they’re not wearing us – or wearing us down? 

The simplest answer is for CMOs to invest in continual learning across hard skills and soft skills. Further, we must ensure that we are bringing our teams with us on our journey. As the proverb goes, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.”

Chief Growth Officer

In today’s boardrooms, CMOs don’t simply present media plans. They demonstrate agility, understanding, and insights into data, financials and creative messaging. They form close working relationships with CFOs and CEOs to stay in sync with their priorities, visions and questions. They take advantage of the fusion of data and creativity to tell and sell the brand story not only to the customer, but also to their entire organization. 

Like anything worth doing, it takes time to get new visions over the line. It also cannot be done without transforming your team – anything from major reorganizations and new structures to individual mindsets. Being part of any major growth initiative takes resilience and energy, all day every day – and that goes double if you’re leading it. To modernize their marketing divisions, CMOs have to invest, build credibility, and convince people that change and growth are healthy. They have to move the brand and level up the team, and none of those things are smooth, straightforward paths, just like growth itself.  

Chief Customer Officer: Customer Listeners and Customer Whisperers

CMOs today are absolutely expected to investigate and demonstrate marketing impact to the bottom line. That means understanding the data and the tools on a much deeper level than ever before. CMOs need to be on the forefront of the ‘death of the cookie’, for example, since marketing’s focus on and knowledge of the customer is a critical asset to their organization.

In many ways, marketing is the voice of the customer into the organization. We must listen and convey customer messages where they’ll do the most good. Similarly, if we’re too arcane or misdirected in our communications, then our customers won’t be able to find or understand our value propositions – they won’t know what’s in it for them. 

Brand Guardian

Is your value proposition differentiated? If I cover up the logo on one of your newest products, could it look like one of your competitors’ products? For technology, a lot of our differentiation is in the storytelling and the illustration of the features under the hood, better user experiences, and unique benefits.

At Lenovo, we’ve been investing in growth and transformation that still honors our decades-strong brand legacies. We’ve dived into new ways of marketing our consumer portfolios, such as in gaming, in Motorola phones, and in the Lenovo Yoga sub-brand. And as Lenovo built on the success of our PC business and expanded beyond hardware devices into key growth areas like servers, storage, mobile, solutions, and services, we've also transformed the way that we market our B2B offerings. This has meant playing to the strengths of our scale in having one of the widest technology portfolios in the industry – from mobile devices in the pocket all the way to IT solutions in the cloud – and engaging with customers in ongoing ways beyond transactional. 

All of this is in addition to driving short-term goals such as sales and promotions, because we believe – in fact, we know – the marketing function has a responsibility to preserve and protect the brand for the long term. 

Data Leaders

I love a story that looks incongruent on the surface: Lenovo working with Queen Latifah for small business, Lenovo working with fashion designers, Lenovo sending volunteers to a remote island in the Pacific Ocean, Lenovo helping grow millet in India. Critically, every one of these stories is backed by more than creativity – they’re backed by data.

In the LinkedIn benchmarking report, B2B marketers highlighted that their most important upcoming challenges are:

• Finding and acquiring new customers

• Incorporating emerging tech in marketing (e.g. AI)

• Boosting customer engagement and experience

• Proving value of marketing to the C-suite

• Growing brand trust, safety and reputation

• Attracting and retaining talent

• Budget cuts

• Improving data management, and

• Upskilling in a changing landscape

These are more than a list of challenges: they are critical opportunities for the CMO and for marketers. And if you look closely, nearly all of them will require marketers to interact with data. 

CMOs of the past could make their names on impressive, creative, heart-winning campaigns. Today, we need to do more. There might be a hundred years of marketing experience around a table (or a video conference), and yet not a single answer about why the data is skewing a certain way – or, sometimes, any data at all. That has to change, industry-wide. 

I believe deeply that marketing must be connected to sales and to customer insights. As part of my goal to accelerate Lenovo’s marketing transformation from device manufacturer to holistic solutions provider, backed by data, I spearheaded the establishment of three global Centers of Excellence (COE). The COEs – focused on Paid Media, Customer Insights, and Measurement – allow Lenovo to better tap into the strengths of our in-house talent and our agency partners, optimize our marketing structure and increase our competitive advantage. 

Team Leaders

The best team is full of people who are better than you and/or complement you – they're not all exactly like you. On my teams, we share a baseline set of skills. Then I've got quantitative analysts, creative stars, extraordinary strategists – people who seem to pack a week of getting stuff done into a single day. What does success look like in your team? How do you draw top-notch capabilities and competencies to the surface? How do you model what success looks like quickly so people can understand? 

CMOs need to build a good team with curiosity, empathy and vulnerability. Hiring for hard skills like adtech stack mastery is relatively straightforward. But how do you hire for soft skills? You can't just ask someone: “On a scale of one to 10 how curious and empathetic are you?” Would you date someone for 45 minutes and then marry them? Probably not. But we do the equivalent of this all the time in hiring and interviewing. One way to overcome this is by asking situational questions such as: How would you handle this situation? Tell me about a time when you didn’t know what to do. What is it like to work for you? These are great ways to see someone’s thinking patterns and emotions. 

Frontier Pioneers

When I wrote about a day in the life of a (new, remote) tech CMO in 2021, our world looked very different. I didn’t know anyone at Lenovo when I first started. I spent nine months on a screen all day, every day, trying not only to learn but to lead, while my husband, my daughters, and my dog wandered through the background of my home office the way they never would have if I had been at HQ. It taught me a great deal about being vulnerable and open in order to chart new frontiers together with everyone else who was in this boat with me. It wasn’t only about the work; it was about us as people. 

Now we’re facing a similar situation with AI, with category creation and uncharted territory. AI is not new to Lenovo’s tech portfolio, and in marketing, we’re already putting stakes in the ground. In order to share the story of Lenovo’s AI, we started from the proposition of: What’s in it for our customers as people? How do we bring meaning to our customers with AI and how compelling is it for them? How is our value proposition enhanced or transformed by AI? What differentiates our offering? 

As marketers, there’s an urgency to master the opportunity before you get left behind. But ultimately – I believe AI is about assisting and augmenting, and not replacing. That’s why I’m leading our teams to approach AI in Lenovo’s marketing function with transparency and open conversation; education and upskilling; and strategic, responsible experimentation.

In a very real way, I believe the opportunity is about using our empathy to bring AI to life. Right now, many AI features can be crudely packaged, robotic, inhuman. It’s a powerful computing tool, but we as marketers have an opportunity to create bridges of humanity when connecting the technology to real-life users and uses. If AI brings the speed and power to this brave new frontier, we bring humanity to the table – human insight, human need, human understanding. That’s a project we can undertake ourselves, and it’s a story we can tell our customers. 

2024 will be exhilarating, demanding, and filled with opportunities for Chief Marketing Officers. It will involve embracing change, nurturing dynamic teams, and leading with a vision and a story that aligns with the evolving needs of the market and the boardroom. As we navigate the future, let's not just carry our many hats – let's wear them with pride, knowing that each one contributes to the success of our teams and the brands we represent.