Maybe If We Talked About Why Top Marketers Are Getting Fired, We Can Find Ways to Stay Employed

Old Navy, Taco Bell, Miller Lite. The list goes on of major brands cutting loose their top marketers within the last month or so. While the specifics vary, it seems that the general trend that Spencer Stuart identified in its first tenure report in the mid-2000s continues to haunt CMOs. Your professional life is going to be short and not so sweet, and I’m not sure there’s been a good or accurate conversation about why.

There’s been lots of talk about “expectations” and “alignment” (along with other mealy-mouthed buzzwords), but it doesn’t budge the performance needle. The most recent stats I could find suggest that far too few CMOs hold their jobs for more than three years; they get fired 25% quicker than chief information officers and nearly twice as often as every other C-suiter. But judging from the literature on the subject, it’s as if CMOs are an unappreciated victim class, doomed to suffer the indignities heaped upon them by employers who should know better.

On the other hand, maybe some top marketers deserve to get fired?

I know it’s a radical proposition, but it’s very possible that there are discernible causes for such termination and, maybe if we talked openly about them, we’d figure out more actionable and successful approaches to staying employed. Consider these three points:

go to http://adage.com/article/cmo-strategy/hard-cmos-jobs/229690/

“Working as a CMO can often be somewhat like having a 2-year old kid: you spend a surprisingly large amount of your time simply keeping them from killing themselves. One of the biggest problems for marketers is (and has long been) that the process of getting someone to prefer a particular brand, and make a purchase decision towards it, is a process that isn’t instant. The process of cultivating brand preference and influencing purchase decisions often takes many months or even years. So by the time the people make a purchase, the marketing people responsible for it are long gone. The impatience, greed and most importantly fear that are so dominant in the companies that employ marketers are making it impossible for many of them to do their jobs properly. And working for a publicly traded company makes matters even worse, as they have shareholders breathing down their necks to show immediate results for a process that really takes a long time. If bakers had to make their cakes in 5-10 minutes, we’d have some pretty shitty cakes.”

Your Dirtymind Creative/Production New York, NY