By Thornton May
Futurist, Senior Advisor with GP, Executive Director & Dean - IT Leadership Academy

The C- Suite is not for the faint-of-heart. Things change quickly at the top of the house. At the beginning of 2014 the Chief Marketing Officer [CMO] was touted as the new wunderkind. Significant resources were being shuffled from other parts of the enterprise to fuel the Big Data enabled March to Glory. By the end of 2015 the same analysts who had hoisted the CMO up on a pedestal were now at the forefront of a mob clamoring to have them carted them off to the career guillotine.

How Can You Hate Marketing?
In the marketing and advertising industries [are they different?] and the national defense/security/intelligence communities there is widespread concern regarding the efficacy of ISIL’s marketing program designed to radicalize and recruit various demographic cohorts.

The fact that marketing can be a tool to get good people to do bad things is not news. Nor is this the primary driver behind the current nadir being experienced by marketing professionals and the marketing profession.

The fact that marketing can be a tool to attempt to “spin” a story [as Chinese regulators appear to be doing vis a vis the performance of their economy is not news. The issue is – marketing is not delivering on its promise.

The blogosphere is unambiguous in its discussion and lamentation regarding marketing’s many missed opportunities. In Episode two of the Digital CMO Podcast [22 December 2015]– a program aimed at the modern marketing community - the podcaster concludes, “Big company marketing is still very unsophisticated.”

England’s Guardian newspaper proclaims, “Marketers are now more mystified than ever about whether their marketing works.” Forrester Research has conducted research detailing that “43% of marketers still don’t know what works.”

The Marketing Opportunity
Jeremy Bentham, an eighteenth century English philosopher and social theorist introduced the world to the concept of a Panopticon – a place imbued with the possibility of being observed all the time. Our economy has become Panoptic.

Ubiquitous sensors and location-based data allow marketers to measure just about everything. Mobile devices provide marketers with the option of communicating with the customer wherever/whenever. And what are marketing professionals doing with these marvelous tools…

Are Marketers Good at Technology Management?
Analysts generated a lot of ink in 2014 predicting that the marketing tribe would control technology budgets by 2017. The evidence would seem to indicate that marketing departments have not delivered. And the rest of the organization is angry about this.

Is this because they made the wrong investments? Or is it because they have been too timid and not made bold enough investments?

There are infinite opportunities to do something with technology in the marketing space.  Has the multitude of choices essentially shorted-out the cognitive capacity of senior marketing execs?

How will your CMO re-establish credibility and trust?