REDWOOD SHORES, CA--(Marketwired - Nov 17, 2015) - To help CMOs meet skyrocketing customer and boardroom expectations, The CMO Club, along with Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), today released "The CMO Solution Guide for Building a Modern Marketing Organization." The guide, which is based on interviews with CMOs and digital marketing leaders from major brands including Dow Chemical, JetBlue Airways, MasterCard, PayPal, Quiznos, The Hershey Company and Viking River Cruises, includes insights and best practices that CMOs can apply to build customer-first marketing teams that drive measureable results.

Marketing leaders are faced with a perfect storm of business, consumer and technological change that is exponentially increasing the complexity of every single marketing activity. In this new business environment, marketers need to rethink existing processes and embrace data, technology and content to deliver more meaningful customer experiences and demonstrate marketing's impact on business results. To help marketers successfully manage this transformation, the new CMO Solution Guide provides practical advice from 20 in-depth interviews with CMOs and digital marketing leaders from organizations of various sizes and different industries.

"While the number of tools and amount of data available to marketers continues to multiply, the age old challenge of capturing and leveraging the right data to create engaging customer experience across all channels still exists," said Pete Krainik, CEO, The CMO Club. "The first step they must take is to establish the appropriate organizational alignment to successfully create this type of customer experience. While no organization is exactly the same, this guide helps provide easy-to-implement changes that any marketer can use to drive transformation."

CMO Priorities: Acumen, Alignment, Agility and Accountability

While there is no organizational model that fits every company universally, four key themes emerged during the course of the interviews that informed the organizational decisions that CMOs make: Acumen, Alignment, Agility and Accountability.

"During the course of our interviews, we heard repeatedly how marketers could address key issues around acumen, alignment, agility and accountability and how these forces shape the CMO," said John Ellett, report author and CEO of nFusion. "The leaders we spoke with all emphasized how thoughtful organizational changes can help better position today's marketer to keep pace with rapidly changing consumer dynamics."

Acumen: To become more effective modern marketers, respondents reported that enhancing the skills within their department has become a top priority. From developing valuable customer insights through data mining to investing in content creation and the need for greater evaluative analytics, leading marketers are investing heavily in helping their teams learn new skills.

"We set up an analytics center of excellence to centralize and analyze information across platforms," said Karen Quintos, CMO, Dell. "This equips our marketers with the real-time insights and agility they need to develop customer-centric programs that advance our business."

Alignment: From top to bottom and across all functions, the guide shows that it is critical for all departments to follow the same processes and company culture in order to effectively engage customers across all touchpoints.

"Alignment is very important," said Rishi Dave, CMO, Dun & Bradstreet. "Marketing is evolving and becoming very specialized across a number of disciplines -- technology, data, analytics, content, operations, creative, etc. Marketing organizations need to hire specialists who are experts in these areas and create the processes for the specialists to work together in an integrated way in service of the customers. This was less of an issue when marketing was a general discipline in the old days."

Agility: To meet consumer demands for exceptional customer experience, the guide noted how important it is for businesses to have strong cross-functional teams and the flexibility to pilot something new to test and learn best practices.

"Pilot is my favorite word -- trying something new with the intention of learning and knowing it may fail," said Snehal Desai, Global Business Director, Dow Water & Processing Solutions, Dow Chemical. "People are more willing to support a pilot than to completely change the way they are doing things today."

Accountability: To demonstrate marketing's impact on the bottom line, the guide recommends establishing the right measures from the outset and instilling a culture of personal accountability around those parameters.

"I can measure everything today, and that is both a blessing and a curse," said Heidi Melin, CMO, Plex Systems. "The curse is you have to decide what the most important things are to measure to demonstrate accountability."

"Modern marketing has undergone significant changes in the last few years," said Andrea Ward, vice president, Marketing, Oracle Marketing Cloud. "To help marketers successfully navigate these changes and drive measurable results, we teamed with The CMO Club to produce this guide. The guide provides invaluable insights from marketing leaders at some of the world's largest brands and reminds us all to continue to focus on key marketing tenants of acumen, alignment, agility and accountability. These themes are at the heart of the Oracle Marketing Cloud, which enables marketers to activate the right data, in the right way, in the right channels at the right time, in order to stay ahead of their competition."

Additional Information

  • View The CMO Club and Oracle guide here.
  • Learn more about The CMO Club.
  • Learn more about Oracle Marketing Cloud by following us on Twitter and Facebook and reading our Modern Marketing Blog.

About Oracle
 Oracle offers a comprehensive and fully integrated stack of cloud applications and platform services. For more information about Oracle (NYSE: ORCL), visit oracle.com.

About the CMO Club
 The CMO Club is the world's most engaged and inspired community of Senior Marketing Executives who help each other solve their biggest challenges within a candid, trusted and sharing environment. Collaboration fueled by inspiring events and within the members-only Digital Solutions Clubhouse raises the standard for what is required to be a successful Chief Marketing Officer. With more than 850 members, The CMO Club is the go-to center for today's Senior Marketer for peer-based personal and career success support. For more details, please visit www.thecmoclub.com.

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