Christine Moorman is the Director of The CMO Survey and the T. Austin Finch, Sr. Professor of Business Administration, The Fuqua School of Business, Duke University.

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In Search of Marketing Excellence: Ten Differences Between High-Performing and Low-Performing Companies

January 16th, 2013

Marketing excellence—marketing leaders strive to attain it and marketing professors try to dissect it. For the first time, The CMO Survey-August 2012 asked top marketers “How would you rate your company’s marketing excellence?” on a 7-point scale where 7=one of the best in the world, 6=a leader but not one of the best, 5=strong, 4=good, 3=fair, 2=weak, 1=very weak. The mean score was 4.4 (standard deviation=1.4). Figure 1 contains the full distribution of responses.

Figure 1. Marketing Excellence Ratings in Companies

Over time, The CMO Survey will develop a longitudinal database and provide more definitive answers to the questions surrounding marketing excellence. However, using only the August 2012 data, I can share some of the performance, spending, strategy, leadership, and organizational choices/outcomes that are and are not correlated with marketing excellence.

To generate these insights, I classified companies participating in The CMO Survey according to whether they performed above or below the mean on the marketing excellence question. The high-performing group (n=184 firms) has a mean marketing excellence score of 5.52 (s.d.=0.66) and the low-performing group (n=170 firms) has a mean marketing excellence score of 3.22 (s.d.=0.88).
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Economic Pessimism and Strong Company Performance Promote Risk in Growth Strategies

August 30th, 2012

The August 2012 CMO Survey finds that company growth strategies will take on more risk in the coming year. Looking at Table 1, we can see that there two types of risk familiar to marketers—targeting new markets and offering new products or services. Combining these two, there are four general types of strategies that range from market penetration, which is the lowest risk because the company targets current markets with current offerings, to diversification, which is the highest risk because the company targets new markets with new offerings.

Table 1. Types of Growth Strategies

Similar to past CMO Surveys, growth spending over the past twelve months reflects a dominant focus on market penetration with an average of 51.7% of spending focused on this strategy. This is followed by product/service development (22.8%), market development (15.7%), and diversification (9.7%). However, as shown in Table 2, these figures are expected to shift significantly in the next twelve months. Growth spending on market penetration is expected to drop by 11.6% to 45.7% while all three of the other strategies are expected to increase by nearly 10% or more! These changes are consistent with a longer-term trend The CMO Survey has observed during this post-recessionary period.
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Why Apple is a Great Marketer

July 13th, 2012

Apple was voted the overall winner of the 2012 CMO Survey Award for Marketing Excellence… yet again. Apple has been selected as the winner or co-winner for five consecutive years by the sample of top marketers. So why is Apple a great marketer?

When Apple, Inc. (then Apple Computer, Inc.) incorporated in January 1977, its investor/advisor, Mike Markkula, assembled a 3-point marketing philosophy. Amazingly, thirty-five years later, this philosophy remains at the core of what makes Apple so effective at creating and profiting from loyal customers. This, in my view, is the definition of a strong marketing capability. Here are Apple’s original three points:

  • Empathy – We will truly understand their [customer] needs better than any other company.
  • Focus – In order to do a good job of the things we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.
  • Impute – People DO judge a book by its cover. We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software, etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.

Apple has used these principles to become the world’s most valuable company (measured by market capitalization) and one of world’s most valuable brands. Here are ten strategies Apple has used to become one of the world’s greatest marketers:

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CMOs on Economic Recovery: A Look at the Long Climb Out

March 20th, 2012

While going through my students’ resumes before class, I read one that listed “stair climbing” as a competitive sport. I had never heard of this, so I looked it up and found a well-established world-wide network of races. You can, for example, climb the Empire State Building and Gran Hotel Bali. Doing well requires strength, sprint, and endurance. If you are really good and perform well in the 100+ races around the world, you could win the Towerrunning World Cup.

All this talk of climbing made me think it would be interesting to plot the economic recovery using data from The CMO Survey. I plotted several key financial metrics as reported by The CMO Survey between August 2009 and February 2012 in Figure 1. What a beautiful sight! Steady and significant improvement over the course of 2.5 years to where we are today. These numbers are in response to the question, “Rate your firm’s performance during the last 12 months.”
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The Marketing Goals-Marketing Performance Gap

December 13th, 2011

The CMO Survey asks marketers to share their actual performance and future goals for each administration of the survey across a range of metrics: market share, sales revenue, profits, marketing ROI, customer acquisition, customer retention, and brand value. I took a look at what is happening with these metrics during this rough economic period. (more…)

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As CMOs See It: Dramatic Improvements On All Economic Fronts

February 15th, 2011

The results of the February 2011 CMO Survey are in and the news is unequivocally positive.  421 top marketers shared their views to create the following portrait of healthy economy-wide, firm, and job effects. (more…)

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