Marketers in the Boardroom

MARKETERS IN
THE BOARDROOM
In association with
Modern Marketing Actionable Insights Series

2
The aim of this Econsultancy research, produced in
partnership with Oracle Marketing Cloud, is to explore the
role of the marketer on the board. At a time where business
is more data-driven than ever, how can the marketer help
their fellow business leaders put the customer at the centre
of the business to deliver sustainable, long-term growth that
satisfies every stakeholder?
The methodology involved two main phases:
Phase 1: Desk research to identify relevant issues and
opportunities for marketing at board level; examining the
current leadership landscape and how it is evolving.
Phase 2: A series of in-depth interviews with a number
of senior marketers, the majority of whom are currently
members of leadership or executive boards.
We would like to thank the following for their contributions to
this report:
• Pete Markey, CMO, The Post Office (UK)
• Philip Almond, CMO, BBC Audiences (UK)
• Alex Aiken, CMO, UK Government
• Sholto Douglas-Home, CMO, Hays (UK)
• Barnaby Dawe, Global Chief Marketing Officer,
Just Eat (Global)
• Randall Rozin, Global Director, Brand Management and
Marketing Communications, Dow Corning (US)
• Evan Greene, CMO, The Grammys (US)
• Bjorn Sprengers, CMO, PropertyGuru (APAC)
• Julie C Lyle, Chairman of the Board; CMO in transition
The Global Retail Marketing Association (US)
ABOUT THIS RESEARCH
Published by Econsultancy in association withMarketers in the Boardroom
CONTENTS
Foreword by Oracle Marketing Cloud 3
1. Introduction: The marketing leadership landscape 4
2. Why do we need marketers on the board? 6
3. How to gain a seat on the board 9
4. Board and marketer in harmony 15
5. The future for marketing on the board 18
6. Actionable insights: steps to be taken today 20
About Econsultancy 22
About Oracle Marketing Cloud 22

3Marketers in the Boardroom Published by Econsultancy in association with
Credibility in the boardroom is measured in hard numbers.
For marketers, earning a spot alongside the CEO and CFO
comes down to being able to demonstrate how they add
value to the business in terms that decision-makers can
easily understand.
We’ve seen a growing number of CMOs join the executive
ranks of leading companies in recent years as businesses
understand that marketers are harnessing the power of
customer data and digital technologies and driving the
customer experience with the brand.
The value of marketing in driving revenue is undeniable, and
as such it’s time marketers solidify their role next to other
executive decision-makers to drive business strategies. It is
with that in mind that Econsultancy has dedicated this latest
report to determining where progress stands so far, what
continues to hold marketers back, and how marketing leaders
can better highlight their contribution to the business to
accelerate their rise to the boardroom.
The first step for CMOs is to gain credibility for the positive
impact that marketing activities have on sales, financial
performance and the customer experience. To do this
CMOs need to ensure they can speak the right language. As
mentioned, concrete figures are the currency of boardroom
decision-making and CMOs must be able to clearly discuss
what they do in terms of its financial and strategic impact to
play an active role in key decision-making.
The rise of digital technologies has also impacted the ability
for marketers rise to prominence in the wider business. As
the custodians of data, analytics and customer touchpoints,
marketers are in an ideal position to establish themselves
as growth levers and strengthen their position on the board
– so long as they can make clear the link between the
engagement with customers, the insights they uncover and
their implications for the wider business.
This will require them to think beyond marketing and build
stronger relationships with their other Line of Business
leaders. They must also stay abreast of their industry’s
competitive landscape, not just in terms of other companies’
marketing campaigns and strategies but also with regards to
what their business is doing strategically.
The role of today’s CMO is all-encompassing. It requires
them to be part artist – leading their teams to develop
inspiring campaigns; part scientist – analysing and uncovering
value from the huge volumes of valuable data they collect;
and part politician – building relationships and becoming great
communicators. As Econsultancy’s research also shows, this
last role remains one of the hardest for marketers to inhabit
as they adjust to making decisions based on their market
value rather than exclusively on their impact on a particular
campaign.
Andrea Ward
Vice President of Marketing
Oracle Marketing Cloud
FOREWORD BY ORACLE
MARKETING CLOUD:
IT’S TIME WE STOP GETTING
LOST IN TRANSLATION

1. INTRODUCTION: THE MARKETING
LEADERSHIP LANDSCAPE
The tide is most definitely on the turn. Gone are the days
when the primary qualification for a board-level appointment
was a lifelong dedication to accountancy and chasing
the shareholder. Today’s boards want to be described
as visionary, cutting edge, agile and forward-thinking. To
manage long-term growth in a rapidly changing environment,
they are seeking professionals from all walks of life.
At the vanguard of the most progressive boards is the
marketer. It is no exaggeration to say that the companies
garnering the most attention, most column inches and
inevitably, the most customers are led wholly or in part by
executives with some kind of marketing background. And
this in itself is a broad definition. Marketing is no longer what
was once rather uncharitably referred to as ‘the colouring in
department’. It is a data-driven, digitally expert, strategy-led
discipline with more than one eye on the bottom line, shifting
it away from cost-centre perceptions and into growth-centre
reality.
“Chief marketing officers are being challenged to fortify their
positions, expand authority and assert ownership of critical
leadership roles in their organisations,” stated Donovan
Neale-May, Executive Director of the CMO Council. “A true
CMO must be the CEO-in-waiting, groomed in all aspects of
the business and the value-setter for the organisation. Many
aspire, but few make it to the corner office. But as the CMO
rises to the realities and requirements of the new mandate of
the CMO, this will change.”1
That said, for many the pace of change is simply not fast
enough. For every claim of customer centricity by a company,
there is not necessarily a marketer at the heart driving the
strategy.
Andy Duncan, speaking at ThinkBox 2015 in September
2015 addressed the issue that the number of marketers on
the board is growing – slowly: “Of the Fortune 1,000 US
companies, only 34 marketing directors sit on the executive
board. On the FTSE 100, this number is only slightly better.”2
Indeed, according to a survey by Spencer Stuart, in 2011 only
14% of FTSE 100 CEOs had a marketing background but
this had grown to 21% in 2015. Conversely, in 2011, 53% of
CEOs had a finance background but this dropped to 32% by
January 20153
.
1 http://www.cmocouncil.org/apac/press-detail.php?id=4993
2 http://www.marketingweek.com/2015/09/30/why-marketers-are-failing-to-get-a-place-in-the-boardroom/
3 http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/article/1330862/marketers-boardroom-door-open-step-inside

Of Marketing Week’s Vision 100, 34 were members of their
company’s executive or leadership boards although not all of
these were in marketing positions with those such as Andy
Duncan of Camelot, Jill McDonald of Halfords and Martin
Glenn of The Football Association all occupying CEO roles.
Marketers are also beginning to occupy non-executive
positions outside their ‘day job’. Drinks manufacturer
Diageo brought Facebook’s EMEA vice president Nicola
Mendelsohn, former executive director of independent
agency group, Karmarama, onto the board as a non-executive
director and will also join the company’s audit, nomination
and remuneration committees. She already occupies
Facebook’s most senior role outside the US and this
appointment is a signal that companies are particularly keen
to harness the power of data and digital at a high level.
Bringing marketers to the board is largely a global
phenomenon with both European and North American
companies seeing marketers making inroads at the top level.
However the rest of world picture is a little more fragmented.
In Australia, a brief survey of the top 10 companies as ranked
by Business Insider4
, marketing experience is making it
to both board of directors and executive leadership levels,
however, very rarely is this in the form of a single marketing
director or CMO. Typically it involves someone with a
management consulting background who has overseen
marketing strategy.
In China in 20115
David Roman was heralded as bringing
the wind of change to technology company, Lenovo, as
a marketer taking over the reins from finance and sales
executives. But in the vast majority of cases, the latter is
still the norm on both boards of directors and the executive
leadership board.
Australian marketers have been identified as pulling away
from other nations in the region in terms of marketing skill
and development. With digital and data at the centre of
establishing the marketer’s path to board status, Australia is
noted as placing far greater emphasis on this than regions
such as Singapore and India (The Australian, Sept 20146
) with
52% of organisations placing their chief marketing executives
in charge of digital marketing strategy compared to the
regional average of 39%. China and Korea are highlighted as
using data only as a reporting rather than strategic tool.
However, digital-first companies are leading the way in the
West for accommodating the marketer at board level.
It follows that the APAC region, with a high digital adoption
overall and a strongly mobile- and social-first approach to the
customer, it may not be long before we see the region catch
up and perhaps even overtake the US and Europe with a
marketing-centric board make-up.
4 http://www.businessinsider.com.au/here-are-australias-top-100-companies-and-how-they-performed-in-2014-2015-3
5 http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/article/1106569/chinese-coming
6 http://www.theaustralian.com.au/media/australia-a-skills-hub-in-digital-marketing/story-e6frg996-1227069065781
“In South East Asia you are dealing with some dynamics that
many marketers would struggle with if you weren’t able to do
some of the dirty work. One important difference is the talent
gap in leadership and below leadership and the second is the
labour crunch. We are experiencing far higher turnover of staff
in South East Asia than in Western markets. Many times, your
team is going to be understaffed, making it extra challenging to
strengthen Marketing fundamentals”
Bjorn Sprengers, PropertyGuru
“Context is important. There is a reason why there are more
marketers on boards in digital companies than others. Here,
marketing has been positioned more upstream in the conversion
funnel,”
This paper looks at the compelling reasons to
have marketers at the most senior levels of the
organisation; what marketers need to do to attain
this level and what the implications are for the
company as a whole.

2. WHY DO WE NEED MARKETERS
ON THE BOARD?
Marketing has come a long way from the Mad Men of
the 50s (or TV, depending on where you take your cultural
references from). Even the most junior brand marketer
today understands that customer experience is driven from
the centre of the organisation and that sales, operations,
marketing and technology all need to work together to be
able to drive consideration, acquisition and retention. But
what does marketing bring to the table at the very highest,
strategic level of the organisation?
Simply put, it is because marketing is the customer’s
representative in the company and the company can do
nothing if it does not put the customer first. This is nothing to
do with a charming ‘the customer is always right’ scenario.
It means that without understanding the customer, without
unlocking customer behaviour, attitudes and desires, no
element of the organisation can function properly. And the
marketer holds the key.
That inside-out focus comes of being managed at high
levels by finance and technology leads or sector experts.
Their default starting point is to assess what they have and
then how the customer might be persuaded to buy it. This
has long since been debunked as a useful way to build a
sustainable business model over the long term.
“I think of marketing as GPS for the organisation. Taking readings
from the market, triangulating customer needs and translating
that into the insights that focus the sales forces and help a
company focus externally, squarely on the customer and the
market. This is needed at board level to counter a traditionally
inside-out focus.”
Randall Rozin, Global Director,
Brand Management and Digital Marketing, Dow Corning
“What gives marketers huge authority is their ownership of the
customer. From the insight and analytics perspective – what
trends are they buying, the context of marketing’s opportunity
and responsibility to bring thing to the table that other parts of
the business can’t access.”
Pete Markey, Post Office
“The core function of marketing has not changed. It’s to
represent the customer in the organisation. There is no-one else
in the organisation uniquely positioned to do that.”

WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Companies are beginning to recognise that the customer
is at the heart of the organisation and the marketer their
champion. This has resulted lately in a rash of interesting
C-suite titles including Chief Customer Officer and Chief
Value Officer among others. Does this mean that the
marketer’s brief moment in the sun is about to be subverted
and they will be returned to the advertising department as
the new customer champion takes over?
These new titles may simply be the manifestation of
the company signaling that it is restructuring to cement
a customer-centric culture. It does, however, point to
an interesting challenge facing businesses, namely the
recognition that if marketing is now so much more than Mad
Men then – what exactly IS it?
So the creation of Customer and Value roles could well be
down to the fact that the landscape is moving so fast that
there is no comfortable term for what is essentially Marketing
Plus. What is the plus? It’s marketing plus technology;
marketing plus sales; marketing plus operations; marketing
plus retail; marketing plus finance – plus any discipline you
care to think of.
What is certain is that, if the customer is at the centre of the
organisation, marketing is the interface between it and every
other function and so its place on the board isn’t arguably
required, it is essential.
7 http://www.marketingweek.com/2014/05/07/co-op-board-needs-more-marketing-expertise/
“When I was looking for a new role what I heard over and over
again from the chairman of the board or senior partners was:
‘We need a chief customer officer. Someone who understands
the digital side as well as the traditional marketing side – a chief
omnichannel officer.’ It’s someone who understands big data and
know how to leverage it for the growth of the organisation. It’s
not a CTO, but it’s about understanding the ecommerce world
and the intersection of those forces.”
Julie C Lyle, Chairman of the Board;
CMO in transition Global Retail Marketing Association
“I’m still digesting the chief customer officer, or chief brand
officer roles. Is this the rebrand of marketing? It’s more of a step
in the journey. It’s great if marketing is aligned with being the
customer champion – I feel that any board should be thinking
‘customer first’.”
Sholto Douglas Home, CMO, Hays
“Having the customer advocate is imperative at that level.
When titles such as chief customer officer were emerging the
conversations with CEOs would be: “What is the difference
between a CCO and a CMO? I need someone who can bridge
the divide between tech and marketing so that rather than going
from a single interaction with the customer we go to having a
relationship at every touchpoint.”
Julie C Lyle, Global Retail Marketing Association
“Given what’s happening in the data and technology sphere, the
way it has become central to the operation of the business and
the customer’s interface with it, these things need to be pulled
together and they need a clear voice on the board,”
Philip Almond, Director, Marketing and Audiences, BBC
“There is no one function that owns the customer and you need
a style of leadership that is less about ownership and more about
collaboration.”
Philip Almond, Director, Marketing and Audiences, BBC
“Why is this the marketers’ purview? It’s because the role is
inherently the point of access between the organisation and
external forces. Marketers should be more externally focused
than everyone else with the exception of the CIO/CTO dealing
with cyber threat.”
Julie C Lyle

A COLLABORATIVE EFFORT
Companies have begun to realise that by putting customers
at the centre of a multichannel environment, it has had a rapid
de-siloing effect on the organisation. Some businesses are
less responsive to this change than others – it’s frequently
clear to the customer which ones they are as personalised
direct mail pours through the letterbox but emails to
customer services go unanswered. But the pressure is on all
organisations and it is forcing cultural change.
This means that the marketer’s skill with the customer and
their role as interface between them and the company is only
one reason to get them on the board pronto. The marketer’s
ability to communicate and liaise internally is also going to
prove vital in a new, integrated corporate environment.
It is instructive that, following an organisational crisis, the
need for marketing to be incorporated at the board level is
quickly identified. A review of banking, funerals and grocery
brand, The Cooperative Group, was conducted following
scandals including the arrest of its chairman on drugs charges
and the practical collapse of the banking arm. The review’s
head, Lord Myner, former UK financial services secretary,
stated that the current board’s expertise particularly in
marketing came “nowhere near the required level”7
.
The disconnect within the company between its stated
values and the behaviour of its senior management was
stark and a cultural refit was clearly one of the things Lord
Myner identified. Any organisation that recognises the power
of marketing to steward a company’s integrity towards its
customers is unlikely to have found itself in The Cooperative
Group’s position.
The group had in fact removed its head marketer from the
board a few months prior to the review in March 2014. In
September 2015, in an echo of Diageo’s move to digitally-
focused executives, the company appointed former UK
Government digital chief, Mike Bracken8
, to its group
executive board while the company’s group board saw Stevie
Spring, former brand marketer and CEO of Clear Channel,
appointed as an Independent non-executive director .
Moving from the fringes to the very centre of the organisation
is a personal as well as cultural challenge. If marketing has
moved beyond the Mad Men, that is still where the vast
majority of its practitioners start out. Marketing is increasingly
accepted as a strategic pivot around which the brand can
revolve. How can marketers “upskill” to meet the challenge?
8 http://www.cio.co.uk/news/cio-career/mike-bracken-appointed-co-operative-chief-digital-officer-3622018/
9 http://www.co-operative.coop/corporate/aboutus/board/stevie-spring/
“Boards are looking for maximum departmental integration
and collaboration among executive leadership so that there are
process improvements. The larger the organisation, the greater
the need for collaboration.”
Randall Rozin, Dow Corning

3. HOW TO GAIN A SEAT
ON THE BOARD
If the marketer’s ambition is to find a place on the board,
first of all it’s instructive to determine what kind of board
is being discussed. The uppermost tier is of course the
Board of Directors. Populated by a number of non-executive
directors, this elite group oversees strategy, direction and
governance. Executives are typically made up of experienced
management consultants, financiers, lawyers, not-for-profit
professionals and business leaders. Increasingly we are
seeing executives with marketing experience but this is not
often from marketers at the CMO level. Instead, this tends to
be people in management positions who have had oversight
of marketing, sales or brand in some wider capacity as
Managing Director or CEO.
It is more common to find C-Suite marketers on the
Leadership Executive or Management Team but here again,
the group is dominated by financiers, lawyers, consultants,
technologists and CEOs past and present. This is where
marketing is making the greatest inroads however as it is the
Executive team’s remit to oversee operations and ensure the
smooth running of the business, design and execute strategy
and command buy-in from the CEO and directors.
To gain access to either of these echelons requires a sea
change in the marketer’s skill set, however. For some, this
is easier to achieve than others. From research conducted
for this report, it is becoming clear that marketers who have
grown through the ranks in digital organisations or been
part of the launch teams of successful and rapidly growing
startups are finding the path to leadership easier than those
in more traditional organisations.
It is unsurprising, for example, to find that the director and
leadership boards of financial institutions in Australia are
predominantly populated by financiers and lawyers, while
Silicon Valley stalwarts Twitter, Uber and Facebook feature
a large number of technology and data-led individuals with a
strong focus on brand-building.
However, one of the highest profile board level marketing
executives is Unilever’s Keith Weed. He, along with his
counterpart Roisin Donnelly at PG UK, has been largely
responsible for creating a strong brand focus in the
FMCG sector and allowed many products to transcend
commoditisation. The presence of these two executives
both on their own companies’ boards as well as a wide range
of industry associations and even government committees
demonstrates how important the marketing voice has
become.
For these two executives and the others who have risen
to marketing halls of fame, they have been able to perform
the alchemy that has seen them drive the creative focus of
their organisations while still being able to respond to the
demands of their executive boards. The skill set to be able to
do this is not one that is acquired lightly. In this chapter, we
examine the main skills a board level marketer must deploy
and how to acquire them.

COMMUNICATION
The single most important skill identified by all
the executives interviewed for this report was
the ability to communicate in a vernacular that
the board can understand. In the vast majority
of cases this means leaving a great deal of
what could be termed marketing speak at the door.
To resonate with the board, it’s not just about adapting
language to be less familiar, less colloquial. Using the
language of finance and IT literally isn’t lip-service. Marketers
have to be able to distinguish between metrics that are
perhaps not financially rigorous but still allow them to make
decisions at team level and those that can be applied directly
to the bottom line.
Translate that boardroom discussion to the debating chamber
and the scrutiny increases still further: “For marketing to
succeed with skeptical politicians, it requires measurement
and data which proves impact, not talk about assertion, reach
and volumes,” warns UK Government CMO Alex Aiken.
It can be easy to trip up. Marketers may now be metrics
and measurement focused but not all measurements are
created equal. The UK Coalition Government released a
campaign around the apprenticeship scheme that focused
on measuring reach and the number of ads seen: “That got a
real degree of challenge because the measurement was not
sufficiently about outcomes,” admitted Government CMO,
Alex Aiken. “This is partly why we brought in an evaluation
council to peer review and that’s the point they consistently
make, that with social and digital media there are a vast
number of ways you can cut the numbers. Marketing has to
be objectives-focused if it’s going to succeed at board level.”
That said, there is no need to become a slave to PowerPoint:
“When I took the CMO job at RSA I fell into thinking that I
had to conform and deliver presentations in the same way
as everyone else. You don’t realise that they’re getting all the
same presentations and yours is no different. When I did a
piece of work on brand positioning I changed the materials
and brought them in on boards, then took the executive off
site. A board member turned to me and said it was the best
meeting they’d ever been in,” Pete Markey, Post Office.
Using the marketer’s skills to subvert the norm is a way of
getting the point across boldly and with impact but it has to
be exquisitely judged. Even if a marketer has a reputation
for flamboyance, being something of a renegade and was
hired specifically for those qualities, it doesn’t necessarily
mean they have permission to burst into the boardroom, all
bells and whistles on the first day. To deviate from the norm,
there still needs to be a base level of trust and that trust
needs to be established by playing by the rules, at least at the
beginning.
Much is also made of the marketer’s need to translate
marketing for the board but traffic in the opposite direction is
just as vital: “Marketing must lead the organisations’ efforts
in brand alignment at every customer touchpoint to ensure
marketing promises match customer experiences. To achieve
this, marketing helps lead the translation of brand strategy to
employee behaviours –well beyond the marketing department
– to deliver superior customer experiences,” Randall Rozin,
Dow Corning.
The marketer at board level is a split personality. To show
credibility and strategic leadership, they need to fit into the
mould of their peers at the table. But as advocates of the
customer and custodians of creativity in the organisation,
they also need to distill the dry facts and figures, the long-
term goals into excitement and enthusiasm through the
teams they lead - teams that aren’t just made up of marketers
any more - that drives brand performance and delights
customers.
“The CMO should be the champion for the customer and having
excellent communications skills that are adapted for a board-
level audience is a must. If you’re speaking to the CFO, speak in
financial terms. For the CIO it must be about IT and technology.
You can’t leverage marketing speak in the boardroom and be
successful.”
Randall Rozin, Dow Corning
“You can’t just turn up and be wacky. You’ve got to do it in the
right way. Marketing demands you market what you’re doing
in the business. The right answer has got to be not giving them
more of the same. As marketers, we would never do that in the
real world.”
“I’ve absolutely had to learn the language of the board but also
recraft the language of marketing for my board papers. How I
would communicate a marketing initiative in the board is very
different to how I would frame it in a team meeting. It’s beyond
critical that marketers recalibrate they use in an operational or
board context. But it takes time to get it right, so best immerse
yourself in the business to make sure you strike the right note.”
Sholto Douglas Home, Hays

THE SCIENCE BIT
As we have already alluded to, it’s not enough
to simply speak like a board member. Those
figures and measurements being trotted out
really do need to add up. There is no point in
coming up with woolly indicators that somehow
made sense at the time of the team meeting. Telling the CFO
that the social media strategy broke the company’s previous
‘Tweets favourited’ record won’t cut it. For many marketers,
the need to get to grips with a degree of statistical analysis,
modelling and a deep dive into the technological processes
that deliver customer information is vital.
Borders no longer really exist in terms of ecommerce so
while the marketer may nominally be purely US, Europe,
APAC or LatAm based, the fact is an understanding of global
markets is also required.
Just Eat’s Dawe occupies just such a global role and reveals:
“Operating in 15 markets there are two key challenges.
The first is that they are at different stages of the business
lifecycle, from startup to very mature and the second is that
the local, cultural nuances affect consumer behaviour.”
The relative technological advancements of each territory are
also an issue. As was noted in the introduction, the US and
Europe are well advanced in using data and digital to drive the
growth of the organisation. As a result board level marketers
need to be more than au fait with the implications these twin
masters have for the business.
Australia, it was noted, is following a similar path but other
regions including China, India, Singapore and even the
relatively technologically advanced South Korea, are not
using data to support marketing and customer experience
strategies at anything like the same level. Assertions around
being a data or digital savvy marketer to operate at board
level therefore have very different implications dependent on
the relative maturity of the market.
To succeed at this level, regardless of the levels of
market maturity, in terms of technological and information
capabilities, it is always advisable for the marketer to adopt
a gold standard of understanding. If their market is not
yet mature, trends are moving so fast it will be a matter
of moments before the market catches up and overtakes
capabilities. To be fair, no marketer, however highly placed,
has reached the gold standard simply because the market
keeps moving.
“There’s no place for marketing on a board if they are only
bringing communications and marketing tactics capabilities.
Whether it’s in terms of brand ownership, customer centricity
or digital ecommerce management, those are the key areas
that are fundamental to a business. Where the marketer can be
the custodian or source of deep data analytics, intelligence and
actionable insight will add strength to their case for the board.”
Sholto Douglas Home, Hays
“If you get past the marketing jargon there were so many
situations where the marketer just didn’t have the technological
skills to understand the digital touchpoints, explore the purchase
cycle, leverage the big data and use algorithms to define
behaviours.”
Julie C Lyle

THE VITAL DATA ELEMENT
To give an indication of just how many hats
the modern board-level marketer must wear,
here is Just Eat’s Global CMO, Barnaby Dawe
describing the scope of his role:
“I’m responsible for growth and revenue. From the growth
side there are all sorts of different elements: Our business
is driven by brand, the more traditional side of what people
consider marketing. Then I focus on acquisition, which
is performance-driven marketing. From there, we go to
attribution and understanding what channels are driving
customers into our world, followed by understanding
retention strategies. There are also trade side relationships
and making sure the B2B side of the business is steadfast.”
While Dawe’s role may vary from that of other marketers,
he is faced with the common challenge of keeping up with,
understanding and managing the data transformation. The
digital environment has been a clear boon to marketers
wishing to make the leap towards the board. Its inherent
measurability and the fact that marketing leads the majority
of the sales strategy in this space puts the marketer at the
centre of the conversion conversation.
The marketer has the key to PL both bottom and top line.
In essence, in digital and particularly etailing, there’s less
emphasis on the traditional role of Sales. As an online retailer
you know what the margins and acquisitions are and these
are what the marketer is responsible for. That’s why the
marketer is so important in the digital space. Overall business
– not just ecommerce – is moving more and more towards
a data heavy environment which is going to become more
scientific and will need experts who can help this transition.
Marketers who have cut their teeth in digital may already
possess these skills but those who don’t need to seek to
build teams of data scientists and marketing automation
experts who can deliver on this need. The marketer has
become quite a difficult profile to fill. Being both conceptually
strong, data inclined, commercial and focused on ROI.
TEAM BUILDING
Marketers reading through the growing
shopping list of skills in this report might be
starting to worry that the demands on their
intellect is rapidly becoming an unsupportable
burden. While it is true that the marketer at board level is very
much more the generalist and is expected to a degree to be
a Jack or Jill of all trades, there is no expectation that they are
expected to be the font of all knowledge in every area.
Marketers no longer have the luxury of claiming “I’m simply
not a numbers person” but they are still hired for their creative
and strategic side. Providing there is enough understanding
to comprehend how the detailed components will drive the
strategy forward, delegation isn’t just desired, it’s vital.”
If marketers are having to develop their data muscles to a
degree then perhaps an even more important one to exercise
is their people-building skills. If their place on the board is
going to be built on a ‘people pyramid’, it’s up to the marketer
to make sure the foundations of that pyramid are solid.
“Data and technology are steep learning curves and that’s why
I have a technology person alongside me. We are probably the
first generation of marketers where there are people who are a lot
younger who know a lot more. That requires a different style of
leadership where it’s all about enabling. Sometimes, you do have
to ask dumb questions and be unembarrassed about doing so.
But you still bring the strategic leadership.”
Philip Almond, BBC
“In any senior position you need to have experts beneath you.
By the nature of your role you’re going to be a generalist. You
need to have oversight over all those levers and it moves so
quickly that every day there is a new tool and a need for new
understanding of customer behaviour. You need to know the
right questions to ask and understand the answers as they
come.”
Barnaby Dawe, Just Eat
“Underneath all of that and underpinned by data is the business
intelligence that drives all the understanding of consumer
behaviour, purchasing patterns and brand affinity. This is why the
brand marketing role is fundamental to the leadership team.”
“What changes with digital is that the conversion funnel
becomes a lot more transparent and the marketer moves
much more towards the sales role. They are responsible for
acquiring the customer and their conversion. In the ecommerce
environment that is a closed loop, ROI is linked to a lead and the
monetisation of that lead.”

Lyle recommends taking a three-pronged approach to being
the custodian of knowledge across the organisation:
• Be aware enough of the tools and capabilities that are out
there to collect and harness real-time insights.
• Know enough to hire and retain a competent team.
• Understand how to build bridges across the organisation
with the CIO and CTO.
THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF
EXPERIENCE
Gaining experience at board level
isn’t about plunging headlong into an
advanced accountancy course. The
argument is that senior marketers should have more than a
working knowledge of business finance regardless. However
it is about gaining as much experience and as broad a range
of experience as possible. Halfords’ CEO Jill McDonald took
a technical demotion working for another brand earlier in
her career by accepting an international role because she
understood this would have a positive impact in her later
career10
.
There isn’t one path or defined set of experiences and
characteristics that make up the archetypal board marketer.
PropertyGuru’s Sprengers started out in strategy consulting
which he would suggest is a good starting point. “You’re
trained in the fundamentals of business in analytics and
communications, understanding how the dots in the
organisation are connected.”
Sprengers agrees about the curiosity angle. Today, marketers
need to frequently step outside the creative division and
understand how the business functions operationally. It has
a direct impact on the brand promise. He appreciates that
the culture of the organisation has to be in place to allow the
marketer to do this as reaching beyond their remit can be
seen as much of a risk as an opportunity: “The marketer’s
tools have changed, data and the possibilities it creates have
become more complicated. You can’t be educated for it and
only trained to a certain extent.”
Moving about between functions including a traditional
marketing role and leading startups has been vital, particularly
in the South East Asian market where, he states: “If you
operate in large companies for all of your career you may be
very inclined to lose touch with the operational complexities
of the job.” This is important in the APAC region in particular
where skills gaps, high staff turnover and a wide disparity
between advanced, multinationals in the region and those
who are still approaching data at a very basic level (see
Introduction).
Lyle explains where her influences come from and how
she can grow the sum of her knowledge by looking outside
traditional marketing channels. She allocates four days every
year to go and explore something. She has gone to live in a
remote village in Bangladesh to understand micro financing.
She visits Silicon Valley twice a year to do a beauty parade of
venture capitalists’ investments and she visits universities to
audit classes and participate in lectures.
“I try to weave learning into my day. We have a lot of interface
with companies such as Facebook and Google. There’s a
codependency there. They are providing us with a massive
channel through which to engage customers but equally I like
to talk to start ups on the technology side who help me deliver a
better understanding of customers. These people seek me out.”
“You can’t just go to the same conference that everyone else is
going to and think you’re going to have a competitive advantage.
It’s about creating an agenda for your own constant learning.”
Julie C Lyle, Global Retail Marketing Association
“The key is to be curious about the business that you’re in. There
is a danger for anyone in a junior level not to be curious about
the organisation around you and to focus on marketing as the
centre of the universe. If you reach out across the organisation,
naturally you build a network you can tap into.”
“You can’t micromanage everything. It’s about the internal team
dynamic and under that umbrella comes delegation, right-sizing
people and identifying their strengths and weaknesses.”
Evan Greene, CMO, The Recording Academy (GRAMMYs)
10 http://www.marketingweek.com/2015/10/22/halfords-jill-mcdonald-on-moving-from-cmo-to-ceo/

A SAFE FINANCIAL PAIR OF
HANDS
To an extent it is alright to delegate
the management of data and insight
in the company to the technical
experts who can build the algorithms
and distill results but when those insights begin to impact
the bottom line, it is down to the marketer to be able to
translate those impacts into financial information for the
business. An understanding of how all the elements under
their guardianship, from campaigns to call centre resourcing,
translates into the financial health of the business is ultimately
the only way to keep credibility on the board.
Marketing has always struggled to a degree with justifying
its value. Before an era of measurability it is true to say that
it was hard to see it as anything other than the cost-centre,
where tens of millions of dollars would be spent on a TV
campaign and the link to a sudden spike in sales could be
assumed, but not proven.
With a wealth of metrics, experts and financial ability at
today’s marketer’s fingertips this need no longer be the case
and yet an echo of the marketer going cap in hand to finance
remains. If marketers are to be taken seriously and that
cost centre switched to a perceived investment, as Markey
suggests above, they have to embolden themselves and talk
financial turkey. Their place at the table is earned in pounds,
dollars and reminibi and they can prove it.
“You have to bring finance with you. Get endorsement from
within the business if you are developing a tool. It’s very
powerful to have finance say: We support this.”
“The role of marketing in its Mad Men definition has been very
much focused on brand awareness and in all fairness, that
positions marketing as a cost centre. That’s not the best position
to be in if you aspire to be higher up in the organisation.”
“Where marketing is best is where it’s clearly positioning itself
as a growth lever. If it can show how it’s playing a role in moving
from being a cost to an investment, then it automatically earns a
place at the table.”

4. BOARD AND MARKETER
IN HARMONY
Interestingly, a board can have an intense understanding of
creativity, yet still be unsure about the most effective ways to
move forward, as in Greene’s experience with the GRAMMY
brand: “Boards can sometimes be traditional and cautious.
However, when you are the brand steward, that often puts
you in the position of driving change, and pushing to do
things that haven’t been done before, to stand behind taking
strategic and calculated risks to evolve and scale the brand in
new ways.”
For marketers, being the agent of change can be a
difficult mantle to adopt. Making bold moves in front of a
contemplative board is almost the antithesis of what they are
trying to achieve when much of the advice has been to prove
that it is not a cost centre but rather a safe pair of hands
when it comes to profits.
On coming to the board with a typical marketer’s CV: “It can
be hard because in our sector in particular, longevity is deeply
valued – newcomers without sector experience have an extra
challenge to establish credibility.” Sholto Douglas Home,
Hays
THERE IS ROOM FOR CREATIVITY - EXPRESSED
CORRECTLY
UK Government has seen this disconnect come through via
external agencies. When they went to view a presentation
from an agency about a communications project, the team
was shocked at being presented with what amounted to a
consumer brand awareness campaign: “Marketers can come
in thinking that marketing is an end in itself but they have to
focus heavily on business objectives. The marketing agency
showed us really nice consumer campaigns but our job is to
help recruit soldiers or make tough interventions on obesity.
I was quite surprised that senior marketers wanted to sell us
consumer campaigns,” Aiken reveals.
“You get to a point where you realise that what got you to being
good at marketing isn’t going to make you successful from
here on in. It’s more about what can my function do for the
organisation as a whole. How am I going to lead this group of
people?”
Philip Almond, BBC
“If there’s ever any disconnect between marketing and the board,
it’s around priorities. It’s never about what colour the logo should
be. It’s about what the commercial value of it is.”

WHY THE BOARD MUST ADAPT
It was instructive in the construction of this report that
much of the desk research was conducted by going through
the biographies of major boards of directors and executive
leadership teams in top tier companies in major markets
worldwide.
With very few exceptions, the majority of board members
were late-middle aged or even retirement age men with
classical routes to board level through management
consulting, finance and law. The glass ceiling was
showing some cracks and women were increasingly being
represented. But on the whole, if you were to think of a
stereotypical board member, you would not be far wrong.
This is of course changing in the digitally native sector where
the Jack Dorseys (Twitter), Mark Zuckerbergs (Facebook),
Martha Lane Fox/Brent Hobermans (Lastminute.com) and
Jeff Bezos (Amazon) are building teams in their image.
Although here too, there is a degree of additional statesmen
and women being added to the league of non-executives.
After all, there’s no need to throw the baby out with the
bathwater. But it’s time so-called traditional enterprises again
took its lead from the digital space at board level:
The consensus between the experienced, board-level
interviewees for this report was that more could be done at
board level to prepare incoming marketers for this culture
change. Perhaps this is because the role they come from
requires such a great deal of recalibration to fit at board level,
perhaps because the discipline at this level is still relatively in
its infancy and there is still a sense of cultural exception to it.
By taking some of the steps outlined in this paper, the
marketer should feel confident they are more prepared
than ever to tackle board level responsibilities but it is vital
to recognise that if marketing has been given a seat at the
board, it is because the board values its contribution there. It
is up to marketers to prove them right – or wrong. More than
anything, marketers need to adopt this state of mind.
Greene advises having the courage of your convictions and
believes that with the right preparation, marketers at board
level have permission to take bigger and bolder steps: “I’ve
always believed there is a quiet confidence that comes from
doing the right things for the right reason. Change can be
slow and sometimes methodical and sometimes not in a
straight line. But it will happen if you have the right vision and
patience.”
It’s just important to be able to foster that patience across
the rest of the board using the techniques outlined in this
paper if that long term vision is to be realised. And it won’t be
without its bumps in the road:
“We tend to think that everyone is talking about the Millennials
and the way they are changing the customer base. That change is
also happening in the talent base. They expect different access to
information, flexibility in the work environment and a voice at the
table. You won’t keep them if you’re not up for that.”
Julie C Lyle
“I took a lot of lumps in our boardroom for quite a while from
people who weren’t terribly well versed in brand dynamics. Now
I’ve gotten to a point where I do have the credibility to make
decisions and say things. Stick to your guns. Be the expert you
were hired to be.”
Evan Greene, The Recording Academy
“Generally, boards could do more to prepare new entrants.
There is too much of an assumption that people can always
swim. This is a contract between the marketer and the board and
their expectations. The best thing to do is to ask: What are your
expectations of me?”
“Being on the board is a fundamental change for a marketer.
You have to be part artist, part scientist and part politician.
The bit that’s currently less tuned is the politician part. Going
from the functional board to the main board, the expectations
are different. You need to raise your game and thoughtfulness
because you are with people who are shaping the business and
they want your information. It takes you from being a functional
expert to a leader. You bring the customer to the boardroom but
you fail if you just talk about marketing.”

THE RESISTANT BOARD – A CAUTIONARY TALE
All of the executives named in this report have stated
unequivocally that they have found the boards they have
joined to be nothing but supportive and welcoming of the
expertise and perspectives they bring.
This is not always the case. One senior executive, speaking
on condition of anonymity, revealed their current, day-to-day
experience of being asked to join a leadership board where
their contributions were far from welcome.
“I can only describe the atmosphere in the boardroom as
toxic and frankly, I can’t wait to do my time and move on,”
this executive states. “It was clear from the start when
I was brought in by the owners of the business (after a
management change resulting from MA activity) that I was
upsetting things a lot. My way of doing things was very much
not the way it had always been done.”
An expert in data and digital, this executive is ideally placed to
help the organisation to understand new trends and respond
to them. Using metrics that clearly demonstrate the validity of
certain strategies, they are following an accepted and highly
valued path to what should result in boardroom acceptance.
However: “When I ask them to look at the results, the
metrics, the board isn’t interested and in fact seem very
disappointed with the work. The attitude would seem to be
‘we’re really disappointed that you bang on about data when
we have employed you for your expertise.’ Directors are
threatened with data and I feel I regularly show them up for
making bad decisions based purely on politics.”
Unsurprisingly, this executive feels that this company is
unlikely to keep up with the market if this attitude prevails and
happily admits that, rather than stewarding the business into
a period of growth, it is simply a “stepping stone to future
roles”.
On speaking to the executive the frustration is clear – at the
missed opportunity for the business and for the personal
roadblocks at every turn.
Published by Econsultancy in association withMarketers in the Boardroom 17

5. THE FUTURE FOR MARKETING
ON THE BOARD
As more and more marketers transition to the board, is it the
end for creativity at a high level? Executives interviewed for
this report would argue most certainly not. It is in the how
and when it is applied that consideration needs to be taken.
Perhaps the biggest challenge for the modern marketers is
the number of moving parts now under their control. And it is
a challenge for the leaders of the organisation too. Are they
to entrust areas that, by their own admission, marketers are
not yet experts in and possibly could never be?
This signals the move towards a more collegiate approach to
brand and customer management. Boards must trust that,
while a marketer may only have a working knowledge of data
technologies or corporate finance to a certain degree, the
one thing they do intuitively understand is the customer and
it is around this that all other things revolve.
Without care, there is potential for a marketer trying to
establish themselves at board level to find themselves in a
Catch-22 situation.
Boards can be brought round if marketers can demonstrate
the value of their actions in terms that can be understood
and appreciated by those whose functions are nominally
unrelated, such as the CFO and CTO. Of course, we have
already established in this paper that there can be no modern
organisation where these roles are now completely separate
from marketing but it is easier to transcend these barriers in
some corporate cultures than others.
“With marketing on the board, marketers still have a creative
element to their role. We will see more creative strategies, more
partnerships and use of third parties to deliver new business
models. Parity at the product level is happening faster than ever
so marketing leadership at board level will connect corporate
strategy to improving customer experience. Marketers can excel
at board level if they can help create relevant, differentiated and
consistently well executed customer experiences. Marketing
needs to take advantage of its role as a creative force.”
Randall Rozin, Dow Corning The most difficult thing to change is corporate culture. You have
to really understand what buttons to push and levers to pull to
execute your strategy. That requires an evolving infrastructure;
having the right people and mobilizing them.”
Evan Greene, The Recording Academy

THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF CMO TO CEO
The progression of marketers to the board – and on to CEO
level – is always going to be easier in organisations that
already have marketing at the heart of the business. Jill
McDonald is a marketer who has made the leap between
national and international marketing roles that have ultimately
led to not one but two CEO positions.
In conversation with another former marketer now CEO,
The FA’s Martin Glenn at The Marketing Society, she stated
that: “McDonald’s values marketing very highly and therefore
I was a key player on the board with a number of other
colleagues. In other places, like British Airways, commercial
was at the top table but marketing wasn’t, so that would
make it even harder to get there.”
This is not to say that marketers should abandon any
attempts to take marketing to board level in companies
where it has not traditionally led the strategy. However
it does indicate that the marketer needs to adapt to
accommodate the habits of that particular board. The role of
change agent may yet be further down the line.
Marketers need to gain the trust to perform activities that
demonstrate the value of their new roles, but in many cases
need to prove they are able to perform those activities in the
first place. This paper has touched on a variety of tactics that
marketers can use to overcome this hurdle but, as in the case
of the anonymous marketer, it will be just as important to
recognise when the cultural barriers are still too great.
The GRAMMYs’ Greene believes that a lot of board-level
success comes simply from having the courage of your
convictions.
“It’s important to stick to your guns. You can easily fall victim
to group think. If you prepare and have the brand’s best
interests at heart you can be bold, be aggressive, make sure
you’re doing the right thing for the right reason. If you can look
yourself in the mirror and say yes then let the chips fall where
they may.”
“The bottom line is the thought processes. The CMO and CTO
need to be really good friends. It’s very easy to get territorial.
They want to know why the Mad Men are suddenly talking about
technology. You need to organise yourself in the company
horizontally between the functions, within customer groups
and create a plan for the whole organisation to deliver on. But
this needs a strong leadership team that is neither political, nor
territorial.”

6. ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS:
STEPS TO BE TAKEN TODAY
1. GAIN CREDIBILITY
We are in an era of test and learn and corporate
cultures are adapting to be slightly risk averse
and dip a toe in uncharted waters. Engaging with
this culture is one way of being able to prove a
hunch but the executives interviewed for this
report had mixed responses to using small test cases to
prove credibility at board level.
It was generally felt to be more important to be able to
marry the two areas of experience and data to demonstrate
credibility. Before approaching the board with ideas for
change, they need to be thoroughly worked through. Bringing
the weight of experience to bear on your decisions and being
able to take what, in many cases, may still have an element
of calculated risk gives marketers the courage of their
convictions when putting their case to the board.
Credibility is not about being mealy mouthed. Nor is it built
on false promises. Marketers need to have the confidence
to be bold if they are to instill confidence in their leadership
peers but doing this requires the marriage of experience
and science. Not always, but for the most part, this is a
foundation rather than a skill that is several years in the
making.
2. SPEAK THE LANGUAGE
Certainly there are exceptions where a
convention-busting moment of clarity is
called for but to engage with the board on a
day to day basis, it is important to absorb the
language, the vernacular if the marketer is to get their point
across with credibility and clarity.
There is a sense that because the digital era has increased
the measurability of customer interactions immensely, that
these metrics are therefore instantly acceptable at board
level. This is not the case. In many respects, reporting
marketing metrics directly to the board has the potential to
destroy rather than enhance credibility.
Understanding how to translate marketing outputs into
operational metrics is vital, as is the ability to translate
strategic imperatives delivered at board level back
through the organisation. Marketers are the instinctive
communicators of the organisation. Operating at board level
is the ultimate opportunity to exercise this muscle.

3. WORK TOWARDS INTEGRATION
With customers now at the centre of the
business and the marketer their advocate,
this now establishes marketing as the
fulcrum around which all other functions
revolve. It’s a scenario that could give
more impressionable marketers delusions of grandeur
but essentially what it means is that marketers are the
link ensuring that technology, data, operations, sales and
finance all understand what is required to create the optimal
customer experience that will deliver competitive advantage.
Many of the executives interviewed for this report insisted
on the ‘political’ element of the board level marketing role.
The ability to liaise, break down barriers and silos internally is
as important as generating award-winning creative. Without
a seamlessly working multichannel delivering excellent
customer experiences, no brand promise can ever be
fulfilled. Marketers need to make sure that their organisation
is capable of cashing the cheques their communications
departments are writing.
4. PUSH YOUR BOUNDARIES
No marketer who stays comfortably within the
bounds of the marketing department will ever be
able to cut it at board level. To appreciate how
to integrate the different functions, marketers
have to step outside the discipline to understand not only
the challenges faced internally within the business, but the
market forces acting on the business as a whole.
No marketer focused on advertising or public relations could
have foreseen the disruptive influence of apps on consumer
behavior; focus groups will not deliver the insight that helps
marketers understand why consumers are so aware of their
need for data privacy and so willing to relinquish it when it
comes to social media.
By moving outside functional areas and gaining experience
of the world beyond communications, marketers are able
to advise and guide in their other roles as organisational
translator (speak the language), collaborator (integration) and
experienced professional (credibility).
5. MARRY ART AND SCIENCE
There is no escaping the fact that marketers
need to have more than a working knowledge
of data, insight and technology. This doesn’t
mean abandoning the creative drive that
probably brought many marketers to the function in the
first place. However being able to use these tools to drive
competitive advantage is now no longer solely the purview of
the chief information or technology officers.
Certainly, their input and expertise is invaluable and bringing
them on board to help deliver an efficient and effective
technological solution in an environment that is increasingly
dominated by marketing automation is essential. However
the marketer cannot afford to delegate the acquisition and
management of these capabilities entirely. The marketing
environment is changing so rapidly, almost entirely because
of data and technology advances that it is imperative to have
a handle on how the sector is evolving.
Marketing at board level is a generalist’s role and in-depth
expertise is not expected. The skill lies in being able to
engage the experts that will deliver the service to the
marketer’s design. This is not a tipping point where we
see the marketer embrace the bottom line at the expense
of creativity. Instead, it is the departure point from which
marketers can use detailed insight and information to inform
creative with increasing accuracy and efficacy.

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