Boathouse Study: CEOs’ perceptions of CMO performance and marketing are improving

CEOs’ perceptions of CMO performance and marketing are becoming more favorable, according to Boathouse’s third annual CEO Survey on Marketing and CMOs released this week. For example, the study surveyed 150 U.S. public and private company CEOs across 17 industries and found that 51 percent of CEOs currently believe short CMO tenures are a sign of a problem. It is shown that success The proportion who said they were satisfied with their role rather than a failure was up from 20 percent in the 2021 survey. Additionally, compared to 2021, he had nearly double the number of CEOs who rated their company’s marketing and his CMO as “best in class.”

Below are key insights from the survey, including CEO perspectives on marketing, trust levels between CEOs and CMOs, and perspectives on AI. We then chat with Boathouse CEO John Connors about the most important and surprising facts from the report.

Executive perspective

CEO Perspectives on Marketing and CMO

• CEO respondents believe that marketing drives growth in five key ways: customer expansion, sales/market share, competitive differentiation, brand/reputation enhancement, and changing the company’s narrative in the marketplace. I showed what I wanted.
• 49% of CEOs rate their company’s marketing capabilities as “best in class,” up from 20% in 2021. Respondents rate his 40% of CMOs as “best in class.”
• Half of CEOs now believe that a short CMO tenure is a sign of success rather than failure in the role, up from 20% before the survey.
• In 2023, CEOs rated CMOs higher in the following areas of responsibility within Marketing:
• Highest score: Relationship/trust between executives and CEO (43%)
• Sharpest increase: Innovation and new idea generation (38% vs. 19%)
• Lowest score: Strategy (31% in 2023, 16% in 2022)
• 71% of CEOs think their brand and reputation are the same thing, while 29% think they are different.

Trust between CEO and CMO

• CEOs are increasingly aware of their loyalty to the CMO. Eight in 10 CEOs believe their CMO will “take the bullet for them,” up from 3 in 10 in 2021.
• But in 2023, CEOs believe personal loyalty will be replaced by company loyalty.
• Only 9% of CEOs say CMOs are more loyal to their CEOs (vs. 27% in 2022) and 51% to their companies (vs. 34% in 2022).

Setting business and financial goals

• In 2023, CEOs said 77% of CMOs understood their company’s board and political dynamics, an increase from 2021.
• When assessing CMOs’ P&L understanding and participation in financial goals, CEOs’ views varied from 2023 to 2021. His 69 percent of CMOs understand P&L and balance sheets, up from 53 percent in 2021. However, only half of the CMOs participate in setting financial goals. In 2021 he was down from 73%.
• The top five issues that are “increasingly important” to CEO decisions are related to financial performance, but CSR, DEI, employees, and ESG are a step back compared to 2021. AI, security/privacy, and cost reduction are now part of that. The most important issue.
• CEOs say workforce issues, employee recruitment, and DEI are becoming less important, down 41% compared to December 2021.

C-suite and AI

• 76% of CEOs are integrating AI into their organizations.
• By department, marketing has the most extensive adoption of AI, while IT, product development, and operations are the most mission-critical.
• 58% of CEOs say their CMO uses AI to give presentations, request funding, or create new processes using AI
• AI integration in marketing is most evident in content (generation/personalization) and analytics (about two-thirds) and customer experience or research (half).

Q&A with Boathouse CEO John Connors

Chief Marketer: What surprised you about the report’s findings?

John Connors, Founder and CEO of Boathouse, said: There are a few things that are surprising. Even before we got into the CMO story, the abandonment of CEOs on diversity, DEI, and employees was alarming and depressing. We did not intend to point out the CEO’s capricious nature, as we initiated this study specifically to assist him in relation to the tenure issues facing his CMO. But I think we’re starting to understand that now too.

Second, we were pleased to see a turnaround in CMO perception after a period of middling and negative results over the past few years. And it’s really encouraging to see that recovery. Because I work for his CMO as an agency. So if the CMO’s numbers are trending low, that means I’m trending low.

Third, there is a lack of personal trust between the CEO and CMO. There’s still an interesting opportunity gap there. And fourth, he says, CEOs see brand and reputation as the same thing. These are very different issues from an academic marketing perspective, but the CEO brings them all together in one bunch.

CM: Given these findings, what is your advice to CMOs?

JC: Over the course of three years, we asked CEOs about the issues and audiences that matter to them. Because I think CMOs, almost as a discipline, need to spend more time making sure they’re tracking the issues and audiences that matter most to the CEO. CMOs don’t shy away from doing consumer research. But sometimes they don’t do much research on their own executives. Be a little more disciplined about tracking the issues that are most relevant to your audience and your CEO, and don’t just suddenly say, “It’s all about the consumer.” Because if you do that and the consumer isn’t at the top of the CEO’s list right now, your credibility is going to suffer. Then part two is, as you say, building personal trust and really working on it.

CM: While trust in the CMO is increasing, it was interesting to see that trust transfer to the company rather than the personal relationship between the CMO and the CEO.

JC: Agree. My intuition is that they have built trust over the past few years during the coronavirus pandemic. The CMO wasn’t used to worrying about his supply chain, his employees, etc. But they needed to get some kind of religion because it permeated every company. I think they’ve built more structural alignment there, but personal alignment is still needed.

CM: Why do you think CEOs view a CMO’s short tenure as a sign of success?

JC: This is a really surprising statistic for me because both of the last two years were perceived as failures. I want to see what will happen in 2 or 3 years. [regarding] The question is, is this trend continuing or is it an anomaly? But I think once you start trusting this person more, you start assigning movement to success and movement to failure. We don’t have personal trust, but we do have professional trust. Here’s my theory: We’ll have to wait another year or two to see a pattern in the data.