Marketing Officer

Building the Right Team:
How CMOs are finding, keeping and motivating talent in a changing world

It’s a whole new world out there for marketers. They face more pressure to deliver results amid an uncertain economy; keep pace with dramatic changes in the way consumers want to interact with brands; and run a global organization agile enough to deliver the brand in relevant ways to audiences around the world. More and more, organizations across industry sectors also are turning to their marketing teams to deliver innovative and breakthrough consumer experiences in a host of digital channels and social media platforms. Amid all these pressures and demands, marketing leaders have to make important decisions about how to organize and manage their teams — the capabilities they need to add or build and how to retain and motivate their key people.

These issues were at the center of Spencer Stuart’s ninth CMO Summit, an annual gathering of CMOs and senior marketers to discuss the most timely business issues of the day. Featuring a diverse panel of experienced CMOs, the CMO Summit explored how chief marketing officers are building and evolving their teams today. The panel featured:

• Lee Applbaum, executive vice president and chief marketing officer of RadioShack
• Alfredo Gangotena, chief marketing officer of MasterCard Worldwide
• Annie Young-Scrivner, global chief marketing officer of Starbucks

The panel discussed marketing’s evolving priorities — including digital, social media, innovation and global brand building — and how these priorities are affecting the way CMOs are recruiting, retaining and motivating their teams.

Evolving marketing priorities require new capabilities

The marketing agenda at most companies is evolving and, therefore, the mix of skills and capabilities is changing as well. A survey conducted in conjunction with the CMO Summit confirmed that team building is a top concern of CMOs and senior marketing leaders. More than half of survey respondents, 56 percent, said their marketing organization does not have the right team and skill-sets in place to deliver on the company’s marketing strategy and priorities.

What capabilities are most in demand? In the survey, metrics and analytics skills and social media experience topped the list of capabilities marketing leaders said their organizations most need to add. Forty percent of respondents said their organizations need metrics and analytics skills and 39 percent said social media skills.

CMO Summit panelists acknowledged that expertise in social media and digital expertise are increasingly important to marketing organizations today, but that they need more senior marketers who bring both new media savvy and sophisticated traditional marketing skills. In fact, the skill-set for leaders in social media has been transformed as marketing analytics and measurement tools have become more sophisticated, Applbaum said. “A few years ago when I staffed a team for social, they were fresh out of college,” he said. “What’s happened very quickly in social media is, the same as in traditional media, a sense of measurement and accountability has been instilled, and the tools to measure social media have evolved very rapidly. And so the skill-set for leaders in social media have transformed. I have more senior executives deployed against social media who think more like a sophisticated marketer.”

In addition to adding capabilities in social media, mobile and other digital channels, marketing organizations increasingly need to develop executives with general leadership and team-building skills, a research-based understanding of customers, the ability to operate across different countries and generations, and a comfort with cultural differences, panelists said. “The ability to hire people or induce into the staff this notion of cultural diversity is number-one for me. In addition to digital and social media, the ability to operate across countries, the ability to operate across generations, and therefore the ability to be very nimble, very versatile with the advertising piece are all important. We need people who are light on their own feet and extremely quick in changing and adapting,” Gangotena said.

So, how are CMOs and other top marketing leaders finding talent with capabilities in these new areas, retaining key players and motivating their teams? Several themes emerged from the CMO Summit discussion and the survey results.

The key to recruiting success: a well-articulated value proposition

More than half (57 percent) of the marketing leaders who responded to the survey said their marketing organization is most likely to hire from the outside to acquire needed skills, and one-third reported that recruiting new team members with key skills was their primary leadership challenge related to their team.

Organizations can improve their ability to recruit top talent when they thoughtfully craft their value proposition to candidates and articulate compelling benefits. While many senior marketers are obviously drawn to world-class brands and unique and energizing cultures, others are looking for opportunities to reshape and reposition a brand for the future and thrive in environments that provide more freedom to take marketing risks.

When recruiting from the outside, it is also important to assess an individual’s cultural fit with the organization and strike the right balance between external hires and promoting from within. “That balance is really critical because if you hire from the outside all the time, pretty soon they get rejected from the organization,” said Young-Scrivner.

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