Conversation #3 - What’s in a title? CMO or CCO?

What’s in a title? There is a move in some businesses to have a ‘Chief Customer Officer’ rather than a ‘Chief Marketing Officer’. Is this semantics? After all, great CMOs would be the first to say that their primary responsibility is to ensure that an organisation and its culture becomes or stays customer centric.

The question is, what does ‘customer-centric’ mean going forward? Many marketing job titles, and the marketing organisations that go with them, originated in an era when products and brand messages were pushed out to mass consumer markets.

But today, powerful technologies have transferred the control to customers and enabled much greater interactivity. Increasingly, it is the ability to build enduring customer relationships that drives value, particularly in B2B and Service businesses.

Great relationships can only be developed if the marketing function has influence, and an element of control over all the customer interfaces that impact this relationship. This includes CRM (currently sitting in the IT function in many companies), R&D (often a separate function from marketing), some aspects of Finance (e.g. billing communication) etc.

But does the Marketing function need to control all other functions, becoming a 'Chief Customer Officer', or does Marketing instead need to learn to engage with and influence other business functions with new ways of working that put customer-centricity at the heart of the whole business?

Let us know what you think. Submit your response here and we’ll post asap.