Seventy-three percent of CEOs think Marketers lack business credibility and are not the business growth generators they should be: they are still too far from being able to demonstrate how the cross-channel marketing strategies and campaigns they deploy grow their organizations’ top line in terms of more customer demand, more sales, more prospects, more conversions or more market share.

That’s one of the key findings that The Fournaise Marketing Group, one of the global leaders in Customer Acquisition through Marketing ROI, identified through its 2011 Global Marketing Effectiveness Program in which it interviewed more than 600 large corporate and SMB CEOs and decision-makers in the US, Europe, Asia and Australia.

The top issues CEOs have with their Marketers are:

  1. They keep on talking about brand, brand values, brand equity and other similar parameters that their top management has great difficulty in linking back to results that really matter: revenue, sales, EBIT or even market valuation (77%).
  2. They focus too much on the latest marketing trends such as social media, because they believe they represent the new marketing frontiers - but can rarely demonstrate how these trends will help them generate more business for the company (74%).
  3. When asked to increase their Marketing ROI, they tend to understand it as cost cutting through better economies of scale or negotiations with their third-party partners and agencies, instead of top-line growth generation: more revenue, more sales, more prospects, and more buyers (73%).
  4. They are always asking for more money, but can rarely explain how much incremental business this money will generate (72%).
  5. They bombard their stakeholders with marketing data that hardly relates to or means anything for the company’s P&L (70%).
  6. Unlike CFOs and sales forces, they don’t think enough like businesspeople: they focus too much on the creative, “arty” and “fluffy” side of marketing and not enough on its business science, and rely too much on their ad agencies to come up with the next big idea (67%).

The worrying part: while 73% of CEOs think Marketers lack business credibility and are not effectiveness-focused enough to generate incremental customer demand, 69% of the Marketers Fournaise talked to feel their strategies and campaigns do make an impact on the company’s business, even though they can’t precisely quantify or prove it - confirming the great CEO-Marketer disconnect.

“Until Marketers start speaking the P&L language of their CEOs and stakeholders, and until they start tracking the business effectiveness of all their strategies and campaigns to prove they generate incremental customer demand, they will continue to lack credibility in the eyes of their CEOs and will continue to be seen more as a cost centre than an asset” said Jerome Fontaine, CEO and Chief Tracker of Fournaise.

Source: Fournaise