One in three European chief financial officers don’t believe marketing is crucial in determining business strategy. More than half – 54% – rated the effectiveness of their marketing teams at less than 60%, according to a report by Deloitte.
Although support for marketing comes from the people leading the company – 67% of chief executives claim to fully appreciate the value of the discipline – this doesn’t seem to translate to the people on the ground. Just 50% of marketers believe this to be the case.
There is also a disconnect in terms of how much importance marketing has at board level. Marketers on the board think that just 16% of the discussions held on the board relate to marketing but chief executives claim it’s almost as much as a third.
Seventy per cent of chief executives also don’t think that marketing as a role is clearly defined within their organisation and 77% agree that their employees don’t fully appreciate its value.
There was more positive news for marketers, however, as 81% of respondents thought marketing is a key driver of growth, 85% say it is crucial to devising strategy and 44% think that a marketing director’s best skill is in strategic planning.
The Deloitte study involved 217 in-depth interviews in five European countries and you can download a copy of the report direct from Deloitte here.
January 16, 2008 at 12:01 pm |
[...] brandstrategy wrote an interesting post today on Bad news for board-level marketers?Here’s a quick excerptAlthough support for marketing comes from the people leading the company – 67% of chief executives claim to fully appreciate the value of the discipline – this doesn’t seem to translate to the people on the ground. … [...]
January 16, 2008 at 5:37 pm |
This is an astonishing story and is further evidence of the lack of connection between marketing and other functions. It reminds me of something I recently read where forward-thinking CMOs were working with CFOs to jointly develop performance measures. (I think a previous head of marketing at Yahoo! had done this.)
It seems marketing is the most nebulous and difficult to define of business function and more collaboration on performance would be useful and important.