Which Type of CMO Are You?

“Our managers believed that good products sell themselves, that marketing was nothing more than selling, and that selling was only needed when you had a me-too or weak product.”

Great quote, huh? It's the Samsung's CMO describing that company's situation prior to its amazing transformation into a brand leader from what it previously had been -- a supplier of commodity electronics to OEMs. Of course the "old" Samsung believed marketing was just about selling me-too products. That's exactly what they were selling.

The Samsung case is recounted in the current issue of Strategy+Business (Booz Allen Hamilton's online magazine). It's the jumping off point in an article by Edward Landry, Andrew Tipping, and Brodie Dixon that invites marketers to profile themselves by taking a short test. The test places every marketing organization in the world into one of six categories: growth champion, senior conuselor, brand foreman, growth facilitator, best practices advisor, and service provider. The article tries very hard to make each one of these types sound equally virtuous -- the real "test" is whether your particular style matches the company that employs you.

Yeah, but I don't really believe it. I don't know about you, but I'd rather be a growth champion any day than a mere service provider. More to the point -- marketing, like public relations, is something that happens anyway whether you consciously work at it or not. Somebody will champion growth -- and somebody will provide service (just to pick on those two opposite ends of the BAH marketing spectrum). Besides, who says commodity OEM suppliers can't have growth champions? They'd better. If that's not the CMO then by default it will be someone else doing one of CMO's jobs. Granted, different personalities will gravitate naturally toward some marketing roles and not others. But if the CMO doesn't make sure all these bases are covered, who will?