When a good friend of mine told me recently that he would be departing the agency business for the supposedly greener pastures of being a Chief Marketing Officer on the client side, I could not help but commenting, "So where exactly will you be working in 14 months?"

Needless to say, he did not appreciate my lame attempt at humor. Hey, I thought it was kind of funny.

I am very confident my friend will not have to worry about a job a year or so hence, as he is brilliant and driven. He’ll do just fine. But, the fact remains that the CMO position is famously precarious. In recent years they’ve measured the average tenure of a CMO, and he or she typically lasts in the position a little less than a year and a half. Ironically, that’s not even enough time to really screw things up.

The short shelf life of the modern CMO points up how important the position is for beleaguered companies these days — and also how misunderstood the job really is. The CMO job is actually kind of thankless, an unfortunate fact that my good friend will discover soon enough.

Indeed, CMOs are the Rodney Dangerfield of the corporate hierarchy. They don’t get much respect (like the CEO, CFO, COO, CTO or CIO), they don’t actually have all that much influence (sorry, it’s true), and they get don’t get much credit if things go well.

But, CMOs sure do get blamed when things don’t go very well (or as planned), which is much of the time in modern business.

I believe CMOs would be much more respected in the corporate scheme of things — in fact, I believe they would be viewed as absolutely vital — if they put more emphasis on a role that is part of the CMO job description, but frequently given short shrift: That role is being the organization’s head innovation executive.

More than "just" an executive in charge of driving innovation for the company, the CMO needs to be the chief cheerleader, chief promoter and chief incubator of innovation. She/he needs to be the person who is tirelessly and steadfastly searching for the newest innovations that will help the company bust through the inevitable slow spots and problem times to find that necessary ingredient for success in any business entity (and many organizations, too): growth.

Innovation is essential for growth. And growth is the lifeblood of the company. It should/must be the primary metric for judging the success of the CMO.

Do most CMO’s do a good job as Chief Innovation Officer? If they did, they wouldn’t be looking for a new job every 14 months. Of course, there are notable exceptions to this rule. Those are the companies that always seem to succeed, even in the rough times like the past year and a half when most companies (my agency included), were probably eschewing the importance of innovation as they desperately tried to just stay alive.

Actually, the really smart companies kept on innovating (and searching for new innovations) even during the worst of the Great Recession. A terrific new article in Fortune discusses how the best companies are now changing their "attitude" to focus on innovation that spurs growth, rather than just emphasizing survival strategies.

Now, you might say that truly great, game changing companies like Apple or Amazon (to name just two notable examples) don’t need innovation minded CMOs. That role is played by the CEO (Steve Jobs for Apple and Jeff Bezos for Amazon). These really are special cases, where the brilliant and mercurial founder is indeed the chief innovator. At these companies, I don’t think they even have CMOs. Jobs and Bezos play that role, and do it superbly, successfully and visably.

But, at most companies, the innovation responsibility is highly fragmented, split across too many departments, with too little focus on this vital job, and not enough coordination. Too often the innovation function also does not have the C-Suite imprimatur and buy-in that it requires to truly flourish.

Again, the CMO can and should be holding that innovation flag up high in all of these cases. Why not be the Steve Jobs of Innovation at your company?

Some may think innovation just means new products or technologies, or great new designs. And, the perception of CMOs is too often that when they speak about innovation, it is usually just about a hot new ad campaign or digital marketing promotion. "Hey, we just got up on Twitter and Facebook! Aren’t we innovative?!"

Both views are wrong and short sighted. Innovation can and must be found at every level of the organization. It pertains to new distribution models (like the "Redbox" self serve DVD machines that are threatening both Blockbuster and the movie studios by successfully renting first run films for a buck a night), new pricing, new ways of collaborating and "co-creating" with customers, new ways to spur and accelerate product development, M&A, etc., etc.

Even a retailing giant like Walmart can innovate to drive growth. Ad Age today has a story on how Walmart has revamped its store brands under a new in-house "brand" called Great Value. This new brand is already estimated to be worth more than $10B in sales, and growing. This is a smart, innovative move by Walmart in a recessionary market where shoppers are very price conscious, but still don’t want to buy seemingly cheap and inferior Brand X products. Great Value fills that niche between no-name generic and established brand.

That’s innovation. It’s also the kind of strategic move that CMOs should be coming up with in a challenging economy like we continue to face in the US.

Innovation is critical for the company’s/organization’s success, and the CMO is uniquely well positioned to be the primary corporate driver of that necessary activity.

I hope my good friend reads this post. If he does, he will quickly realize that in his new CMO job he cannot just focus on driving revenues, crunching numbers, creating memorable communications and optimizing marketing operations and profitability. I would also advise him right now to forget the overused marketing buzzword — ROI – and instead get busy emphasizing innovation and its vital role in generating real growth for his company. (Don’t worry, dude, that’s my last gratuitous and unsolicited bit of advice!)

Who knows, if he views his job as Chief Innovation and Growth Officer, he might even stay at his new CMO job for several years, rather than just the requisite 14 months.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS