With just over two months left until the new year, a great deal of planning has been done and yet as marketers, there’s still so much to do. When we’re in this constant state of planning, the one question that’s always top of mind is: how do we stand out to our audiences? Offering an inside look at the decisions that VP-level marketers are making at hundreds of U.S. companies, the bi-annual CMO Survey extrapolates backward- and forward-looking data to help inform future decisions. In today’s episode of The 19: Entrepreneur Edition, we have an exclusive interview with the report’s founder–professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business–Christine Moorman.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:00:05] This is The 19. In 19 minutes or less game-changing insights from Orange Label, the leading response marketing agency for established brands that are driven by a fearless entrepreneurial mindset.
Rochelle Reiter: [00:00:24] Welcome to The 19 Entrepreneur edition! I’m Rochelle Reiter, President of Orange Label. Author Tom Fishburne once said, “the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing.” Behind the scenes, we know the magic of marketing isn’t magic after all. It’s constant planning, research, optimizing and more. And while we know the plans that we’re making, it’s always good to take a pulse on trends as a whole. The biannual CMO survey pulls back this curtain and details data points from hundreds of VP-level marketers across the U.S. to help guide future decisions and innovate marketing strategies.
Rochelle Reiter : [00:00:59] Here to share key insights from the latest report is Christine Moorman, professor at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and founder of the CMO Survey. Christine, thank you for joining us on The 19!
Christine Moorman: [00:01:10] Thank you, Rochelle. Happy to be here!
Rochelle Reiter : [00:01:16] So you created the CMO survey in two thousand eight. What led you to create the survey?
Christine Moorman: [00:01:21] You know, I was part of several organizations like the American Marketing Association, the Marketing Science Institute and just talking to a lot of practitioners. There was a lot of concern and hand-wringing over the fact that marketers really weren’t getting that seat at the table. They weren’t getting the respect within organizations that they frankly deserve. It was unclear what I could do as a single academic, but one of the things that I thought about and was inspired also by my colleagues who were running something called the CFO survey at Duke University, was to create the CMO survey and to provide a way for the regular collection of information from marketers as a way to get that information out because people were asking about, say, what was going on in the marketplace and they were asking CFOs about that because there was no regular source of information about what CMOs we’re thinking. That’s changed a lot over the last thirteen or so years. There’s more and more of these sources, but I think the CMO survey is very unique, and I think it’s had some of the impact that I hoped it would had, which was to bring attention to what marketers were thinking, but also to provide some benchmarks to to marketers.
Rochelle Reiter : [00:02:35] Yeah, it’s it’s been great for us to access for sure as an agency. So it comes out twice a year. The most recent release in August. In your opinion, what value does the report bring to marketing leaders and brands?
Christine Moorman: [00:02:48] Well, part of it is really to collect and disseminate the opinions of these top marketers, and we use that and we ask them a lot of forward looking questions. What will you be doing over the next year? so, because often I think marketing is driven by a backward looking view. We ask about what happened in the past, but we don’t have any way to extrapolate into the future.