I saw this headline from Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim blog in my feed today. Good grief- 76% of all CMOs are so bad at their job that they should be fired? Not that I didn’t trust you, Andy- but I had to download the full report from the CMO council.

Apparently marketers are forgetting the “basics.” In a time where marketers are obsessed with using new tech tools to launch elaborate marketing campaigns and reach consumers, the basics have been left in the dirt. Among key findings of the study, the following is quite relevant to what we believe at Questar:

The CMO Council study highlighted three key obstacles and deficiencies for not optimizing the full revenue potential and lifetime value of existing customers. This included:

- Lack of real-time data and analytics that captures insights from across all customer touch points.
- Information not only being selectively gathered, but often inaccurate or incomplete.
- Data being siloed and restricted in its availability and use across the organization.

The world is always changing and new ways of reaching consumers are always surfacing. But are CMOs paying enough attention to their brand’s existing customers? The report suggests this as a problem. The introduction includes these sections, which (in my opinion) offer a valuable take-away:

Identify new routes to revenue; Resilience during recession…Get more personal; Own the entire customer experience; Mobilize brand advocates and co-innovate

I haven’t read the entire report yet, but I definitely think it is worth taking a look at. Even the introduction and executive summary inspired this blog post from me.

So alright now, CMOs, this is what I think: Get on the social web, find your customers and have a dialogue with them, delve into new technologies, and keep up with changing times. But don’t forget about gathering customer data! At Questar we know the importance of this, because that is what we do (and we do it well). This report accuses senior marketers of leaving these basics out of the mix. So, here we are to remind you. Attention expert marketers- time to dig these fundamentals out of their early grave.

Be sure to check out Andy’s blog post and the CMO Council report.

And just for fun- I asked an actual CMO (Barry Judge of Best Buy) for his thoughts on the report (via Twitter). His response:

BestBuyCMO: @emgiel CMOs don’t last long for a number of reasons. Top 2 reasons: Difficulty in being able to measure impact followed by narrow scope

-Liz Giel