Last week, I kicked off a blog series titled, A Tale of Two CMO’s: A Study in Contrasts. The goal of the series is to contrast the styles of an old school and new school CMO whose personas I’ve fleshed out in my original post. Over the next five weeks, the series will focus on a different aspect of the marketing funnel (awareness, interest, desire and action) in order to get a perspective from each CMO.
Before I start asking our two CMOs questions about this week’s topic, I am going to take a question from Steve Poppe who was kind enough to ask a simple yet profound question in the comments’ section of last week’s post.
Here goes:
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Who owns the brand?
James: I know that the answer that everyone wants me to give is, the$customer. And believe it or not, I do believe that our customers share in the ownership of our company’s brand. However, at the end of the day, our management team is responsible to our shareholders. Occasionally, what our stakeholders (customers, prospects, employees and partners) want and what we are financially required to do on behalf of our shareholders are mutually exclusive. Whenever possible though, we do everything in our power to steer the brand in the direction that all of our stakeholders desire.
Tessa: Based on what you read in today’s press and in the blogosphere, companies have little to no ownership of their brands. To me, that is a load of horse crap because without our products, employees, website, press relations, advertising and yes, social presence, brands wouldn’t exist. With that said, I am a firm believer in the fact that the old “command and control” style aka “we’ll tell you what our brand is and you’ll like it” days are over. Smart companies — I’d like to put ours in that bucket — are realizing that we live in a world of customer co-creation and that customers are sharing what they think of “us” every day. We may not like what our customers are saying about us, but shame on any CMO that isn’t paying attention to their customers’ feedback.
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If you could only spend money on facet of marketing to generate brand awareness, what would it be and why?



A very interesting study in two different perspectives of brand awareness. But, are they really all that different? In the end, large or small, each CMO has the same mission and must evaluate and choose among all available tools to accomplish that mission. It's interesting to me that both had very similar answers to the last question – and, indeed, I think they are right. "Social" may not be the best tool for better brand awareness, but it is a great vehicle to engage customers and provide publicized customer service.
Elmer – insightful comment. I think you'll see a lot more differentiation as we go deeper into the funnel.
Aaron, I love Tessa's frankness re. "Who owns the brand?" but didn't quite expect her answer. She's pretty smart that Tessa. There was s recent McKinsey study posted on WARC stating that brand managers today need to be generalists. I'm leery of that POV but know where it's coming from. Brand management is an art which both of your CMOs seem to recognize. Now, if we can just get the newbies, media socialists and talk circuit on board.
I am very much impressed by this article. I think both of them have made good point to focus upon. Brand management is the one which both of your CMOs seem to recognize.