The role of Chief Marketing Officers is changing

Radical changes in the business environment and multi-dimensional professional demands are forcing the role of Chief Marketing Officers to evolve. The profiles of two successful CMOs can now look so different that it is hard to believe they hold the same positions, according to Egon Zehnder consultants Dick Patton and Rory Finlay.

In their view, the CMO role is quickly diversifying across five critical axes, each marked by discrete tensions. These axes include, for example, the all-round business leader versus the specialist marketing guru or the forward-looking innovation champion versus the sales-now shopper expert. Few CMOs currently have a sufficiently broad palette of competencies to span these borders. The next step in the CMO evolutionary chain, say the authors, will be a leader who blends both comprehensive and specialized perspectives to guide the company’s ever-widening range of strategic marketing demands.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-23/are-you-a-cmo-coping-with-cladogenesis