Eric-Jan (EJ) Schmidt, CMO, Hitachi Data Systems
Bob Braham, VP Enterprise Marketing, EMC
Victor Maurta, Global Marketing Director, Dow Chemical Co.
Bob Braham of EMC kicked off the session with three must haves:
· Goals – agreed with the CEO/division president
· Dashboard
· Metrics
Victor Maurta of Dow Chemical picked up the baton sharing some relevant quotes including his favoriate:
“Measurement in the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.” – H James Harrington
“At Dow, the CMOs must drive a culture of growth throughout the company,” said Victor. “And CMOs must own the brand and customer experience, so we have deployed a standardized global customer perceptions survey program that measures four dimensions – satisfaction and loyalty, brand, competitive advantage, and transformation index – all important metrics for the CEO. And finally, CMOs must achieve a ROI for not all but some program elements.”
Eric-Jan (EJ) Schmidt of Hitachi Data Systems explained that marketing ranked fairly low on the totem pole when he joined the company, so it was important to understand the context of marketing and balance expectations with the CEO.
One big challenge for EJ was developing metrics without systems or institutionalized process. “You want to get started quick, you want to think big, but you want to act small,” he said. “The culture and aspiration reset was the biggest change. And how you position your own function alongside others is incredibly important – such as how to integrate with sales, work with IT, and work with the CFO.”
Victor explained that, at Dow, the functions which are really strong own processes and are the important drivers of the organization. For example, marketing has built an innovation dashboard for the CFO.