The Marketing Plan

The average tenure of a chief marketing officer (CMO) can be measured in
months—about twenty-six months or less, in fact.Hallie Mummert, “Sitting
Chickens,” Target Marketing 31, no. 4 (April 2008): 11. Why? Because marketing is
one of those areas in a company in which performance is obvious. If sales go up, the
CMO can be lured away by a larger company or promoted.

Indeed, successful marketing experience can be a ticket to the top. The experience
of Paul Polman, a former marketing director at Procter & Gamble (P&G), illustrates
as much. Polman parlayed his success at P&G into a division president’s position at
Nestlé. Two years later, he became the CEO (chief executive officer) of
Unilever.David Benady, “Working with the Enemy,” Marketing Week, September 11,
2008, 18.

However, if sales go down, CMOs can find themselves fired. Oftentimes
nonmarketing executives have unrealistic expectations of their marketing
departments and what they can accomplish.Quotes in this paragraph are from Kate
Maddox, “Bottom-Line Pressure Forcing CMO Turnover,” B2B 92, no. 17 (December
10, 2007): 3–4. “Sometimes CEOs don’t know what they really want, and in some
cases CMOs don’t really understand what the CEOs want,” says Keith Pigues, a
former CMO for Cemex, the world’s largest cement company. “As a result, it’s not
surprising that there is a misalignment of expectations, and that has certainly led to
the short duration of the tenure of CMOs.”

Moreover, many CMOs are under pressure to set rosy sales forecasts in order to
satisfy not only their executive teams but also investors and Wall Street analysts.
“The core underpinning challenge is being able to demonstrate you’re adding value
to the bottom line,” explains Jim Murphy, former CMO of the consulting firm
Accenture. The problem is that when CMOs overpromise and underdeliver, they set
themselves up for a fall.

Much as firms must set their customers’ expectations, CMOs must set their
organization’s marketing expectations. Marketing plans help them do that. A welldesigned
marketing plan should communicate realistic expectations to a firm’s CEO
and other stakeholders. Another function of the marketing plan is to communicate to everyone in the organization who has what marketing-related
responsibilities and how they should execute those responsibilities.