How CMO’s can thrive in tough times

It’s often in the toughest of situations and economic environments the best CMOs shine.  

During ADMA Global Forum, two marketing leaders of different ilk, Alexander Meyer and Mel Hopkins, shared how their efforts to align with business while honouring the craft of marketing enabled them to solidify marketing’s role at the executive table in disparate circumstances.  

Their lessons come in the nick of time given the stark warning presented by fellow speaker, Scott Galloway: If you’re a CMO who’s not in the business of business, you won’t survive.  

“If you’re a CMO focused on supply chain and incorporating innovation and there’s a pull between you and business heads because they think you are talented and someone who can scan the world, bring great ideas and help them be successful, that CMO survives and may become the COO or SVP of supply chain,” Galloway told attendees.  

“If you’re a CMO that shows up and says I need more budget so I can do a brand identity study, spend money on advertising and hang out with people at great conferences who are more interesting or better looking than me by spending media dollars that are less and less effective, you’re like the second lieutenant in Vietnam: You’re dead in 18 months or less.”  

Alexander Meyer: 7 principles to cope with uncertainty, transformation and tough times 

Former CMO of The Iconic and The Bay, Alexander Meyer, agreed the struggle for marketing is real and the ‘mad men’ era is well past us.  

“Marketing is in uproar – we are all dealing with difficult situations right now. There’s the economic situation, budget cuts, transformations, all the challenges of too much coming on to us, too much opportunity, choices for consumers,” he said. “That can be frightening – how do you deal with that? It starts by having the right conversations to then install the right actions.” 

In response, Meyer offered a seven-point framework he’s used throughout his career to fuel the right conversations and actions. His first principle is respecting the craft of marketing itself.  

“There is science and knowledge behind it. You never lose the conversation if you go back to the craft and root it in what marketing is all about,” Meyer urged.   

The caveat is balancing that with recognition of the business and organisational context you’re operating in. Hence Meyer’s second principle: Champion business strategy.  

“If there is a shift and focus on profitability for cashflow reasons, what are the planning teams looking at? They’re looking at the profitability of categories, brands and SKUs; they make tough decisions and may need to cull some categories and de-invest from brands,” he commented. “So from a marketing side and a demand perspective, look at profitability by customer, by channel and by campaign. Find the right angles to do that.”  

In complement, marketers need to be transparent with cross-functional colleagues about what is and isn’t working. In Meyer’s case, a budgeting sheet giving buying teams visibility across marketing’s total spend, split by categories and performance channels and representing each category’s share of total business, was a useful way to broker agreement.  

“You’ll not only start transparent conversations, you’ll get buying teams and category officers who have to think hard and be forced to understand the constraints you may have with budget,” Meyer said. “Lead with transparency and be vulnerable in the sense you’re not afraid they talk into your craft.  

“You have to deal with this together and the business needs to handle it together. Use tools to show what you have available, then discuss strategically how you organise that.”   

Aligned to this third principle was Meyer’s fourth CMO imperative: Get closer to the business by utilising different ways of working and learning from other departments. Meyer, for instance, has harnessed agile marketing and matrixed structures to create autonomous squads with accountability and alignment to category management, buying and strategic product teams.  

 “The point here is there is an opportunity to look at different ways of working for the sake of getting closer to the business and creating connection at speed in the go-to-market process,” he said.  

Meyer’s fifth principle is brand is the CMO’s first love, not the customer. “If the brand is doing well, the customer will follow,” he argued.  

One way Meyer achieved this at The Iconic was linking brand strategy to micro moments in shopping by introducing the ‘Considered’ filter. This enabled online shoppers to easily search for environmentally conscious products and came off the back of brand positioning work that defined sustainability as one of The Iconic’s key differentiators.  

“We realised when we put the filter up to be one of the top filers in the journey for consumers that we really changed the game and brought supply and demand together for sustainability,” Meyer said. “Customers didn’t have to go out of their way anymore to search a category or see criteria. We also made it easier for our brands to get more data points and understand customers really wanted this when it’s possible without much friction. And it was based on our brand positioning work.”  

Meyer’s sixth principle is one many marketers have already heard but continue to struggle with: Talk like a CFO. “Numbers are a powerful enabler and measurement is a new currency,” Meyer said. “I’m a big believer creativity is the real differentiator of the future, but data is a staple and measurement an absolute must.”  

Meyer’s approach has been to build a 360-degree measurement framework taking advantage of a combination of measurement models including return on ad spend (ROAS), market mix modelling, attribution models and incrementality tests.  

“The goal is to create real numbers to manage investments to be profitable,” he said. “Since I joined The Bay [as CMO], we made our dollars 40 per cent more efficient, changed the channel mix and realised, once we looked at profitability, how the investment strategy becomes completely different.”  

As a final to-do, Meyer advocated “creativity beyond the creative”. This could be creative business models, partnerships or investing in in-house skillsets such as content writers over another above-the-line campaign.  

“Sometimes we are having the wrong conversations in marketing. Look at the reality of the business and you don’t need to be,” Meyer concluded. “You have a certain budget, a certain CFO viewpoint, certain team choices. The right things will come to you if you focus more on your environment.”  

Mel Hopkins: Bringing marketing and brand strength to bear during a data breach 

It was in a very different set of circumstances which saw former Optus CMO and now chief marketing and audience officer for Seven Network, Mel Hopkins, focused on business environment and cross-functional connection: The 2022 Optus cyberattack. The data breach saw the personal data of 9.7 million customers exposed and was followed several high-profile data breaches including at Medibank and Latitude Financial Services.  

In Hopkins’ case, impact on the customer was front and centre of decision making and critical to getting through the first days and weeks of the crisis. Like Meyer, she reflected on how as a CMO she operated in a situation where many aspects were not in her direct control and alignment with executive colleagues and business to deliver appropriate outcomes was vital.  

According to Hopkins, one of the wisest things Optus did during the early days of the breach was split the whole organisation into two: Crisis team, and business as usual. As CMO, Hopkins was seconded into the cyber response team alongside 150 cross-functional colleagues to focus solely on the evolving situation.  

“Part of my success is I’ve always championed working cross-functionally. I don’t think Optus would have been able to respond in the manner it did without those tight relationships and cross-functional workings,” Hopkins said. “I had a tight relationship with my head of cybersecurity. I had a great relationship with my CIO, with tight relationships with the legal team, customer success. Our data teams and how they manage all of that data. That made it a little easier because the relationships had been established in the first instance, and there was deep respect for each of us in our subject matter expertise.” 

This also enabled responsiveness. Optus sent out 120 different pieces of communication to 9.7m customers over a 3-week period detailing what information had been put at risk or not. That was after recreating the 20TB of data taken by the hacker, so teams knew exactly what had happened. Individual communications had to be approved not only by the legal department, but multiple government departments, that with a point of view on what Optus said and how it managed that with customers. In all, Hopkins was dealing with 30 different government departments, state-based and nationally, given the mix of personal data exposed in the breach. 

“That was eye-opening and a massive learning, as we were dealing with government departments and asking them to turn things around in radical time,” she said. “My big callout to anyone here that collects data that has any link to any single government department nationally is to be really clear on how it works state by state as it’s so complex.”  

Having solid compliance training was another foundation Hopkins and the Optus team relied upon. 

“The upside around privacy and regulation is we were so well versed in it at Optus, we were able to respond super quickly. There wasn’t an education job required around what is good to share with people, what’s not, and how you manage X, Y or Z. That made a huge difference,” Hopkins said. “In a crisis situation, you’re dealing with everything from privacy, cyber, data handling through to things like duty of care and how you manage people having to work in an incredibly stressful environment, considering things like service communications versus the SPAM Act.  

“Then there’s the right type of communications. Some people said we should have just gone and texted everyone immediately. What are we going to text them? ‘We’ve had a breach; your data may have affected’. What’s likely to occur from that? You alarm people. We didn’t have the answers and we would have had call centres absolutely overloaded. Trying to work through all those things at really fast speed and to be frank, on limited sleep, were massive decisions.”  

Putting the brand into action was another critical part in how Optus responded to the unfolding situation. For her part, Hopkins believed the strength of the Optus brands thanks to the work her team had put in over several years enabled it to better weather the storm.  

“We went back to what our brand stood for and why we existed,” Hopkins continued. “At the heart of what we believed at Optus was connecting Australia’s infrastructure. Two, that we always act with optimism in action. While we were never going to be flip during this period, as a team, the best thing we could do was remain optimistic and calm. Then finally, we overcommunicated. We shared what we could when we could, people got together, there was an amazing outpouring of empathy between individuals wanting to help out.” 

For Hopkins, being an instrumental member of Optus’s team during the data breach crisis required both her unique strengths as a CMO and enterprise leadership.  

“I was calm, I was in control, I was measured. I had a whole lot of stuff going on with individuals throwing crap at me, approaches many publicly – none of it bothered me and I felt comfortable in my discipline and what I was doing representing the customer,” she said.  

“The other thing around the role of a CMO is the job is not advertising and brand. The job is bringing customer to a business, and ensuring we look after those customers respectfully, end-to-end. That is what kept me awake at night and ensured we did that with dignity and respect. It’s no one else’s role.  

“I appreciate the job of a CMO is not to manage the discipline of marketing only; I was an integral part of the organisation and it was super important I had that enterprise leadership approach.”