by Colleen Backstrom
Way back in 2007 Harvard Business School put out a paper entitled “Fixing the Marketing — CEO Disconnect”, which highlighted the gap between the marketing function and the C-suite. It emphasised that too much delegation of responsibility to the marketing department can result in marketing activities, which are not supportive of the company’s greater strategic goals. In 2011 the fundamental nature of marketing has shifted so rapidly that many CEOs, given the pressures of other priorities, have found it hard to keep pace.
Digital has become core to the future of marketing.
The days when digital simply meant a PR website are over. 2011 marketers require online to be more productive. They appreciate the extra reach that the internet offers and are making the deep strategic shift to make online work; digital needs to accelerate revenue growth; and digital needs to find new clients and generate real leads.
This requires a mind shift from the way we’ve done things before. And the CEO is the one that should be driving this mind shift to ensure that online marketing activities are aligned with strategic objectives. Unfortunately,
however, CEOs have often felt out of their depth when it comes to the inter- net and have left online marketing up to the marketing divisions completely. To make matters worse, the online marketing function in some corpo- rates has now been taken over by the IT department, because “they’re the only ones that understand the technol- ogy.” This gives us communications
that work technically, but the strategic marketing objectives have been lost somewhere down the line.
How to fix the rift?
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