The CMO has become a generalist: RK Group CMO

A CMO has become a generalist as they need to understand every single part of the marketing process and funnel, according to Katherine Cole, CMO at RK Group.

She told Digital Nation Australia, “I find one of the challenges is that balance between internal staff and external agencies to get the outcome that you're looking for in the start-up and scale up space.

“In the last five years, as a CMO and head of marketing, one of my biggest challenges has been looking after multiple brands in the portfolio. Sometimes these brands are competing brands. It's exactly the same product, we're just positioning it differently. There's a lot of challenges around that,” she said.

CMOs also need to have a major technical understanding, Cole explained.

“The CMO has to be very technical and understand the technical side of business, not the product, but the tools that are available in the toolkit to use,” she said.

There can be some confusion in B2B marketing when it comes to what a marketer is in charge of, Cole said.

“With a B2B product that has a quite expansive distribution network, the marketer’s role is far broader and you are responsible for the customer experience across absolutely every touch point,” she explained.  

“You're responsible for the language, the messaging, the responses, the conversion on the website, and the conversion at the point of sale at retail.”

Cole encourages CMOs to network with other heads of marketing to discuss issues and help each other along the journey.

She said, “One of the driving factors for successful CMOs is being connected to each other. I'm in the CMO network and we do share a lot of our challenges and how are we going to address that and are you having the same challenge or have you looked at this?

“It's a quite a supportive platform and it goes back to communities which are important.”