Event Wrap Up:

Mark-Hans Richer, Chief Marketing and Innovation Officer at Fortune Brands led a recent CMO Club Virtual Roundtable around how CMOs can generate “new value” for their organizations during this time of extraordinary uncertainty. In a first reveal to The CMO Club, Richer introduced his “T-Method” framework for how Marketers can identify opportunity areas.

Listen to the full Virtual Roundtable [56:16]

Listen to the Virtual Roundtable Highlights Trailer [1:27]

All this Uncertainty = Tremendous Opportunity for CMOs

In moments of crisis, CMOs have the opportunity to build the foundations for the most creativity and value creation, Richer said. Organizations are looking to the CMO to create that value, to help bridge past the uncertainty across the organization.

Knowing Your Customer Is Everything

• Companies want their CMO to stand up and show that you really know the customer intimately.
• Are they buying or are they waiting? What are they thinking?

Businesses Need Marketing Leadership Now More than Ever

• Now is the time to guide your leadership team through understanding consumer behavioral change, macroeconomic situations, digital transformation dynamics, and more.
• Moments of crisis create rich opportunities for creative and value creation.

“The ability to have agility, flexibility, and nimbleness right now is more important than ever.” – Jon Suarez-Davis, SVP, Marketing Strategy and Innovation, Salesforce

Introducing the T-Method for Marketers

Richer’s T-Method introduces a process for identifying areas for value creation and stability as a marketing leader.

“The T-Method for marketers is a construct to address what a CMO can do now to add the most value.” – Mark-Hans Richer

Review Your Trust Base

• What are the strengths your organization has already developed that your consumers already appreciate?
• How can you make those even stronger? This is the easiest way to extract value right away because it’s already inherent in the business.
• Look for the assets your company has built up over time that are under-leveraged.

Make the Transformation Case

• What is the opportunity for transformation?
• The future needs to be a place you create.
• CMOs should be owning and educating on industry and consumer changes.
• CMOs need to show the rest of the leadership team where the company CAN go, even if they aren’t asking.

Recognize Today’s Transitions

• “Today” is a trap for CMOs – full of urgent and unimportant temporary distractions.
• What impacts a CMOs long tenure is playing bigger and taking risks that others are not willing to take.
• The CMO role should be stretching and forcing the organization to explore things that it wouldn’t normally explore.
• Make the creation of new value a daily pursuit.

“In this situation, the CMO can rise above and be the preeminent C-suite player.”
– Mark-Hans Richer

Listen to the full Virtual Roundtable as Richer expands on the key pillars of the T-Method and how CMOs can add value to their organizations in this time of great uncertainty.