Should Your CIO/CMO be in Charge?

I actually think that the Chief Information Officer, in principle should or could be in charge but I don’t think it’s going to happen because they do sit in isolation. In fact, what I do think is so ironic is none of those three different titles were probably in charge.

The CMO today has not managed to create a position that has power. Quite often it is a function where the person has authority but not a mandate and where you have to work with all your product managers or the head of the products and brands in order to persuade them to go in certain directions but you rarely can say anything.

The CDO is kind of the same issue. I think the issue here is that we probably see an entirely new function which is really on top of this – that would probably be a person who is hopefully someone who can understand the consumer to an extreme degree. A Consumer Officer.

In fact what I find is interesting is if you go to UK you’ll see that Tesco, which are struggling right now, has developed a function called the Chief Customer Officer. It actually is the CMO but she has changed the function to oversee the consumer behaviour and psychology and then sees the conduct of the operation.

I think this is the right direction because that function is much closer to data and insight than any of the other functions and it becomes, again, the conductor or all this information, making sure that you don’t oversee vital information or vital insights.