In 2007 fourteen FTSE 100 companies had a marketer on the main board. Today none do, though 70 per cent have marketing expertise somewhere at the table.
Not one FTSE 100 board has a chief marketing officer or marketing director sitting on it. That is the headline finding of a new study by the agency The Marketing Directors, and it marks a slow disappearance: when Professor Malcolm McDonald and Cranfield School of Management ran the same count in 2007, fourteen companies had a marketer at the top table.
The picture is less bleak than the headline. Seventy per cent of the companies have what the study calls meaningful marketing, customer or brand expertise somewhere on the board, as Marketing Week reported. Around one in ten chief executives came up through marketing or customer roles, among them Tesco’s Ken Murphy and Reckitt’s Kris Licht, and 45 per cent of main boards have marketing experience beyond the chief executive.
Below the main board the numbers improve again. Thirty per cent of companies have a senior marketing or customer leader in their top management, and consumer brands lead the way: all sixteen in the index have one. Energy and financial services are where the expertise is thinnest.
Two things have happened at once. Main boards have become watchdogs, concerned with governance and long-term oversight under the corporate governance code, while the running of the business sits with an executive committee, which 86 per cent of these companies have. And marketing has been folded into other titles. Chief growth officer and chief customer officer now do the job the chief marketing officer used to.
It arrives in a telling week. Virgin Media O2 has just removed its top marketing role and handed the brief to a consumer chief executive. In the same few days, Next’s chief executive told investors that marketing drove his growth and published the return on every pound.
Put those two stories together and you have the honest answer. Marketing’s influence has not vanished, but it now travels under other people’s job titles, and it is strongest where a chief executive already believes in it. The risk is what happens where one does not. A discipline with no seat has no one to argue for the long term when budgets tighten, and the brands that keep investing through a downturn tend to be the ones with somebody in the room making the case.
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