Around the CMO Council offices, we often hear a phrase from our executive director, Donovan Neale-May: “It’s not about working HARDER, its about working SMARTER.” Now, try to say that while imitating a South African accent, and you'll have a slice of the CMO Council staff meeting experience.

But the reality is that this could actually be the year of “working smarter, not harder” for CMOs—according to the results of the CMO Council’s Marketing Outlook 2009 report. Consider the top findings:

• For the majority of marketers, budgets will be unchanged from last year, with some budgets set to increase.
• The media mix will change dramatically: up to 18% of respondents indicated significant decreases in print media spend, while increases in spend are expected in digital media, SEO and SEM.
• Instead of slashing and rehiring talent, marketers indicate they will enhance training, making existing staff more skilled in areas like digital media.
• Marketers want to connect with customers and gain better customer insight, but other top professional priorities include mastering that 'work-life balance'.

Marketing Outlook is really about what you, our CMO Council members, identify as some of the top priorities in the year ahead. And, we heard you loud and clear: it’s about driving the bottom line, connecting with customers and supporting sales. So we are here to raise the bar on the programs and content that we develop in order to share best practices from colleagues and peers. To give you just a glimpse into our year ahead, here is what we have on tap:

• We'll take a deep dive into customer experience, specifically in the telecommunications world, with The Customer Experience Board with Amdocs.
• Loyalty programs will take center stage with Getting a Business Lift from Loyalty as we look at all of the ways to get more—and waste less—in those retention-focused loyalty programs.
• Looking for a new PR resource or on-demand translation services? Look no further than the CMO Council’s Global Sourcing Center, part of our new program to help streamline the Marketing Supply Chain.

These are just three of the new programs that will help you work smarter...and keep us working harder AND smarter! If you would like more info on these programs as they get ready to launch, don’t hesitate to contact us.

And, if you haven’t already, be sure to download Marketing Outlook 2009 today!

Until next month,

Liz Miller
VP, Programs & Operations
CMO Council

Get to Know A CMO:
Blair Shane, Chief Marketing Officer for the California Academy of Sciences

Your professional background is very diverse, from start-ups to large corporations to even your own nonprofit. What brought you to work for the museum?

When the opportunity came across my desk, I realized it was the convergence of some pretty amazing things. I've always had a passion for education, and the chance to combine that with a business launch was really appealing. The Academy, at 155 years old, had the opportunity to reinvent itself, and it is happening at a time when science and scientific literacy are more important than ever.

For a knowledge-based economy – a popular topic of conversation these days – the sciences are critical. The Academy is all about sparking curiosity in people and teaching them about science. So I was excited to work with an organization whose mission is to further our understanding of the natural world, and raise awareness of some of the most critical issues of our time: sustainability, climate change, and science education.

What has that reinvention meant for you in terms of programs and initiatives?

To redefine the museum for the 21st century, we really wanted to make science more relevant and more accessible. Museums are typically perceived as kind of old and dusty, and our goal was to make the Academy a place you can come and have fun—somewhere that is bursting with life, somewhere that sparks questions in visitors so that they want to continue the exploration and discovery after they leave.

The first major opportunity and challenge for us was redefining what the Academy means to people today. It was a very basic and important piece for us. Before we started our work a year and a half ago, unaided brand awareness for the Academy was 5%. Since the launch, we are up to about 21%. And we want to keep on that trajectory. The messaging for the public relations and advertising campaigns around the opening was a huge part of seeding that reinvention, and continuing to demonstrate the relevance of the Academy’s research and public programs in people’s lives. That means taking an integrated marketing approach that makes use of partnerships, public relations, social networking, advertising, the Web, and other channels to get information to people the way they want it. We have to put all those pieces together to drive home that the Academy is a meaningful institution for the 21st century.

You have a great deal of web experience, including working for a start-up during the dot-com boom. What are your goals for the academy's online space, calacademy.org?

Since our goal is not only to drive two million people through our doors annually, but also really create and build relationships with those people, increasing engagement on the Web is an important piece. We’re about to add a great interactive map that will allow you to see the whole museum before you come, flag areas that you’re interested in, and even print out an itinerary. That's coming soon. We’re also really trying to leverage social networks for audience development, and referrals. An example is our new NightLife series that targets people age 21-35. Social networking - tools like Facebook, Flickr and Twitter - is a primary mechanism for marketing the events every week.

The site is also about making the Academy a museum of the future, one without walls. It is a way to make the museum accessible to those who may never set foot through our front doors—helping science education spread worldwide. Audiences like teachers and scientists are really important for us to communicate and engage with. Our site allows teachers to do complete lesson planning before and after a field trip, and even if they aren’t going to come to the Academy for field trips, it has immense resources to help within the classroom. We have a new initiative coming up to further build out our web presence for the scientific community.

As a marketer, do you find there are any challenges specific to working in a not-for-profit environment? Do you have any key recommendations?

In not-for-profit environments where resources can be limited, it's especially important for marketers to build a great team. Everyone is here because they have a passion for our mission, which is unifying among staff. At the same time, because everyone is mission-driven, sometimes there can be tension around balancing what we need to do to accomplish the mission, and to sustain the organization from a revenue standpoint. So, open communication and collaboration with peers is especially important, and being factual and analytical is key to building support for marketing initiatives.

Nonprofits can also have a more diverse set of audiences. But whether with corporate or not-for-profit organizations, we must always strive to make organizations audience-centric. I believe that integrated marketing makes all the difference. Functional, siloed marketing is not the way to go. Integration around core goals and themes is the key to success with your audiences.

The Chief Marketing Officer of the California Academy of Sciences, Blair Shane strives to strengthen recognition and understanding of all that the organization has to offer its diverse audiences. The Academy’s mission is to explore, explain and protect the natural world. Prior to joining the Academy in 2007, Shane served as the Vice President for Marketing Planning and Integration at Charles Schwab & Co. Prior to Schwab, she gained experience running lines of business at General Mills and Franklin Templeton Group. Shane earned her MBA from Stanford University, as well as a certificate in public management. At Johns Hopkins University, she received her bachelor’s degree in history. Following her undergraduate work, she co-founded the non-profit “Hands on San Francisco.”

A CMO's Most Valuable Role: Innovating your Business Model

By Kay Plantes, author of Beyond Price: Differentiate Your Company in Ways that Really Matter

CMOs like you are working harder than ever. But are you working smarter? The escalating challenges you face may be diverting attention from your highest value-add role: being a catalyst to business unit and corporate leadership teams struggling to define and build innovative business models. The best marketing efforts will fall short of their goals if leaders stick with an undifferentiated business model.

Commoditization—the process by which price becomes a progressively stronger purchasing decision-factor—is occurring at an accelerating rate. Starbucks learned this lesson the hard way as McDonalds and others entered the premium coffee market with lower prices.

Many factors create accelerating commoditization including a plethora of maturing categories, most with excess supply. A strong business service industry enables companies to quickly copy competitors’ innovations. With the Internet, consumers price shop effortlessly and they increasingly shape brand images. Add in auctions and disruptive innovators offering lower-cost solutions and you have the quicksand that pulls offerings, markets, and companies (not to mention CMOs) into competing on price.

The hottest models aren’t at Victoria’s Secret. They are at companies smart enough to build brand equity by creating and sustaining differentiated business models. Companies like Apple, Target, Walmart, IBM, Harley-Davidson, and GE Medical (among others) understand, in the words of retired Harley chairman and CEO Rich Teerlink that “Change is continuous and accelerating; the old strategies don’t cut it!”

CMOs have largely dealt with realities of accelerating commoditization using traditional tactics: placing more emphasis on branding, improving marketing communications, investing in new product innovations, and participating in cost-saving product and process improvements. Yet brand loyalty and brand premiums continue to decline because such actions fail to reverse the underlying drivers of commoditization, drivers that have worsened in this recession. The growing success of private label store brands provide testimony to this troubling trend.

An innovative business model built on hard-to-copy companywide advantages is your only way to escape growing price competition. Stated more simply, if you can’t be your industry’s Walmart, the low cost competitor that thrives in commodity competition, avoid becoming its Sears. Find new answers at both the business unit and corporate level to the five core strategy questions that define a business model:

• Who is (are) our target market(s)?
• What business are we in?
• What is our differentiated value promise that leads targets to choose us?
• What advantages enable us to deliver on this promise and keep competitors from being able to easily copy us?
• What is our formula for profitability?

The foundation of a successful business model is differential advantage: a weaving of knowledge, learning, competencies, technologies, partnerships, and culture that is infinitely harder to copy than individual new products or services. The best business models are not only differentiated, hard-to-copy and profitable, they are also highly relevant to customers and therefore offer strong growth opportunities.

Apple provides a stellar example. Despite a lower R&D spend as a percent of revenue than its competitors Apple delivers breakthrough products and new categories because of its design advantage. Business Week reported in its November 10, 2008 issue that Dell’s market capitalization was about the same as Apple’s net cash on hand.

CMOs have the expertise, knowledge and opportunity to play a leading role in business model innovation. Take responsibility for seven operating practices for empowering business unit and corporate leadership teams to build and sustain unique business models:

• Regularly remind other leaders that commoditization is the gravity of our economy. Absent change, business becomes all about price;
• Create a strong market-understanding process, parallel to the financial understanding process, to guide company decisions and keep leaders market-focused, not just customer-focused;
• Challenge the underlying assumptions of existing business models and surface strategic insights to keep business models differentiated, relevant and full of growth opportunities;
• Facilitate leadership teams’ business model decision-making;
• Make sure that annual business plans advance the value promise and create or strengthen hard-to-copy advantages;
• Help leadership teams define norms and operating practices that would unleash more of the growth potential of their business model; and
• Make marketing the internal voice of the value promise, helping other parts of the organization understand how the company wants to win business.

David Packard stated, “Marketing is too important to leave to the marketing department.” If a leadership team does not agree on its business model and in particular its value promise, efforts of different parts of the organization will not be aligned and even the best tactical marketing will fail to improve financial and marketplace performance.

Business units and companies need you as their CMO to step into your strategic role. Make business model innovation a top priority. Delegate more of marketing’s tactical efforts to advance annual revenue to your staff. Work smarter, not just harder.

Mary Kay Plantes is an MIT-trained economist, business strategy consultant and co-author of Beyond Price: Differentiate Your Company in Ways that Really Matter (Greenleaf Book Group, 2009). Beyond Price provides a step-by-step, holistic road map for business model innovation. Before starting her 20-year old business strategy consultancy, Plantes Company LLC, she led marketing and business development for a global medical equipment company.