Mind the Capability Gap

A very interesting report on the state of CMO’s and budget setting for 2023 from our friends at Gartner was released last week. The good news is that budgets are up, although still not at pre-pandemic levels (as a proportion of company turnover).

But what’s really interesting is the analysis of the “capability gap” between what CMO’s regard as important priorities and their actual capability to deliver on them.

So whilst for example tackling the core functions of a marketing department - customer acquisition and retention for example - is felt to be well within the capability of most of the respondents and their teams, other rather vital skills were felt to have significant shortfalls.

I should say that n=405 CMO’s in 2022, 400 in 2021 etc so this is no small survey and the CMO’s are with large and often global corporations.

And so the fact that a full 26% of the CMO’s in the survey felt that they lacked capability in “Marketing Data and Analytics” is I think rather chilling.

A further 23% felt a gap in their ability to fully embrace “Customer Understanding and Experience Management”.

And 22% placed “Marketing Technology” as a shortcoming in their armoury.

The respondents were large and often global corporates which makes the results all the more surprising - the missing capabilities are hardly ‘nice-to-haves’ in any competitive market.

Over the most recent period the study also noted that hiring people with the relevant missing skills was rather static.

For those with the people and consultancies in place this looks like a terrific competitive advantage to me and a gap that will inevitably close.

As if these findings alone were not enough, right at the end of the report Gartner slip in another remarkable finding.

71% of the CMO’s questioned believe that they need to “re-evaluate the role their function plays to achieve their long term vision”. I might be being pedantic here but shouldn’t that “…need to” be an “are”?

In a post-pandemic, record inflation, likely recession economy with a host or permanent and temporary changes to customer behaviour, further change (again) in media channel trends and everything else happening; a better grasp of data and analytics, customer experience and MarTech might be a rather good idea.

And whilst I’m no longer a CMO, I rather think the re-evaluation 71% seem to think is needed is in fact needed rather soon.

For premium and luxury clients we are of course here to help to mind that gap.