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I struggle to think of a reason why they (or anyone else for that matter) even need a CBO or CMO.

• georgespencer 9y ago
  I'd speculate that most businesses would benefit from a good CMO. From [at times painful] experience: CMO should be a surrogate-founder level position for a quant marketer who is aware that they are not a qual marketer. Ultimately the challenge of optimising the deployment of a marketing budget in excess of $5m USD is difficult for a CEO who is operationally involved in any other area of the business, but pre-profit is an incredibly metric driven task. A good quant marketer will be able to handle numbers in a way that a brand marketer will not, but will be open to listening to arguments for qualitative marketing. The trouble is that marketing as a discipline is full of quals pretending to be quants, and most of them are bad. Whenever I have dinner with friends who run venture-backed startups I ask how happy they are with their CMO, and there's a general acceptance that CMOs have a two year lifespan. (I should add that I'm certain it's incredibly unforgiving being CMO in a startup where product/market and the unit economics are probably not proved. Simple things like calculating churn or LTV are made impossible. Tough gig.)