Chief Marketers Need to Balance Digital, Relationship, and Financial Skills

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Chief Marketers Need to Balance Digital, Relationship, and Financial Skills

18 October 2024 / Article

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To achieve business goals, today’s chief marketing officers (CMOs) need to have artificial intelligence (AI) and digital skills to leverage complex data—in addition to human intelligence, business capabilities to drive growth, and interpersonal skills to be effective collaborators and change agents across the company.

This article highlights what skills CMOs and CEOs consider most important skills based on insights from interviews with CMOs, CEOs, and executive recruiters; a CMO roundtable and survey; and third-party sources.

This article is part of a series of insight articles on the CMO role.

Key Insights

In contrast to CEOs, CMOs highlight tech and data skills more as increasingly important for future CMOs than relationship and financial expertise.
CEOs want a CMO who is primarily a businessperson and has marketing expertise, emphasizing business acumen and soft skills as relatively more crucial for CMOs than CMOs do.

Author

Denise Dahlhoff, PhD

Denise Dahlhoff, PhD

Director, Marketing & Communications Research
The Conference Board

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