My tough love for CMOs these days is “adapt or die”. Your required portfolio (as well as other c-suite peers) is changing fast and that change is usually summed up in one word. Digital. The CMO in today’s organization better be a curious technician, a keen analyst, and comfortable building a business case. If XML, RSS, and SaaS look like alphabet soup, you might want to keep reading.

Jeff Gundersen, CEO of Executive Connections, offers some help in a recent Ad Age article where he lays out a digital primer for tech-hungry CMOs. He describes the digital dilemma:

They (CMOs) often don’t have the direct marketing, analytic/segmentation and customer-relationship-management-consultative skills to lead integrated media and marketing programs, combining general advertising, branding, direct, promotion, PR and digital elements.

Today’s marketing world is less and less about stand-alone campaigns that use one medium at a time and more about an integrated approach that speaks to your customers when and where they want. The kicker there is just because you find your market, doesn’t mean they’re ready to engage. Gundersen expands a bit further using the increasingly pervasive “micro” term, used to describe everything from the nature of today’s content to the characteristics of markets.

We are moving toward a marketing world that is driven by a direct-marketing opt-in, predictive modeling and tracking approach. Marketing in the future will not be about the masses but about understanding micro-segments of customers and using tools that enable marketing to get more granular and take campaigns to a one-to-one level.

I heard someone describe it recently as “customers are now looking for marketers instead of marketers looking for customers”. That’s earth-shattering, if not exciting.