Turning culture into business' superpower

How CMO and CFO became best friends

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Out of everything I said during my recent book tour, the thing that resonated with the audiences the most was that CMOs and CFOs have to rapidly become best friends. This means that they have to work closely together, understand what one another is doing, and collaborate on common goals and KPIs.

This is new. Unpacked, it looks like the following.

Traditionally, companies, across creative industries, are set up to separate idea creation from idea commercialization. This means that those who come up with ideas are not the same people who sell those ideas. The outcome is not only a slow linear process - a series of hand-offs - but also the lack of clear and consistent KPIs. It’s really hard to measure ideas that someone else came up with and that you are in charge of selling.

Much better is to agree together on what are the revenue targets and sales goals, what are the KPIs measuring progress on each, and what is the contribution of each of the creative ideas for the overall revenue. Broken down further, the conversation looks like this:

The starting point of the conversation is the annual or quarterly revenue target.

From there, this target is broken down into specific business and brand goals and KPIs. Each media action and retail channel is assigned a contribution the goal, measured through KPI.

Target audiences, including customer personas, subcultures, and target cultural commentators are mapped agains retail channels and media actions. Target audiences