[PRACTICE NOTE] The CMO's New Customer Centric Imperative
Organizations rarely fail to notice a gap in accountability. They fail to decide who closes it. The chief marketing officer sits on one of the most visible of those gaps. The response over the past decade has been to widen the job rather than to resolve it.
Marketing's remit has been stretched twice. First into demand generation, where the function absorbed pipeline, lead quality and the machinery that produces both. Then into revenue, where the function took on a number that every other part of the commercial system also touches. Both expansions were real, and both were earned, and neither closed the gap the role actually sits on.
That gap is narrow enough to state in a single sentence. Marketing is measured on the formation of intent and almost never on its survival. A campaign can perform, a brand can win preference, a customer can decide, and the value of that decision can still leak away in everything that happens next.
Two expansions of the remit that left the real gap open
Demand generation gave marketing a pipeline and a defensible contribution to it. Revenue accountability gave marketing a seat in conversations about growth that it had often been invited to observe rather than shape. Each move raised the stature of the function, and each move also tied it more tightly to the moment of decision rather than to the outcome of one.
The consequence shows up in how marketing performance is reviewed. Awareness, consideration, conversion and the cost of each are measured with real discipline, often to a level of precision the rest of the business cannot match. What the customer went on to get, and whether the value promised at the point of decision was ever realized, usually belongs to somebody else or to nobody at all.
Why a converged category stops rewarding better messaging
There is a cognitive reason this matters more now than it did, and it has little to do with media. Customers often cannot meaningfully separate their perceptions of one company from the next. Every competitor works to influence, guide and compel a preference. Customers are frequently left with the impression that all the companies involved in a decision are generally positive and generally the same.
I describe that effect as positivity bias, and its commercial consequence is severe. It marginalizes, homogenizes and commoditizes value propositions, which quietly counteracts the expensive brand messaging and advertising built to differentiate them. What remains is head to head competition over features, functions and price, which is the condition most mature categories now describe as normal.
A CMO whose category has converged is therefore being asked to differentiate on message in a market where message no longer differentiates. The budget may be intact and the creative may be excellent. The medium of differentiation has moved, and it has moved toward what the customer actually experiences in the course of trying to get something done.
What a retailer understood about where competition gets decided
Nordstrom is the example I keep returning to, because the choice it made was structural rather than promotional. In a retail category where assortment and price can be matched inside a season, the company tilted the basis of competition toward a warm and welcoming shopping experience. Attentive frontline staff, hassle free returns long before returns were easy anywhere, and a visible commitment to exceeding expectations inside every interaction became the thing that was hard to copy.
Starbucks made a comparable choice at its first store in Pike Place Market. Quality, taste and price of coffee could be matched by other specialty houses. The company built differentiated value in the emotional and experiential dimensions instead, through the physical environment, the barista interaction and personalization. In the book I called the broader shift Experiential Commerce, a way of naming how experiential factors entered lifecycle decisions alongside product and brand rather than trailing behind them.
An experience-led growth strategy belongs inside corporate strategy
The constructive version of this argument sits at the level of strategy rather than campaign. An experience-led growth strategy carries three features that distinguish it from the customer experience plans most companies have written. The first is structural. Such a strategy must be a subset of corporate strategy rather than something created in a vacuum. It flows from enterprise mission, objectives and key results before it ladders down into any measurement framework.
The second feature is a choice about where to compete. The strategy must name the experiential battlefields the company elects to contest beyond its core products and services, based on its own view of the customer and the opportunity landscape. Few companies make that choice explicitly, which is why so many experience programs read as a list of fixes rather than as a position.
The third feature is where the argument earns its name. An experience-led growth strategy must act as a strategic revenue driver across every stage of the customer lifecycle rather than as a post-purchase concern. It begins at awareness and acquisition, carries through consideration and conversion, and continues into usage, renewal and referral, influencing corporate objectives and customer goal attainment at each of those stages.
The economics of intent that does not survive
The economics here are not subtle, and they are the reason this sits with a CMO rather than with a service function. The cost to acquire a new customer runs five to twenty-five times the cost to retain one. That ratio makes the vicious cycle of continuous acquisition alongside disenfranchised existing customers far too costly to sustain. Marketing bears the acquisition cost twice when the first relationship fails quietly.
The external evidence points the same way. Forrester's customer experience index reported that customer obsessed organizations saw 41% faster revenue growth than the rest. Gartner's work on effort found that low effort customers are 61% more likely to stay, which is the kind of signal no open rate will ever produce.
Bain adds the caution that keeps this honest, calling goodwill "a necessary but insufficient condition for generating revenue growth" in its own research on loyalty. Favorable sentiment rarely converts itself. Somebody has to design the conversion, and that design work sits closer to marketing than to any other function in the building.
What changes when the customer is a prescriber and a patient
None of this is a pharmaceutical argument yet, and the translation is where it becomes uncomfortable. A pharmaceutical CMO owns narrative, evidence and credibility, which are three of the hardest assets in commercial life to build. That same CMO owns almost none of what happens after a prescribing decision has been made.
After the decision, the value of the science travels through coverage checks, prior authorization, pharmacy fulfillment, specialty logistics, onboarding, titration, support programs and the long arithmetic of persistence. I think of those stretches as the Path to Fulfill and the Path to Adhere, and they sit largely outside the marketing organization's instruments and budget. The commercial system in pharma is part of the therapeutic value chain, and experience is the mechanism by which scientific value is realized as patient and commercial impact.
This is where the first doctrinal commitment of my practice does its work. Written prescriptions are intent rather than realized value, because scientific value is realized when the patient accesses, starts, continues and benefits. A brand team can hit every demand measure it owns and still watch a meaningful share of earned value disappear into value leakage that no competitor collects.
Marketing excellence is one domain and Customer Excellence is the fourth
Pharma already runs three recognized domains of commercial excellence with real rigor, namely launch excellence, marketing excellence and sales excellence. Each has owners, budgets, benchmarks and a seat at the planning table. Customer Excellence is the fourth domain, and it is the one that was never built. That absence is why the work of carrying intent through to realization has no natural home.
The imperative that follows is therefore narrower than it first appears. Marketing does not need to absorb fulfillment, support or adherence, and attempting it would be a design error. A CMO occupies a position no other executive does. What that position allows is a refusal to let the work sit unowned, and an insistence that the question of ownership gets settled in the open.
Two measures that make the argument auditable
An argument about unowned work can be dismissed as organizational complaint unless it comes with instrumentation. Two measures turn it into something a finance organization can examine. The Realization Rate is realized value divided by earned value, and Customer Value at Risk is earned value multiplied by one minus that rate.
Those two numbers change the conversation a CMO can have with a chief executive. Instead of reporting reach, response and share of voice against a growth expectation, marketing can report how much of the value it earned was realized and how much remains exposed. I have found that a leadership team may argue about the inputs to those figures for some time. The argument itself tends to be productive. It is often the first occasion on which the organization has had to name who is accountable for the gap.
Key Takeaways
- The CMO's remit has widened twice in a decade, and neither expansion made marketing accountable for whether intent survives the journey that follows it.
- Positivity bias tends to flatten competing value propositions, which leaves message based differentiation working against the grain of how customers actually decide.
- An experience-led growth strategy sits inside corporate strategy, names the experiential battlefields a company chooses, and drives revenue across every lifecycle stage rather than after purchase.
- Retention economics are unforgiving, because the cost to acquire a new customer can run five to twenty-five times the cost to retain one.
- A pharmaceutical CMO rarely owns what happens after a prescribing decision, so the practical imperative is to insist that somebody does.
- The Realization Rate and Customer Value at Risk give marketing a language for value that a finance organization can audit.
Diagnostic Questions to Consider
- Whether marketing's scorecard stops at the formation of intent or follows that intent through to realized value.
- Which experiential battlefields the company has actually chosen, and whether anyone outside marketing can name them.
- Where value leaves the system after a prescribing decision, and which function is accountable for each of those losses.
- What the Realization Rate is for the largest brand in the portfolio, and who is responsible for reporting it.
- Whether the experience leg of the value proposition has a designer, a budget and an owner, or only a set of good intentions.
Closing Reflection
The three legs of a value proposition are product, brand and experience. Pharma has built the first two to a standard few industries can match, and has largely left the third to default while the other two were designed. A CMO is the executive most exposed to that asymmetry, because the promise made at the point of decision is made in marketing's voice.
I learned the standard for this outside pharma, at The Ritz-Carlton Leadership Center. The Credo there names the genuine care and comfort of guests as "our highest mission", a line every employee could recite. More to the point, the operating model behind it made the sentence true in practice. Culture of that kind does work no campaign can do, and it is built deliberately rather than declared.
The customer centric imperative for a CMO is not a request to care more. It is a request to carry accountability further down the lifecycle than the role has traditionally been asked to reach. Every stretch the role cannot reach itself needs a named owner. A function measured only on the formation of intent will keep producing intent, and the organization will keep wondering where the value went.
About the Author
Wayne Simmons is the founder of The Customer Excellence AGENCY and the author of The Customer Excellence Enterprise (Wiley, 2024). He is founding faculty of the MS in Customer Experience Management at Michigan State University's Broad College of Business. He led global customer excellence in Pfizer's first Chief Marketing Organization and in Bayer's Customer Powerhouse.
The Customer Excellence Agency: Advancing the Pursuit of Excellence in Service of Science.
