The CMO's Periodic Table

Book excerpt: Imagine how much you would learn if you could converse with 64 of the brightest minds in marketing. Now imagine if those conversations were focused on all the essential elements that go into being a top-notch chief marketing officer and organized into seven logical, intuitive categories. Now you can stop imagining, and start reading The CMO’s Periodic Table, an essential resource for the modern marketer. Over the last five years, thanks in large part to his friends at The CMO Club, author Drew Neisser has interviewed over 100 marketing leaders at prominent companies such as American Express, Audi, Belkin, Black Duck Software, Converse, College Humor, D&B, Dow, and many more. These interviews, 64 of which are highlighted in this book, reflect the fundamental diversity of challenges and subsequent solution sets deployed by each. Though these interviews don’t yield a magic formula, they offer something a bit more profound and definitely more fundamental—a compendium of elements that every marketer has or will need to examine in the very near future. Organized into a CMO-worthy periodic table modeled on the classic organization of the chemical elements, the chapters progress from basic challenges like research and strategy, to internal issues like culture change and managing up, to advanced, highly volatile subjects like risk-taking and changing agencies.