1. Asked to identify the top organisational goals for the business, companies expect their marketers to grow revenues (20.75 per cent), acquire new customers (20.6 per cent), and improve the customer experience (17.9 per cent), as their top priorities.

2. Marketers are investing in programs to better demonstrate the value of their work. However, these are often unsophisticated. 

3. As such, marketing is still poorly perceived by its management peers. Barely 15 per cent of respondents said their peers saw marketing as a primary business driver and revenue generator. 

4. Marketing technology has made huge strides improving the lot of CMOs over the past decade, and most companies have made investments across a range of disciplines. The top five functions identified by marketers in the survey were CRM, Social Media Engagement, Email Marketing Platforms, Marketing Automation, and Data Management.

5. As to their own goals, marketers want to build a bigger personal profile (interestingly, in the deep dive this was partly motivated by wanting to demonstrate the value of thought leadership to their peers). They also aspire to taking a larger role in business strategy and see gaining additional skills and capabilities as key to this.

The report from Accenture Strategy found that 50% of CEOs see CMOs as the primary driver of disruptive growth in a company. But if a company does not achieve that growth, 37% of CEOs said the CMO would be first in the firing line. Chief sales officers at 34% and chief strategy officers at 29% were next in line.

However, despite the fact both CEOs and CMOs believe disruptive growth is crucial for a company’s growth, CMOs only spend 37% of their time on innovation. In addition, while 60% is spend on traditional marketing approaches.

Due to this, more than half (54%) of CMOs feel a large portion of their marketing budget is being wasted and not delivering the results the business expects, while only 30% of CMOs believe they are cutting-edge marketing innovators.