Jim Lecinski is clinical professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and author of The AI Marketing Canvas. He’s previously written about how to give your annual marketing plan a makeover; how to adopt an Agile approach to marketing; how marketers can use the “3 A’s” to identify AI use cases; how to make the most of attending a marketing conference; and building a world-class team. Here he offers his advice for how to grow your career in marketing to become a CMO.
The views expressed are those of the authors and may not necessarily reflect the views of Google.
What does it take to become a chief marketing officer today? To find out, I asked three world-class CMOs how to build a successful marketing career. These leaders generously shared the top career strategies they’ve used to navigate challenges, adapt to industry shifts, and ultimately ascend to the top marketing position.
A clear pattern emerged from these conversations: a deliberate and strategic approach to career growth. In this article, I’ll distill their wisdom into three essential pillars for marketing career success: build a strong foundation; embrace diverse experiences; and master organisational dynamics.
1. Build a strong foundation and keep learning
A foundational understanding of the core principles of marketing is the bedrock of any successful marketing career. While it may be fashionable now in some circles to discount formal marketing training and talk instead about “growth hacking,” “outsiders reinventing marketing,” and “the death of marketing,” none of that is actually true or effective.
“Starting your career with a strong foundation is absolutely crucial,” says Manish Shrivastava, CMO of Pulte Group. He attributes much of his success to the classical training he received early in his career, including his MBA and formative marketing roles at Procter & Gamble. “P&G instilled classical marketing training in me, and taught me the fundamentals and the importance of always knowing your consumers, and relying on a strong fact base when building recommendations.”
Starting your career with a strong foundation is absolutely crucial [to learning] the fundamentals and the importance of always knowing your customers.
Amber Holm, CMO of Winnebago Industries, also emphasises how early roles at General Mills and Bridgestone helped her gain a foundational understanding of brand management, digital marketing, and business leadership. “Each of these roles gave me the opportunity to lead teams and to deeply understand consumers, and each enabled me to build different muscles to grow both my marketing and leadership skills,” she shares.
But foundational skills are just the start. The next key is to keep learning the craft of marketing. Steve Moffat, CMO at GoHealth, believes in maintaining a healthy balance between mastering and applying foundational marketing skills while also continuing to build new skills, like understanding AI in marketing. “Accumulating these experiences over time, and maintaining a balance of applying past learnings while always building new skills, has uncovered new opportunities for me around every corner,” he says.
The common thread across these leaders’ journeys is that they learned the basics correctly and thoroughly, and they never stopped learning more. Neither should you! There are many ways to follow their example: Take advantage of internal marketing training programmes if your company offers them, complete online marketing certificate programmes, attend industry events, and enroll in university executive education programmes for working professionals.
2. Try sideways moves to be more adaptable
Career growth isn’t always about a series of straight-line promotions from junior marketer to CMO. Often, it’s about moving sideways to gain new perspectives. Each of the three CMOs I spoke with emphasised making lateral moves that expand your experience base and improve your pattern recognition.
As Shrivastava points out: “Over my career, I’ve had several jobs that some might look at and call lateral moves. But the truth is that I made those moves intentionally to ensure that I was building out a diversity of experiences and a breadth of skills. This has allowed me to adapt as the marketing industry itself evolves.”
As a marketer, you are as valuable as the sum total of your experiences.
Holm shares a similar perspective, having moved across multiple industries and brands, from General Mills to Bridgestone to Newell Brands, and now to Winnebago Industries. “I have been willing to seek new opportunities and move to new companies to accelerate my development, with the common thread of pursuing my passion for building remarkable brands that consumers love, regardless of industry,” she says.
Steve Moffat also underscores the value of embracing diverse experiences. He intentionally decided to move from a brand marketing role at PepsiCo into a sales leadership role, which broadened his perspective. “Rather than stay the course and follow a linear path, I jumped at the opportunity to join Google and lead a sales team,” he explains. “This allowed me to diversify my experience with functional and industry adjacency, which in turn made me a better marketer and business leader.”
“You are as valuable as the sum total of your experiences,” a former manager of mine once said. Think about what lateral experience might be a good next step for you. A next position to the left or right of what you are doing now, like a rotation in sales, customer service, or product development, can make you a more complete, well-rounded, and more successful marketer.
3. Learn about dynamics and align with leadership
To make a real impact as a marketer, you need more than just technical skills — you need to understand how your work fits into the bigger picture. Holm says it’s important to understand the business impact of marketing. “In some businesses, marketing can be viewed as a cost centre. But it’s our job to show how marketing is a demand generator that grows the topline,” she says. She encourages marketers to align their work with broader business objectives and demonstrate the real value marketing delivers.
Learn to speak [the C-level executive’s] language and translate marketing initiatives into the business needs that matter most to them.
Shrivastava urges marketers to focus on what is right for the company more than who is right. “I’ve found that the smartest marketers understand that being ‘brilliantly right’ isn’t always enough. Sometimes, you have to navigate competing agendas and personalities, finding solutions that might not be perfect on paper but actually work for the organisation as a whole.”
To ensure alignment to your key initiatives, it helps to be integrated with cross-functional leaders, Moffat adds. “One of the key lessons I’ve learned going back many years is to understand the objectives of each C-level executive. Learn to speak their language, translate marketing initiatives into the business needs that matter most to them.” This “multilingual” ability, as Shrivastava calls it, to talk both the language or marketing and the language of finance and the C-suite, sets apart the best marketing leaders from the rest.
Key takeaways: Growing your marketing career to CMO-level success
As these three world-class CMOs have shared, having technical skill or creative flair in marketing isn’t enough. To thrive, you need to understand organisational dynamics, meet the needs of senior leadership, and position marketing as a strategic driver of business growth.
- Start: Build a strong foundation with a commitment to continuous learning. Seek roles early in your career that give you exposure to fundamental marketing and business skills.
- Stop: Don’t shy away from lateral moves that broaden your skill set. Embrace the opportunity to diversify your experiences and adapt across industries.
- Continue: Try to align your work with business outcomes, understand the objectives of top leadership, and position marketing as a strategic contributor to growth.
Follow these three strategic pillars and you’ll be better equipped to navigate your career in marketing, whether your goal is to reach the CMO’s office or simply to grow and succeed as a marketing leader in today’s fast-paced world.
About the author
Jim Lecinski is a clinical professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, where he was named 2022 Professor of the Year. A recognised marketing expert with over 30 years of experience, Jim teaches popular MBA courses on marketing strategy, omnichannel marketing, and AI for Marketing. His seminal book, “Winning the Zero Moment of Truth” (ZMOT), has been read by over 300,000 marketers worldwide. His latest book is “The AI Marketing Canvas,” published by Stanford University Press. Follow him on LinkedIn and watch for future articles from Jim here on Think with Google.
