Insider Intelligence spoke with Michael Roberts, MetLife’s chief marketing officer, to higher perceive how expectations and priorities for the CMO role are altering. He emphasised the significance of each agile marketing and channel integration for driving constructive outcomes that align with enterprise goals.
“Marketers need a more direct relationship to what matters in the business from an overarching perspective,” Roberts said. “It’s about identifying the shared outcomes that an executive team has and then measuring marketing’s direct contribution to those.”
Below, we spotlight excerpts from our dialog about how insurance CMOs are being challenged, how they’ll prioritize to align with the wants of their organizations and seize rising alternatives, and the significance of objective for successful over clients.
The following has been edited for brevity and readability.
Insider Intelligence (II): If you have been to put in writing a job description for your self, what would it not embody?
Michael Roberts (MR): Experience would come with gross sales, marketing, and strategic planning, and expertise would come with communication, affect, and humor—sure, you’ll be able to follow being humorous. There’s an entire career devoted to that! Key traits would come with curiosity, humility, and confidence. As everyone knows, the “what” in the job is as necessary as the “how,” and why not have enjoyable at work?
II: How has the role of the CMO modified over the previous few years?
MR: This is my third tour of responsibility as a CMO, so I’ve had just a little bit of expertise in the role. One important change I’ve seen is that whereas promotion marketing—model or performance-centered—continues to be a crucial component of the role, it’s not adequate.
The CMO role must have a broader strategic affect and focus on levers of development past simply promotion. And that is really possibly a return to the origins of marketing as a self-discipline, when marketing encompassed a number of components, like worth, promotion, product, and place—it was actually type of a fulsome strategic lever for the enterprise. This dissipated over time as these disciplines began to be professionalized and aligned with different elements of the enterprise construction, however I believe we’re returning to the want for entrepreneurs to have affect over, if not a duty for, many extra components past promotion. So now the marketer turns into extra like a normal supervisor that makes use of marketing as a major lever versus a frontrunner of a perform whose mandate is to help the normal managers of the enterprise.
II: What ought to entrepreneurs’ high priorities be at the moment?
MR: Demonstrable, direct enterprise worth measurement has acquired to be a precedence for all entrepreneurs. And this isn’t nearly measuring the return on each marketing greenback spent, which is a considerably myopic metric. Justifying marketing spend is not sufficient in the context of the marketer as a normal supervisor. Marketers want a extra direct relationship to what issues in the enterprise from an overarching perspective. It’s about figuring out the shared outcomes that an govt group has and then measuring marketing’s direct contribution to these.
The different precedence is integrating marketing’s capabilities into all the completely different elements of the enterprise. We’re at a degree proper now the place we expect of companies as ecosystems, not as collections of completely different features.
The third precedence is a duty to evolve marketing as a self-discipline—an evolution of expertise, functionality, and talent units. Marketing is altering nearly on a day-to-day foundation, and it’s completely paramount that a CMO be on high of the newest trends, how expertise wants to alter to take benefit of these trends, and what expertise is required to help these shifts.
II: Coming again to the first precedence you recognized close to how entrepreneurs ought to measure success. What particular metrics do you suppose are necessary?
MR: I believe buyer lifetime worth is vital not only for measuring success however for optimizing how entrepreneurs function. And then it’s necessary to trace end result metrics like the direct contribution to earnings or to revenues. We have to zero in on enterprise metrics as an alternative of marketing ones and then measure success by how marketing contributes to these metrics.
II: What are the important trends impacting insurance marketing leaders at the moment?
MR: One of the high trends throughout industries is that marketing is shifting to an Agile working mannequin. And I believe this shift will have an effect on insurers extra and extra considerably over time. So the skill to maneuver from a marketing campaign and applications assemble to an “always on” assemble that makes use of Agile to optimize initiatives on a steady foundation is changing into key. And insurance entrepreneurs who can embrace agility in their work can unlock important worth for his or her corporations.
Another key pattern is the maturation and integration of all the completely different marketing channels. What we’ve largely seen in insurance thus far is layering fairly than integrating channels. But true integration means every channel must be actually mature so you’ll be able to perceive how finest to deliver them collectively, and that is significantly true when integrating on-line and offline channels, whether or not it is insurance brokers or junk mail built-in with digital.
II: Can you zero in on the way you suppose these trends could change market dynamics in the future?
MR: I believe we’re in an attention-grabbing second proper now. The pandemic precipitated many shifts in buyer conduct, and what I described as a possibility to embrace Agile and combine channels can be a buyer expectation. And that expectation is heightened now that clients are extra digitally oriented than ever earlier than.
So ensuring that there’s worth in each the on-line and offline channels and that they’re working collectively to create the proper expertise for patrons goes to be actually necessary. But I additionally suppose that if incumbents can get channel integration proper, they’ll pull forward of digital natives. Incumbents can have a big benefit over time given the significance of offline channels in the branding and distribution of insurance.
Consumer sentiment round safety can be altering proper now, pushed by some of the challenges that folks confronted throughout the pandemic. And if insurers can embrace agility to check and be taught, they’ll discover methods to seize the second.
II: What have we not coated at the moment that you want to speak to me about?
MR: Something I take into consideration quite a bit is the affect of objective on how we perform as an industry. Strong objective expressed by an organization is usually a big benefit with clients, staff, and companions. And as an industry, we have made quite a bit of progress activating objective inside the company partitions. We’re working on company social duty, DEI, and sustainability initiatives, however the frontier that I’m actually in is: How can we as an industry activate it much more broadly? How can we make a larger collective affect given our attain and scale?