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As complex as the influence exercise of chief marketing officers is, context is needed to evaluate them and determine which 50 chief marketing officers make it onto the 2024 Forbes list of the World’s Most Influential CMOs.
What one person considers “influential” may not be what another person considers. Marketing, like any other aspect, is no different, and rational people can disagree. That’s why, working with our leading research partner, Sprinklr, and leveraging key complementary data and analytics provided by LinkedIn, we took a broad, multifaceted and rigorous data-driven approach, ultimately analyzing nearly 8 billion individual data points to select the 50 Chief Marketers who are honored here.
So how do we evaluate and measure a CMO’s influence? What metrics do we look at to isolate and identify the CMO’s direct influence, as opposed to, say, a great product or a CEO’s missteps or strokes of genius? Is it the brand equity built up over hundreds of years? Is it events big and small that are beyond our control? Is it the actions of others that, for better or worse, challenge the brand and business that are beyond our control? We should also point out that we shouldn’t assume that influence is an indicator of good work, even if we often see a correlation.
In fact, we are more influenced and learn more from what goes wrong than from what goes right.
Hereby, we acknowledge that arriving at an indisputable methodological approach at scale, globally, and across categories and industries is not simple or easy. But to be clear, this list is not, and never has been, a “monetary reward.” No one can apply for or be nominated for it.
The 2024 selection process will be based on seven distinct and authoritative data sources: Forbes Global 2000 and the Brand Finance 500).
A data-driven process is then used to score CMOs on 20 distinct influence metrics to narrow the initial 2,835 eligible CMOs down to the final 50. Sprinklr, the lead research partner for the past eight years, uses its proprietary product suite to measure and analyze CMOs’ prominence, performance, and influence across approximately 8 billion distinct data points, including news articles, mentions, posts, and comments about the CMO’s work and about the CMO.
The 20 indicators and proxies of CMO influence included personal, brand and marketing attention, sentiment, salience and visibility of the CMO and their work in the marketing and business communities. Rankings for each individual CMO were then determined based on a weighted aggregation of these 20 indicators, while taking into account financial performance and editorial judgment.
Providing significant secondary data and analysis, LinkedIn measured CMOs’ impact on their community, industry, and organizations by analyzing over 8 million CMO/brand mentions across the platform and approximately 1.6 million unique engagements on CMO posts. Metrics specifically assessing engagement among marketing professionals and business decision makers were captured from approximately 153 million LinkedIn members.
Additionally, we considered the breadth and scope of mandate and the CMO’s visibility in the marketing and business communities, while trying not to penalize CMOs who don’t post or promote. Visibility on this list is a measure of influence, not “popularity.”
The key is that in analyzing emotions during the first year, we no longer default to seeing “negative” emotions as bad, because what is done or not done in generating conversations, good or bad, can impact how others behave or don’t behave in the future.
Also, for the second year in the list’s 12-year history, we evaluated financial performance — specifically, year-over-year (YoY) revenue and market capitalization metrics — against publicly traded companies reporting the same performance. We also looked at these same metrics by peer group to better account for fluctuations in category and market temperament that are outside of a CMO’s control.
Individual scores and CMO rankings were determined based on a weighted aggregation of data across these 20 metrics. For more detailed scores and rankings of this year’s most influential CMOs, see Sprinklr’s related report.
Collectively, the 50 marketers recognized here as the world’s most influential CMOs work for companies headquartered in 11 countries around the world, directly influencing thousands of brands across a variety of categories and industries around the world. The companies they manage employ more than 10 million people and have a market capitalization of nearly $11 trillion (considering only the 41 companies publicly traded as of market close on June 7).
But as always, this is a list about people, not about brands or companies. Of course, there is an inescapable connection, because attention is a minimum requirement for influence, and influence requires a platform to be heard, seen, disseminated, noticed, and learned from. Bigger brands and companies provide bigger platforms.
With thanks to our partners at Sprinklr and LinkedIn, we invite you to get to know the 50 chief marketers on this year’s list. There’s much to learn from what each is doing, or not doing, to create customers; how they’re influencing the character and destiny of their industries and the world itself, and the trajectory of their own brands and companies.
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