MMM. DDA. Personalisation at scale. Dynamic pricing logic. Incrementality testing. These are systems tools. They require systems thinking to use properly.
And they are being hired into a role whose job description also requires the person to build a compelling brand narrative and bring it to life across multiple customer journeys in close collaboration with cross-functional teams.
Those are not the same skill set. They are not even adjacent skill sets. One requires the ability to hold a commercial system in your head as a set of connected variables and reason about what happens when any one of them changes. The other requires the ability to communicate a coherent story to a broad audience and build consensus around it.
Both are real and valuable capabilities. The organisation that puts them both in the same job spec and then wonders why the person they hired is either a brilliant strategist who cannot read an incrementality test or a brilliant analyst who cannot get the board to listen is learning an expensive lesson about what the CMO role was actually designed to do.
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