Marketing's Revolving Door

You may have experienced marketing's revolving door as a marketer, as an HR professional or as a business manager. The median tenure of a chief marketing officer is 27.5 months but some organizations are replacing marketing people at all levels as frequently as annually. Obviously, this is not ideal.

One could surmise that one or more of the following might be the problem:

• The quality of candidates in the marketing pool
• Flawed candidate screening and selection, including hiring for the wrong skill sets
• The increasing complexity of the marketing role, especially the CMO role
• The rapidly changing nature of the marketing role, especially with the emergence of big data, marketing automation and digital marketing
• The increasing dominance of small businesses in the job market. They are less able to pay top dollar for top marketing talent. They are also less able to pay for ongoing training. And some marketing departments are so lean that there is only one person in the department, leaving no room for on-the-job learning from more experienced marketers. 
• The continued inability to measure the ROI of many marketing activities
• Inadequate marketing budgets
• The organization's culture is sales, operations or finance-driven and does not value marketing as a function
• The wrong organization design or structure

There may be other problems too. If the company has inferior products, services, business model or value proposition, skilled marketing can only go so far in driving increased revenues. 

If you are a staffing professional, hiring manager or company executive and if you have been unhappy with your marketing hires, I would encourage you to assess and rectify root causes for this problem before you hire your next marketing professional. 

Revolving doors are costly to organizations and their employees. Please try to understand why your marketing personnel choices are not working out before you hire your next marketer.