Mars chief growth officer: CMO role will not disappear

Industry Contributor 15 Jul 2019 - 2 min read

Mars chief growth officer: CMO role will not disappear

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Tags: marketing, CMO, chief growth officer, Mars, FMCG

Mars Wrigley’s chief growth officer, Berta de Pablos, suggests the shift to CGO has enabled the company to better harness the brand as a tool for growth. But she thinks the CMO role will not disappear and that CGOs and CMOs can complement each other - but recruiting data expertise will be critical to the future of marketing (Marketing Week).

Key points:

Several big CPGs are shifting to CGO structure, most recently Kimberly-Clark, which last week hired former Johnson & Johnson CMO Alison Lewis as CGO
Berta de Pablos took on CGO role for Mars in January
De Pablos says whereas CMOs traditionally use brand for communication, the CGO focuses on using the brand “as a tool for growth”
Says the shift has enabled a better framing of marketing’s purpose to the rest of the business
“It depends on the industry … but I think there is still space for a CMO and a chief growth officer” Berta de Pablos

Berta de Pablos has been both marketer and general manager, running the US confectionary business before taking on the chief growth officer role. She has also held senior marketing roles in fashion (as CMO of Lacoste) and luxury (Boucheron). Suffice to say she understands the value of marketing, and probably its weaknesses as seen from a management perspective better than most. A marketer at heart, de Pablos says the chief growth officer role at Mars is making the business “think differently”. Not just around how it deploys the brand for growth – but how it recruits and retains the talent it needs to drive growth within existing categories. That means hiring more experts and fewer generalists, says de Pablos, as the firm uses data – and data experts – to pinpoint growth opportunities. For that reason, she says, “talent acquisition is going to be critical in the future for marketing”. Presumably, for growth too. But then, most CMOs would argue that they are already leveraging the brand for far more than communication.