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Top tier marketers have always had a lot to offer when it comes to driving growth and implementing change. But as consumers’ media habits continue to morph alongside their burgeoning digital footprints and explosion of data capture, companies are demanding the adoption of more customer-centric strategies. They are looking for the types that require marketers’ innate abstract reasoning, critical thinking and leadership skills as much as their ability to pull together strategy and commercial, economic, market and competitor data to develop product offering and pricing.
Recruitment firm Heidrick and Struggles’ 2017 study ‘Route to the Top’ found almost one-in-five (18 percent) FTSE 100 CEOs are former marketers, with Tesco CEO Dave Lewis, KFC US president Kevin Hochman and EasyJet CEO Carolyn McCall among them. The study, which explores the backgrounds of CEOs at the top 100 companies from the FTSE 100 in the UK, the Fortune 500 companies in the US, the DAX 30 and MDAX 50 in Germany, the SBF 120 in France and the 50 largest companies represented in the SMI Expanded in Switzerland, found marketing was the second most common route to the CEO position, behind only those with a background in finance (36 percent). But it appears this isn’t just an international
