For brands, businesses, and the chief-marketers helping steward both, this year has begun as the last ended. A continuing cavalcade of crises of all types and flavors, each influencing the human context that they market in and around, required CMOs to reconsider what, how, where, and when, they do what they do to drive sustainable growth.
A still looming recession, fluctuating stock market, inflation, indictments, the cost of eggs, gas, rent, mortgages and money itself; Russia’s war in Ukraine, quiet quitting, layoffs, floods, AI, North Korea, Taiwan, China, TikTok, Twitter, bank failures, indictments, the war on ESG, “wokeness,” school shootings, and 10,001 other macro and micro things can all play a part in a chief-marketer’s decisions to do or not.
So, as it turns out, Voltaire was wrong, and this is most definitely not “the best of all possible worlds.” But it is the world in which the marketing chiefs highlighted in this, the 2nd annual Forbes Entrepreneurial CMOs 50 list, operate so well.