CMO Club May '08: Leading Business Wide Change from the CMO Position

Kevin M. Joyce, CMO, Eastman Kodak Company talked about his charge as CMO to reinvent the company through marketing.

Kevin understood what people thought about Kodak. "Oh, you're the company that makes cameras, film, and we're sorry to hear what happened to your business." The downsizing has been drastic. They've had 80,000 employees downsized to 29,000 employees. And of those 29,000, 15,000 are new. They created a new commercial part of their business. Their goal is to balance the consumer-focused strategy with the new commercial strategy. Joyce deals with the commercial side and manages $4 billion of the company's $10 billion in revenue.

When Joyce took on the CMO position, nobody knew what he did or was supposed to do. Most people define marketing as branding, PR, and messaging. But that wasn't what Joyce was hired to do. He had to understand what new markets Kodak were in, create the idea of what they needed and take it to market completion.

His second challenge was to convince current marketing professionals inside his group on the role of marketing. They also defined marketing as branding, PR, and messaging.

Kodak's primary customers are commercial printers. They had created a service industry. Eighty percent of what they sell is for marketing materials.

To create change within Kodak, Joyce needed to, as a CMO, build the following requirements:

1. Organization must have clear understanding of the role of marketing. Marketing's only function is to connect idea to execution. Deal with operational efficiency and create an environment for innovation and growth
2. Create a fundamental need to grow. Marketing drives innovation and growth. It defines the growth plan from strategy, markets, products, tools, measurement, and ROI.
3. Get agreement by the business that things are not operating the way they need to in order to grow.
4. Then move to cross-functional agreement to make necessary changes to drive growth.
   

What goes wrong without the right marketing? Everybody chases the ball, trying to do everything. People start taking on different roles, trying to plug holes, and as a result it creates inefficiency.

Joyce is just at the beginning of his process. He's begun by laying out a marketing network. Staffing up management for the platform, customers, marketing, and product generation. He clearly believes that marketing is the growth engine that drives business-wide change.

Watch this video of Kevin Joyce discussing marketing as a critical force to drive growth.