Our thinking appears in marketing articles and publications around the world

Walmart’s Stephen Quinn has it. Steve Meyer of Dell services and Cammie Dunaway of Nintendo have it, too. “It” is a P&L mind-set.  It’s a mind-set critical for senior marketers to develop or sharpen if they expect to advance from being order takers or sales supporters to enterprise-wide, visionary leaders.

Scott Davis’ latest book outlines the five shifts marketers must undertake to fundamentally shift the role of marketing and help drive both the growth agenda and bottom-line results.

This article, focused on key themes from Scott Davis' upcoming book, "The Shift," outlines a series of profound shifts that have ushered in a new era in marketing. This era is marked by Visionary Marketers who know that no one is better suited to help drive the growth agenda than the head of marketing.

In this article, Scott Davis answers questions about customer control: Does the customer really want to be your co-pilot? Does the customer want to do the marketer’s work in building the brand? Make your ads? Design your products? Distribute your message? Maybe not, he argues.

Color today’s marketers dazed and confused. It’s an understandable reaction to an environment that has become almost impossibly complex, making it difficult for them to figure out where to start (or much less how to go about) meeting management’s escalating demands for demonstrable returns.

Two Choices: Burger King and Ford followed different paths in their quests to grow-and stand as case studies of why the best marketing comes from innovation, not desperation.

In this article, Scott discusses the challenges being faced by Senior Marketers and four key mandates they should address on the path toward becoming empowered CMOs.

A recent survey of marketing executives found only 30% want to be a chief marketing officer. Small wonder, then, that CMO longevity is what it is: exceedingly short. How to make the CMO's job more attractive and, perhaps, stretch the tenure out? Read on.

In this article, Scott discusses the need for marketers to take a broader view of their role if they are to contribute successfully to business growth. This includes thoughts around owning the customer experience, successfully using new technologies, and blending business, brand, and marketing strategies.

It is important to create a brand-centric culture that's open to and encourages change, where management is aligned on everyone's role in fostering that environment, and where the basis for moving forward is a shared vision of and commitment to the best of what the brand stands for.

Technology has made it possible, through advanced research and information gathering techniques, to forge a deeper understanding of what matters most to customers.

After years of paying lip service to the importance of marketing while engineering and design ruled the roost, technology companies are learning that maybe they need to be more like other businesses after all.

Despite marketing's lingering reputation in some senior management circles as the function that is more interested in spending money than bringing it in, top-level marketers increasingly understand they share the same mandate as their peers in the executive suite: To help drive profitable business growth.

When it comes to assessing marketing's effectiveness in creating the type of customer relationships that fuel business growth, consider this: Maybe marketers should stop thinking so much like traditional marketers.

What's in a name? Plenty. It's the most obvious representation of a brand and comes with all sorts of positive and negative associations, externally and internally. (BrandWeek, January 2006) 

Better-informed consumers are changing the nature of the customer-brand relationship as well as the nature of branding building. As the importance of non-marketing touchpoints such as customer service and the actual in-store experience continues to increase, marketing is challenged to step beyond its traditional role to prove its value in generating business growth.

Marketers aiming to better position themselves and the marketing function to add real value to the organization have their work cut out for them. A new year makes the timing right to recap three of the most critical prescriptions for change.

If it's so axiomatic that "your next best customer is the one you already have," why do marketers expend so much energy — and hard-fought resources — chasing after new ones?

This book combines the thought leadership of the school's highly regarded marketing faculty with perspectives of senior business executives with years of experience in brand building. It includes a chapter written by Scott Davis titled "Building a Brand-Driven Organization."

There is a growing need for businesses, and particularly their marketing leadership, to look differently at what constitutes innovation, and create a culture that fosters and rewards it.