Our thinking appears in marketing articles and publications around the world

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.

In many of today's leading organizations, marketing is front and center in driving solid business performance - based on a heightened understanding of and responsiveness to the customer. Leading the charge are empowered chief marketing officers, who have developed a more expansive influence, range of responsibilities, and view of marketing's capabilities in the broader business scheme.

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.

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.

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.

CMOs need to leverage corporate and business-unit capabilities to reinvent the marketing function.

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.

It's all about relationships in today's business world, and for marketers, that usually translates into a mandate to get closer to the customer to solidify the loyalty that helps drive top-and bottom-line growth.

Marketing's role in driving growth is threatened by the chasm between its need to influence the customer experience and its ability to do so. Leveraging the internal relationships necessary to impact the customer experience that drives business growth is a huge obstacle, with many marketers claiming no role whatsoever in shaping key customer touchpoints. This gap is one of the highlights of the new 2005 State of Marketing Survey sponsored by Prophet and conducted by IDG Research.

Corporate and business unit marketers must recognize their differences and their common ground, and work together to maximize business success.

Today's red-hot market for mergers and acquisitions spells huge opportunities - and challenges for marketing leaders and their teams. Three principles are discussed to ensure a successful transaction.

No marketing imperative today can be met without without the capabilities and insights of the provided by the organization's technologists. Marketing and IT need to bridge operational gaps to create a less executional and more strategic partnership.

Applying a brand lens on post-merger integration can significantly increase chances of success. This article outlines five key lessons, and includes several examples from the pharmaceutical industry.

CMOs and the marketing function can expect intensifying pressure in 2005 to prove their effectiveness in aligning their strategies with how customers buy, and with broader business imperatives.

A point of view on the role CEO's play in creating brand-driven businesses and a toolkit to guide their efforts - reprint of Handbook of Business Strategy 2004

In a growing number of businesses, marketing will have more of a strategic role.