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Corporate board members have a long list of responsibilities and concerns: succession planning, executive compensation, regulatory compliance and business growth strategies -- not to mention shareholder interests and value.

One topic that gets less attention is brand, often because many senior marketers have not mastered the art of turning marketing-speak into the financial language that resonates with directors. If brand value and the benefits of brand-building investments are not translated into the language of numbers, marketing will always be at a disadvantage in winning over the board.

When thousands of people lost their jobs during the Great Depression, many of them started riding the rails across the country in search of work and food. Hobos, as they were called, had been hopping trains since the 1870s, working as migrant laborers wherever they could find a job. They often traveled by themselves, leading to the inevitable problem of knowing what to expect when arriving in an unfamiliar place. Some cities might be welcoming while others might be less hospitable. A farmer might feed those who worked his fields while others might turn you into the police. A secret language of signs was developed that informed hobos about what awaited them. To the casual observer, the signs were gibberish or graffiti; but to the hobo, they could mean the difference between a hot meal and a night in jail. And therein lies a key question for today’s companies to ask themselves:

For some time now, marketers have talked about methods to measure the economic effectiveness of their programs and have looked for financial metrics suitable to report their activities to the board. A recent survey by the Columbus Business School indicates their success has been limited. Only 30% of the CMOs interviewed use financial metrics for reporting, and 57% of CMOs use no measure of Return on Marketing Investment to evaluate their achievements.

Marianne Caponnetto is a case in point: Change agents can come from anywhere in the organization. At Scholastic, the leading children’s book publisher and education technology company, she’s enabling change from the boardroom after having earned her stripes driving the change imperative in sales and marketing leadership positions at DoubleClick, IBM, and Dow Jones &Co. 

We hear it all the time among clients, within companies and at meetings. Everyone understands that if you stand still in today’s rapidly changing environment, then you’ll be choking on the other guy’s dust as you fade into irrelevance. The ability to get ahead, much less to transform, is today’s business imperative. But it takes change agents to lead the charge.

All too often, though, stuff gets in the way. The barriers of silos. Resistance to change. A shortage of the right skills for the challenges. The fact is that transforming a business is really hard work.

You can run, but you can’t hide. Especially in a social world.

It’s one of the stark realities that hit home last week with the uproar sparked when the Susan G. Komen Foundation yanked, then reinstated, its funding to Planned Parenthood.

At best, you can hope to influence perceptions. That takes a deep understanding of today’s milieu and how your brand holds up against the increasingly critical guideposts of openness, transparency, authenticity.

Komen failed on all three fronts.

Scott Davis and 7 other visionary marketers reveal their predictions for the marketing industry in the next decade in ANA Magazine.

In this article Jeff Gourdji and Jeff Smith explain how to better connect business strategy and marketing execution.

In this article Scott shows how important it is for marketers to step forward and demonstrably expand mindsets, skills, and capabilities instead of sliding back into comfort zones.

Successful companies get it: they report to the customer. But how do you effect a shift away from an out-dated operational focus to one that truly puts the customer front and center? Scott Davis explains that it doesn’t require a re-organization so much as a mind-set shift (plus visionary leadership).

Scott Davis blogs about concepts from his latest book, The Shift, and discusses the shifts marketers must undergo to become Visionary Marketers.

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, David Aaker examines how silo barriers within organizations can be reduced or eliminated, leading to stronger offerings and brands and effective synergistic marketing strategies and programs.  *Please note, there is a fee to obtain a copy of this article.

This issue of Marketing y Ventas features a 6-page interview with Joseph Gelman.  In it, he discusses the notion of the empowered CMO, emotional branding, and challenges facing Spanish brands. *Please note, this article is in Spanish.

In this article, Michael Dunn argues that in order to be effective, marketers need to up their game, take on the new media, and be prepared to be adventurous, extending their influence over many of the critical business growth drivers.

Innovation is now a priority in most firms around the world just as quality was two decades ago. The challenge then was how to transform a quality program and results into a quality image. Today the need is to gain image credit for developing an innovative organization and a flow of innovative products.

Marketers continue to face an uphill battle when it comes to creating an effective marketing organization that demonstrably drives the business. Increasingly, senior management looks to marketing to enable, if not drive, short- and long-term business growth. Yet marketers typically don’t see themselves at the wheel for this particular journey. This gap is one of the highlights of our 2006/2007 State of Marketing Survey.

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.