CMO's, Chief Marketing Officers, (along with many other CxO's) don't hold onto their jobs long.

Here's some research performed by the CMO Council and MarketBridge that lays out why. Some of the top level points:

- Confusion over what a CMO's role really is
- Poor hiring process and definition of the role
- Lack of respect for the CMO's job
- Lack of traceable ROI coming out of the marketing department

It looks like CMO's still have plenty of way to go in tying their activities to results in their company. It's pretty clear that CMO's who can distill their results down to clear returns that the CEO and board can quickly see will be the ones sticking around for a couple of years.

The Define & Align the CMO report is avaliable to today after 2 years in the making. The report actually turned out to be more interesting than we orignal thought based on our working hypothesis.

The year-long research by the CMO Council and MarketBridge encompassed qualitative and quantitative interviews with CMOs, CEOs, board members, senior marketers and executive recruiters throughout North America. The 80-page report, priced at $295, along with a complimentary executive abstract, is available for download at http://www.cmocouncil.org/.

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