At CMG we stress collaboration and teamwork both when helping our clients solve problems and when turning inward to find opportunities for our own business. One of the nice perks of operating this way is that you have plenty of stimulation to get the wheels turning when a thorny issue arises (and the support to keep you honest). It’s a benefit of working across a variety of industries and a wide range of marketing disciplines as well. We learn from working with clients in one industry and get to apply those ideas to clients in another. And for most of us, that kind of diversity is one of the big draws of working in consulting.

What we’ve learned through our conversations with CMO’s (as part of our CMO Agenda research) and through our experience helping companies is that this type of knowledge and inspiration is truly coveted by marketing leaders. It’s a big part of what led us to kick off our CMO Agenda research, now in its second phase. We are not only getting the opportunity to have fascinating conversations that provide insight and inspiration to our team, but we’re able to pass on the ideas and learnings from participating senior marketers to their peers and our clients.

Here’s an article we published with the CMO Council in their monthly e-journal Marketing Maginified that explores seven thought starters for active leaders looking to transform their organizations. These concepts flowed both from our CMO research and our work, and we hope they spark an idea or two for you.

You can find out more about the first phase of our CMO Agenda research effort by reading our executive summary or requesting a copy of the full report.

It’s been well documented that the economy is presenting marketers with increasingly difficult challenges on a daily basis. But we believe the recession also provides new opportunity in at least one area: marketing performance. Now is the time for companies to put the practices in place that will ensure they are making smart decisions and practicing results-driven marketing.

Read this article we published on MediaPost’s Performance Insider for ideas on what critical steps you should be taking to survive upcoming budget cuts while building a foundation for marketing performance long-term.

As we write our first CMGP blog entry, we’ve witnessed a week in which the global economy continued its meltdown, in spite of the record setting, $787 billion Recovery and Reinvestment Act being signed into law.  To reinforce the weirdness of things, while the markets melted, Japan’s Finance Minister resigned after appearing drunk at a weekend G8 press conference. 

This method of reality avoidance is really not an option for the rest of us. We have to deal with the reality we are dealt.  But the macro-economic level of the world also isn’t our reality.  What is our reality occurs at the individual company level, where we have millions of variations of realities.  While many businesses are wilting, some businesses are growing and a great deal have found ways to tread water and stay level.  Who sinks and who rises in the coming months, quarters and years will be determined by one overarching truth: the customer is king. 

While companies have paid lip service to this self-evident fact in the past, now it is truly our reality and the only thing that matters.  How we as marketers step up to our responsibility to engage, support and delight our customers, current and future, will determine our companies’ success.  Good is no longer good enough when it comes to these now highly informed and thoroughly skeptical customers and prospects.

And so we are launching this blog as a forum for discussing the entire continuum of strategic marketing – from identifying and evaluating opportunities to executing the tactics and learning from the results, and back again.

Use this forum as you see fit. Read. Share. Jump in with your own thoughts. With those initial thoughts, we’re off…