CMOs are facing extraordinary expectations — from the enterprise, customers and their own teams.
In this episode of ThinkCast, Gartner experts Alex De Fursac Gash and Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone cover a portion of their Opening Keynote from this year's Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo. Together, they outline how marketing leaders can navigate heightened demands, avoid strategic dysfunction and embrace what they call the "Epic Journey to Growth." From shifting AI from tool to actor, to building long-term vision and scenario planning muscle, Alex and Kristina reveal how CMOs can strengthen reputations, exceed CEO expectations and transform disruption into opportunity.
Tune in to discover:
Why CMOs Face Extraordinary Expectations
The Hamster Wheel of Marketing Pressure
Expanding Accountability: From 5 to 8 Areas
The Epic Journey: Why Doing Nothing Isn't an Option
The Readiness Check: CEOs, Customers, CMOs
Strategic Dysfunction: 84% of CMOs Struggle
Strategic Oversight & Proactivity: Planning Beyond 18 Months
Scenario Planning in Action
Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone | VP, Advisory, KI Leader
Kristina LaRocca-Cerrone is a Senior Director, Advisory for Gartner for Marketing Leaders, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She leads the Marketing Leadership and Strategy Key Initiative, and acts as Gartner's marketing headlining speaker. Kristina helps CMOs with developing marketing strategy, communicating strategy to the rest of the C-suite, and helping translate strategic objectives to operational plans and goals. She also supports CMOs in leadership: change management, cross-functional collaboration, upskilling marketing's strategic thinking, and in org design and operations: understanding org trends and structural tradeoffs or pros and cons, evaluating potential operating models, conducting org restructures and communicating about structural changes. And, she has a deep background in buyer and customer research, focused on understanding how people (B2B buyers and customers) buy and make decisions, especially in digitized environments. This includes topics like how buying groups conduct research, how online and offline experiences drive commercial outcomes, and how marketers can impact customer behavior. Kristina leads Gartner's "Marketing Leadership and Strategy" initiative, and has over a decade of experience in public speaking from webinars, conference presentation, workshop facilitation and designing and leading focus groups, to delivering conference keynotes to audiences of 2000+
Hosted by: Karen Lockhart
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