Modern
Chubbies’ co-founders (Tom Montgomery and Preston Rutherford) have heated up on LinkedIn of late, posting their thoughts on brand, scaling and creating Chubbies.
Most of it’s been great, but there was a post this week—in the run up to this weekend—that felt a bit off (not to mention a Ben Horowitz rip). We’re running it in full here to better discuss it.
The Modern CMO is a different breed.
The Modern CMO isn’t looking to justify their outcomes to the board or to leadership.
The Modern CMO is a truth-seeker.
The Modern CMO is half CMO and half CFO - they simply cannot afford to not hold every dollar they spend accountable.
No more $100k lifestyle photo shoots. No more allocating massive chunks of the budget to uncertain outcomes on gut feel.
No more showing high return on ad spend as the get-out-of-jail-free card.
The modern CMO is a collaborator with the CEO and CFO in understanding what truly drives demand and customer connection - and the exact right price to pay for that.
They are a right AND left brained, hyper-agile, wildly entrepreneurial and scrappy powerhouse who lifts their business up.
And they are an invaluable member of the executive team.
Replace “modern” with “good” and this could have been written 30+ years ago.
The DTC growth playbook, it seems, has clouded our memory that this—and more—has always been marketing’s job.
Good marketing—and a good CMO—intimately understands the market and the customer, and builds a hypothesis on how to grow a brand within the market for those customers.
In fact, this is what has been so refreshing about Tom’s and Preston’s content: this is what they’ve written about. Watching spend is useless if you don’t know your market; trusting your gut becomes OK when you understand your customer.
But it’s also what many of the classic books that so many marketers like to cite talk about. Because being good will never not be modern.