Judge of the Day: Yana Ernazarova, CMO at Edushape

As a CMO, what is the most important challenge you face today?

The most important marketing challenge I face today is continuing escalation in cost per customer acquisition. Costs went up after iOS 14 upgrade a couple years ago and never came down. This puts pressure on profit margins, which are increasingly important in consumer goods with shifting investment landscapes. I’ve found that – whether the brand is corporate, venture- or private equity-backed – strong profitability from day 1 is becoming an increasing expectation.

One effective way our team found to counteract this trend in acquisition costs is to experiment even more with creatives. The stronger the creative, the better chance we have of attracting the right consumers at a reasonable acquisition cost.

What is the biggest challenge of maintaining a consistent brand across multiple markets?

The biggest challenge to maintain a consistent brand across multiple markets is balancing effectiveness of brand communication with consistency. Marketing at its core is an exercise in empathy and speaking to your audience in the way that resonates with them, and it’s a fact that what resonates strongly depends on the cultural and socioeconomic context. To effectively market across multiple markets, we need to adapt our brand messaging to stay relevant in important markets, however such adaptations need to happen within a reasonable range from core brand fundamentals in order not to dilute the brand and its value.

What excites and/or concerns you about how the role of the CMO is evolving?

CMO is a dynamic role where analytical and creative skills complement each other daily. That’s the fun in marketing and that’s why it’s remains a great career aspiration for any marketer starting out today. However, the role doesn’t come without its challenges. CMOs/senior marketing leaders have always been in tension with Sales and other C-suite roles (not the least of which is CEO) regarding ascribing successes and failures. With increasing pressures on customer acquisition costs and tighter expectations on profit margins, frequently CMOs get blamed for anything that goes wrong or remains stagnant.

One of the remedies is to communicate regularly with important stakeholders such as the Board to bring them along on decision making, give them a good understanding of marketing strategy and tactics and a feeling that they can influence them in a timely manner. It creates shared understanding and builds armor for those stakeholders to support you regardless of the situation.

How can marketers better demonstrate their value at C-suite level?

I believe in most businesses, especially in consumer products, marketers need to act like a General Manager or a CEO within their scope from day one. It means integrating marketing strategy and tactics into the core of a company’s processes. It also means having a holistic understanding of the company’s performance and what role marketing plays.

This is one important lesson I learnt at P&G – act like a leader before you are one. In my role as a CMO today, I regularly speak with C-suite regarding our product portfolio strategy, pricing, channels, and other cross-functional topics – I choose to engage in them proactively and display insight in topics not directly under my purview. Interestingly enough, when other C-suite understands the quality of your thinking in cross-functional topics, they trust your decision making in marketing too.

In your business sector, what do you feel is the key to creating a brand that stands out?

I believe that the core of a strong brand is a strong product. If the product (no matter physical or digital) is differentiated and brings clear value to consumers at a cost they are willing to pay, marketing it becomes easier.

Another important consideration is being bold enough in branding decisions. With the number of decisions we make on a daily basis, it’s easy to start defaulting to safer options regarding creatives and messaging. To build a brand that stands out, we consistently need to curate what we put out into the world to be bold, unique, and free of fluff that doesn’t matter. In our noisy media environments, brands need to be sharp enough to attract attention and make an impression.

If you could only spend your budget on one media channel/platform, what would it be and why?

Meta remains the most important discovery channel, in my point of view. While the costs are challenging and technical hiccups are frequent enough, Meta still retains the reach and breadth of consumer data that makes it an important channel regardless of the company stage and scale.

How do you anticipate the growth of AI-driven marketing solutions will change what you do as a marketer in the future?

In our team, we actively use AI tools to increase our productivity, whether it’s writing copy, generating creatives, brainstorming a strategy, or doing competitive research. I believe that usability of AI for marketing in-house tasks is here to stay.

What’s harder to predict is long-term AI usability for external marketing communications. Quality of AI models depends on the quality of data underpinning it. Future of such tools depends on what data brands own and/or how it flows across marketing channels. If data remains scarce or siloed, I believe AI would be largely misleading when deployed at scale.

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