Introduction

The fact is that it just can’t be boiled down to a sentence, or a paragraph, or even a few pages. It’s bigger than that. It would take a whole separate book of its own. (Stay tuned, I’m working on that one right now.)

As far as this book goes, I can promise that after you’ve read and absorbed these sixty-four targeted interviews with the brightest brains in marketing today, from “living legend” Fortune 100 CMOs to rulebook-torching whiz kids at nimble, disruptive startups, you’ll have a strong foundation for understanding how Renegade marketers think—and more importantly, how they act. (And, of course, you’ll have a plethora of brilliant new ideas you can apply right away to supercharge your own career.)

This isn’t to say that everyone I had the privilege of interviewing for this book would necessarily self-identify as a Renegade. But the work they do and the energy they exude caught my eye so powerfully that I knew I had to sit down with them, hit the “record” button, and get them to talk about what drives their day-in-day-out excellence.

And if there’s one thing in the marketing world I’ve always been inexorably drawn to, it’s Renegade thinking. In light of that, I daresay it’s not a coincidence that I was hell-bent on interviewing these specific sixty-four luminaries. The work these marketers do resonates—big time—with what matters most to me and to my company. Whatever your core marketing values are, I’m confident these interviews will resonate similarly with you.

It’s taken me over five years to track down the folks you’ll meet shortly and get them to pry open their vaults of priceless marketing know-how. I shudder just a little to think of all the trial-and-error I could have bypassed with a resource like this at the beginning of my career...heck, at every stage of my career. The ability to instantly reference the pithy-yet-substantive advice of the world’s best marketers on today’s and tomorrow’s most critical marketing competencies is practically an unfair advantage.

If only marketing were a science. We could memorize a bunch of formulas, gather some data, apply category variables, get a few grad students to help with the mixing and measuring, and presto—we’d have a failure-proof, go-to-market plan that builds the brand, generates serious sales, and skyrockets our reputation. Next stop: Nobel Prize. (Or at least a CLIO or a CMO Club Award.)

Alas, reality begs to differ. For one, there’s that whole pesky (by which I mean, awesome) element of successful marketing that is at best a distant cousin of science: Art. With all due respect to the great physicists, chemists, and biologists who have made our modern lives possible, if marketing were as objective and predictable as those fields we would lose the creativity that defines the best campaigns.

And now we find ourselves in the era of big data, programmatic media buying, search engine optimization, social platforms, CRM, marketing automation, and (this space reserved for the next hot buzzword). The rate at which our available tools and metrics are changing defies belief, and today’s game-changing, must-use software or widget is tomorrow’s “remember when?” punchline.

So, a detailed formula for success that will be repeatable for decades to come? Forget about it. Just staying current with the changes and the snowballing complexity of it all is practically a full-time job.

Here’s the good news: Marketing does share some important traits with the sciences. And they’re traits we marketers can leverage to create better work, faster. There’s one such trait I’m excited to focus on in this book.

It emerged, as I conducted more interviews, that effective marketing is like a complex molecule, composed of common “elements” that bond together in a logical, inevitable way. Some elements are universal and timeless—things like leadership, customer-centricity, courage, and innovation. Others are not exactly household names, though they’re no less important to the “molecule” performing its unique and vital function.

With each interview it grew clearer that the elements were interrelated and begging to be categorized. It was a short hop from there to start thinking in terms of this Periodic Table. And so with a nod to Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, who in 1869 created the earliest version of the table we all studied in high school chemistry, I set out to do the same with the elements of marketing.

The table I offer you now may or may not do justice to Mendeleev’s astonishingly logical arrangement, but I do promise you this: When you have a firm grasp of these sixty-four elements, it’s as certain as the attraction between a proton and an electron that you will generate state-of-the-art value for your company and your customers.

You can read this book front-to-back, consuming the interviews in order. Believe it or not, there is a method to the madness herein. But you can also jump straight to the elements that interest you most, whether they’re urgent issues you need help with right away or just something you’ve always wanted to know more about. I don’t know any great marketers who approach learning (or anything else) in a totally linear fashion, and accordingly this book is designed to be conducive to jumping around.

As you’ll see when you immerse yourself in these conversations, the interviewees and I were ourselves prone to a little jumping around—but only when we stumbled upon a truly exciting and valuable sidetrack from the primary topic. There are so many overlaps in this business, and no element of marketing can be tied up with a neat ribbon—especially as the purview of marketers continues to expand into areas like customer experience and product development.

However you choose to process this material, I urge you to pause after each interview and carefully consider how its content might be applied to your marketing goals and challenges. Perhaps imagine the subject of the interview you’re reading will be calling you in twenty-four hours expecting an outline of your action plan based on their advice.

The most essential characteristic of a marketing Renegade is a voracious hunger for new perspectives and ideas. Without this, there’s no escaping business as usual. The CMO’s Periodic Table is a record of my ongoing (and never-ending) attempt to satiate that hunger within myself. If I’ve done my job, it will help you do the same.

One last note: Marketing is a dynamic industry, and these interviews span the better part of the past five years. As such, some of the marketers you’re about to hear from no longer work at the companies they did when I interviewed them. In such cases, the chapter titles typically identify the subject with his or her former company—the one where they performed the work that caught my interest in the first place.

May the insights and wisdom these sixty-four visionaries so generously share give you as many “Eureka!” moments in your marketing laboratory as they’ve given me.

Drew Neisser
September 2015