CMO Council: Market Sense-Ability Center to help Global Businesses develop Market-Minded Cultures.

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council announced the formation of the Market Sense-Ability Center to provide new advocacy, thought leadership, benchmarking services and best practices on how to advance market-centric thinking as an integral part of a company’s organizational DNA.

The Council recommends that CMOs team with their CEO and executive team members to create corporate cultures where every employee and partner across the extended enterprise is sensitized and attentive to customer, competitor and market conditions and dynamics. This level of insight and agility is essential to driving business performance and competitive advantage, notes the CMO Council.

“Global businesses are challenged to dramatically raise their capacity to understand, predict and respond to both current and future customer, market and competitor dynamics, demands and disruptions in an era of unprecedented change and complexity,” states Donovan Neale-May, the executive director of the CMO Council. “Yet many companies have not adequately developed the systems, practices and cultures needed to become Ever-Alert Enterprises with sufficient Market Sense-Ability to keep pace.”

According to CMO Council research, only 10.7 percent of companies have deployed real-time systems to collect, analyze and distribute customer feedback. While 75 percent say they receive customer feedback via e-mail, only 23 percent say they track and measure the volume and nature of these messages.

The CMO Council advocates that CMOs take a leadership role in benchmarking and transforming the levels of market and customer centricity and responsiveness throughout their organizations. The Market Sense-Ability Center, housed on the CMO Council website, is designed to provide content and tools to help marketers improve competitiveness and performance by upgrading cultural alertness and response.

Included in the new Center is a free self-audit made exclusively available for free for CMOs to rate their level of Market Sense-Ability and responsiveness to current and future customer needs, market dynamics and competitive change. The Market Responsiveness Index (MRI)TM measures culture based on a variety of organizational behaviors and allows CMOs to compare their ratings with those of CMOs of other companies.

Developed by MarketCulture Strategies, the MRITM has been proven, when used as an organization-wideal benchmarking instrument, to be a strong predictor of business performance and customer value creation, and is an invaluable platform for the planning of change activities.. An organization-wide MRI benchmarking servicdiagnosis e from MarketCulture Strategies is being offered to CMO Council members at a special discount.

The Center also includes a new white paper by Donovan Neale-May on the need for CMOs to take a leadership role in building Ever-Alert Enterprises, as well as other relevant articles and content. The white paper is entitled “Creating Market-Sensing Corporate Cultures Is an Essential CEO-CMO Joint Initiative.”

“Today’s Chief Marketing Officer needs to be a valued change agent,” states Neale-May. “More than 50 percent are hired to fix broken marketing organizations and lead transformation across all functional areas. This includes measurably impacting and influencing company culture, customer experience, competitive differentiation, brand recognition, sales effectiveness and business performance,” he added.

For more information at http://www.cmocouncil.org>