Chief Promise Maker: life as a 'temp'.

Perhaps it would be easier to fill the chief marketing officer (CMO) position with a contractor or temporary employee. Or, maybe that has already happened. Certainly turnover among all members of the "chief" team has increased across the board. CEO turnover increased by a factor of three from 1995 to 2002, according to Booz Allen.

Why has life become so difficult for the top position in the world of marketing? There is no single cause. We would certainly be safe to start with the issues of saturation and clutter. Supply of products and services seem to have overwhelmed available demand, creating a buyer's market where there is heavy pressure to move product and sell services. Naturally for many organizations, this is seen as a marketing problem, er, opportunity.

The result is that the glut of products and services has now been translated into a glut of advertising and promotional messages. Supply definitely exceeds demand. The late Henri Nouwen described it this way: "Wherever I looked, there were words trying to take my eyes from the road. They said, 'Use me, take me, buy me, drink me, smell me, touch me, kiss me, sleep with me.' In such a world, who can maintain respect for words?"

Why did Super Bowl TV ads fetch $2.4 million per 30 seconds this year? The hope was to catch most of the continent at one time, paying attention, maybe even interested. The opportunity to cut through the clutter doesn't come cheap.

In my view, clutter is the second largest challenge. The single largest challenge goes to the core of the CMO role as Chief Promise Maker. It starts with devising a promise that is attractive and that will gain customers and their wallets. It must be catchy enough to grab attention, it must be substantive enough to entice and powerful enough to affect positive customer behavior.

That word "promise" carries a lot of emotional baggage. "But, you promised" is a well rehearsed line that most of us started practicing not long after potty training and that we are still perfecting. The disappointment of broken promises is something with which we have all had considerable experience. Living up to promises is not child's play. It is one of the most difficult challenges of our lives.

Corporately, as organizations have gotten larger, being in the promise business has not gotten easier. The distance between the Chief Promise Maker and the Chief Promise Deliverer has grown considerably. In addition, promise delivery has become much more fractured: from single products to multiple products, from single channel customer interface to multichannel interface, from geographic to line of business--the complexity can be incredible.

Yet at the end of the day, hell hath no fury like a promise scorned. So many organizations that are winning at promise making are losing at promise delivery--winning the battle of heightened expectations but losing the battle of heightened delivery. In the process they are investing their money to create a marketplace brand of promise distrust--a hardened target for future promises.

One of the ways to think of an organization is as a series of promises. The very best organizations that I have worked with are very intentional about promise management. They have decided not to be in the propaganda business. Someone has defined propaganda as the art of persuading others what you don't believe yourself. These organizations do three things better and in a more integrated way than mediocre organizations. One, makers do not promise without commitment from deliverers. Two, deliverers keep their promises. Third, promise makers and promise deliverers track promise metrics and then respond to promise gaps. Promise management is a delicate dance. Aim too high and you disappoint. Aim too low and you become ignored and irrelevant. Aim too often and everyone gets confused. Aim too seldom and the target moves elsewhere. Miss what you aim for and everyone gets clobbered.

One final point: What do you think would happen if the promise makers and the promise deliverers took promise management more seriously? One possibility is that there might be less marketing saturation and clutter. First, if we got rid of all of the spurious promises and claims, surely the sheer volume would decrease. Second, if we lived up to our promises more effectively, there might be less need for promise promotion. I wonder how much of the need for today's marketing message is directly in response to yesterday's broken promise--either by us or others who play in our market. It is an interesting cycle--over-promising leads to broken promises, which result in the need to further over-promise, which leads to more broken promises--the downward spiral of promise flogging.

Said differently: How much of tomorrow's marketing budget will be absorbed by today's mishandled promises?

How long does it take for a marketplace to figure out that the promise makers and the promise deliverers aren't together? Oh, on average about 23 months.

Robert Hall is author of "The Street Corner Strategy for Winning Local Markets." E-mail: [e-mail]