Do We Really Need Another Marketing Executive Position. . Head of Content?
As the typical management consultant would say, “it depends”. Barry Lowenthal , President at The Media Kitchen , wrote a very interesting post recently entitled “Why Companies Need a head of Content Strategy, Creation and Distribution”. (refer below for link) Barry makes an excellent argument that companies need this new role, reporting to the CMO:
Every piece of communication can help dimensionalize a company, further define its brands and tighten bonds with customers. But very few have that kind of macro perspective on and exposure to all the content they produce. At larger companies, which are often siloed and matrixed, few people even think about the kinds of content that can be shared with customers.”
For many large companies, I would agree that they need someone that is responsible for content across the organization. Too many large, decentralized marketing organizations have spent too much money creating thousands of pieces of content that they never use. In many companies, I would argue that this role should be a short-term executive position to build the culture and processes that are needed to improve content strategy across the disciplines that are already in place for content strategy and execution. (e.g., VP Marketing Communications, VP Product marketing, VP Sales Enablement, etc.)
Smaller companies simply need to gain greater discipline across their existing teams as part of their content creation, curation and cultivation processes. (refer to Building a Content Supply Chain by Jake Sorofman at Gartner)
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