Marcus Schögel on the m&k Podcast: „First the customer, then the metric“

Anyone involved in business should be knowledgeable about finance. So far, so uncontroversial—and that’s exactly how Marcus Schögel begins the conversation. But then he shifts gears: The president of the Society for Marketing and professor at the University of St. Gallen (HSG) believes that the demand—which has grown increasingly vocal in recent years—that marketing must speak the language of finance in order to justify its place within a company is misguided. Finance, he argues, is merely a functional perspective on a company—no more and no less than the sales perspective. The fact that this single perspective has become dominant has to do with shareholder value and the quarterly performance reports of publicly traded corporations. According to Schögel, marketing has allowed itself to be co-opted in a way that does not help when it comes to understanding how to manage a company over the long term.

A feature that doesn't come into play until later

Schögel’s objection is fundamental. He argues that stock-market-driven companies are driven by quarterly results, and some even admit that they think too short-term to be able to plan for the long term. So why, of all things, should marketing be subordinate to a discipline that only comes into play once the deal has already been made? He emphasizes that this has nothing to do with an inflated ego, but rather with logic: it simply makes no sense for a single function to dominate all the others.

It all starts with the customer

For Schögel, every business starts with the customer. He cites Peter Drucker, his academic mentor, and the Balanced Scorecard pioneers Kaplan and Norton, who all agree on this point: First, you need a customer who pays—«before I can count the peas.» He attributes the fact that things often work the other way around in everyday practice less to conspiracy than to systems. He expressly refuses to promote a theory circulating on social media that IT providers had early on declared marketing to be an internal corporate enemy. What is verifiable, however, is that with the introduction of ERP systems, the key-figure logic of accounting was pushed to the forefront—researchers like Thomas Davenport have described this. But if a company’s information base is built on accounting metrics, its business model will also be primarily mapped through financial figures. This is evident even in executive training: first strategy, then finance, then HR—and eventually, at the very end, marketing.

No more excuses—but no worship of numbers either

Does that mean marketing tends to resist measurement? Schögel admits that the claim that impact simply cannot be expressed in numbers has a long tradition in marketing—but today it mostly serves as an excuse. There’s now a database for almost everything. The real question is whether a data point is valid and reliable and actually reflects what one believes. As an example, he cites the Net Promoter Score: Hardly anyone measures satisfaction anymore; everyone measures the NPS—even though the metric often doesn’t reflect what it’s supposed to. Data is also retrospective; it says nothing about the future, but it helps us understand the present. Analytical skills, a sense of what’s expensive and what’s affordable, calculating media investments—none of this is rocket science, but rather a necessity. The more interesting question, however, isn’t «Marketing, what do you contribute from a financial perspective?» but rather: What does Finance do, what does Marketing do, where do the two intersect, and how can we develop this further together?

The CMO belongs at the table

This puts Schögel on the management team. A CEO, as he understands the role, facilitates a committee that develops strategy collectively—and in doing so, deliberately gives marketing not just a little, but significant room to operate. He knows plenty of CEOs like that. On the other hand, however, there are those—mostly finance-minded executives—for whom marketing is primarily a cost center that produces «colorful cardboard.» He would recommend that they familiarize themselves with the marketing mindset—because it helps them understand that there are long-term benefits that can be monetized, just not today, but only in the future. And what is the common language that CFOs and CMOs should find? It’s, says Schögel, «business model speak»: a shared understanding of value proposition, structures, operating model, revenue streams, and technologies—always from the perspective of what competitive advantage a company is striving for and how it converts that into money. Because making money remains the goal. «I don’t make a penny,» he quips dryly, «from counting peas.»

From Title to Attitude

The fact that the CMO title is becoming less common—Schögel points to a decline from 71 to 66 percent—worries him less than one might expect. The debate is over twenty years old; BMW, too, had once abolished the CMO role and distributed its responsibilities among the other board members. It wasn’t the role itself that was eliminated, but simply a redistribution of the work. Today, the roles have different names: a Chief Commercial Officer is responsible for revenue and growth, with «growth» being nothing more than the modern form of growth marketing. A company in Basel, on the other hand, has a Chief Customer Officer in charge of marketing and IT—without being any less market-oriented as a result. Whether someone is called a CMO or a Growth Officer, or whether a CEO simply calls himself “customer-centric,” ultimately doesn’t matter to him, as long as the focus is on the customer and that’s what sets the company apart from the competition.

A Matter of Courage

Anna Kohler counters this: The discussion about impact and relevance has been going on for years, and yet surprisingly little has changed. Many brands nodded in agreement but then played it safe. Schögel sees two aspects to this—a question of courage and one of paying close attention. Instead of simply copying best practices, he says, we need to ask what truly contributes to differentiation. He cites the well-known 60/40 rule from Les Binet’s impact research: About 60 percent of resources should go toward long-term brand building, and 40 percent toward short-term sales promotion. In reality, however, up to 86 percent flows into short-term digital measures—and the least goes toward the brand. Those who focus solely on return on advertising are aiming for very short-term effects, and no one knows for sure whether these even work in today’s media landscape. He has a clear answer to the ongoing debate over reach versus relevance: Relevance has always been key; reach is merely a nice-to-have. When a «big corporation from Mountain View» advertises that it owns the most important search engine and the best video platform, it reminds him of the 1990s, when ARD and ZDF boasted about being at the forefront and *Bild* cited a million readers who couldn’t possibly be wrong. The same arguments—now grounded in financial considerations. The question driven by Generative Engine Optimization, on the other hand, leads back to the core: Who are we, and what do we want to be relevant for?

What AI Sees in a Very Matter-of-Fact Way

Both agree that the AI transformation is forcing the industry to engage in precisely this kind of self-reflection. Schögel doubts that someone who puts together a clever campaign in five minutes using Claude or ChatGPT is providing the kind of quality the market truly needs. Above all, however, he rejects the convenient narrative that AI is the realm of values and humanity. An AI doesn’t look at a map of values. It evaluates, in a cold, hard-nosed way, which data points best represent a company—and those aren’t the self-declared values, but rather what’s found on high-reputation platforms like Wikipedia, in press releases, on company websites, and in customer reviews. His colleague Dennis Herrhausen put it aptly: These days, AI sits right next to you as a member of the buying center. The AI evaluates what can realistically be found, while humans overlay their preferences on top of that. This dual evaluation gives rise to an old yet new obligation: to reflect on whether one actually has a functional performance advantage that makes the product unique—and how to convey to the person presented with five options the specific feature that tips the scales in favor of the purchase.

Imagination as a Required Course

«You need both,» says Schögel, «and it’s absolutely essential.» Today’s CMO must have a firm grasp of financial data and metrics and be able to explain where the levers of influence lie. There’s no getting around it. At the same time, he refers to a text from the 1970s: «The Marketing Imagination» by Harvard professor Theodore Levitt. You need the fundamentals, but you also need imagination—a sense of how to fit into a culture. He explains the current boom in cultural marketing by noting that many companies have become estranged from their target groups and subcultures. An Amazon web store with the company’s own logo is not enough; a creatively designed flagship store, on the other hand, sets a company apart. At the HSG, they therefore consciously venture into the creative realm: Students collaborate with agencies and learn what creative processes look like—a demand that agency professionals had been making for years and which he believes is correct. For him, the best students are those with openness, drive, and a unique flair—a mix of creative thinking, curiosity, and a strategic perspective that recognizes that it’s not the fancy Instagram post that drives business. This is developed through project work, group settings, and a three-day boot camp, from which students emerge exhausted but full of joy and a “twinkle” in their eyes. Those who neglect this quickly end up in a place where “operational chaos replaces intellectual calm.”.

Schögel's Advice to a CEO

What advice would he give to a CEO who wants to lead his company into the future in a credible and creative way? “If I had a formula,” Schögel jokes, “I wouldn’t say it out loud”—and responds with examples. Hilti realized as early as the 1960s that its products were too expensive for retail sales, and so it learned to think from the customer’s perspective: direct sales, on-site product development, open innovation, and collaboration. No member of the executive board has ever been able to bypass sales, so discussions there revolve more around customer problems than anything else. He also mentions Jura, the manufacturer that consistently stays close to its customers with its fully automatic coffee machines and doesn’t let itself be distracted by capsules, as well as Stöckli—companies that are all heading in the same direction.

Kohler notes that it is no coincidence these are not publicly traded corporations—and asks whether customer focus isn’t a luxury reserved for those who don’t have to justify themselves on a quarterly basis. Schögel disagrees: It is not a luxury, but a strategic decision. Cooperatively run institutions, an insurance company, a cantonal bank like the one in Graubünden—they are all geared toward avoiding short-term pressure to perform. One of these CEOs once told him that he had the luxury of being able to focus on the customer—and in the same breath corrected himself: It’s not a luxury, but the core of the strategy. And so the conversation ends where it began. After all, it is precisely companies that are not driven by shareholder value that can often demonstrate most convincingly just how financially successful they are. The CEO in question is a virtuoso when it comes to financial metrics—he knows exactly why and how he uses them.

Perhaps that is the real answer to the wrong question. It’s not that marketing needs to learn the language of finance. Both sides need to speak the same language—that of the customer.

The podcast episode on Spotify

You can find Marcus Schögel's article here.