I attended a breakfast roundtable Thursday morning with senior marketers from RBC, Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp (OLG), and The Home Depot.  What made it doubly interesting is that two CFOs also participated.  The most stimulating part of the discussion had to do with “agency math” versus “CFO math.”

That point was most clearly illustrated by Rob Moore, SVP at OLG.  Rob spoke about his days as a senior marketer at HBC, where he said the retailer compared favourably to Wal-Mart in consumer preference surveys, brand favourability and the like — yet Wal-Mart was killing HBC in sales.  The lesson:  marketing metrics don’t always align with business metrics.  Therein lies a prominent disconnect between the CMO and CFO. Read the rest of this entry »