Neil Barrie of TwentyFirstCenturyBrand: 5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Career As A CMO

An Interview With Rachel Kline

Learn and leverage the culture: Understanding the folklore, the norms, and the way decisions are taken. This is a huge theme for the CMOs I work with and many have learned the importance of it the hard way. You can have a great strategy and vision, but if you don’t roll it out in a way that works for the culture it will likely fail. As observed by Satya Nadella during the Microsoft turnaround, “We can have all the bold ambitions. We can all have bold goals. We can aspire to our new mission. But it’s only going to happen if we live our culture, if we teach our culture” (Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft).

A successful CMO has many roles, including leading an organization’s marketing department, establishing marketing strategies, and tracking successes and failures. How can a CMO create a highly successful career? What tools, strategies, and approaches can a CMO use to be successful? In this interview series, we are talking to current or retired CMOs about “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Career As A CMO”. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Neil Barrie.

Neil Barrie is the Co-Founder and Global CEO of TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, a purposeful growth consultancy that partners with the world’s most ambitious brands to drive purposeful, profitable growth. As one of the world’s leading progressive brand strategists, Neil Barrie works with companies that are changing things for the better. He’s proud to have led the development and global growth of a range of top-tier brands such as Airbnb, Netflix, Pinterest, Unilever, Snapchat, and Disney.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share your personal backstory with us?

Born in Scotland, grew up in Leicester in the UK ‘Midlands’. I had a previous life as a ‘failed rock star’ in an indie electro band where I sold about 999 records but made no money. But it did teach me about what it’s like to put yourself on the line both as a creative and a ‘founder’ which is very helpful in my more successful career building brands in London and Los Angeles. I have three beautiful young daughters who keep me in order and up to date with pop culture.

What do you think was a pivotal moment that led you on your path to founding TwentyFirstCenturyBrand?

I have to say it was meeting my co-founder Jonathan Mildenhall in 2014 when I was working at the advertising agency Chiat Day Los Angeles. He had just taken the CMO role at Airbnb, and there was a massive delta between his characteristically gargantuan ambitions and the resources at his disposal. I was totally charmed and inspired by his combination of outsize humanity, ambition, and creativity — literally from the first call where he told us he was going to pay us less than our other major clients, demand more, but help us make the best work of our careers!

Getting to spend four years building that brand was a life-changing experience — we had to create a new marketing playbook that worked for Brian Chesky, the most intense, demanding, and inspirational CEO I’ve ever worked with, pulling together product, policy, community, marketing into one integrated thing. It was definitely a bumpy ride taking Airbnb from a hipster backpacking site with a squiggly logo to being the world’s most influential, valuable travel brand, but it lit a fire in me that directly led to the founding of TwentyFirstCenturyBrand to do that type of work for the generation of companies and leaders that had a similar blend of ideals, ambition, relentlessness, and vision.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?

The biggest change has been stepping into my power as a CMO Whisperer. For the past six years, I’ve had the privilege to work alongside many of the world’s best CMOs at over 100 leading brands across a whole range of categories and markets, from tech disruptors and legacy corporates from Pinterest, Monzo, Grammys, Netflix, Peloton, Headspace, Mars Pepsico, Lyft and more. The common theme is helping those CMOS use the brand to navigate big inflection points, whether that’s evolving the growth model, transforming a 5000-strong marketing organization, or getting ready for an IPO. So I’ve had a front-row seat to understand what works and what doesn’t and have started intuitively recognizing the patterns and moves that make or break the truly great CMOs. It’s a real privilege to get to play that role, and I want to make sure that I share that knowledge by playing an informal CMO whisperer role for clients, particularly during those formative first 18 months in a role.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful for who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

Evan Sharp the co-founder of Pinterest. He was TwentyFirstCenturyBrand’s first client, and he took a huge gamble picking us over the best agencies in town to evolve their mission and brand when, frankly, we weren’t even a real company yet. The experience of working with him and Ben Silbermann was truly life-changing for me, seeing how really principled leaders use the mission as a guiding force and conscience to keep user well-being front and center of the company’s operations. Evan also took Jonathan and me to task about TwentyFirstCenturyBrand’s lack of a proposition and co-wrote our own brand narrative and thesis on 21st-century brand excellence with us!

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“We all live on in the imprint we leave on others. That’s the true afterlife.” I read something like this in a Financial Times Weekend interview with someone whose name I’ve now forgotten. This is a very inspiring idea to me and the magical thing is it works both ways. It influences how I approach relationships with my family, friends and even my team, and it also influences how I cope when people dear to me pass away. My mother died quite young, and my father died last year and it’s a great comfort for me to channel some of the qualities I most loved about them into my daily life and hopefully pass them on to others too.

Can you share with us three strengths, skills, or characteristics that helped you to reach this place in your career? How can others actively build these areas within themselves?

1. Truth Geek. I have a hunger for truth and genuine understanding, whether that’s people, culture, business models, or companies. I feel instinctively uneasy until I have a decent understanding of how stuff works. I think people can probably tell that when I work with them and appreciate that intent. It also makes a lot of ‘work’ seem fun. This comes naturally to a lot of strategic people, but you can hone it by always seeking out shortcuts to the truth — the truth-tellers who’ll give it to you straight.
2. Unlocking the smartest voices in the room > being the smartest voice in the room. This is a natural outcome of being perpetually hungry for truth and understanding — it means you’d rather listen to others rather than yourself.
3. Making language memorable. It probably stems back to spending my twenties trying to make it as a rock star while intermittently writing about markets. I want every point, headline, and narrative to have a sense of flair and dynamics, no matter what the topic. Company leaders are generally always distracted, so strategies need innate magnetism to earn attention and become useful. Make metaphors, references, and alliterations your friends.

Which skills are you still trying to grow now?

Running toward difficult decisions and making them relatively quickly without being rash.

Sustaining a high-performance culture in an era where people’s relationship with work has radically changed.

Fantastic. Here is the primary question of our interview. Having reached this space, what do you believe are the five things you need to be a highly successful CMO? Please share a story or example for each.

1. Learn and leverage the culture: Understanding the folklore, the norms, and the way decisions are taken. This is a huge theme for the CMOs I work with and many have learned the importance of it the hard way. You can have a great strategy and vision, but if you don’t roll it out in a way that works for the culture it will likely fail. As observed by Satya Nadella during the Microsoft turnaround, “We can have all the bold ambitions. We can all have bold goals. We can aspire to our new mission. But it’s only going to happen if we live our culture, if we teach our culture” (Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft).
2. Define a clear, credible role in driving growth on two horizons. Frame it through the value drivers of the business and continually evangelize marketing’s impact. Don’t wait for brand equity to move — identify the leading indicators and communicate them. Show your workings: CFOs mistrust ‘black box’ marketers, they know there are a lot of hypotheses involved, and they just want to understand where it’s coming from. I’ve found it very helpful to use the Business case for a brand to summarize the critical external and internal dynamics influencing the company’s growth strategy, the key ‘jobs to be done’ that the brand will focus on to address those dynamics, and the two horizon scorecard of KPIs to track progress.

3. Recruit and rally your communities. Create the right team around you and make the necessary tough decisions that set marketing up to succeed. Forge your critical x-functional peer alliances — CFO, COO, CTO. Understand their personal KPIs and show how marketing can enhance them. Global marketing leaders need to maximize their first 90 days, one of the key tasks is to map their stakeholders on entering the business. Assessing who are skeptics or advocates allows incoming CMOs to build a clear plan to consolidate the support required to deliver their ambitious plans.

4. Make your martech matter. The marketing value equation has changed. You might be evaluating your CMO role through the lens of: “What budget can I play with?” Think instead: “What data can I play with?” Get your martech fundamentals and alliances in place so you can ensure maximum leverage and minimal distraction for your growth.

An organization with $250 million in revenue only utilizes 33% of its total martech stack. Based on Gartner benchmarks, if the organization allocates 9% of its revenue on marketing and 25% of that marketing budget goes toward technology, then the organization could be wasting nearly $4 million in underutilized technology spending. And once martech proves to be less useful than anticipated, the marketing team takes the hit. 67% of marketers agreed that lower-than-expected utilization of martech stack lowered the credibility of the team across the organization.

5. Look after yourself! The CMOs that I see thriving for longer are very intentional about how they manage their energy and their personal brand. The ones that don’t tend to end up exhausted and lose touch with the inspirational authentic qualities that are so critical to the role. I use our ‘Anchors’ framework specifically to help leaders identify and stay in touch with the critical ‘anchors’ necessary to provide stability in their roles.

These five things are featured TwentyFirstCenturyBrand’s CMO Thrive Guide — a definitive year-one playbook for the world’s most brand-ambitious CMOs, which includes .

Are there any underrated skills or qualities that you encourage others not to overlook?

Invest time in defining your own personal brand, your values, and your signature moves. I do this with a lot of brand leaders and it’s game-changing. The most influential CMOS have a magnetism that comes from deep conviction and authenticity. This isn’t one of those you’ve got it or you don’t qualities — put in the work and I promise it’ll compound over your career.

What are some of the main issues that other CMOs commonly struggle with? What can be done to address those challenges?

‘CFO Fluency’ and bridging the worlds of marketing and finance. Establishing a robust and active relationship with your CFO is a key goal in your first 12 months — it will have a critical influence on your credibility with the entire leadership team and board. You need a common language.

What do you believe is the most effective way to stand out and make an impact as a CMO?

Carve out a reputation as THE leader that can bridge the commercial and customer’s lives. Don’t outsource customer understanding to decks, research, and other teams. Walk in their footsteps yourself and become an expert on the spirit of customers/users, what pains them, what delights them, and how that connects back to key value drivers of the business. If you really hone that intuition, it will help you cut through the circular leadership discussions on strategy in a refreshing way and grow your influence across the leadership team and beyond.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.

Ensuring that the communities that give cities their character are able to meaningfully benefit from their ongoing expansion and gentrification rather than be forced out.

We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them.

Working breakfast with Bruce Springseen, Lil Simz and Kendrick Lamar on the topic of how to use creativity to safeguard democracy.

Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.