Today's CMOs have a greater opportunity to play a critical role in the growth and performance of their organizations. Customer centricity is a fundamental shift in an organization's framework that will cause competitive differentiation. The CMO's opportunity is to understand the explosion of data from many disparate customer touchpoints and use it to create insights, targeting and measurement that lead to more effective integrated marketing communications. This is connected CRM.

Accomplishing these goals requires a specific set of skills that CMOs must master and incorporate into the marketing strategy. Merkle has developed a Blueprint for CMOs that includes:

• Customer-centricity and business strategy
• Marketing currencies
• Customer experience and communication management
• Marketing investment strategy
• Customer relationship marketing enablement