Teams with MarketCulture Strategies to Audit and Assess Organizational Sensitivity and Responsiveness to Customers, Competitors and Business Conditions

PALO ALTO, Calif. (Jan. 5, 2010) -- The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council today announced the formation of the Market Sense-Ability Center™ to provide new advocacy, thought leadership, benchmarking services and best practices on how to advance market-centric thinking as an integral part of a company’s organizational DNA.

The Council recommends that CMOs team with their CEO and executive team members to create corporate cultures where every employee and partner across the extended enterprise is sensitized and attentive to customer, competitor and market conditions and dynamics. This level of insight and agility is essential to driving business performance and competitive advantage, notes the CMO Council.

"Global businesses are challenged to dramatically raise their capacity to understand, predict and respond to both current and future customer, market and competitor dynamics, demands and disruptions in an era of unprecedented change and complexity," states Donovan Neale-May, the executive director of the CMO Council. “Yet many companies have not adequately developed the systems, practices and cultures needed to become Ever-Alert Enterprises with sufficient Market Sense-Ability to keep pace."

According to CMO Council research, only 10.7 percent of companies have deployed real-time systems to collect, analyze and distribute customer feedback. While 75 percent say they receive customer feedback via e-mail, only 23 percent say they track and measure the volume and nature of these messages.

The CMO Council advocates that CMOs take a leadership role in benchmarking and transforming the levels of market and customer centricity and responsiveness throughout their organizations. The Market Sense-Ability Center, housed on the CMO Council website, is designed to provide content and tools to help marketers improve competitiveness and performance by upgrading cultural alertness and response.

Included in the new Center is a free self-audit made exclusively available for free for CMOs to rate their level of Market Sense-Ability and responsiveness to current and future customer needs, market dynamics and competitive change. The Market Responsiveness Index (MRI)TM measures culture based on a variety of organizational behaviors and allows CMOs to compare their ratings with those of CMOs of other companies.

Developed by MarketCulture Strategies, the MRITM has been proven, when used as an organization-wideal benchmarking instrument, to be a strong predictor of business performance and customer value creation, and is an invaluable platform for the planning of change activities.. An organization-wide MRI benchmarking servicdiagnosis e from MarketCulture Strategies is being offered to CMO Council members at a special discount.

The Center also includes a new white paper by Donovan Neale-May on the need for CMOs to take a leadership role in building Ever-Alert Enterprises, as well as other relevant articles and content. The white paper is entitled “Creating Market-Sensing Corporate Cultures Is an Essential CEO-CMO Joint Initiative.”

"Today's Chief Marketing Officer needs to be a valued change agent," states Neale-May. "More than 50 percent are hired to fix broken marketing organizations and lead transformation across all functional areas. This includes measurably impacting and influencing company culture, customer experience, competitive differentiation, brand recognition, sales effectiveness and business performance," he added.

About the CMO Council

The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council is dedicated to high-level knowledge exchange, thought leadership and personal relationship building among senior corporate marketing leaders and brand decision-makers across a wide-range of global industries. The CMO Council's 5,000 members control more than $125 billion in aggregated annual marketing expenditures and run complex, distributed marketing and sales operations worldwide. In total, the CMO Council and its strategic interest communities include over 12,000 global executives across 100 countries in multiple industries, segments and markets. Regional chapters and advisory boards are active in the Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa. The Council's strategic interest groups include the Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales Effectiveness (CLOSE), Marketing Supply Chain Institute, Customer Experience Board, LoyaltyLeaders.org, Online Marketing Performance Institute, and the Forum to Advance the Mobile Experience (FAME). www.cmocouncil.org

About Market Culture Strategies

MarketCulture Strategies works with corporations around the world to improve competitiveness through the adoption of market-centric values, practices and skills. The company offers benchmarking, strategic planning, skills assessment and training, and transformation services that result in more dynamic businesses and measurable improvements in sales growth, profitability and customer satisfaction. Its Market Responsiveness Index benchmarks an organization’s capacity to respond to current and future customer needs, competitive threats and external factors. MarketCulture Strategies then work s closely with corporate leaders to develop a meaningful roadmap for developing Cultural Sense-Ability. Our research shows that for incremental every a 10 percent improvements in an MRI score delivers a measurable 4 percent improvement in profitability.