What are the innovation opportunities and challenges today’s marketing leaders face?

I was honored to be asked back for a second interview with Spiral Marketing, a podcast that helps current and future business leaders, marketers and entrepreneurs elevate their brand. (Their first return guest!)

Host Karl Boehm and I discussed the recently released 3rd Annual Energize Growth CMO Report, From Fledgling to Falcon: How CMOs Make the Leap from Order Taker to Innovator….

What a whirlwind year! Our dynamic CMO community continues to thrive and doubled in size since 2014.

Many members celebrated professional milestones which have propelled them forward. I’m proud to share ten highlights here, proving that there’s power in numbers:…

Jen Kern dazzles modern marketers at Inbound15. Over 850 attendees learned what it takes to build lasting bridges with your Sales organization. Using jazz as the underlying inbound marketing metaphor, Jen’s audience rated her session one of the most pragmatic and valuable at the HubSpot conference.

Are mindfulness programs a leadership fad?

This is the time of year when leadership teams announce new professional development programs and formulate their offsite planning agendas. Many companies are jumping on the bandwagon with Target, McKinsey, Royal Bank of Canada, and Google to incorporate mindfulness programs into their curriculum.

Sadly, mindfulness is dangerously close to joining the ranks of “corporate buzzword bingo.” Think back to the early days of LEAN, Six Sigma, Solution Selling, and the Total Quality Movement….

By Guest Blogger Billee Howard, Founder and Chief Engagement Officer of Brandthropologie

Here are the top 9 emerging trends CMOs must watch for in the year ahead that will impact innovation and the customer landscape. As we know, the CMO function is currently among the most vital, while also the most volatile.

These 9 emerging trends are designed to enhance your agility in the year ahead:

1) Sound will continue to emerge as the new word, with the audio headphone industry surpassing the $13 billion mark by 2016….

Follow me back 45 years ago, when my Mom invited me to skip school and visit Dad’s office at Litton Industries.

This represented a BIG adventure to me. I knew Dad was a mechanical engineer, but I never truly understood what his job entailed. This was my chance to get answers.

We pulled up to the four story, steel gray industrial building in West Hartford, Connecticut. As we exited the elevator, I spotted Dad in the conference room….

A few weeks ago, a doe-eyed workshop volunteer stopped me at the entrance to the crowded meditation room.

“Has anyone talked to you about our dress code?” she asked. “You see, we require you to wear white clothing from head to toe. Our teacher said that if you don’t have anything light to wear, you will have to sit out the next session and go home to change clothes. Another option is that you can buy some of our clothing in our upstairs room.”

Truthfully, I had no idea about any dress code….

By Guest Blogger Deanna Zaucha, Senior Specialist of Content Marketing for Webs and Pagemodo

Independence Day will come and go, but it never fails to set the momentum for the holiday season to come. For marketers, holidays are a great time of the year to drive traffic and encourage engagement with customers. However, we’re often faced with outdated and stagnant social media campaigns.

For your marketing campaign to stay ahead of the curve and stand out in a crowd, it should be memorable, unique and most importantly, engaging….

We just completed our first annual CMOs Leading Innovation Conference (CLIC ’15) in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia. Although this full day session deserves more reflection than a David Letterman-style Top Ten List, I wanted to pass along my initial thoughts.

Twenty-five CMOs and CEOs gathered from cool companies such as Twitter, Informatica, H&R Block, SageWater, Gannett/USAToday, Decision Lens, XO Communications, Celerity, and DestinationDC. Adobe’s CMO.com, a globally reknown publication reaching over 22,000 marketing leaders, partnered with us to cover the event….

Let’s talk about how we design our marketing communities. In Buddhism, we have a term called sangha. This has to do with surrounding yourself with like-minded people who support you in whatever you’re doing.

We need to find our sangha as mindful marketers. In this video, Jamie Gorski, CMO of The Bozzuto Group, and I discuss what’s worked for us over the years. Some of the points we cover include:

The importance and benefits of a peer group (for example, our Marketing Leaders of DC™  community)
Guidelines and ideas for designing your own peer communities
How surrounding yourself with champions can also make you a champion

I invite you to take four minutes to enjoy the video….

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There are many different strategies involved in mindful marketing, from using intentional language to designing our customer communities in a new way. It can be hard to implement all of these things in our companies at once. Where to begin?

In this video, I offer guidance in setting your mindful marketer priorities….