The CMO Course

What actually changes when you become CMO — accountability, audience, time horizon — and why marketing education doesn't prepare you for any of it.

The 95/5 rule, NBD-Dirichlet model, penetration vs. loyalty, mental availability, and why most of your market is invisible to performance advertising.

The five growth vectors, Kinner's three phases (Start-Up / Scale-Up / Maturity), wrong-phase mistakes, and the three mechanisms that actually move purchase frequency.

How a P&L is built from revenue to EBIT, the three business models (FMCG, D2C, joint), trade spend categories, CM1/CM2, LTV:CAC, and how to talk to your CFO.

Why performance marketing hits a ceiling, the J-curve of brand investment (months 1–6 stall, 7–15 flywheel, 16–36 compound), blended CAC, and share of search.

The six resource types, the channel matrix, personality fit, what owning a channel actually means operationally, and when to add a second channel.

Why pricing is the highest-leverage marketing decision, price elasticity in practice, price architecture across the range, promotional discipline, and defending price to the CFO.

The legal reality of board membership, where decisions are actually made (before the meeting), power dynamics, and how to communicate marketing to financial board members.

What investors are actually buying, the three components of an equity story (with IKEA and Walmart moat examples), TAM/SAM/SOM, investor types, proxy KPIs, the Story-Value Matrix, and lessons from a €47.6M Frankfurt Stock Exchange IPO.

Why earned media is a CMO skill, ethos/logos/pathos as a story frame, the ABC interview technique, news-jacking with the Veganz Facebook boycott case, press release craft, and the compounding play.

Why brand and sales are one flywheel, reading the retailer structure, rotation as the master metric, showing buyers their own upside, Harvard vs. Schranner negotiation, POS + shopper marketing, learning the shopper at the shelf, channel-by-channel strategy, and the connections & relationships work that makes sales actually happen (with Ferrazzi + Van Edwards).

A compact framework primer, not the full PM course. The strategic layer of product management the CMO cannot cede: product–market fit as CMO concern, quarterly product-strategy questions, portfolio frameworks (PLC, Ansoff, BCG), the full Produktpolitik framework (Product Design, Assortment Breadth × Depth, the 5 Product Tools including Elimination as growth lever). Full rewrite pending.

Personal reflection on the CMO role, and the North-Star line for the whole course: strategy is focus.