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Forrester research found this year that only 58% of Fortune 500 chief marketing officers report directly to the CEO or sit in the C-suite. And CMO membership on boards is down more than 7% between 2023 and 2024. But in todays unpredictable cultural and political climate, we need marketing leaders at the table who can navigate complexity and change. I have always advocated for the inclusion of CMOs on company boards, on the grounds that CMOs bring a nuanced understanding of customer behavior and cultural context. In the past, Ive seen that the biggest challenge preventing broader representation of marketing leaders on board was the limited turnover of board seats. In this new reality, the question isnt just access to the boardroom, but how CMOs lead in complex times. That leadership in this moment can be broken down into three main ideas: practice discernment, prioritizing trust, and embracing breadth and depth. Lets discuss them in more depth. 1. Practice discernment Right now, its important to remember that not every cultural or political moment needs a branded response. Discernment means understanding timing, relevance, and deeply understanding your audience. CMOs can be leaders guiding internal debates on when not to engage publicly, just as much as when to act. Understanding that sometimes inaction is an action itself, is essential to public affairs leadership. More broadly, effective CMO engagement in public affairs is about knowing when and how to cut through the noise and maintain long-term strategic relevance. In my organization, weve developed response protocols that provide internal guidance on when a response is necessary. Our decision process on when and how we respond starts with the shared understanding of our organizations values. We discuss our values, our teams needs, and how recent news may impact them personally. From there we make decisions about how we respond internally, and if an external response is necessary. 2. Prioritize trust Trust is the cornerstone of any marketer’s role. CMOs should focus on long-term trust with staff, board members, and external audiences. It is here where marketing and communications alignment on trust is critical. CMOs who lead with clarity and consistency earn the trust that drives long-term success. 3. Embrace breadth and depth Especially right now, CMOs cant afford to specialize too narrowly. They must understand stakeholder engagement, public affairs, issues, and reputation management, among all the other pieces of their day-to-day work. This breadth, and the skills that come out of being an effective marketer, enable effective internal partnerships, especially with communications and government relations teams. This key idea makes the CMO indispensable at the leadership table. At my current organization, our stakeholders include staff, a broadly impacted patient community, healthcare providers, researchers, institutional and individual supporters. These stakeholders represent a myriad of backgrounds; socioeconomic, political, social, and geographical. That means we spend a lot of time thinking about the impact of our marketing campaigns as well as our communications and government relations strategies. MARKETING LEADERSHIP AS A NONPROFIT IMPERATIVE In the nonprofit world, the stakes for relevance, impact, and trust are even higher. With leaner budgets and heightened scrutiny, every message matters. CMOs in nonprofits must bridge fundraising, advocacy, and audience engagement, making them indispensable to long-term strategy and sustainability. Being a CMO is as much about strategy and strategic thinking as it is about any other piece of the job. Their proximity to audiences and grasp of evolving culture gives them a unique advantage, but only if they can lean in. As marketers and CMOs, we should work to reframe the role as a connector between brand, purpose, audience, and leadership. Simone Grapini-Goodman is chief marketing and digital officer of American Diabetes Association.
Category:
E-Commerce
Female entrepreneurs are on equal footing with their male counterparts in creating businesses with a societal impact. But there is still a colossal gap in startup funding between women and men who prioritize social issues alongside corporate profit. That is in danger of growing even larger as DEI policies are increasingly removed. The Schwab Foundations Global Alliance for Social Entrepreneurship report, The State of Social Enterprise 20132023, notes that there are 10 million social enterprises around the globe, accounting for $2 trillion in annual revenue, and providing 200 million jobs. Half of those businesses are led by women. This number corresponds with business startups in general. In fact, 49% of new startups in 2024 were woman-led. The need for funding Behind that seeming equality, however, is the devastating reality that solely owned women-led companies get a meager 3% of available venture capital funding. You read that right, 3%. To work around that wall, women often must be more creative and innovative to secure funding. They often turn to less traditional funding sourcesorganizations such as ours, Boundless Futures Foundation (BFF), and Kiva. BFF provides financial support and leadership resources to female founders whose businesses also address a societal issue. Kiva is a global nonprofit that supplies much-needed capital to social entrepreneurs through crowdfunded loans. Our organizations recently partnered to establish a revolving loan fund, produce an impact study on the effects of women social entrepreneurs, and collaborate on strategic approaches to reduce barriers facing female founders. Organizations like ours are making an impact in a world that desperately needs businesses to stand up and do the right thing. Women are addressing social causes Even with one or more financial arms tied behind their backs, women founders who envision a better world are hanging out the open signs. So, what are these innovatively financed women-led businesses accomplishing? They are fostering economic opportunities while tackling some of the worlds most pressing issues like poverty and hunger, climate change, financial inclusion, and much more. For example, Quipu is a female-founded socially responsible digital bank. Its on a mission to empower informal entrepreneurs in Latin America by providing easy and fair access to credit and other financial services. Quipu has served over 23,000 microentrepreneurs, 60% of whom are women. Their crowdfunded loan from Kiva allowed them to scale financial access to an additional 1,800 informal small businesses whose average loan request was $55. Bake Me Healthy is a business founded by Kimberle Lau that received a grant from BFF. The company produces easy-to-make plant-based baking mixes that are gluten-free, vegan, and avoid the top nine allergens. Bake Me Healthy ingredients are not only clean, but they also tackle the problem of food waste by including upcycled ingredientsfood that typically goes to waste and creates greenhouse gasessuch as ugly bananas and flour made from the byproduct of sunflower oil production. Diaspora Co. couldnt sit idly by as the commodity spice trade severely undercompensated farmers and produced low-quality final products. This woman-led social enterprise circumvented the status quo and began working directly with small sustainable farm partners in India and Sri Lanka. They strive for quality products and, in the process, greatly increased the farm laborers wages. Their Kiva crowdfunded loan enabled Diaspora Co. to bring on more farms and buy more produce. The path forward Stories like these are endless. Social enterprises are good for the world and women stand shoulder to shoulder with men trying to make the world a better place. And while we have some measure of equality in terms of the number of businesses, we are a long way from any sort of equity in the ability for women to attain financial support. Its time we understand the financial barriers that women business founders face and take the necessary steps toward institutional change. Vishal Ghotge is CEO of Kiva. Soon Hagerty is cofounder and president of Boundless Futures Foundation.
Category:
E-Commerce
AI arguably presents the greatest opportunities and risks of our time: How will it reshape the way we live and work, and improve our efficiency without losing judgment, context, and nuance? AI is changing the foundation of every industry, including commercial real estate (CRE). From growing data centers and energy infrastructure to site selection, investment, and development strategies; the physical side of our industry is rapidly changing. However, thats just one piece of the puzzle being reshaped by AI. New technological innovations promise industry transformation and while theres no question that AI based tools are changing behaviors and outcomes, were focusing on one question: How will AI realistically shape the near-term future of CRE? To explore this, I sat down with our chief information officer, Martin Jepil, who joined Avison Young in 2021 from Hewlett Packard. Having worked extensively outside our industry, his experience allows him to break through legacy approaches and cultivate transformative thinking. Mark Rose: Looking at the capabilities of generative AI, I see a changing balance between the tasks done by people and those augmented by AI. This shift isnt just an incredible opportunity; its a necessary move to keep pace. How do you see AI changing our industry? Martin Jepil: With the ability to process various databases, AI models can create connections and identify patterns that humans cannot see as quickly. For CRE, this provides two overarching opportunities: improved productivity and knowledge. With the potential to decrease the time intensity of projects, AI will increase the number of opportunities that can be handled by our teams. We will have more time and capacity to dedicate to differentiating ourselves and delivering beyond our goals. Generative AI also offers potential knowledge gains. Does traffic in your office gravitate towards a specific workspace? Are there cyclical lulls in energy demand? Traditionally, answering these questions involves a time-intensive cross-referencing of both quantitative and qualitative data sources. AI will simplify these workflows and improve the insights delivered to clients around the location and performance of an asset. Rose: What is your future vision as it relates to AI and how do you foresee the technology/IT roadmap taking shape at real estate advisory firms? Jepil: Alongside data management, some of the most powerful uses of AI are in summarization, translation, and deep research. As an industry rooted in written, unstructured data, these AI applications are increasingly important. An AI driven transformation will allow our teams to do more innovating, advising, and consulting beyond traditional transactional roles. Instead of being bogged down by routine tasks, theyll focus on activities that make a larger impact on the built environment. Our company is already a fully cloud-native organization, allowing us to be nimble and agile. Our next step is to become AI-native. That means embedding prompt-based features and automating tasks using machine learning and generative AI capabilities. This allows us to shift our peoples focus to high-value work such as business development, service delivery, and client engagement, while deepening our technologys focus on predictive analytics, scenario modeling, and, ultimately, delivering better decision-making. Rose: As we continue to adopt and integrate this new workflow, risks and challenges will arise. What are some of the greatest challenges around adopting AI technology in a meaningful way? And how can we use the skillsets of our teams to address these challenges? Jepil: In our industry and beyond, the biggest hurdle continues to be quality of data. While there is a vast network of data, it is not structured or indexed in a way that allows us to easily derive value. Beyond what we consider to be traditional CRE data, AI can facilitate the integration of non-traditional data sources. Theres a wealth of untapped resources across the internet that might tell you more about a property. Demographic, building, and organizational data are significant unstructured data sources. The new patterns identified by AI will be even more valuable when there is access to both traditional and non-traditional data sources. The first steps should focus on integrationfiguring out how to facilitate communication between database infrastructure and sorting through unstructured data, such as sale and lease comps, property listings, and planning codes. This infrastructure must be organized properly to train generative AI. While this may seem like a behemoth challenge, it is a problem that AI can help to solve. Through data extraction and reading unstructured data, AI models are helping aid the integration process. Like any technology platform, AI is a tool that will enhance productivity and knowledge growth. For instance, when power tools were introduced in the construction industry, they didnt eliminate the need for builders. Instead, they made builders more efficient, safer, and capable of handling more complex projects. AI in CRE is much the same. It is not here to replace brokers, developers, or property managers but to give them more powerful tools. Above all else, AI will provide advisors with better tools to analyze data at scale, spot risks, and automate routine tasks so they can focus on the human insights, relationships, and decisions that ultimately drive value. Final thoughts Those who embrace AI thoughtfully and strategically will thrive. Thoughtful strategy includes having a vision for how peoples daily roles evolve and determining the viability of different AI functions. Employees who embrace AI will gain a deeper understanding of how people, businesses, and markets more generally impact CRE. As a CRE firm, setting a thoughtful strategy includes choosing the right AI tools and building the appropriate IT infrastructure to unlock that promise. Our ambition? To lead in predictive analytics with a commitment to delivering outcome-based insights that combine real-time, platform-generated data with human interpretation and expertise, assisted by GenAI. We believe that people, not technology alone, will be the key differentiator in the age of AI. The ultimate success of a built asset is shaped by the needs and satisfaction of its occupants. There will always be our priority to get boots on the ground, embed ourselves in projects, andabove allanticipate human needs. Mark E. Rose is chair and CEO of Avison Young.
Category:
E-Commerce
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