More and more CMOs are investing in their personal brands

Their goals range from simple self-promotion to marketing their employers in a different way than usual. Efforts can include carefully crafted LinkedIn posts about everything from corporate leadership to their costumes at the company’s recent Halloween party.

Many executives have help crafting and sharing their materials, in some cases outsourcing most of the process to ghostwriters or third-party firms, according to companies that provide such services. But critics may question whether such efforts really support the companies’ business goals, especially as some executives move their personal brand building from LinkedIn to less formal venues like TikTok.

Jonathan Mildenhall, co-founder and chairman of consultancy TwentyFirstCenturyBrand and former chief marketing officer at online travel company Airbnb Inc.,

said that modern marketers need to invest in their own brands to do their jobs effectively.

“The work of a CMO is always in the public domain and the CMO should be closest to the community the business serves,” Mr Mildenhall said.

Marketers promoting themselves is hardly a new concept, but the trend is gaining momentum. About 240 senior marketing executives are clients of executive reputation management firm Qnary, up 75% year-to-date in 2022 after a 50% increase in 2021, according to founder and chairman Bant Breen .

Mr. Breen, a former advertising agency executive, said he decided to start Qnary after finding that executives’ social media posts tended to get eight to 20 times more engagement than their employers’ accounts. People who follow both a company and one or more of its executives are twice as likely to buy from that company, according to Qnary’s research, Mr. Breen said.

Christina Dolan, global head of alliances at security software company Netwitness, said she hired Qnary a few years ago while leading marketing for a stock trading software firm because she was new to social media marketing and was too busy to post frequently and engage with users. Qnary’s team now creates most of the content posted under her name on LinkedIn and Twitter, Ms. Dolan said.

“They write it and I have editorial control,” she said.

Some companies encourage their executives to build their brands.

Banking company First Horizon corp.

is allocating more resources to positioning its marketing leaders as so-called brand ambassadors, said Erin Pryor, chief marketing officer and executive vice president of customer experience.

“The best way for them to do that is for them to have their own strong personal brands,” Ms Pryor said.

Some First Horizon executives choose to hand over their login information to the company’s internal social media team or its outside marketing firm, who write, edit and schedule LinkedIn posts on their behalf, she said, noting that executives retain final approval of the content published under their names.

Ms Pryor said she usually writes and publishes her own material, but in some cases, these teams present her with several pre-written options to choose from.

Recruiting is another goal of personal branding, with several executives saying they feel the need to post more often about their own companies, especially on LinkedIn, to attract future talent.

Social networks with a purpose

CMOs also build personal brands to further their own careers.

“Senior marketing leaders have come to the conclusion that their success lies in being widely known guns for hire and that their careers will be a series of two- to three-year internships,” said Mark Stauss, founder of marketing software firm Proof Analytics and former CMO at aircraft manufacturer Honeywell Aerospace, a division of Honeywell International Inc.

Melissa Hobley, chief marketing officer of the dating app Tinder, built a reputation at her previous job at OkCupid as the rare CMO who is outspoken on sociopolitical issues like abortion and non-binary gender identity.

Matching group Inc.,

The parent company of Tinder and OkCupid discovered a few years ago that there was a business case for that kind of political commentary as more OkCupid users discussed issues like reproductive rights on their profiles, Ms. Hobley said.

Marketing campaigns for Tinder and OkCupid that touch on such topics are among the most engaging brands to date, and Ms. Hobley is passionate about promoting them on her own accounts and in interviews, even as they provoke political backlash, she said.

Ms Hobley said she writes all her material unsupervised by Tinder. As for her personal brand, she said, “It’s not as calculated as it should be.”

Business or vanity?

Other marketing executives get help.

Content studio Fitch Ink, which has worked with companies such as General Electric Co.

and meta platforms Inc.,

started adding marketing executives to its client list about three years ago. It produces between eight and 20 pieces of content a month for clients, including blog entries, LinkedIn posts, client emails and long-form comments or ads in publications like Ad Age and Wired, said Stefan Fitch, founder and editor-in-chief. Monthly fees can range from $20,000 to $50,000, he said.

Qnary creates up to 28 LinkedIn posts or comments, 24 original tweets or replies, two 500-word blog posts and one audio or video interview as part of a $950 monthly basic package for CMOs, Mr. Breen said. Customers retain final approval on all content, he said.

LinkedIn and Twitter remain the dominant platforms for CMOs, but the past year has seen a generational shift as millennials began taking marketing leadership positions and asked Qnary to help create professional content for their Instagram and TikTok pages, said Mr. Breen.

This can further blur the line between professional and lifestyle-based content, as these platforms are often perceived as “vanity-based,” TwentyFirstCenturyBrand’s Mr. Mildenhall said. If CMOs spend their companies producing such content, employers may want to make sure the posts support corporate goals, he said.

“This is going to become a political hot button in the C-suite: Are CMOs building for vanity or are they building for corporate reputation?” he said.

As executives build their public profiles, they also need to ask themselves whether they’re paying as much attention to their colleagues and team members as they are to their personal brands, said Mr. Stows, founder of Proof Analytics.

“If you’re super active on LinkedIn and barely talk to your teams … then you’re on the wrong foot,” he said.

Email Patrick Coffee at patrick.coffee@wsj.com

Corrections and enhancements
First Horizon was incorrectly listed as Horizon First in one instance in an earlier version of this article. (Corrected on November 18)