The new non-negotiable marketing skills according to Booking.com

Arjan Dijk has presided over Booking.com’s most significant campaigns to date and sets out what it takes to cut it as a CMO today – hint its ‘numbers, numbers, numbers’

The marketing boss opened up about how the role of a CMO has intractably changed and how marketers must adapt to leaner budgets and more scrutiny. According to Dijk, being able to quantify the impact you’re having on the business is vital to the job of a CMO today.

Key takeaways

• “People need to be good with numbers and cannot be thinking only in pictures,” Dijk says. If you are not good with numbers, “you need to only work as a brand VP or as a brand manager. You cannot work as a chief marketing officer,” he says;
• Dijk says CMOs today should be able to go to their CEO, CFO, or board and say: “For this investment, on the basis of everything we know, we expect to get this return.” Concepts like incrementality, average ROI, or even marginal ROI are essential to understand;
• “To have a seat at the table to be able to be very close to the chief financial officer, and then be able to go to the CEO together and say that this is the best plan that we can that we can get,” Dijk says.

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