Why CISOs Should Make Friends With Their CMOs
A partnership between IT security and marketing could offer many benefits to each group — and to the entire enterprise.
August 27, 2018
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It might not seem like CISOs and CMOs have much in common, but both executives stand to gain by becoming allies.
Every day cybersecurity factors, such as bad breach publicity and phishing impersonators, erode enterprise brands — thereby diminishing the effectiveness of a CMO's daily efforts. Brand value goes down, email marketing ROI gets trashed, and customer churn increases, all of which reflect poorly on the chief marketer. CMOs need help from CISOs to lock down risk factors. On the flip side, CISOs grapple with a number of challenges that CMOs could help them with, including insecure marketing technology and communication processes, breach response communication, and inadequate budget for preserving brand value.
While CISOs and CMOs might never become corporate besties, there's clearly a lot of room for some mutual back-scratching. Here are some proof points to show why a partnership between this pair of executives can benefit both parties, as well as their companies.
Email marketing continues to be the preferred channel of communication for CMOs today, with about 86% of them sending out marketing emails at least a couple of times a month. According to one study, marketing teams using email marketing realize a massive $38 ROI for every $1 spent.
Phishing criminals use this wave of marketing email to good advantage, dressing up fraudulent scam messages in what looks like legitimate branding and spoofed email addresses to lure their victims astray. And that is seriously threatening CMOs' email marketing ROI. One study from ReturnPath broke it down, explaining that customers are less likely to interact with a brand after being phished by a criminal using that brand as a lure. Not only that, but phishing also impacts email deliverability.
Anyone will tell you that it's harder to win a customer than to keep a loyal one. But a CMO can tell you exactly how much it'll cost. According to a recent survey of CMOs by Gartner, it costs three times to acquire a new customer as it is to retain one.
And, unfortunately, a big data breach is a customer retention nightmare. A recent study by CA Technologies found that 48% of customers stopped using the services of a vendor due to a data breach. Nearly half of all organizations also cited the long-term impact of a breach on consumer trust, as well as their revenues.
When breaches do occur, CISOs have their hands full with incident response and forensics, so communicating the details of what happened in an on-brand fashion isn't usually their highest of priorities. What's more, communication is probably not in the CISO's wheelhouse, anyway. This is where CMOs can bring a lot to the table. Unfortunately, most cyber-response teams don't take advantage of the expertise of their marketing colleagues. According to a study by Deloitte, just 22% of consumer product companies report that CMOs are on their cyber incident response teams.
Finally, CISOs are aware that brand value is at stake when security incidents pop up, but that doesn't necessarily equal action on their part. According to Ponemon Institute, CISOs don't see brand preservation as part of their job, and they usually don't have budget for it, either. But you know who does? CMOs. Marketing teams are twice as likely to have budget set aside for brand preservation as IT teams.
Finally, CISOs are aware that brand value is at stake when security incidents pop up, but that doesn't necessarily equal action on their part. According to Ponemon Institute, CISOs don't see brand preservation as part of their job, and they usually don't have budget for it, either. But you know who does? CMOs. Marketing teams are twice as likely to have budget set aside for brand preservation as IT teams.
It might not seem like CISOs and CMOs have much in common, but both executives stand to gain by becoming allies.
Every day cybersecurity factors, such as bad breach publicity and phishing impersonators, erode enterprise brands — thereby diminishing the effectiveness of a CMO's daily efforts. Brand value goes down, email marketing ROI gets trashed, and customer churn increases, all of which reflect poorly on the chief marketer. CMOs need help from CISOs to lock down risk factors. On the flip side, CISOs grapple with a number of challenges that CMOs could help them with, including insecure marketing technology and communication processes, breach response communication, and inadequate budget for preserving brand value.
While CISOs and CMOs might never become corporate besties, there's clearly a lot of room for some mutual back-scratching. Here are some proof points to show why a partnership between this pair of executives can benefit both parties, as well as their companies.
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