Dive Brief:
- Pharmaceutical industry CIOs and CMOs aren't the best of buddies, but they should be, according to a new study by Accenture released this week.
- The study asked the same questions of senior pharma executives, and compared the answers to conclude that there is a cultural disconnect between chief marketing and information officers. More than 90% of the CIOs surveyed said that they'd like to see more alignment between IT and marketing, while only 58% of marketing execs felt the same way—a 33% difference.
- "The reasons for the difference include traditional structures, cultures and sales representative-led commercial models," said Anne O’Riordan, senior managing director of Accenture's Life Sciences industry group in the release announcing the study's results.
Dive Insight:
Territorial squabbles are common in large corporate environments, and the rift between marketing and IT is not indigenous to the pharmaceutical industry. Marketers rely more on experience and creativity, even as the advertising business tends to lean more heavily on analytics to drive their ad buys. Traditional marketing executives tend to put more faith in creative ideas than statistically-driven analytics, while IT managers are typically engineers and are not trained to go with their instincts. They follow the numbers, and allow the data to dictate their choices.
This rift in ideologies is complicated by the fact that marketers are generally paid less than IT professionals. As an example, Salary.com lists the median salary for a CMO in New York City at $253,000, compared to their listing for a Big Apple CIO who makes $291,000, a 14% difference.