The SME / mid-market specificity — No CMO: a single leader

The studies cited so far are addressed first to large organizations. Gartner, for example, devotes the bulk of its recommendations to repositioning the CMO: its survey shows that brand strategy performs better when marketing steers not only positioning but also part of the product, pricing, and customer-experience decisions — and that the companies where this is the case exceed their growth targets more often.

Let us transpose this to the French reality. In the vast majority of SMEs and in many mid-market companies, there is no CMO. No brand department, no annual barometer, no study budget. There is a leader — and that is far from being merely a handicap. Bpifrance Le Lab has documented it for ten years: in an SME or a mid-market company, the identification between the leader and the business is total; he holds a decisive place in running the organization, out of all proportion to a leader in a large group. Where Gartner must argue for a difficult transfer of leadership toward the CMO, the SME natively possesses the very configuration that large companies are trying to rebuild: brand and strategy are already in the same hands.

The deficit, then, is not a deficit of governance. It is a deficit of tooling and of representation. Of tooling, because the SME leader lives Gartner's doom loop in its most radical form — not an insufficient measurement, but a total absence of measurement: his brand he "senses," he perceives its weak signals (a client who recommends, a competitor who poaches, a principal who consults him spontaneously), but he has no framework with which to objectify that capital, compare it, and connect it to his decisions. Of representation, because — as Bpifrance Le Lab has shown with regard to the employer brand — many leaders still hold the brand to be a matter for large groups, a communications luxury unrelated to their day-to-day order book. The figures in chapter 2 demonstrate exactly the opposite: it is precisely because the SME has neither the awareness nor the firepower of a large group that each point of brand capital yields a higher marginal return there — on acquisition cost, on margin, on recruitment, on valuation at the time of transfer.