Sprinklr partners with Forbes to recognize the world’s most influential CMOs: what’s behind the list

For the past 10 years, Forbes has released the Forbes World’s Most Influential CMOs list, recognizing CMOs who innovate their brands, grow their businesses, create strong cultures, and positively impact their peers. Sprinklr has partnered with Forbes for the last 6 releases of this list. The list is generated by a detailed, rigorous, and data-driven analysis of what the world’s leading brands and executives have accomplished in the past year, and what sets them apart from other CMOs across the globe.

Last year was the first time we incorporated Sprinklr’s AI into our scoring process, and this year we refined our use of AI-based sentiment in order to measure CMO personal sentiment even more accurately. This tenth year of the World’s Most Influential List represents ten years of measuring and learning—and gives us a rigorous, data-driven assessment of marketing influence that defines who is leading the field.

Those leaders include the 5 CMOS we profile in The 5 Models of Influence, which reveals five distinct leadership styles that help CMOs build and wield influence:

• Breadth — building and signaling influence at a very high level across a range of brand, personal, and business indicators
• Broadcast — learning attention from established news sources, including broadcast, print, and major online outlets
• Business — capturing the interest and engagement of fellow marketers and the broader business community
• Buzz — driving conversation and attracting attention on social channels, including X, formerly Twitter, LinkedIn, and blogs
• Brand — stewarding a major brand in the public spotlight

The Models – or The 5 B’s of influence – are examples of paths that CMOs have taken to be featured on this year’s Forbes World’s Most Influential CMOs. By providing more detail around these models, we hope to inspire marketing leaders to strive for personal and professional growth, strengthen their brand’s performance, and become leaders in the marketing industry.

Behind the list: How we measure marketing leadership

Understanding the data and process behind the list not only provides insight into why it contains the names you see on this year’s list, but also underlines the range of activities and metrics any marketing leader needs to attend to in order to grow their brand and influence. Marketing leadership becomes more complex and sophisticated every year, but CMOs who stand out in all three of our key measurement areas are CMOs who have a handle on the breadth of the challenge: 1) personal impact onbrand awareness, 2) brand performance and 3) industry/internal influence. We also looked for sustained impact: our analysis was based on data running from June 1, 2021 through March 31, 2022.

Sprinklr’s Unified-CXM platform is built to help companies understand all three of these challenges. We’re proud that our platform and expertise have helped power the Forbes World’s Most Influential CMOs list once again this year.

Key indicators of influence

The scoring system recognizes CMOs as influential if they’re demonstrating personal leadership, driving brand success, and catalyzing industry conversation. We score CMOs across all three of these areas with twelve distinct indicators

Not all of these indicators are equally significant, so the scoring and ranking system weights each one a little differently. Asterisks indicate baseline indicators; to make the top 50, a CMO must score above the median on at least one of three baseline indicators in each of the three areas.

1. Personal impact on brand awareness, as measured in Sprinklr’s Social Listening product, which aggregated more than 260,000 news, blog, web, and X, formerly Twitter mentions about or from eligible CMOs.
   • Personal media attention*: Volume of CMO's mentions in broadcast, print and online media outlets excluding newswires and press releases
   • Personal web attention*: Volume of CMO's blog and website mentions
   • Personal X, formerly Twitter attention*: Volume of CMO's direct (@) and indirect (CMO + brand name) mentions on X, formerly Twitter
   • Personal media influence: Volume of CMO's mentions in influential broadcast, print and media outlets
   • Personal sentiment: Net sentiment of all mentions of CMO in media, web and X, formerly Twitter
2. Brand performance indicators, as measured in the Sprinklr Competitive Insights & Benchmarking product, which aggregated more than 2.5 billion brand-related social media shares, likes, retweets, and comments.
   • Brand sentiment*: Net sentiment of all social media mentions of the CMO's brand
   • Brand attention*: Volume of incoming social media messages to brand
   • Brand engagement*: Average portion of brand followers engaging with each of its social media posts
3. Industry and internal influence, as measured by our research partner LinkedIn, which analyzed more than five million profile views along with nearly 600,000 LinkedIn engagements.
   • Industry engagement*: Impressions and engagements on CMO's LinkedIn shares
   • Internal attention: Volume of CMO's LinkedIn profile views from within company
   • International attention*: Volume of CMO's LinkedIn profile views from outside country where brand is based
   • Industry attention*: Volume of CMO's LinkedIn profile views from outside company

Brand and leadership platform

Brand scale and reputation has a significant impact on a CMO’s ability to build and wield influence: Leaders at larger brands have a bigger platform to shape the marketing conversation. That’s why the process begins by defining a universe of eligible brands: Brands that are big enough to drive business or consumer attention, and/or respected enough to attract the interest of the larger marketing world.

This year’s eligible universe was made up of brands and companies that appeared in following lists:

• Forbes Global 2000 2021: Companies in the top 250 overall, or top 10% for their country.
• Brand Finance Global 500 2022: Companies in the top 250 overall, or the top 50% within their country. We also considered lower-ranked brands on this list if their CMO appeared on last year’s World’s Most Influential CMOs list.
• Interbrand’s Best Global Brands 2021: All brands.
• World Federation of Advertisers: All current members.

Read the full report for a deeper understanding of the data behind this year’s World’s Most Influential List, and the wide range of CMO talents it represents.