Even though marketing has grown more and more complex, at the heart it is a very simple game. It's all about your consumer, your brand and the relationship between the two.

As a marketing leader, you will succeed if you have a relentless passion to know your customer, understand your brand and build a profitable relationship between the two and… you eliminate any activity that falls outside of this equation!

In the end, we have offered both signs of a failing CMO as well as a few points from which to conduct a personal fitness test for marketers wanting to be CMO -- to know if you have the right stuff to withstand the scrutiny and be prepared for the onslaught -- but really…

"It's a very simple game, you throw the ball, you hit the ball, you catch the ball." -- Bull Durham