For someone chasing the CMO position in the next 8-10 years, would you recommend them to practice brand marketing before product marketing or reverse?

The way I think about the ‘pillars’ of B2B tech marketing a CMO needs to be familiar with are as follows:

• Product Marketing: e.g, go-to-market strategy, product positioning & messaging, competitive intel, sales enablement, analyst relations, etc
• Demand Gen: Includes sub-pillars of
• Performance marketing (e.g., paid media, website, seo, nurture, etc)
• Field marketing (e.g., curated experiences, trade shows, etc)
• Customer marketing (e.g., customer stories, videos, references) 
• Content marketing (blog, content pieces for nurture, webinars, etc)
• Brand/Corporate: large corp events (e.g., if you throw a branded conference every year), company look and feel (like the logo, website), exec experiences, etc.
  
  Usually CMOs have a “major” in one field and “minors” in the other - no CMO is going to be great at every aspect of marketing. They usually hire someone to handle the parts they “minor” in, but they have to know enough about all aspects of marketing to understand what “good” looks like.
  
  When it comes to what “major” or “minor” to purse - in the B2B tech world, I’d recommend majoring in PMM and minoring in Demand Gen. A couple of reasons:
  
  1. PMM in many ways is the most strategic marketing function - you’re being asked to come up with the strategy of how you take a product to market to drive the most revenue. Is it through your existing customers base? Is it through partners? How do I position and message it so that it resonates? These are really meaty questions that require a very strategic mind when done well
  
  2. The right strategy then informs the demand gen and, in many ways, the corp/brand side as well. For example, if we want to go after a certain buyer and we know that buyer likes X or hangs around Y place, we can then figure out the right DG strategy to reach that person, with the right message. In this way, DG is more of a programmatic function - you need someone who knows how to execute these programs seamlessly (and believe me, that is a skill), but the fundamental strategy still sits with PMM
  
  With respect to corp / brand, I’d say this is a much bigger priority (in general) in B2C marketing than in B2B. Increasingly, from what I’m seeing, most CMOs in B2B tech either came up PMM or DG, with an increasing number on the PMM side (for the reasons I outlined).

The answer to this question really depends on the size of the company where you want to be CMO. Larger companies with massive scale and sell more mature products must implement successful brand marketing strategies to compete. Therefore, I would optimize your development of that brand marketing skill set. However, if you want to work for a smaller company or an organization selling products in a newer product category, they value that product marketing skill set when selecting a CMO. While there is no “hard and fast” rule to which I can point you, this broad guidance should help give helpful direction on where to focus.