When I first
started in
marketing,
it was about
creating stories and glossies
and things that looked perfect
and then I realized
that all needed to just be blown up.
It was actually about human
to human connection.
Storytelling wasn't
about making stuff up.
It was about telling the truth.
What is marketing?
Marketing is about deepening
the relationship
between a brand and a customer.
That's essentially what we are.
It's the art and science of doing that.
And I think that when there's passion
and there is joy,
it sort of unlocks creativity.
It's been a year of just rapid
digital acceleration.
What advice
do you have to
younger people, aspiring marketers,
looking to get into the business?
I would say be unstoppable.
I like to wrap it up in three CS.
The first one is curiosity.
The second one is courage.
And the third one is conviction.
Because your curiosity gave you
the knowledge.
Your courage
gave you the fearlessness
to put into an action plan.
The conviction is going
to give you the resilience
to carry it all
the way across the finish line.
At Salesforce,
we pride ourselves
in having a single source of truth.
How do you connect
with different departments within IBM
and deal with different silos of data?
I was part of the team at Dell
that helped roll out
Salesforce to our sales organization
and now we are at IBM
doing the same exact thing.
And so that's one way
that we can get one source of the truth
and all get on the same page
in terms of the tools that we're using.
But the other thing
that I observed
when I came to IBM
and it's so common in big B2B
tech organizations,
we basically have 40 marketing
organizations at IBM,
which I actually want to build
into one marketing organization
that works together to move the market.
That's a big change
that we're thinking about doing,
and your tools actually underpin
a big part of that.
You've said
that 20th century marketing
was about selling,
but 21st century
marketing is about listening.
Explain that to me.
So we were looking at the likes
of a Patagonia
and a Nike and the Hoagies
and just these great iconic brands.
And one of the things we saw last century
was that they were very good
at sort of creating message.
Nike, just do it.
We absolutely understand
the value of doing that.
But we think what's happening
in the 21st century,
at least for a company like Strava, is
it's really not our ability
to have the right message.
It's our ability
to take all this information
that's coming in from our athletes
and listen in a way where we can create
personal experience.
It's going to be our ability
to understand
Sara, the runner on Strava
and provide you with the information
that you need to go
have a successful day,
much more
so than just delivering that
that iconic brand message.
And what advice do you have for marketers
that are trying to explain their products
as so eloquently as you do?
Get to know your product management
and your product marketing people.
They are the secrets
to understanding
what the product does
in such an intimate way
that after they've explained it
to you,
using all of that complexity,
they'll eventually get to a place of.
And this is why it matters.
How did you transform this organization
into using these modern
marketing tactics? Failing fast.
We tried some stuff.
We got the data from it.
We figured out what made sense,
what didn't make sense,
and then we were able to bring
that information
back to our leadership appropriately.
Heat mapping for email communications.
Learning that we don't need to send
emails that are stories,
but maybe two or three
really tight paragraphs
gets the job done
and gets people to the call to action
and then implementing things like,
you know, geo targeting
for specific locations
that we're interested in.
It's been such a growth
for the organization holistically.
We're excited about where we're going.
What do you think is the future
of marketing for brands and experiences?
We created a whole program
of what
that would look like
and it was all about enhancing
the skills of our organization
so that they felt like
they could be confident
to be bold in that space.
The future is bright.
We have the metaverse coming.
Who knows what?
This physical space will be virtual.
I can't tell you everything,
but I'm dreaming. I'm dreaming big.
And I'm excited about how hyper targeted
and hyper personalization air A.I.
is going to take us
to the next level of experience.
We could be in the pocket
of every agency here if we do this well.
So with this crazy business world
we're in.
How do you think that marketers can lead
with the next phase of reinvention?
I always say, look,
marketing is not to support
or is not to enable
you not get to support the
business with all
the leads.
I love that.
We lead by informing
where the market's going and informing
customers wants,
and that's really a mentality to have.
You've been
just one of the most innovative
CMO's out there.
You're on every list
and everybody admires you.
How do you bring that innovation
in every day
and how do you do things at a fast pace?
Thank you for your kind words,
but know it's
I think as the leader of the team,
you get disproportionate credit
for what is happening
in terms of innovation.
My first thing is
to have the right team in place,
people who are unbound in their thinking,
who are willing to really go
beyond, above and beyond everything.
How does creating connections
correlate into marketing?
A lot of marketing is about curiosity
and seeing a story
and figuring out
how to connect things together
in order to drive growth for a business.
And so you don't know where ideas
are going to come from.
Sometimes the diversity of the people
you interact with gives
you new ways to see an equation.
So much of marketing is about you an idea
and how do you actually make
it happen, right?
So can you find the right person?
Can you get to the. Yes.
A lot of
that is connections and relationships.
There's so much work that shows a company
that is driven
end up outperforming the market.
And so it's that notion of tech for good
where you leverage
something to enable people
to actually get to know each other.
That's what it's all about for me.
I feel like as
marketers, what we need to strive for
are stories
that are as interesting and compelling
and engaging as the best thing
that we're streaming on television.
And that is a ridiculously high bar.
But I feel like that's
what good storytelling is, is
how do you make people fall in love
with your brand?
Thanks for tuning in.
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