Ensconced in the luxurious observation lounge of a brand-new 168,000-ton ship, Meg Lee, chief marketing officer of Norwegian Cruise Lines, greeted me with smiles and a champagne glass. This demonstration of the notion that travel should be fun ended with my first question about her definition of marketing. She responded: “filling ships.” “My job is to fill a fleet of…
As one of the founders of Marketo, Jon Miller helped make marketing automation a mainstream approach for b-to-b companies. And in his role as chief marketing officer back in 2011, few were better at creating content to drive inbound leads. In our interview back then, Miller noted that “our marketing team generates 80% of the sales pipeline” and that Marketo was…
It’s inevitable that a new chief marketing officer will launch a new campaign within 18-months of taking the marketing helm. In many cases, this new work will be no more effective than previous messages, simply because it’s like a new coat of paint on a rickety old house. However, when the new campaign is combined with an innovative product or…
One of the most bizarre yet pervasive quirks of the business world is that everyone thinks they are a qualified marketer. The collective rationale is that because they consume products like other humans, their opinions must be valid. Well folks, I’ve witnessed a rocket launch but that doesn’t make me a NASA scientist. Marketing is an increasingly sophisticated discipline requiring…
If there’s one lesson Alex Reed could share with his fellow B2B marketers it would be “just stand out.” It’s a lesson he’s taken to heart during his 10 years at the immodestly named Big Ass Fans, the industrial strength fans that you’ll find in gyms, warehouses, atriums and other giant rooms around the globe. Having taken over the global…
Maybe it was his years on the agency side but Burt Rosen, chief marketing officer of HealthSparq, a health care software solutions provider, just refuses to speak health care. Describing the industry as an “echo chamber” that has “little to no idea how to talk to people,” Rosen is a man on mission, looking to reshape not just the vocabulary…
When Paul Gottsegen grabbed the CMO reins at Mindtree in 2013, he noticed a major deficiency in both himself and his team—there wasn’t a single marketing technologist among them. Throwing down the gauntlet, Gottsegen shocked his team by mandating they all become more tech-centric since until that point, “everybody thought that was someone else’s job.” While Gottsegen admits there have…
When Nathan Rawlins became chief marketing officer at diagram software maker Lucidchart in March 2017, no one said to him—perhaps unsurprisingly—”Hey, go create a viral campaign that will generate over 80 million views.” In fact, his charge was to build a demand generation engine through website optimization, marketing automation and carefully tracked media spending. Having done those things, Rawlins also…
Fourteen years ago, Simon Mulcahy startled his boss by turning down a promotion. He then proceeded to a pub (“This is what you do in England,” he said) and was later joined by his wife to ponder their future. Together they reviewed an issue of The Economist that listed the best places to work and live in the world and, remarkably, they…
When I asked Sarah Kennedy, the relatively new CMO at marketing automation firm Marketo, what’s the best advice she’d ever been given, her answer set the tone for our discussion: “Jump out of the plane and find your parachute on the way down.” It is little wonder that Kennedy, who jumped into her role eight months ago, felt compelled to not…