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Top 10+ Noteworthy CMOs Of The B2B Marketing World

Top 10 noteworthy cmos of the marketing world

Marketing has always been at the heart of businesses from the inception of trade and for the majority of men & women of the marketing world, the title of chief marketing officer (CMO) is only a dream of holding one day. CMOs are central to the success of corporations & they are notable for their unique style of offering to businesses. They are infamous for engaging with their target audience, delivering intelligence & foreseeing customer trends, which ultimately increases the bottom line sales & profitability.

 

Bonus: The evolution of CMOs in planet corporate.

CMOs are more important to the success of global businesses than ever before and not just in executing corporate strategies but also in shaping them. They need to navigate quickly at the moment while charting new courses while keeping a close eye on costs & putting the customer at the center of everything they do.

The core areas they must explore are how to add value to the clients they serve & how to add value internally to help stimulate the culture. Yeah, it’s true that the title of CMOs was crafted by self-described awesome marketers who were fine with marketing the job of marketing & themselves but sucked at driving revenue or demonstrating results.

 

Because of this, these CMOs were ill-prepared to perform at the same level as other C- level executives. Things have changed a lot. CMOs now play a broader role which includes driving revenue, leading innovation & providing strategic vision. It’s never been more difficult to be a CMO but at the same time, it’s also never been as exciting.

 

Bonus: How CMOs are Evolving with The Changing Marketing Scene.

A walk through marketing history

Many of the greatest leaders in history were brilliant marketers – some even before marketing was ever a thing. It will be an injustice if the legacy of at least a few of those earlier hustlers is not mentioned before going to the CMOs of today.

Yup, one of the most notable marketers who rocked in the past was Plato. He’s known for many things, majorly as the founder of Academy in Athens, one of the founders of Christian ideologies, a pivotal figure in the development of western philosophy but what was it that made him a great marketer? He influenced his audience through the medium of education.

It’s said that when Julius Caesar was away in Gaul, his enemies in Rome were busy trashing his reputation which made him invent the advertorial. Caesar made sure that the whole of Rome came to know about his victories through his advertorials which were allegedly sent to keep the people “informed”. By the time Caesar finally crossed Rubicon, he had a reputation to die for.

A botanist, physician, classical linguist & inventor of word of mouth marketing Conrad Gessner was a man of many talents. It was back in 1559 when he crafted a lyrical about the beauties of the tulip – a flower which at the time was not well known in Europe. His work paved the way to “Tulipmania” and during the craze, some tulip bulbs were sold for the contemporary equivalent of several million dollars.

Hugh Jackman’s film, The Greatest Showman, celebrates P.T. Barnum who was hailed as the “Shakespeare of Advertising” due to his innovative & impressive ideas. He is still remembered for his promotion of celebrated hoaxes & founding the Barnum & Bailey Circus. While some say that he was a scam artist there are many who say he simply indulged in the truth & made it more appealing. Yet, there is no doubt at the truth that he was a creative marketer & a genius businessman.

The inventor of the celebrity endorsement acted, sang, and conducted highly publicized sexual escapades for decades and created an image of glamor, which she exploited by adding her famous name to a line of cosmetics. Now hold on to your seat folks! Coz the fee she charged the cosmetic firm was her body weight in gold….pound per pound. The legacy of these marketing geniuses will never fade away & has paved way for new aspirants into this world. Even though the modern ways of marketing have been crafted by names such as Henry Ford, David Ogilvy, Steve Jobs, Seth Godin, etc… many of the ideas of the old-timers still exist today.

We know that there are more noteworthy CMOs, but it’s not possible to mention all of them. Read on to know what makes these top players special in the arena of B2B marketing.

Linda Boff helped reinvigorate the 125-year-old organization & is leading its new marketing vision through a strategy that is dependent on experimentation & a willingness to be first on new-age media platforms. She encourages her team to use as many technologies as possible to drive down the conversion funnel so that the leads they hand over are real business opportunities. Linda Boff believes that the real change in the market has come with developments in technology, data, and the speed to market being demanded by customers.

Foley was the one who guided interlinkONE into its very successful period. He & his team have worked with associations for more than 20 years to create marketing strategies that aim to generate more leads, improve member satisfaction and increase engagement. These guys have also launched a social media platform designed to grow associations to their full extent.

In 2016, a letter was sent out to the agency partners of Verizon by Scotti, calling on them to raise the number of women & people of color who work for them. And in last year, Verizon took it a step further by revealing its own diversity-fellowship program. Scotti, who was appointed as Verizon’s first CMO back in 2014, is known to be a power player & is heading the initiative to transform the company from a legacy telecom to a top-notch tech platform that can rival Google, Facebook & Amazon.

Remember the exploding-phone fiasco that Samsung faced in 2016. Mathieu not only guided the tech giant through the challenge but also flipped Samsung’s then marketing strategy on its head while doing so. He turned around the incident as an opportunity to change how the brand communicated with their users on a fresh focus on building love & trust.

Last year during March, Lemkau slashed the number of websites that Chase used to advertise from 400,000 to 5,000 because many of them were not generating any clicks on Chase ads. By making this radical decision, Lemkau saved Chase from wasting their money & also shed light on the murky world of digital programmatic ads. Lemkau was also the key figure in pushing the brand forward on its winning streak after the successful online-marketing push around its ace card, the Sapphire Reserve.

From the time Lewnes joined as Adobe’s CMO in 2006, she has been working to aid the brand to realize its full potential not just on creative products, but also its entire marketing suite. In 2016, using the insights such as online purchasing patterns & partnerships with professors from Stanford & the University of Chicago, Lewnes led the launch of Adobe Digital Price Index to launch a monthly report on various economic indicators that affect a marketer’s business. She transitioned the approach of Adobe to customer experience from an inside-out approach to an outside-in approach. Now all marketing materials of Adobe start with the customer’s problem & how Adobe can help solve it instead of Adobe telling the customer what they want.

7. Ann Mukherjee - CMO, SC Johnson (@marcfmath)

In the 2016 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, SC Johnson won five Lions with four awards to Glade’s “Museum of Feelings” interactive experience. There, Mukherjee spoke to the crowd on how she uses data as the foundation to dazzle consumers with creative campaigns. Her words were “We can’t simply take on board the data without reminding ourselves of the inspiration of why we are here. Data is the latest magic pixie dust. Going back to fundamentals works every time.”

Ann Mukherjee

Since the time Antonio Lucia became HP’s CMO in 2015, he has been responsible for branding, demand generation, strategic events & global communications. Lucio has focused a lot to give customers a more emotional connection to the iconic brand through the iconic marketing spell, “keep reinventing”. Last year, Lucio also proved as an innovator by being insistent that HP’s ad agencies have a more diverse group of employees.

The man responsible for transforming the world’s second-largest PC maker into a global power brand, Roman joined Lenovo in 2010. Lenovo’s first global branding campaign was spearheaded by him & the efforts included developing integrated, creative campaigns that are relevant across a range of geographies, languages, cultures & product lines. He has been recognized as a member of Creativity Magazine’s Top 50 & Ad Age’s marketing Top 50 for his innovative approaches and his campaigns have won countless awards, including Ad Age Campaign of the Year, a Gold Effie, and a MIXX award.

Annwall who joined the automation industry giant at the end of 2015 has quickly helped the company strike a number of important partnerships. He brought upon a different type of expertise as a former McKinsey & Co. consultant. Last year he forged a deal with Microsoft to test the HoloLens augmented reality headset. The organizations are also joining their forces to make driverless cars together.

Karen transformed the marketing department of Cisco into the business entity that aligns closely with the sales team, just how it’s supposed to be. Adweek featured her campaign “There’s never been a better time“ as the Ad of the Day as it was the start of a new approach that keeps customers first & is optimized enough to reach targets, digitally & socially. Walker has also taken on the responsibility for the growth strategy of the company & is an executive sponsor of several women-related organizations.

Quintos is famous for her realistic approach to corporate social responsibility towards almost all elements of the business, for which she received a social responsibility accolade at the CMO Awards. Mother of three has worked on a span of roles from supply chain management, services & support before donning the role of CMO. Her responsibilities increased a lot after the famous Dell & EMC merger. She is also a champion of women in IT & business in general & is also a great host at the annual Dell Women’s Entrepreneur Network event.

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End note

These are some of the CMOS of today from whom we marketers can learn a lot. Marketing is not just about the brand, events & advertising. The CMO of today is expected to move beyond the traditional responsibilities to maximize the contribution to the overall goals of the business.

 

And most importantly, they have to put the customer at the center of everything they do. This makes CMOs important for marketers to connect with for their business proposals. Attaining a CMO email list is the best way for this in the current fast-paced corporate world.

 

Also read on: 35+ Most Influential Women Leading B2B Marketing Technology

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