Shaping client-centric marketing in a digital world

On a recent episode of The Client-Centric CMO, I discussed transforming marketing strategies with Jim Jackson, former CMO at Hewlett Packard Enterprise. We explored how HPE embraced digital-first marketing, integrated data, and positioned itself for growth.

Here are some of the highlights from our conversation.

What changes have you seen in marketing during your tenure as a CMO? 

The pivot to digital and data was huge. We were already on that path, but COVID accelerated it. Overnight, we couldn’t execute in person, so we doubled down and really pivoted to digital-first. Another big shift was to more multi-channel integration. Today, customers interact with brands across a multitude of channels – social, email, websites, in person… So, how do you bring all of that together and drive a consistent message? This requires a more sophisticated marketing infrastructure, so investment in data was huge for us. But data itself isn't that important – it's the insights you get from it. 

As buying becomes more challenging, how has the expectation of marketing evolved? Has it become more client-centric and growth-focused?

Marketing sits in a unique position at the intersection of customers and partners, outside of the business units and sales. It’s our job to work with all those groups, but to ultimately be the voice of the customer. When in doubt, always put customers first – they are looking for partners who understand their pain points and their industry, and that's where marketers have lot of power. We can tune our marketing and bring the message about what our customers need back into the organization. We can play a huge role in terms of helping organizations become client-centric. 

“Marketing is the glue and the catalyst to make sure everything is driven from a customer perspective.”

Given this client-centric culture, how have your teams’ capabilities and skills evolved? Have you got more cross-functional collaboration? 

Putting the right programs in place to gather customer insights was very important. We invested a lot into customer advisory boards, surveys, interviews, and focus groups. And we brought it all together to look at how we map the customer journey. From a skills perspective, we focused heavily on data literacy and analytics – building a team that’s very focused and proficient in data analysis and interpretation to deliver a better experience for our customers. 

And, as you know, marketing doesn't operate in the vacuum. So it’s important to be able to collaborate very closely with sales. We look at marketing and sales as one go-to-market organization. Through product marketing we also have very tight alignment with the BU so, in many ways, marketing is the glue and the catalyst that can help to make sure everything is driven from a customer perspective.

How will skills be affected with generative AI? 

In terms of generative AI, we've been investing for a while. If you think of just true AI machine learning, that was to enhance our ability to analyze vast amounts of data and then drive more actionable insights. We're currently looking at a lot of different ways to leverage AI – productivity and cost efficiencies, customer experience, and driving growth. 

We're also having a little bit of fun. For example, I had this vision of taking some of our best salespeople and replicating them in a way that enables us to get more scale. With Nvidia, we built an interactive generative AI hologram and armed the underlying models with the knowledge of the entire HPE portfolio of services and solutions. This was a huge hit at Discover in Barcelona this year. A great example of marketing taking the lead and showing how we're thinking differently and experimenting with more advanced use cases. 

"The power of marketing is being able to shift perception, drive demand, and create emotional engagement."

Looking at customers being partners, not transactions; how do you collaborate with them? 

I spend a lot of time in the field with customers. As a marketer, you cannot fake showing up. You have to invest the time to be in front of your customers, constantly engaging with them, listening, and learning. Customers are looking for us to partner with them. They want someone who takes the time to really understand their environment and their business. And when a customer understands that you’ll go the extra mile and bring proactive ideas forward, and even challenge them, that's where I see a lot of positives. 

Across the technology landscape, business models are evolving. We look at the more holistic customer engagement with our brand across pre-sale, sale, and post-sale. Customers are constantly looking, so we can use data to optimize the experience for them. The relationship with our customers is dynamic, and we must remember that while we have new ways of engaging with them, they also have new ways of getting information. 

You can never take your foot off the pedal. The power of marketing is being able to shift perception, drive demand, and create emotional engagement. I always talk about that with my teams – are we emotionally connecting with our customers? Are we locking something in their brain, where later they're going to say, ‘We need to go and see what HPE is talking about’. That's the power of client-centricity.

Listen to the full episode of the Client-Centric CMO podcast.