• “Marketing is the single point of accountability for disparate organizations” – Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director, CMO Council

• “Market leadership occurs when you have the intersection of brand permission and product delivery. By brand permission I mean that all stakeholders (banks, merchants, and consumers in our case) welcome your brand. Then it’s up to your technology to deliver on the brand promise” – Carl Pascarella, former CEO of VISA USA

• “A key marketing contribution is sensing and responding to demand” – Lauren Flaherty, VP of On Demand Marketing, IBM

• “Marketing is here to do one thing—impact topline and bottomline. I strongly recommend forging alliances with your CIO and CFO because they understand process and metrics way better than you do. And focus on leading indicators like leads not trailing indicators like sales.” – Christine Heckart, GM, Microsoft TV

• “67% of CMOs polled look to online marketing vendors to offload part of their marketing tasks.” – Lisa Arthur, CMO Akamai

• “Marketing should be concerned with 3 things—customer acquisition, retention, and re-activation of former customers. And brand marketing must speak to all three audiences.” -- Gary Elliott, VP of Brand Marketing, HP

• “Make Marketing deliverables to the field actually useful to the customer. For example, we have an online risk assessment tool that customers find very valuable. It sparks the right dialog with the customer.” – Janice Chaffin, CMO Symantec

• “There’s a data explosion out there. One study told us that 11% of all human data was created in 1999 alone. Now we have about 10 TBytes of data every day.” – Cammie Dunaway , CMO, Yahoo

• “Leaders in my Marketing organization need to be generalists to manage the marketing mix yet very analytical in order to optimize ROI. I find that’s an uncommon combination and have had to look to financial services and telecom industry where this is blend is highly cultivated” – Todd Forsythe, VP Marketing, Oracle

Sridhar great post. I really liked Christine Heckart's comment.

"Marketing is here to do one thing—impact topline and bottomline. I strongly recommend forging alliances with your CIO and CFO because they understand process and metrics way better than you do. And focus on leading indicators like leads not trailing indicators like sales.”

That is so true.

Posted by: Brian Carroll | November 9, 2005 8:39 AM

Good to see your engagement in Marketing. I feel that marketing is returning to its strength: creating markets, demand and an environment for informed decisions for customers. Thanks to people like you!

Axel

Posted by: Axel Schultze | November 10, 2005 6:43 PM

Sridhar, I was at the Monterrey show as well and was similarly impressed.

The moment that stood out for me was a roundtable conversation we had about how the drive for marketing analytics and ROI was needed but may stifle risktaking and creativity as cautious practitioners start leaning towards historically proven strategies.

One of the CMOs had already addressed this problem. They dedicated a certain % of their budget towards new/groundbreaking/experimental programs.

These would still be tracked but failure or lower ROI was part of the game.

Posted by: Manjula Selvarajah | November 25, 2005 1:19 PM

Sridhar, these are great nuggets of marketing wisdom. Gary Elliot of HP really made a great point; customer acquisition, retention, and reactivation of former customers are the main things that marketing should focus on.

Lisa Arthur's quote, however, does concern me. 67% of CMOs polled are looking to offload some tasks to online vendors - seems like a lot to me. Online marketing is key, however, to achieve the best results, online and offline should work together.

Thanks for sharing this.

Posted by: Wayne E. Pollard | December 29, 2005 6:08 AM

I find Lisa Arthur's comment, “67% of CMOs polled look to online marketing vendors to offload part of their marketing tasks,” most interesting. With two-thirds of CMOs outsourcing marketing tasks, the use of outside marketing must be a very effective model.

Posted by: John Gillett | April 7, 2008 11:00 AM