phoenix ad blog

This week  we kick off a new series here at Phoenix Ad Blog, the Executive Q&A. Each week or so we will introduce you to Valley marketing executives. We’ll find out what makes them tick, how they got to their current position, how they market their organizations, what they recommend for future marketers and what they think about the current and future state of the marketing industry in Phoenix.

Thanks to Ed Brice, SVP of Global Marketing at Lumension, for being our inaugural executive. There are some great insights below so take some time out, grab a cup of tea or coffee and read on.

Tell us about yourself and the company you work for?

I’m currently the SVP of worldwide marketing for Lumension. Lumension is a fast growth company developing software solutions that help companies to effectively manage their endpoints, protect sensitive corporate data, better meet their compliance and regulatory requirements, and achieve lower total cost of ownership.

Marketers tend to come from varied backgrounds because of the intricacies between marketing and other facets of organizations. Tell us your background and how you got into marketing.

I am originally from Arizona and attended Arizona State University where I majored in international marketing. Technically I’ve always been focused on marketing. After college I decided to break out of Arizona and went back East to work for a manufacturing company as a salesperson. It was a real eye opening experience for me because I learned the technical and the business side of sales. After a short stint there,  I moved out to Los Angeles where I found my way back to marketing working for a very successful start up Global Positioning System (GPS)Technology company.  I then came back to Arizona to work for Motorola as a lead for product management and marketing teams. However, when a new opportunity opened up at Sony Electronics to lead their go-to-market effort for GPS in the US, that opportunity took me back to the East Coast. After Sony I went to work for the CMO of SAP where I helped to define a new brand strategy. There, I held various management positions in global marketing and demand generation. While I loved working at SAP, my wanderlust crept in and I really desired a new challenge where I could put all that I had learned into practice, and found a great opportunity back in Arizona with Lumension. The rest, as they say, is history.

How do you engage and track the effectiveness of that engagement with your customers?

The first principle I follow is NIHIO: Nothing Interesting Happens in the Office. This is the most old school concept, yet I find it to be the most effective approach in my view and that’s basically wearing out some shoe leather meeting and visiting customers. This, of course, is easy for sales but it’s harder for marketing to create these engagement opportunities. Great messaging comes from being in the field, not through consultants. I also recommend that you work with your teams to establish a customer communication program. For example, we work diligently on building monthly touch points that deliver value added information that our customers can use in their daily roles. This programmatic way of thinking led us to focus on building new communication channels and not just relying on the traditional marketing push tactics using the old communication channels. As a result we recently launched our new customer community called “Lumension Connect”. This is an online customer forum where we can connect, collaborate and co-innovate as well as  share ideas, not just between Lumension and our customers, but also foster dialogue between customers. This way of thinking opens up the possibilities in what I think will become the greatest opportunity for organizations and that is to co-innovate within their ecosystem (customers, partners etc). For smaller companies like us this ability to communicate and co-innovate with our ecosystem greatly levels the playing fields with companies much larger than ourselves. One early example of how we are doing this is with our “content garden” in the Lumension Connect Community. In the Content Garden customers can create new software widgets which can then be distributed across IT systems currently utilizing our solutions. Customers can create these widgets to do specific tasks and share with other customers, a pure peer-to-peer experience. It’s also important to realize, that at the end of the day, your customers are now defining your brand experience because they can share and communicate with other users online. Making your customers part of your brand experience strategy is vital in today’s world. We also have a program where we survey and track our customers’ perceptions and calculate a Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS is basically how many customers would refer you on to other people, and is a great indicator of your overall degree of satisfaction. We do this survey annually, and benchmark ourselves to other companies in the same industry, so we can get a good comparative view on where we stand, and where we need to improve.

How do you and/or your team stay on top of emerging marketing or technology trends that could help you market to potential or current customers?

This is a challenge for any organization in today’s fast paced world, and especially in the marketing function that has undergone dramatic shifts in technology, required skill sets, and new approaches. It’s important to realize that nobody can ever stop learning, and it’s the skill set of your team, versus the skill set of your competitors that will differentiate your success. So education and training are vital to me as it is more cost effective and efficient for me to add new skill sets to existing personnel than to hire new roles.

Education is part of everyone’s MBO and everyone is given at least 1 outside educational opportunity. For example, I sent two of my team members to a two day seminar to learn how to better optimize landing pages and email campaigns. As a result, conversions have tripled and the team now has a zeal now for testing. We also partake in the global and local marketing community. We attend seminars and read blogs from other thought leaders while trying new things and testing it in real life. We can never stop innovating as a team and, I believe that education and awareness of new approaches is vital to our success.

With the recent popularity of social media platforms such as Twitter, where does social media marketing fit within your organization or your marketing strategy?

Social media is a major part of our marketing and communications strategy. It’s important to realize that the old marketing model of “awareness drives perception” is no longer relevant in today’s world. The days of advertising, cakes and cookies, pretty pictures and big events are being relegated to an ever decreasing role, at least in my marketing mix. The reason why this model has changed is related to what I have said before – you are no longer in control of your brand experience, customers are. What your ecosystem writes, films, blogs and shares are now influencing your brand. You can decide to either engage in that conversation or not, but the conversation is taking place everyday. Just look at the impact that word of mouth has in this frictionless conversational digital world we live in today. A person can write a song about the poor customer service he received from a major airline and have over 1M views on YouTube by the end of the weekend. By participating, listening and monitoring to the conversations online, you and your business can succeed in today’s world. To that end, social media is vital to our business strategy in getting our messaging out there, communicating with our ecosystem, and listening to what others are saying about us. However, be careful when you define goals for social media. In my view it is not about leads and sales. It’s about building advocacy, trust, and conversation. These are longer term goals, and harder to measure the value created in the traditional sense so you have to look at the return on influence or value as I like to put it.

What does your dream marketing campaign look like? And, how do you want it to affect your customers?

It wouldn’t be a campaign at all in the traditional sense. It would be an active, conversational, dialogue within and across our ecosystem that would drive a powerful and emotional brand experience and new levels of co-innovation within our ecosystem.  We take a multi-tiered approach to communicating with our customers, partners, prospects and media/analysts. For every campaign such as the one we’re currently working on called Re-Thinking the Blueprint for Endpoint Security, we first define our objectives/goals, strategy and tactics to support our execution. This includes an integrated approach – Social Media, webinar, ebooks, blog posts, whitepapers, social media news release, and traditional PR outreach to help build awareness, drive demand and SEO, and elevate our thought leadership. You’ll see some great things come out of marketing that not a lot of companies are doing today and that is due in part to the cohesive approach of the team and the integrated, programmatic side of our execution strategy.

Tell us what future marketers should be focused on if they are in college or just starting their career?

Future marketers need to realize that the traditional marketing model has changed. The principles are still the same, but the tools and approach have changed significantly.  They also need to realize that the people you will be working for may be steeped in the old way of thinking. You must build bridges of understanding between these two worlds for you to have success. Business is still about bringing in more revenue and demonstrating ROI (not the return on influence) than what you send out and wrapping the new marketing approaches around that goal in ways that all can understand will be important. Marketing today is more about publishing as content is king. We must know our personas inside and out and develop value-added and relevant content to those personas that will help them in their decision making process across the buying cycle. One important note to remember is that in many ways marketing today is more about science than creativity. Always be focused in building out key skill sets as this will ensure a strong value adding role to any organization.

What will the Phoenix marketing landscape look like in 10 years? Any dramatic shifts you see on the horizon and how will that affect your marketing strategy?

That is an interesting question. I left the Phoenix area for more than 12 years and have worked for very large multinational corporations. Upon coming back to the local market I see a vibrant entrepreneurial community. However, I also see a market that is very challenging to find the level of skill set required for today’s marketing function, especially if you’re a larger company. We have a plentiful resource of young professionals, but in many cases they lack the level of experience and skill set. I find that across more seasoned professionals there is a lack of core skill sets necessary for the more scientific areas of marketing and a general lack of understanding of how the marketing function and role within a company have  changed. This makes it difficult for companies to hire the best talent from the local area, and these companies have to either outsource, relocate or establish virtual resources. This is different from larger metro areas where you can easily find experts dedicated to very specific areas of the marketing model.

Marketing is much more specialized versus generalized today. During my travels I have come across a very active marketing community in Atlanta that is really bent on bringing in the best thought leaders from the outside to stimulate, train and create dialogue across new ways of thinking about marketing. While I see exciting opportunities in Phoenix, especially with some of our younger marketing professionals getting together and exploring these new ideas, we must scale that “outside” thought leadership and, in doing so, we need to get all aspects of our marketing community focused on learning, sharing, and innovating on marketing here in Phoenix. We must develop a skill base, in marketing, in the valley that is on par with that of the larger metro areas. It’s not that it’s not happening, but it’s really a question of needing to come together as a community to do more, in a bigger way, and at a much faster pace than what we are moving at today, or our level of competitiveness will decline on the global stage.

Any additional insights for our readers?

The fundamental principles of marketing have not changed, but the approach and the tools we use have changed significantly. Know your persona, content is king, and think like a publisher. Also, learning and innovating your skill set will remain vital to success.

Tell us what you think of this new series. What questions should or shouldn’t we be asking?