marketing Archives - The Grassy Road

Do all CMOs have to be data geeks now?

Written by me in the The Economist Group today Few would argue against data’s importance in marketing today. Data is essential to every marketing decision now, and the techniques used to transform that data into actionable market insight can make or break a company. Given this, some data-intensive companies now require their CMOs to have a background in data science—but will we get to a point where all CMOs and senior marketing leaders have to have a background in data science? Or will tools continue to emerge that will help [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T09:49:07-08:00May 20, 2014|Career Advice|0 Comments

How Your CEO Is Part of Your Brand Marketing Whether You Like It or Not

Posted in the Huffington Post earlier today We're living in a transparent world today. Everything your write or share online is public and you cannot hide. Anything you say outside (or in) the privacy of your home can be recorded. Anything you do can be video taped and posted on YouTube. But somehow executives can forget this--and more now than ever before the CEO is indistinguishable from the brand of the company. If the recent uproar over the Clippers' Donald Sterling, Mozilla's Brendan Eich and RadiumOne's Gurbaksh Chahal has taught [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-03T02:44:26-08:00May 14, 2014|Leadership|0 Comments

Why CMOs won’t lock CIOs out of the C-suite

Published in the Economist today Money talks. It's common knowledge that people with money tend to get what they want, and today’s business dynamics are no different. A new Accenture study shows that CMOs are claiming more of the tech budget share. Much to the chagrin of CIOs, it is coming out of the IT purse. Regardless of how much injustice CIOs feel, the success of their companies is increasingly reliant on their teams learning to align with CMO teams whose priorities—and very nature—are incredibly different from their own. CIOs [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T09:50:46-08:00January 8, 2014|Leadership|0 Comments

Another marketing organization rip up and retry

How to organize marketing of B2B high tech products is always challenging. The best products rarely come from marketing people and the deeper the technology the more the R&D team is in the inventive role and driving marketing.As a result, where to have marketing report is an ongoing political battle in many companies - and Cadence Design Systems marketing revolving door is a fresh example of this. According to the online gadfly DeepChip.com, editor John Cooley reports "Cadence CMO Bruggeman rumored ousted in unexpected palace coup", confirmed also by Gabe [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:04:59-08:00August 1, 2011|Career Advice|1 Comment

The beleagured life of today’s PR professional

We are at a stage at FirstRain now where we are starting to get more intense and more aggressive about our PR - that is the work we do to share our vision of the company, our strategic partnerships, our technology, and our product with the press and through social media. And I know we are not alone...We met this morning to work through the next 30 days of PR (watch this space for pending announcements) and right after the meeting I was catching up on the day while slurping [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-03T02:44:45-08:00February 26, 2010|Leadership|0 Comments

Photo shoot: laughing and crying

It's the day before a long weekend, a quiet day in the office, and I was scheduled for a photo shoot this morning. A national publication interviewed me for a story and, to my surprise asked for a mug shot but wanted to send their own photographer.I don't mind being photographed but I don't relish it either. I'm too self conscious but it's good for FirstRain to have the exposure. Today was challenging though. It's a beautiful California day but windy. Really windy. So as the photographer shot, and the [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:17:08-08:00September 4, 2009|Leadership|0 Comments

The balance between marketing and hype with a new product

Sometimes it's hard to contain your enthusiasm when you have a new product to market and the temptation is to get carried away and over hype. It's this behavior that can give engineering a bad rap with marketing and marketing a bad rap with sales.Here's the classic typical scenarioR&D truly believes the product is way ahead of where it really it. It's ready, it's fast, all the functionality is basically there, it's usable today etc. This comes from (often justifable) pride in the technology that's been developed. Note technology, not [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:17:32-08:00July 10, 2009|Career Advice|0 Comments

When too much marketing hurts

I spent half an hour this afternoon listening to Kevin Kennedy, CEO of JDSU, present at the Citibank financial conference in New York. My objective was to continue to come up to speed on JDSU as a new board member, and also to give Kevin feedback on his presentation. Kevin is a world class CEO and a thorough and detailed presenter - deeply operational and no spin.At the same time, earlier today, I had lunch with a former Monitor 110 employee who was seeking career advice and we had a [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:23:56-08:00September 3, 2008|Leadership|2 Comments

When personality driven marketing backfires

I have been reading a terrific book on marketing using personality - Personality Not Included by Rohit Bhargava. The premise is that great brands develop a personality that is about individuals interacting with the customer, not just people in a faceless organization, and is very effective when you have a strong product that your employees and customers get excited about.Obviously I am interested in this from FirstRain perspective but I have experienced a classic example in the last two weeks of how aggravating it can be when a company purports [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:26:08-08:00June 23, 2008|Leadership|2 Comments

What CEOs care about – and how to get them what they need

One of my theories on how to be a good CEO is to keep things simple. I focus on four areas of the company, and I have no more than three priorities at any one time. This makes sure I deal with the critical issues, both strategic and tactical, and put great people, process and delegation in place to run the operations of the business.I was reminded of the four areas when I put together a presentation on how to use intelligence for a CEO recently. I believe the important [...]

By Penny Herscher|2017-12-06T17:27:40-08:00March 27, 2008|Leadership|2 Comments