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As we think about the next year, I was interested to find out the areas that C-level executives most want to learn about. Below is insight from 9 executives.
Bruce Hershey, CMO Piper’s Scratch Pizza Shop (former CMO, Tailored Brands)
“Great question. IoT is a medium I wanted to peel the onion back much further on and understand how cookies will affect the connected tissue.”
Gretchen Garrigues, held Global CMO roles at Manulife, First Data (Fiserv), and GE Capital
“The growth of crypto has revolutionized the traditional financial services landscape. As a senior marketing leader who has 20+ years of experience in financial services and fintech, I am very interested in strengthening my understanding of this space. Beyond the technology, it’s also an amazing case study in marketing. Crypto has reinvented the way consumers and institutions exchange currency, with the promise of financial independence and freedom from current banking and monetary constraints.”
Josh Cole, Chief Marketing and Digital Officer, TITLE Boxing Club (former CMO, Sky Zone)
“Without a doubt, my growth priority is learning how to be a better and more effective team leader in a fully-remote work environment. One of the biggest successes, and, frankly, biggest sources of pride, in my 20+ year career has been building and leading cohesive, high-performing, high-morale teams. However, I’ve found achieving this to be much more challenging within a remote environment and haven’t yet hit my stride. I need to improve my communication and management styles to better fit this new work situation and to become the leader, team builder and coach that I want to be and that my team members deserve.”
Mollie Spilman, CRO, Oracle Advertising & Marketing
“My experience is in marketing and advertising, and until I was at Oracle I never really thought about where the adtech and martech and data were – what servers or cloud – or why that mattered. Now that I am part of a company that is doing amazing things in Cloud Infrastructure, I am learning more and more about why that matters. My growth priority is to learn more about Oracle’s Cloud infrastructure so that I can speak more fluently about the value for customers that we run our Advertising and Marketing technologies on top of our own cloud, and about our Cloud Infrastructure in general.”
Lou Paskalis, President and Chief Operating Officer of MMA Global
“I am very focused on machine learning based customer experience orchestration as I think it’s the future of marketer led relevant experience delivery at scale. A big part of this is “ethical AI” and I want to learn how we implement that in an effective way before we do to the metaverse what it seems like we’ve already done to the digital universe.”
Marina MacDonald, CMO, Red Roof Inn
“This is as much a personal thing that feeds my professional strengths, but I am committed to mastering a new language. I’ve started to sharpen my Italian language skills and it is a great benefit both personally and professionally. As a marketer, you need to be able to keep your mind open, creative, and flexible. New language skills improve problem solving skills, expand creative thinking capacity and help with empathy. I try to be an empathetic person, anyway, but there’s a kind of humility and empathy involved in learning a new language. It is helping me to think about people’s differences and similarities in a new context that will undoubtably have a positive impact on the team as we all work to communicate more effectively not only amongst each other but with our customers as well. It’s probably an outlier as a professional growth priority, but I’m excited about progressing with my Italian this coming year.”
Doug Zarkin, CMO, Pearle Vision
“Remain open and curious, ensuring I’m staying in touch with the evolving consumer need state and thinking about how to marry those to ways in which we can enhance our messaging platform to satiate those.”
Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir, CMO, Palo Alto Networks
“The role of marketing organizations is evolving in very exciting ways. In industries that are undergoing constant change, such as ours, we have the opportunity to become category creators and critical growth partners in the business. I am obsessed with measuring marketing’s influence and contribution to business growth and our ability to service content and programs in a journey that we can measure every step of the way. The ability to balance the right amount of art and science within growth marketing seems to be a constant path of learning and exploration for me.”
Christine Purcell, Chief Marketing Officer, Twin Health
“In my current role, I am taking the best of consumer marketing and bridging with the critical industry expertise of healthcare marketing. My previous positions have given me a deep understanding of how to understand and talk to consumers in highly relevant ways. I am energized by the opportunity to learn a new vertical, and apply my consumer marketing knowledge to inspiring people to change their lives forever. To pioneer this new category successfully, myself and my team will create conscious opportunities to learn as an organization and as individuals.”
Join the Discussion: @KimWhitler
