The Marketing Hall of Fame recognizes marketing leaders who have made outstanding contributions to the field of marketing. Presciant’s Joanna Seddon joined with Presciant’s brand strategy expert Bob Kahn launched the awards ten years ago and supported a decade of excellence in recognizing brilliance in marketing, and encouraging the future generation of marketers. Here we share inductee perspective on the future of marketing.
2014 inductees
Give yourself permission to be innovative
Beth Comstock, Senior Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer, General Electric
“Give yourself permission to imagine a better way and then take steps to make it happen. But often we ourselves are what hold us back. We’re afraid of the difference, of not knowing the answer, of having to ask permission. At GE, I built a reputation as somebody who people could cold call me and if they had a good enough crazy idea, I’d often want to talk to them or meet with them.”
On Marketing 3.0
Dr. Philip Kotler, S.C. Johnson & Son Distinguished Professor of International Marketing, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
“Over the past 60 years, marketing has moved from being product-centric (Marketing 1.0) to being consumer-centric (Marketing 2.0). Today we see marketing as transforming once again in response to the new dynamics in the environment. We see companies expanding their focus from products to consumers to humankind issues. Marketing 3.0 is the stage when companies shift from consumer-centricity to human-centricity and where profitability is balanced with corporate responsibility.”
Precision targeting + emotional messages
Joseph V. Tripodi, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing & Commercial Officer, The Coca-Cola Company
“We are changing fundamentally from being TV commercial producers to content developers … from purely mass marketing to one-on-one marketing. Spray-and-pray is gone — precision is the real thing. That said, we can’t be obsessed or seduced by data. At the end of the day that emotional response is still a necessity.”
2015 inductees
Don’t let the speed of AI lead to short-termism
David Aaker, Vice-Chairman of Prophet Brand Strategy and Professor Emeritus of Marketing Strategy at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
“AI has changed branding. Finding and interpreting consumers’ instincts can now be done in hours. AI can generate verbal and visual options to tell the brand story, shortening the time to create outstanding work from months to days or even hours. Yet, you have to fight off short-termism, supported by big data and analytics. Long-term brand building should be so great that it also delivers short-term results.”
Profit is a vote of confidence
Yvon Chouinard, Founder, Patagonia
“Our mission statement says nothing about making a profit. In fact, our family considers our bottom line to be the amount of good the business has accomplished over the year. However, a company needs to be profitable in order to stay in business and to accomplish all its other goals, and we do consider profit to be a vote of confidence, that our customers approve of what we are doing.
Reinventing how we connect with consumers
Trevor Edwards, President, Nike Brand, Nike, Inc.
“As we saw the social networks grow in the US and elsewhere, we asked, ‘What if this was around sports, a specific sport?’ Our job is to reinvent the way that we connect with consumers. We make sure we stay in their world, stay connected, stay relevant, and, more importantly, we allow them to do what they want. It’s their world, their lives. We give them the tools.”
Every single interaction is marketing now
Shelly Lazarus, Chairman Emeritus, Ogilvy & Mather
“A brand is not a product or a promise or a feeling. It’s the sum of all the experiences you have with a company. The lines between marketing, communications, and customer experience have disappeared. Every single interaction is marketing now. The future belongs to brands that know who they are and act like it — consistently, everywhere, all the time.”
2016 inductees
We have to move a lot faster
Bob Greenberg. Founder, Chairman/CEO, R/GA
“We have to move a lot faster. People talk about change and adaptation, but they don’t see how fast the competition is coming, from everywhere. We have to move. We have no choice. It’s transformation at speed. You have to imagine rebuilding your business every few years.”
Building a culture of curiosity
John Hayes, Former Chief Marketing Officer, American Express
“You have to generate a level of curiosity about what’s happening in the world, both in terms of the talent you bring into the company as well as the culture that you build and maintain over time. We have been able to build a culture of curiosity where people are curious about how to make things work better. Then take the things that worked…and apply [them] all over the place.”
The world’s first overcommunicated society
Al Ries, Marketing Strategist and Author
“Today, communication itself is the problem. We have become the world’s first overcommunicated society. Each year we send more and receive less. That is why, now more than ever, the essence of successful marketing is narrowing the focus. You become stronger when you reduce the scope of your operations. You can’t stand for something if you chase after everything”
2017 inductees
Everything is digital
Gary Briggs, Chief Marketing Officer, Facebook
“This is the end of digital, because everything is digital. In Silicon Valley, we don’t use the word ‘digital’ anymore. It just is. Those that haven’t made the shift is why companies like Nordstrom, Staples, etc., are being so disrupted. They aren’t shifting fast enough.”
Character is what counts
Jon Iwata, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Communications, IBM
“Hot products have their time in the limelight and then something else comes along. That’s the nature of technology. So the IBM brand must stand for something other than what we make or sell. We realized that if we were going to think about brand relevance, we have to stop talking about brand itself, and start talking about something deeper. And that is our character.”
We are in a trust and attention game
Jim Stengel, President and CEO, The Jim Stengel Company and former Global Marketing Officer of Procter & Gamble
“Focus on the customer experience, which brings everyone together in a company, and the last one is, never lose sight that we’re in the trust and attention game. If you’re building trust and getting attention you have a higher likelihood of building a great brand. And If you do have two separate organizations internally, one that runs brand and one that runs performance — put them together so they are working off the same song sheet.”
Transforming the consumer into a cocreator
Jerry Wind, Ph.D, Academic Director, The Wharton Fellows Program, Directors, SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management, Professor of Marketing, The Wharton School
“Collaborative projects such as open-source software and Wikipedia are transforming the consumer into a cocreator. Digital networks are the key differentiator, and enable new forms of sharing, distributed intelligence and value creation in the collaborative economy.”
2018 inductees
Listen like hell
Lee Clow, Chairman, TBWA Worldwide
A thing that most creatives don’t do well is that you’ve gotta learn to listen. Data doesn’t tell you everything. You still have to listen, to feel, to watch what moves people. Good advertising is a dialog with people. Advertising is about understanding people. The better you understand them, the better you can connect with them. The best way to get a relationship is to listen like hell to what they’re saying.”
Talking to who actually wants to be marketed to
Seth Godin, Bestselling Author and Speaker
The future of marketing is permission marketing: offering people the opportunity to hear from you, rather than interrupting them. It’s about building a relationship with people who want to hear from you. Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them, who actually want to be marketed to.”
Use data to reveal bigger opportunities
Esther Lee, Executive Vice President, Global Chief Marketing Officer, MetLife
“Data isn’t just about using it to get to creative ideas or brand messages, rather understanding how people are experiencing your brand and products, what new distribution models might be effective, what other new ideas we can deliver – bigger opportunities to have an impact on the business. As marketers, we’re leaving value on the table if we can’t find a way to use data to reveal bigger opportunities for growth.”
2019 inductees
Creativity is wired in
Wendy Clark, Chief Executive Officer, DDB Worldwide
“We’re the only species who communicate through story and that we’ve been storytelling for millennia now, ever since cavemen were etching stories on rocks. Creativity is wired into us. It’s what we seek, how we connect, and how we make progress. I can’t imagine that it will be anything but dominant in our go-forward future.”
Personalization at scale
Ann Lewnes, Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, Adobe
“The future of marketing lies in personalization at scale. Technology allows us to understand and engage with our customers in ways that were never possible before. This means you must design, connect, deliver, and manage experiences across diverse channels and devices to maintain a singular voice throughout the context of the customer journey.”
Purpose delivers growth
Keith Weed, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer, Unilever
“We need to build brands with purpose. We need to go from ‘marketing to consumers’, to ‘mattering to people. Successful companies are marketing for and with people, not to them. We know that consumers increasingly want brands with purpose—and that purpose delivers growth.”
2022 inductees
Technology is changing exponentially
Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer, Procter & Gamble
“Technology is changing exponentially with AI and Gen AI. Media and retail are converging, e-commerce is expanding rapidly, and consumers expect more value. We have built a neural data network from decades of P&G consumer testing. It allows us to make changes to images, music, copy or text to iterate and improve ads for the very, very best performance, very quickly.”
Sharper purpose
Ann Mukherjee, Chairman & CEO, Pernod Ricard North America
“Purpose to me is about brands getting sharper about what they stand for and what they stand against. Sometimes that could be around social values. It could be around how people choose to live. It could be about how brands choose to promote not just emotional benefits, but benefits around identity that help people understand how they are seen by using the brand.”
Tolerance for risk
Bozoma Saint John, Former CMO, Netflix
“It all comes back to tolerance for risk and accepting that not every idea is going to hit. This means teams will have to be rewarded accordingly. If you reward results based on historical data, that’s what your team will work towards. But if you celebrate more risky ideas then people will feel more encouraged to go down that route. As leaders it’s our responsibility to find the right mix. I’m not saying this balance should be 50/50, just as long as it’s not 0/100. You can’t operate a successful business if you’re not allowing for any risk.”
Brand stories for positive change
Antonio Lucio, Former CMO, Facebook, Visa and HP
“Marketers are no longer just storytellers; they are storytellers with a responsibility to drive positive change. Stories are the conversations people are having about the product. Storytelling is so much more than just conveying information. It’s about crafting narratives that engage our imaginations and emotions—and to do and to do that, we need diverse perspectives and voices to reflect the complexity of the world we live in.”
2023 inductees
Predictable irrationality
Dan Ariely, Professor of Behavioral Economics, Duke University
“Behavioral economics helps marketers see what users will actually do — not what they say they’ll do. If you want to influence people, you need to understand the predictable ways in which they are irrational. We are far less rational in our decision making, yet our irrational behaviors are neither random nor senseless — they are systematic and predictable.”
Marketing inextricably tied to the company purpose
Chris Capossela, Microsoft’s Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer
“I’ve always believed that marketing is just a tool to help advance the business, as opposed to an activity you do in its own right. You can’t transform marketing in isolation; you must first define the company’s strategy/purpose and then let marketing serve it. And so I think it’s very important to understand: Where is your company going? What does it stand for? And that, once you answer those questions, you can figure out what you need to change about your marketing.”
Human + machine
Amy Fuller, Former Accenture Chief Marketing and Communications Officer
“The more technical we become, the more important the human element becomes. … the future of marketing is the marriage of both. It’s not about replacing humans; it’s about augmenting work and freeing people up to focus on higher-level efforts, including innovation and decision-making. It’s human plus machine.”
Best time to be in marketing ever
Raja Rajamannar, Mastercard’s Chief Marketing & Communications Officer
“If you look at the field of marketing right now, it is not simply evolving, but it is rapidly getting transformed. I still spend about 5 1/2 hours every single week educating myself over the weekends. There is so much that’s happening and you need to be able to connect the dots across various areas and technologies back to your business, back to the craft of marketing. If you start grasping the concepts, this is empowering and so unbelievably exciting. This is the best time to be in marketing. Ever.”