GE’s CMO Sees Marketers As Innovators

Published: April 11, 2014

As the CMO of GE, Beth Comstock works with a lot of engineers and scientists responsible for the company’s jet engines and medical devices. The marketing department strives to be just as pioneering as the rest of the company, she told the audience at the 2014 Marketing Nation Summit.

“My take is that our marketing should be as innovative as our R&D,” Comstock said.

Marketers should spend most of their energy on practical advancements, she said. “Marketers need to understand where the world is going and focus on practical innovation. An idea doesn’t count if you can’t use it.”

That doesn’t mean that you can’t do something off the beaten path occasionally, Comstock explained. She pointed to the company’s Datalandia animated series about the impact of Big Data as an example. “Big Data is boring, but we don’t have to be boring when telling the story. Focus on the practical and you earn the right to do things that may be a little ambiguous.”

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Marketers are not only innovators, but integrators, according to Comstock. Marketers touch every department in an organization, but must align with sales and technology specifically. She used the term “MIT” not to mean the school, but “marketing and IT. Marketing is part brand, part technology, part design. But there is a shared set of outcomes.”

Comstock also encouraged marketers to find content in unexpected places. “We’ve got beautiful images of jet engines and we use them. We love to celebrate science.”

Marketing should be looking to identify new markets. “Marketing can be instrumental in seizing a market that hasn’t even formed. Marketers are the incubators of new businesses. Marketers have an intuitive sense of the ecosystem.”

Marketing teams need to be diverse in terms of demographics, she said, but also diverse in thinking. And don’t limit input to the marketing department, Comstock noted. “The best ideas come from legal, sometimes.”

She said it is important to develop a culture that breeds ambition and accountability in marketing and across your organization. “GE dreams in scale. Big is beautiful.”

 

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