Ask many CMOs what they’d most love to be doing if they weren’t in marketing and they’ll tell you about long-running passion projects or their favourite sport they could have made a career out of. James Whitemore has a different answer – and a different reason.
“If I weren’t a CMO, I’d be an air traffic controller,” he says with a wry smile. “That has to be the most fun job, because you order people around all day and they have no choice but to do what you tell them!”
As it is, Whitemore is two-and-a-half years into his role as EVP and CMO of NetApp – and he doesn’t have the power to compel everyone in the 30-year-old data services and data management business to do what he says. What he has got is something that, in truth, excites him a lot more: a free hand to reinvent a brand.
“This is my seventh time as a CMO – and the role I’m in now is one of the most fun jobs in the tech industry,” he says. “It’s very seldom that you actually get given the freedom to do what marketers love to do, which is to reinvent and reposition things – and I love that I walked in here and the leadership team gave me that remit. This was a company that was known for one thing: enterprise file storage. We’ve now got cloud and SaaS offerings that have gone from the periphery to the heart of our portfolio. We’ve reached a point where we can stop trying to emulate other big tech companies and be proud of who we are as the largest independent storage company in the world.”
Being yourself in B2B tech
The pride and confidence to be yourself as a tech business is one of the most visible elements of the changes that Whitemore has encouraged at NetApp. If you follow the business on LinkedIn, then you’ll be used to seeing video ads explaining the importance of crystal clear computer vision by meditating on the difficulties telling cute puppies apart from fried chicken. You’ve probably heard debates on the relative merits of serverless computing and containerisation introduced by UFC Octagon announcer Bruce Buffer. It’s all part of Whitemore’s determination not to conform to the norms of tech marketing.
“People come to us and say, ‘that’s fresh, that’s exciting, that’s authentic,’” he says. “I always believe that we should take our customers very seriously and our partners very seriously, but it’s okay to have a little fun at ourselves. A lot of big tech marketing is so stale with the same promises to change the world, and I’m really bored with it. I try to educate my team not to hide everything, to have the courage to be different.”
Authenticity and being yourself isn’t just for advertising campaigns as far as Whitemore is concerned. Diversity is a crucial element of the brand that he’s looking to build. “I grew up as a dyslexic, underprivileged kid who was always outside of the mainstream and I learned to get through that and be confident in who I am today,” he says.
“If you think back ten years ago, there was very little diversity in the world of B2B technology, but today the vast majority of our audiences aren’t from that traditional data centre group. They’re vastly different people and when they see an old-school B2B tech company, they’re going to feel alienated. But that’s not the type of company NetApp is. If you look at our employee base, where we’re located, all of the diverse types of people, we’ve just got to show up as who we are. That’s the whole mantra for me.”
Redefining marketing’s contribution to revenue
The rapid growth in NetApp’s cloud and SaaS offerings don’t just mean new audiences for its solutions. They also mean new, self-directed buyer journeys that are fundamentally changing marketing’s role in driving growth.
“So much more of the selling process is now being driven without the traditional engagement of salespeople,” says Whitemore. “It’s driven by self-education and research. Buyers are interacting through technology such as AI chatbots rather than people – and marketing is at the heart of that.
“Our impact on revenue doesn’t work in the same way that it did five years ago and we shouldn’t be judged in the same way. It’s about the ability to reach and engage audiences, create opportunities to sell and prove that there was an impact on revenue through a broad set of marketing activities rather than just claiming a lead from a one-off event. Personally, I’m on a mission to eradicate the word ‘lead’ from our vocabulary – it’s just so archaic. The narrative around marketing has to change and you’ll fail if you’re unable to articulate that clearly to all of the interested parties around you.”
In true flight controller style, Whitemore clearly doesn’t consider failure to be an option. Evolving the role of marketing may not be quite the same as landing a plane. But in its own way, it’s just as fulfilling.
For more insights from visionary Marketing Leaders check out LinkedIn’s CMO Corner.
