Iris Meyer is no stranger to marketing at major mobile carriers. She has held senior and CMO positions at Nokia and Vodafone, and in late 2021 she joined Verizon Business, her B2B services division.
But this year, Verizon Business added a new letter to her title, promoting Meyer to chief product and marketing officer.
The role of chief marketer is sometimes relegated or seen as just a source of spending, rather than a sales promoter or worthy of strategic investment.
But Meyer said the job has evolved over time and is largely “driven by customer insights and customer data as marketers.”
Verizon's decision to consolidate product and marketing under one leader is “another example of how important the CMO role is becoming,” she said.
AdExchanger spoke with Meyer about her new role and priorities as companies consider approaches to in-office, hybrid and remote working.
AdExchanger: Why did Verizon create a new “Chief Marketing and Product Officer” role?
Iris Meyer: There is a wealth of data in marketing, and marketers have a good understanding of customer experience and customer needs. By aligning product and marketing, you can accelerate your end-to-end commitment to true customer experience lifecycles.
We've integrated features with the sole purpose of keeping our focus on our customers.
What do we mean when we say we focus on the “true customer experience lifecycle”?
We focus on making it easy for our customers to order and use our products. My team is responsible for e-commerce and digital services.
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From a marketing perspective, whenever you come into contact with a customer, ensuring you have a true understanding of their needs is a top priority. We can't deliver the same message to our small and medium-sized business customers as we can to large global companies.
We take a personalized approach when interacting with our customers and strive to provide relevant offers and relevant experiences at each point of contact.For example, what is the customer's current technology or service type? [as in, type of internet service] And how digitally savvy are they?
How has Verizon's B2B marketing changed over the past five years as companies transition from fully office-based wireless to work-from-home services?
COVID-19 has really accelerated digital.
You mentioned working from home, but we're also seeing an acceleration in corporate customers becoming more open to customer service and product reservations online. This is something we've seen that all customers are more tolerant of, but especially our largest customers.
We're also looking at ways to provide secure connectivity for our customers while working from home. They need the right tools to work from home safely. As a result, the way we market our products and the types of products we focus on for our customers has changed.
What types of products do you focus on?
We're thinking about how to incorporate generative AI into our services. For example, in sales, we are looking for ways to make it easier for salespeople to engage with customers.
We are piloting a service that allows you to capture recordings of sales calls and automate certain follow-up actions after the call. You can also check to see if the salesperson has the right materials to talk about the product.
On the marketing side, the emphasis is on personalization. But today it is quite difficult.
We have vast amounts of extremely rich data about our customers, including real-time behavioral and internet data. But using this at scale and quickly for campaigns across multiple local markets that feature personalized content is nearly impossible without AI technology.
We believe this will truly accelerate our interactions with our customers and allow them to interact with us in a more personalized way.
Are you consolidating or expanding the number of ad tech and SaaS marketing services in your organization?
Generally speaking, we can say that consolidation is on the rise. I think that's the general trend.
Let me give you an example. A few years ago, we had over 60 of his data and martech vendors, which was amazing. And if you think back just a few years ago, you were probably using about 50%, or even less than 50%, of the data you purchased.
We have now cut the number of vendors in half and are using over 80% of all data purchased. So, yes, we are focused on integration and making the return on investment more effective.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
