Eduardo Conrado, corporate VP-global business and technology marketing at Motorola Corp., over the past two years has been involved in a reorganization of the company' b2b segments, in which marketing teams have been realigned around vertical segments rather than products.
He has also overseen Motorola's shift to more interactive technologies, both in terms of marketing campaigns and backend technology to support marketing.
Conrado sat down with BtoB at the Business Marketing Association's annual conference last month in Las Vegas to talk about these changes and how Motorola is marketing to its b2b segments.
BtoB: What are the challenges facing CMOs?
Conrado: If you have a CMO title and your only responsibility is communications, then you are missing two components. First, you have to be involved early in product introductions. You need product teams that are embedded closely with your marketing teams. They will have the best knowledge on the segment.
The other piece that has to be key is field marketing, having an impact on revenue generation and having an impact on the challenges in the field.
BtoB: Prior to your restructuring, how did you approach vertical marketing?
Conrado: We didn't have a vertical approach—we were focused more on the product side. Now, within our government space and enterprise space, we have vertical marketing teams that just focus on verticals. On the enterprise side, we have teams handling manufacturing, transportation and logistics, health care, utilities and retail.
When we do research, we break it out by teams in each vertical. For example, in transportation, we look at how do you address parcel delivery, and in health care, how do you manage collecting different specimens within hospitals? We approach it from the challenges faced by each vertical, then work closely with the product marketing teams to create campaigns.
BtoB: How has the downturn impacted your marketing?
Conrado: When we look at the economy, we look at it by vertical segments—which [ones] are up, which are down and how they're trending. If we think one segment will be down and another one picking up, then we can shift our marketing dollars.
BtoB: How are you allocating your marketing budget?
Conrado: We're shifting more dollars to interactive. We feel that interactive media provide very effective ways to get to the end user. On the b2b side, when we break it down to very narrow segments, we are only talking to a few thousand users, so by having interactive assets and working with our databases, we can have very targeted messages. It allows us to take much more of a laser approach.
BtoB: Which interactive technologies are you investing in?
Conrado: Since last year, we've updated our Web content management system, and we are also doing international enhancements to all our sites. We're also enhancing our database capabilities and putting in new lead management systems.
We're in the process of building up organically. My philosophy is, if you have a strategy on how you want to shift your marketing organization, you have to do it in building blocks. We know we have to change, but we have to look at making changes over time across organization design, process and support systems. M