Hasta La Creative!

“I’m just suggesting, humbly, that better products are easier to sell,” says Jerome Nadel, senior VP and chief marketing officer at Rambus, a public software licensing company in Silicon Valley.

This begs the question, are better products really too much to ask for? For decades, the answer for many CMOs has been, unfortunately, yes. Like it or not, it has traditionally fallen on a marketing department to market a product or service — as is — to the best of its abilities, which can handicap even the most brilliant campaigns. The good news? The role of marketing is changing, slowly but surely.

Jerome Nadel is one of today’s innovative CMOs adopting design-led thinking, which is essentially the unification of product development and marketing. By closely integrating the two, each formerly disparate function informs and ultimately improves the other. So, instead of using customer stories at the bottom of the funnel to nurture conversions, or “downstream” as Nadel refers to it, these softer elements of the customer journey are introduced upstream to improve the product, according to what customers actually need and want. By thinking about marketing during product design, the product becomes better and thus easier to market. “You need to be thinking about these user stories and be connected,” Nadel says, “because that’s going to be the foundation of the narrative you’re going to use to promote later.”

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