Hello, I’m Steve. Over the past 25 years, I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the world’s leading tech brands, including HP, Dell Technologies, Microsoft, VMware, and most recently, Nutanix. Throughout my career, I’ve led diverse marketing teams across field, partner, product and integrated marketing functions, covering SME, Commercial and Enterprise segments.
Most recently, I orchestrated global go-to-market strategy and planning, establishing a strong foundation across the full marketing spectrum: managing teams, running programs, evaluating performance, and overseeing QBRs and operational initiatives.
I’ve also been recognised among the Top 100 B2B Marketing Leaders in Technology for four out of the last five years and stay actively engaged with my peers, other CMOs and the broader marketing community on emerging trends, so I’m delighted to be chatting about this topic.
Last night, I watched A Christmas Carol with my daughter because her school play this year is based on the Dickens classic, and she wanted to see it. We watched a CBeebies version, which I actually really enjoyed. which got me thinking about how marketing leaders are a bit like Scrooge – bear with me!
Like Scrooge, we as marketing leaders need to confront our past activities, assess our current tactics, and adapt for future growth. This feels particularly relevant now, with marketing budgets shrinking up to 15% year over year - we're being forced to evolve from focusing solely on immediate returns to understanding the broader, longer-term value of what we do.
The data we use - our performance metrics, market insights, customer behaviour - these are our ghosts of marketing past, present and future. But unlike Marley, who simply warns of what's to come, we must embody the transformation ourselves. We're responsible for adjusting strategies to drive success based on past performance, present goals, and future ambitions.
Just as Scrooge ultimately becomes a force for positive change, marketing leaders must drive organisational growth, learning from past campaigns and adapting future plans. We can't just be haunted by past mistakes - we need to symbolise the potential for growth and renewal in our organisations.
In the end, like Scrooge's journey of reflection and transformation, we need to evolve from being seen as mere cost centres to being recognised as true drivers of sustainable growth. It's about strategy refinement and forward-thinking evolution - ensuring marketing doesn't end up in that metaphorical shallow grave!
One of the most provocative campaigns I spearheaded was for Dell Technologies, where I built a program called ‘Expect Moore’ centered around the concept of a “toxic brand virus.” This was back in 2018, pre-COVID, so the metaphor didn’t carry the weight it would today. The idea was to equate the threat of not digitally transforming to a brand virus, one that could infect and weaken a company’s future competitiveness, turning it into a “zombie brand” that would disappear. This metaphor was bold, and I admit it was a bit provocative even then, but it perfectly illustrated the urgency of digital transformation.
I drew inspiration from Zone to Win by Geoffrey A. Moore—a book that really resonated with me. Moore’s work emphasises how companies must organise into specific zones to survive digital disruption, and his insights around transformation became the backbone of our approach.
So, we built this dystopian environment where executive teams from Fortune 500 companies came for a series of facilitated workshops with consultants, essentially to work out how you avoid becoming a toxic brand. We designed the workshops to feel as if attendees were walking into an environment on the brink of collapse, bringing in actors and consultants who immersed participants in the concept. This wasn’t a typical corporate workshop; we modeled it after immersive theatre, similar to what you would find at a Secret Cinema event. I brought in actors to play the roles of “zombie brands” who had failed to transform, like Blockbuster, represented by a zombie actor in full costume who would stumble through the room with the Blockbuster logo, illustrating the consequences of failing to adapt in a world where Netflix had overtaken them.
We wanted them to feel as if they were in a “clinical lab,” studying this toxic brand virus that could threaten their survival if they didn’t act fast.
Executives from major brands like Shell, Barclays, Disney and others came to these immersive sessions, which took them out of their usual boardroom mindsets and dropped them into a high-stakes setting where transformation wasn’t just a concept but an urgent matter of survival. We wanted them to feel as if they were in a “clinical lab,” studying this toxic brand virus that could threaten their survival if they didn’t act fast. Actors in white jackets facilitated this atmosphere, creating a stark, almost dystopian environment.
I only realised the impact these sessions had when I heard a story about one of the sales guys who was on the phone in Paris with a large telco client in the Netherlands. He mentioned the “Expect More” event, and the client instantly recognised it, saying it was “the best thing they’d ever done”.
The Expect Moore Program at Dell really epitomised the value of storytelling by bringing the threat of a "toxic brand virus" to life. My goal was to make the consequences of inaction feel visceral, urging executives to act to avoid becoming those "zombie brands" by embracing the necessary steps for transformation.
It wasn’t just a presentation or a workshop, it was a moment in time where they were transported to an experience of what could be the future of their brands in a real, tangible way. We had the Shell CIO on record who said that the day he spent in that workshop was “worth a thousand-fold.” Those kinds of comments highlighted how effective immersive storytelling can be—it stuck with people long after the event was over.
What we did here taps into something much deeper: humans have always learned through stories. If you think back to the days around a campfire, that’s how we passed down wisdom and survival skills. We used that same concept, but in a business setting. The message stayed with participants because it was grounded in storytelling that made them realise transformation isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s something urgent and necessary.
Looking at trends in marketing today, it’s clear how delicate storytelling can be. Just look at the recent negative reactions and controversy around Boots’ Christmas ad, which has led to a #boycottboots movement. There's always this fine line between brand positivity and backlash. But in this campaign, we pushed the envelope. By immersing executives in a story where they had to face the potential death of their brands, we made the case for transformation not just compelling, but unforgettable.
One of the biggest challenges I'm seeing - and I've spoken to quite a number of CMOs about this - is that leaders are really grappling with investment decisions across three core areas of marketing: Brand, Demand and Conversion.
The first area, demand creation, encompasses thought leadership and brand investment. This is about planting seeds for future growth, building credibility, and creating top-of-mind awareness. The second, demand capture, involves targeting those actively exploring solutions, ensuring you’re front and center as they evaluate options. The third area is demand conversion, which focuses on turning those engaged prospects into actual customers with direct-response tactics.
The question facing many leaders is, “How much should you invest in each of these areas?” It’s tough because, while you can easily tie bottom-of-funnel tactics like Call-Out Days (CODs), executive roundtables, and other conversion activities directly to revenue, it's far more challenging to quantify the impact of brand and thought leadership on long-term growth.
If you look to marketing theory—especially Binet and Field's The Long and the Short of It—focusing solely on capturing "established demand" without investing in brand-building will eventually constrain your long-term growth. Sustainable success depends on balancing short-term tactics with brand investment to ensure future demand. In fact, growth only occurs if your Excess Share of Voice (ESOV) outpaces your current market share, which means you must look beyond direct-response tactics and cultivate brand awareness for the future.
But here’s the dilemma: if you can’t directly link brand and thought leadership to revenue, how do you justify the investment? Just before I left Nutanix, I discovered a fascinating solution from a San Francisco startup. They’ve developed a digital platform that aggregates all possible customer interactions—TV, digital traffic, podcasts, every conceivable form of content engagement. They track 80,000+ podcasts and use causality theory (which was used for Track and Trace during Covid times) to analyse how exposure to keywords or branded search terms affects revenue, even predicting outcomes two years out. It’s a breakthrough tool that forecasts the revenue impact of PESO (Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned) investments with remarkable precision.
This, I believe, is the core challenge in modern marketing: achieving a balanced strategy that leverages brand-building investments to drive demand and conversion. Every CMO I talk to faces this same struggle. I think the answer lies in using historical performance—the "ghost of Christmas past"—to craft a strategy that optimizes the entire journey, from brand to demand to conversion, ensuring today’s investments set the stage for tomorrow’s growth.
I think for me, it's about becoming a lifelong learner. Understand your craft, do the practical training, listen to the podcasts, research the markets and the categories you operate in. Talk to customers, prospects, customer success teams, sales teams - build a picture of what's going to resonate with your target market or the personas you're targeting. Then build a plan to deliver that.
I went back and did the Mark Ritson Mini MBA in Marketing just before I joined Nutanix, and it reconfirmed something important for me. There are lots of people in marketing who've never done marketing qualifications, and you miss out on the fundamentals - market orientation, diagnosis, strategy, segmentation and positioning - the basics that most people forget.
A lot of people start to think about product or even tactics first. And, I think back to what Geoffrey Moore told me in an airport lounge on the way to Amsterdam - he said, "Steve, no one cares about you. It's all about them. It's all about the customer." Do you understand their outcomes, their priorities, what they're trying to achieve? Yes, there's a product or service or solution you can deliver, but don't lead with a product feature benefit, focus on a value led outcome which solves a pain point. That's the error most people make.
Imagination.
Imagine what good looks like. Then build a strategy and a plan of action that makes your vision a reality. Because as Thomas Edison said “vision without execution is hallucination”.
I'm not religious, but I recently found this quote from the Bible - Jeremiah 5:21: "Hear now this, O foolish people without understanding, which have eyes and see not, which have ears and hear not." And I actually thought, you know what, that's quite apt in a marketing context. It's urging you to embrace data and insights fully. Do your research, don't go into making decisions blind.
Leverage that market data, those insights and tools. Use the ‘ghost of marketing past’ - that wealth of historical data and customer behaviour, the knowledge that matters - and use modern tools to guide your future strategy. There's never been a better time to be a marketing professional. You've got so many tools, so many data inputs, and you've got AI which can make sense of it all and make recommendations for you.
As Alvin Toffler once said, "Knowledge is the most democratic source of power." So listen closely to your customers and foster a robust feedback loop. Collaborate with your sales teams, research your target market, develop a clear ideal customer profile. Then prioritise your efforts relentlessly to reach that target market and try to shift perceptions by doing something that really changes how they see you - as a brand, as a provider, as a partner.
Above all else, use this to challenge the status quo. Just because something worked in the past doesn't mean it will ensure future success. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, we as marketing leaders must undergo our own transformation journey, confronting our past approaches and embracing change to drive future growth.
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