MarketingMasters Luncheon Seminar
An Internal Memo on the Value of Marketing
Eileen Zicchino, Managing Director, CMO, J.P. Morgan Treasury Services
It’s the b-to-b marketer’s lament: Budgets are in free-fall. Headcount has become an endangered species. There’s more pressure than ever to show value.
You knock yourself out creating programs that you know bring revenue into the business, only to hear management say, “Prove it.” Again.
While many marketers throw their hands up and say this is the business they’ve chosen, Eileen Zicchino contends that, at least to some extent, it’s marketing’s fault. She’ll explain why on Thursday, Dec. 3, when she keynotes BMA’s next MarketingMasters Luncheon Seminar at The Standard Club.
Zicchino, managing director and chief marketing officer of J.P. Morgan Treasury Services, is one of those rare success stories in today’s upper echelon of b-to-b marketing. While most CMOs are lucky to last 18 months these days, she has been in her job for 10 years. Despite three major mergers in perhaps the most tumultuous decade in the history of the financial services industry, Zicchino has not only survived, but thrived. In addition to her position at J.P. Morgan, she is a member of BMA’s national board of directors and is vice president of the BMA marketing committee.
The J.P. Morgan Treasury Services business currently generates more than $8 billion in revenue annually by providing wholesale transaction, investment and information services around the globe. Its clients include small and midsized companies, multinational corporations, financial institutions, government entities and institutional investors.
In this fourth installment of BMA’s “Flux”-themed luncheon series, Zicchino will take issue with today’s marketing leaders who grin and bear the unsung hero banner with the justification that management “just doesn’t get it.”
“One of the things I think we need to do a much better job at is marketing ourselves to our internal constituents,” she said. “Generally we just do a really bad job of promoting what we do to the people internally who actually count.”
Those people “who actually count” include the ones who do all the counting, and Zicchino is the first to decry the humiliation of having to document the numbers that justify her department’s existence. But she also acknowledges that marketing has a responsibility to show the company’s internal people what is behind those numbers, and why those efforts are helping these stakeholders achieve their goals as well.
“We need to look at our internal clients as if they were customers, because they are,” Zicchino said. “And we don’t treat them that way.”
As an example, Zicchino noted that J.P. Morgan earlier this year launched a large advertising campaign in Asia. It was the first time the company ever aired commercials on Bloomberg television, and when she traveled to Asia to assess the impact, she was surprised that salespeople didn’t seem to know about them.
“So I said to my market person out there, ‘So how did you promote this?’” Zicchino noted, and the response was, “I sent them an email.”
Zicchino said there are all kinds of ways to promote what you do internally, but there are plenty of ways that are better than sending an email. As thorough as you need to be to satisfy an external client, that’s how thorough you need to be internally as well.
BMA’s November luncheon seminar is expected to reach capacity early, so please sign up soon. To register, go here.
About Eileen Zicchino
Eileen Zicchino is managing director and chief marketing officer for J.P. Morgan Treasury Services. In this capacity she is responsible for brand management, strategic product marketing, campaign management, creative services, collateral development, client communications, business intelligence, syndicated and proprietary research, advertising, social media management and client events on a global scale.
Zicchino joined JPMorgan Chase in 1999. She previously held senior marketing positions with Citigroup, Bankers Trust Company, the Bank of New York and the American Stock Exchange. Zicchino is on the executive board of the Business Marketing Association and is on the boards of BMA’s New York chapter and the CMO Council. She is also a member of the International Association of Business Communicators, the American Marketing Association and the Association for Financial Professionals.
Sponsored by:
