Foreword

Reading and pondering these sixty-four one-to-one interviews is to absorb the hard-won wisdom of a select group of very smart marketing practitioners—men and women with genuinely real, market-tested ideas, all of whom have their own reputational skin in the game.

Full disclosure: Drew and I have a history. More than twenty years ago we worked together at the astonishingly creative ad agency Chiat/Day. It was there that I first came in contact with Drew’s astronomically high standards when it comes to marketing and advertising, which you’ll get to see on display in every chapter of The CMO’S Periodic Table.

The subjects of these interviews manage the marketing processes at companies selling products and services ranging from airlines to credit lines, and from the groceries to the Grammys. With each one of these very different perspectives you’ll be able to derive an interesting or useful lesson to apply to your own business, whatever that may be.

How does Allstate maintain its “You’re in good hands” slogan for more than fifty years? What did Dunkin’ Donuts achieve by teaming with Zynga? Why does American Express offer some of the most helpful small-business content marketing anywhere, and make it available even to non-AmEx customers? All is revealed inside. You’ll hear the former CMO of AXA Equitable and Vonage, Barbara Goodstein, talk frankly about the whys and hows of changing agencies, freely admitting, “The advertising agency is always at the short end of the straw.” Sprint’s Doug Duvall will recall his stint as communications director at Freddie Mac, when he had to manage through the crisis created by the suicide of the company’s CFO.

These are just a few of the truly fascinating glimpses of life in the CMO lane. Reading The CMO’s Periodic Table, in fact, feels a bit like browsing through the transcript of a reality TV show starring top CMOs from around the world.

Perhaps, however, because of my own history with Drew at Chiat/Day, some of my favorite stories within these pages come from the CMOs who are prone to push the envelope a little further, taking extraordinary risks in order to make extraordinary gains—as Drew does today at Renegade. At Chiat/Day we used to chuckle to ourselves that you knew it was a good meeting if your presentation made the blood drain from the client’s face. Well, there are more than a few blood-draining moments in this book that are a thrill to read as well as very instructive.

For example, when Jack in the Box’s CMO Terri Funk Graham launched a breakthrough campaign based on having the brand’s smiley-faced Jack character run down by a bus. And at SAP, the mission of the innovation team managed by CMO Jonathan Becher was “to try new things, break rules, make people uncomfortable.”

Or consider the implication when Tesco’s CEO Sir Terry Leahy tells us about launching his company’s groundbreaking Club Card loyalty program more than twenty years ago, long before he became either a CEO or a “Sir.” Virtually all grocery chains have loyalty programs now, of course, but Tesco’s was really the pioneer in basing such a program entirely on customer data. Launching it meant wagering some 25 percent of the firm’s profits on its success. It’s not hard to picture the blood draining from the boss’s face as Sir Terry pitched the great idea.

If the Papa John’s promise is “Better ingredients. Better pizza” (see Element P, for Planning, within), then Drew Neisser’s promise with The CMO’s Periodic Table is “Better interviews. Better learning.”

And it’s a promise he delivers on.

—Don Peppers, Founding Partner of Peppers & Rogers Group