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Podcast: Getting your CEO to buy in
Jeff White and Thomas discuss how leaders can get buy-in at the top—and enjoy the journey.

Forbes CMO Leadership Talk: Boutros Boutros, Emirates
For my Forbes CMO column, I sat down with Emirates’ marketing head Boutros Boutros. Together with his team Boutros has built one of the world’s most admired airline brands. Here are three nuggets you might find interesting:

Forbes CMO Leadership Talk: Greg Lyons, PepsiCo
Greg Lyons, Chief Marketing Officer at PepsiCo Beverages North America and I spoke about marketing leadership and empathy.

Time For A Reset: Podcast
Paul Frampton and Thomas talk about bravery, leadership—and why it’s time to reset.

The Whole Marketer: Podcast
Abby Dixon of the Whole Marketer Podcast and I spoke about knowing how to influence, having a dream and building credibility.

Forbes CMO Leadership Talk: Virginie De Beco, Sennheiser
For my Forbes column, I have spoken with Virginie de Beco, Sennheiser’s Global Head of Consumer Marketing. Virginie.

Forbes CMO Leadership Talk: Ellie Norman, Formula 1
Recently I sat down with Formula 1 CMO Ellie Norman to talk about the F1 transformation, and what happened to the famous lycra Grid Girls.

The time for marketing is now (again)
For marketers, a massive window for change has just opened—and the prize is big.

How will life look after the crisis?
Marketers are facing a major problem. Post-virus, how will markets change? What are the trends?

Never let a good crisis go to waste
Making change happen is tough. New products? Too risky. Agile working? Maybe next year. Better digital tools? We’ll look into it. Why change when life is good?

What could you create in 90 days?
When the world suddenly stops for 90 days, could you use this time well?

Complete this sentence about the future
Creative accumulation leads to better things. Creative destruction leads to new things. One isn’t better than the other. Both innovations matter.

Forbes CMO Leadership Talk: Katharyn White, T-Systems
Why Katharyn White wants to redefine the collective impact as marketers.

Look beyond performance
Fran Crippen loved the water. The US long-distance swimmer had beaten his competition many times. 7 medals in 6 years—one gold, four silver, two bronze. Olympic games in reach. Expectations were high for the Fujairah Marathon Swimming World Cup. Fran promised to call...

Five secrets of marketing career success
A few days ago, The Marketing Society asked me to share with their senior marketers the insights from the largest ever study on marketer success. Seats were arranged in a circle, so I could see everyone’s eyes as I walked onto the stage. The room was packed. Before we...

How to get promoted
Making it to the next level can be exciting. More responsibility, more options, more pay. But how to get promoted? Perhaps your firm has a fixed promotion schedule, and it’s either “up” or “out.” Perhaps your boss likes you and pushes you up the ladder. Or perhaps...

Forbes CMO Leadership Talk: Mika Yamamoto, Marketo
How can CMOs get a strong voice in the boardroom? Marketo’s Mika Yamamoto shares her views

Do your numbers
When the numbers don’t add up, business dreams evaporate, change movements stall, projects die. Perhaps people love your idea. Perhaps no one asks if the numbers work out. But sooner or later, someone will. Ideally, that someone is you. ...

The hidden power of the marketing funnel
Last weekend, my partner and I took a bicycle tour to a small village near our home, called Adendorf. Each year, it hosts an iconic garden exhibition – a sales show with plenty of champagne and canapés. After a few glasses, we passed a large exhibition of roofed...

Apply for the EU and US CMO Fellowship 2020
For the sixth year in a row, I'll work with The Marketing Academy, McKinsey, and Wisdom to help 40 blue chip marketers on the way to CEO. This year - for the first time - we'll run a U.S.-based program in addition to the successful European stream. The program is free...

Marketers: Don’t lose sight of the fact your job is to find customers
As a marketer, people are paying you for the firm’s most important job (next to innovation): finding customers – at the lowest possible cost. Finding customers is an art and a craft. The art is your work’s beauty: the creative, the intuitive. The truth is, marketing...

For career success, being relevant trumps being cool
I love the Airbus A380. It’s an engineering masterpiece. The world’s largest airplane. Quiet. Spacious. Loved by passengers. Yet the A380 demonstrates what happens to businesses and careers when ‘cool’ trumps ‘relevant’. The A380 promised a solution to a pressing...

Ask customers for feed-forward, not feedback
Who’s the most powerful person in a firm? The CEO? No. The CFO? No. The head of sales? No. It’s the customer. When a customer complains, the CEO sits up. When a customer wants to leave, the head of sales gets on the case. In a firm, the customer’s voice trumps all...

To instigate change, first build credit
“You can help us build a love brand. I want to hire you,” the CEO said. Nina was thrilled. Her last years in consumer goods had been tough. Tight margins. Aggressive competitors. A firm, in which everyone was a marketer. This telecoms CEO promised something very...

Make the middle manager cool again
Who wants to be a middle manager? Not many people. It’s nice to be the trainee – young and cool; it’s nice to be the CEO – with all the power. But the rest? Stuck in the sandwich’s middle. No longer cool. Not really powerful. If middle managers were brands, they’d be...

Have more skin in the game
Everyone in the boardroom turned to me in anger. I spent much of my former career doing two jobs: leading large brands and running major marketing transformation programmes. I loved both. And in both, when it came to success, my head was on the table. In marketing, I...

Don’t recruit yourself
We love the familiar, the recognisable, the known. And when it comes to picking a team member, many people are looking for a clone. Men recruit men. Creatives recruit creatives. Number crunchers recruit number crunchers. It’s easier to relate. It’s kind of natural....

Thrive in a matrix organisation
Do you thrive in a matrix organisation? In a matrix, everybody is in charge--and nobody has all the power. The person who can tell sales what to do, doesn't exist. The person who can tell product development to make amazing things, isn’t on that list. The person who...

To make change happen, ditch your ego
Trust in politicians has evaporated. Consumer trust in brands is at an all-time low. And too many executives don’t trust their bosses. What’s the problem? Perhaps it’s professionalism? Brexit, for example, is a tough (and stupid) challenge – but the politicians in...

Beware the ‘binfluencer’
The internet is great. If you know something and you want to write a blog that 100,000 people read, you can. If you want to do a podcast that 100,000 people hear, you can. The internet is also great for people who don’t know much, but are good in front of a camera and...