Today’s interview is with Thom Gruhler, CEO & Founder of Fjuri, a marketing consultancy that is combining his CMO experience from Microsoft with world-class technology, data science, and the right analytics to help brands optimize their marketing performance and deliver more significant and consistent value from their marketing investments. Thom joins me today to talk about how advertising is no longer effective, how marketers should be using data and analytics to build better relationships with their customers, the impact of GDPR and what is required to succeed as a CMO and CCO these days.
This interview follows on from my recent interview – Brands can create a better customer experience by being purpose driven – Interview with Alicia Tillman, CMO of SAP – and is number 246 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.
Highlights from my conversation with Thom:
About Thom (taken from his Fjuri bio)
Thom Gruhler is the CEO & Founder of Fjuri, a cutting-edge marketing consultancy that has arisen from decades of collective experience within marketing organizations.
Thom is described as a creative, high-achieving leader with twenty years of experience in marketing leadership on a global scale with world-renown brands. Recognized as a dynamic motivator and change agent in driving modern methods for brand and customer engagement across marketing and R&D; building data-driven demand generation and modern marketing programs; and achieving breakthrough results. Respected executive known for hands-on leadership in scaling global marketing strategy and building effective teams. Directed a broad range of successful marketing teams and programs for Fortune 500 companies and start-ups, including Microsoft, Verizon, Nestle, General Mills, MasterCard, Chrysler & Chevrolet.
Prior to founding Fjuri, Thom led marketing team for Apps and Services Marketing Group at Microsoft, for commercial and consumer including Office/O365, Skype, Outlook, OneDrive and OneNote. In his role as one of three divisional marketing VP’s Thom led a cross-functional team of 400, accountable for business planning, product marketing, brand and integrated marketing, demand generation & CRM, sales & partner-channel enablement. Principle to his role as global marketing leader for Office was to drive revenue growth for the Office franchise by directing the important transition to the cloud with O365 and increasing O365 subscribers and retention with oversight of brand marketing, direct acquisition (paid and organic), ecom strategy, trial conversion and upsell, all lifecycle marketing including demand gen and CRM across all segments. Including efforts to improve O365 commercial direct acquisition, which was up 131% in FY16 while reducing CPA through SEO and marketing automation optimization.
Before joining Microsoft, Thom’s decade of thought leadership in the mobile category led to his appointment as Global Managing Partner of Telecom & Technology for McCann Worldgroup, the world’s largest global communications network. Thom also served as President of McCann Worldgroup’s flagship agency, McCann NY, where he led the transform of McCann NY, readying it for the digital age. He reset the leadership team, defined and recruited new agency talent, redesigned key work processes, and coordinated a multimillion dollar redesign of the agency’s physical space. For ten years Thom was the key relationship holder on the Verizon account, Worldgroup’s largest domestic client and an IPG top-tier partner. He led the client and brand through multiple agencies and in 2008 captured Verizon’s full range of wireless, land-line and broadband business. The highly successful Verizon “Can you hear me now?” campaign was developed during Thom’s tenure there.
Thom was the executive leader for a 2016 company-wide initiative to improve global demand gen capability, improving content marketing capability, scaling marketing automation platform, building stronger call-center conversion, and improving RM/user engagement and upsell performance Prior to his role as Office Marketing leader, Thom was the Corporate Vice President and Global CMO of Microsoft’s Windows Division, Thom led all division marketing, working closely with product engineers and field partners to ensure customer satisfaction and to drive revenue and market share in the highly competitive sectors of PC, Tablet and Smartphone. In this role, Thom provided the expertise and leadership needed to align a matrix internally and externally, to deliver an effective marketing plan across the system, and to deliver results. Thom also led US and global marketing for the new Windows Phone as Corporate Vice President and Global CMO of the Windows Phone Division.
In 2008, Thom was recognized for his high-profile leadership, earning the advertising industry’s highest award—induction into The American Advertising Federation’s prestigious Hall of Achievement for professionals under age 40.
You can find out more about Fjuri here, say Hi to Thom and the folks at Fjuri on Twitter @thomgruhler and @fjurigroup and connect with Thom on LinkedIn here.
Thanks to Pixabay for the image.
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[…] interview follows on from my recent interview – CMOs, collaboration, customer experience and the real-time data imperative – Interview with Thom G… – and is number 247 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing […]