The following appears on Forbes.com
By Billee Howard – We are in a period of transformation we haven’t seen since the days of the Industrial Revolution. Once untouchable market incumbents have fallen. Small and agile start-ups have come out of nowhere to reimagine industries. Digital has gone from a mere channel to a necessary and vital component of reimagining business. Within this sea change, the role in the C-Suite that has perhaps been impacted most is that of the CMO.
Faced with an increasing amount of responsibility and accountability for the long-term growth of a company’s brand and performance, it has perhaps never been a more challenging time to be a marketer. With that in mind, I have launched an “Ask the CMO” feature where I speak with some of the top marketers in the world to uncover the leading issues and trends driving change in the marketplace.
For my latest piece in this series, I had the pleasure of speaking with Toni Clayton-Hine, CMO of Xerox and marketing veteran who has overseen the recent transformation of Xerox and its Set the Page Free campaign. The platform is a great example of using marketing as a major driver of brand reinvention. Its core objective is not to focus on the brand’s legacy connected with hardware and paper products, but to instead highlight the ways Xerox can serve clients who need assistance in straddling the real-life and virtual realms, while advancing innovations imperative to the future of work. The project brings together fourteen world-renowned creative talents including authors, poets and songwriters to collaborate on a book about the modern workplace.
