Published August 16, 2014 by CNET

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Silicon Valley didn’t just build the new San Francisco 49ers stadium. It also helped build the football team’s roster.

The 49ers team, which will play the first game in its new stadium in the heart of Silicon Valley on Sunday, relied on a data-analytics app to help with scouting for the 2014 to 2015 season — and the team believes the technology could help it go all the way to the Super Bowl.

“It’s not traditional software where you can say ‘here’s your scouting app,'” SAP Chief Marketing Officer Jonathan Becher said. “If everyone was using the exact same [system] for scouting, there’d be no advantage.”
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Published August 16, 2014 by ZDNet

SANTA CLARA, CALIF.—The San Francisco 49ers move into a new $1.2 billion home this weekend. But perhaps Levi’s Stadium is the first to be built with a foundation in technology rather than concrete, quipped SAP chief marketing officer Jonathan Becher.

During a media tour at the South Bay arena along with the SAP-sponsored Performance Facility and training center next door on Friday, Becher reflected that when the software giant first started talking with the Niners, SAP wasn’t looking to just pay to slap its name on a building or gate.

“We’re not a beer company. We’re not a car company,” Becher asserted. He clarified that if the team wanted to change how its organization runs and how the team plays on the field, then SAP was game.

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Published July 29, 2014 by SAP Youtube Channel/C2MTL

SAP Chief Marketing Officer Jonathan Becher’s keynote from the 2014 Commerce + Creativity conference in Montreal. From a high school graduating class of ten to over 50,000 social connections, Jonathan explains why powerful connections mean more than ego metrics. He also discusses the role of big data and analytics in marketing, and why marketers are going from “mad men to math men.”

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Published July 9, 2014 by LexBlog Inc.

Why is it important for CMOs to be influential on Twitter? Per SAP’s CMO Jonathan Becher (@jbecher):

Your level of credibility can improve. As you establish your personal brand, that helps in entrepreneurship or building a business. If you’re a CMO of a large company, you’re in a pretty similar position because you are someone who can articulate the deeper values of a company, including its approach towards innovation, how it is dealing with social or tech change, or how it is handling environmental risks. You’re a leader of the company, and you’re representing the company and how it deals with key issues. And what you end up being able to do is present the company in a more human way because [you’re] a person’s face, not just a logo.

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Published July 9, 2014 by Epic Presence

There is plenty of advertising advice floating around online — so much so that wading through it could take more time than it’s worth. We thought it’d be helpful to instead get thoughts and advice straight from the CMOs of the best-marketed software-development and SaaS companies in the world.

Here are quotes on advertising from 26 current and former heads of marketing at leading software companies. We have included titles for anyone whose title is not precisely Chief Marketing Officer.

We get emotionally involved in stories that describe what it’s like to overcome these opposing forces. The more involved we are in a story, the more likely we will retell it.

The implications for consumer marketing are straightforward. We want consumers to view themselves as protagonists in a story with the brand as a supporting actor.

– Jonathan Becher, SAP (source)

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Published July 8, 2014 by Forbes

As the necessity of CMOs’ taking center stage in social media for the sake of their companies–and their personal brands–solidifies, so too do rankings of their stature in the social sphere. The latest is from social-media analytics firm PeerIndex, which has created a list of the most influential big-brand CMOs on Twitter TWTR +2.19% based on PI score. A PI score includes an executive’s activity score, audience score and authority score. “The way that we measure it is around the extent to which people respond to them,” said PeerIndex Founder and CEO Azeem Azhar. That analysis puts GE CMOBeth Comstock, with 35,500 followers, at the top, followed by SAP CMO Jonathan Becher, with almost 13,000 followers. “Having followers doesn’t really matter,” Azhar explained. “What matters is whether when Beth Comstock speaks, do other people engage with her, and who are the people engaging with her?” What’s valuable is the earned engagement that a person gets when active on Twitter, and that’s often predictive of the engagement they will get in the future. “We are measuring the fact that Beth is respected widely, and we can demonstrate that by the level of engagement,” Azhar said.

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Published June 26, 2014 by Leadership by Louis Foong 

In our continuing CMO Spotlight series, I am happy to feature SAP CMO, Jonathan Becher. His Twitter handle describes him as a performance management enthusiast, sports analytics aficionado and three times CEO. A fitting choice for our Spotlight feature in the midst of World Cup Soccer 2014.

Becher is credited with turning SAP’s focus to a more human approach. “It’s not just ‘business runs SAP’; it’s also ‘life runs SAP.’ You can sum up the change as moving from B2B to P2P—people to people,” Becher says. This new approach fit right in with the company’s mission to “help the world run better and improve people’s lives.”

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Published June 16, 2014 by Nexalogy

C2MTL is a conference of ideas, but which ones stood out? Using a lexical map, we were able see the key concepts taking hold, and their relationship with each other. Not surprisingly, some of the top social media memes at C2MTL were the result of things said on stage. Here are three speaker quotes that stood out.

1. Mad Men to Math Men

SAP CMO Jonathan Becher hit home with this statement:

We saw it emerge as its own cluster on the lexical map, and it stayed strong throughout the event. This is illustrated by the connections between words, and the size of each node:

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Published June 4, 2014 by the Economist

AT A Montreal business conference last week called C2MTL, participants were encouraged to put on a blindfold, slip into a dry pool filled with plastic balls, and, over loudish dance music, seek solutions with strangers to challenges ranging from cutting youth unemployment to making business ventures involving sex more respectable. Abigail Posner, Google’s head of strategy and a C2MTL speaker, says that her experience in the brainstorming pool was “funky” enough to lift her and others’ inhibitions and the ideas produced were better for it. Put on by advertising agency Sid Lee and Cirque du Soleil, both based in Montreal, C2MTL bills itself as a business conference “somewhere between genius and insanity”.

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Published May 29, 2014 by The Huffington Post

During day one at C2MTL in Montreal, “a business conference somewhere between genius and insanity,” several multi-milionaires delivered TED-Talk style inspirational speeches to the aspiring moguls in the audience. A few misguided lecturers bored the audience with platitudes, preaching the value of adaptability (change is a constant), innovation (think different) and passion (love what you do and you’ll never . . . snore). And then there were the winners who delivered fresh, inspiring ideas that anyone in business can take to heart, including:

Connection. Jonathan Becher, CMO at SAP, believes in the marketing power of social media, but not in racking up the numbers. Any connection, even online, should be based on shared passions and the honest desire to exchange thoughts and ideas. If you’re using Twitter to push your products and boost your ego, you’re not doing it right. The take-away: Depth of connections outweighs breadth.

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