Published March 12, 2014 by Uberflip

Want to take your brand to the top? Here’s a list, in no particular order, of 10 CMOs at the top of their game and their key insights on how to be a kick-ass marketer.

Click here to read the full list

Published March 7, 2014 by Fast Company 

When SAP launched their sports analytics division in 2013, they never dreamed that it would end up creating a whole new adjacent business: small business analytics. That’s right: SAP’s work with the NBA taught them how to sell into mom-and-pop businesses, a market they had previously never touched.

So how did they get from the NBA to SMB?

Sports As a Playground

Consider the analytical experiment that is NBA.com/STATS and the Video Box Score–the system now captures every dribble. By working to document, process, and display virtually every imaginable statistic in basketball games, SAP is showing businesses of all kinds the seemingly endless variety of real-time analytics at their fingertips. And these solutions aren’t relegated to sports alone.

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Published March 7, 2014 by B2B Marketing

Being a female marketer in a male-dominated industry can be difficult. Maxine-Laurie Marshall sought advice from female leaders about dealing with the most common barriers stopping women from progressing their careers.

Mentoring
Jonathan Becher, CMO of SAP, believes the lack of females in their twenties with mentors is potentially harming their future career success: “I saw a survey recently of about 1800 modestly to very successful professionals over the age of 40 in California – heavily weighted toward the technology field. In the study, there was a strong correlation between the degree of success and the presence of a mentor in the respondent’s twenties. If I look at women in their twenties who have business mentors compared to men, it seems substantially lower.”

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Published on March 1, 2014 by PR Week

SAP’s Jonathan Becher speaks to Lindsay Stein about plans to simplify comms strategies and leveraging social media to listen to consumers.

How do marketing and communications work together at SAP?
When I joined the company six years ago, there wasn’t a single marketing department.

Marketing was embedded in the business units and regional functions, and there was a small corporate marketing unit that primarily looked after the brand.

Depending on how you interacted with the company, you got a slightly different story, so we felt more like a federation of loosely connected organizations.

In phase one, SAP created a single-brand entity for itself. Phase two was the story of what the brand is, and the third part was about bringing those disconnected components – primarily for marketing – together.

Part of what I worked on in the first 18 months was making the unit feel like one, because there are synergies when you work together. These efforts will continue in 2014, where we will continue to create more synergies between the two units.

They are not the same discipline, but we call them two sides of the same coin. We have started doing a better job. It’s a journey we are on. I won’t claim we have it all figured out, but it feels more holistic.

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Published February 27, 2014 by USA Today

NEW ORLEANS — Chris Bosh is a 6-foot-11 basketball superstar who has won two NBA Championships with the Miami Heat and an Olympic gold medal in 2008. He’s a nine-time All-Star with a silky smooth jump shot.

In other words, he’s as accomplished as any baller this side of LeBron James and Kobe Bryant. Yet when he heard about a new player-efficiency software program in development at All-Star festivities earlier this month here, he sought out its maker, SAP, and asked for an instant demo.

“I’m open to using any tool that helps, especially since we live in the information age,” says Bosh, who attended Georgia Tech for a year before going pro. “This is amazing stuff.”

The pilot program that riveted Bosh, called SportVU, records every movement and action of a player during a 48-minute game. In all, 792,000 data points for the game’s participants are plotted. With a few clicks, an athlete can be evaluated based on their shooting, spacing on the court, speed, dribbling and other factors. A video component of each play is available in a small screen within the program.

The intersection of elite athletes and data parsing is becoming as common in sports as videotape review and pregame shoot arounds. Every major league is increasingly driven to find a sliver of an edge in training and in-game performance. “Tech comes in waves in the way it can transform an industry — first it was banking, then retail, now sports,” SAP Chief Marketing Officer Jonathan Becher says.

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Published February 25, 2014 by C2MTL

Today, C2MTL announces the addition of four new leaders, bringing to 25 the number of prestigious lecturers attending the event in Montréal this coming May 27 to 29. The four new key figures from the spheres of business and creativity areNathalie Bondil, director and chief curator of the Montréal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA),Kevin O’Brien, Aimia’s senior Vice President and Chief Business Development Officer for Canada, Jonathan Becher, Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) for SAP and James Murphy, former leader of LCD Soundsystem and also co-producer of Reflektor by Arcade Fire.

Click here to read the full announcement

Published February 19, 2014 by Chiefmartec.com

When I posted my presentation The Marketing Technologist: Neo of the Marketing Matrix a few months ago, one of the people who commented on it was Nancy Fessatidis, VP of Marketing Operations at SAP:

Great post Scott. The CMT role has served us well at SAP. We call this our Business Information Officer (BIO). It’s a critical role not just in Marketing but in every key line of business — to help translate our business needs into an enterprise architecture roadmap.

My ears pricked up, as public sightings of chief marketing technologists are still relatively rare. When Gartner released their latest research last month showing that 81% of large companies now have a chief marketing technologist type role, my reaction was both (a) awesome and (b) where are they hiding?

In a subsequent exchange on Twitter, around a Harvard Business blog post on why CMOs and CIOs Need to Get Along to Make Big Data Work, the CMO of SAP, Jonathan Becher, actually chimed in to offer an introduction to their chief marketing technologist:

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Published February 19, 2014 by M-Prize

A Maverick Hangout with Gary Hamel and Jonathan Becher

When it comes to building management and business models that are fit for the 21st century, one of the fundamental challenges is developing organizations that are capable of discovering, nurturing, aggregating, and appropriately rewarding contributions from employees, customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders across boundaries.

Today, employees are enlivened by unprecedented levels of openness, autonomy, participation, and flexibility. At the same time, customers have become more active (and powerful) contributors, collaborators, critics and evangelists. In some cases, customers or “users” are the company. The most vibrant companies are re-imagining their boundaries to connect with a web of partners and stakeholders and facilitate new forms of social production.

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Published February 6, 2014 by IT Business Edge

By Loraine Lawson

Here’s a humbling prediction for IT: By 2018, the CMO’s IT budget could “outstrip” the CIO’s budget, according to Gartner.

And that’s fine with CMOs, who now see marketing as the natural home for Big Data projects, according to a recent Harvard Business Review Blog post written by Jesko Perrey and Matt Ariker of McKinsey & Company.

(continued)

SAP addresses that communication gap by assigning a Business Information Officer (BIO) for each business unit, including SAP Marketing, according to SAP CMO Jonathan Becher.

“The BIO must understand and translate business strategy into an IT enterprise architecture strategy and help guide technology investments,” Becher is quoted as saying.

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Published February 4, 2014 by the Harvard Business Review

By Jesko Perrey and Matt Ariker

In all this table-pounding is a central truth in today’s Big Data world: both the CMO and CIO are on the hook for turning all that data into above-market growth. Call it a shotgun marriage, but it’s one that CMOs and CIOs both need to make work―especially given that worldwide, data is growing at 40 percent per year. To do that, both executives will need to change how they work―and how they work together.

“Most CMOs have woken up to the fact that technology is fundamentally changing what marketers do and we can’t treat IT like a back-office function,” says Jonathan Becher, CMO of SAP. “The CIO is becoming a strategic partner that is crucial to developing and executing marketing strategy.”

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