I remember it all clearly — I was in my bedroom, anxiously waiting for an interviewer to show up in the Zoom call that was open in my red Dell laptop. She showed up soon with a warm smile, instantly putting me at ease by talking about our common ground of studying engineering and choosing a career path in marketing. My nerves vanished just like that.
I was speaking with Jennifer Stagnaro, then the Chief Marketing Officer at the company I was interviewing with. You couldn’t tell how accomplished she was by her humility, but you got a glimpse because of how articulate and intelligent she immediately came across as.
Jennifer has been a tech marketing leader for over 40 years, having led several marketing teams in well-known companies like SugarCRM, HackerRank, and Tymphany. She’s known to bring a mix of curiosity, data-driven thinking and creativity to the table which, one could easily argue, are the elements that make up an exceptional tech marketer. Jennifer’s also actively passionate about making a social impact, as one of the founding members of the San Francisco chapter of a private network called Chief, which was built to drive more women into leadership positions. She also plays the role of Executive Director for The Meth Project, a large-scale prevention program for reducing methamphetamine use. Today, she spends her time consulting at her own firm, Stagnaro Strategic Marketing, for a variety of clients, and learning about new technologies and tools (her latest pursuit was Mailchimp.) I sat down with her recently to talk about her incredible career journey and her advice for young professionals today — here are some excerpts!
On significant changes in the marketing industry
The interesting thing is that while technology has evolved and how you market or sell that technology has evolved along with it, there are some fundamental things that have not changed at all.
I thought about this when I started doing consulting some 20 years ago; there’s some fundamentals of marketing that even predate me — if you’re trying to market something to somebody, you need to understand who they are, what problem you’re trying to solve and how to educate that person that they have a problem that you can solve.
The thing that has changed now are the methods that you do for understanding and educating them.
For example, consumer and market data. The amount of data that you have today can be overwhelming, and in theory you should be able to make anything more tailored now to an individual because you have all this data about that individual. You have all this data, but what can you really derive from it is another question altogether. So, I think the trends are going there now — trying to figure out what and how to derive insights, but it is interesting looking back on how much we know now versus what we knew in the 80s about somebody.
I think my best example of how collecting and analysing data has changed is from when I worked for Procter & Gamble, which is a big consumer packaged goods company. I was in their packaged soap and detergent division, working on Tide and a number of other detergent brands that still exist. I was in the IT department and the brand people wanted to know, what was their market share?
The only way that they could get their market share data at the time was by buying AC Nielsen data that was collected by sending people into grocery stores and literally count how many of each product was on the shelf and the back room, and extrapolate this data and make assumptions.
They would publish this data every two months. That was how frequent you got your market share data, statistically based on store counts!
So, at the time, one of the first big transitions I lived through was when they put barcode scanners in the stores. In fact, I worked for the company that started that - IRI. They would scan the UPC codes and all of a sudden, instead of two months to get your market share data, you could get it monthly. With technology today, you can get those insights much closer to real time.
Another thing that has changed drastically is the way that we reach customers. PCs weren't ubiquitous yet. People didn't have PCs in their home and they certainly didn't have a cell phone, and so you were selling technology to the companies back in the old days using a Rolodex. Do you know what a Rolodex is?
Basically everybody had a business card and you would collect business cards and you literally put it in a little round filing system called a rolodex. So, you'd hire people, especially salespeople, based on who they knew and how good their Rolodex was, because the only way you could reach these people inside a company was if somebody knew them, and the only way you could communicate with them was if they had business telephones.
To market your product, back in the day, you'd have to get a reporter to write a story based on your press release and pitch. There were all of these trade publications that don't exist anymore that would get all the news and follow an industry, and these reporters for these publications were in only a few places like Boston or New York so you’d have to get on an aeroplane to go pitch a story to them. So, you truly went on a press tour.
I remember when I did investor relations. PowerPoint didn’t exist at that point, and for an IPO roadshow, they would only accept 35 millimetre slides for presentation purposes. I remember being in Europe on an IPO roadshow, and having to call the artist back in San Francisco in the middle of the night to make slide changes which they FedExed to me from California to France, so that I could add them to the presentation the next day.
On quick wins
I joined a chip company at a time when they had had some design wins in Japan and Korea, and they were ready to launch the company and tried to sell the product to all handset manufacturers.
Of course the big win would be — at least from a US market standpoint — to get designed into an iPhone.
When I came in, I spent time figuring out who the target audience was, which was a combination of different personas because at the time, the Verizons and the AT&Ts, the service providers delivering the network, would dictate to the handset manufacturers what features they wanted in a new phone, so you had to sell to the both in order to drive change.
So we understood the market from both perspectives, and understood who the influencers were and came up with a killer demo for the chip, that you had to experience yourself or you weren’t going to believe it.
We launched at the Mobile World Congress in February with an integrated marketing campaign with the theme "hear and be heard."
We did this in a small booth at the event, because we were a startup and we couldn't afford a big one. However, because of our marketing efforts, we won an innovator award and quickly became the buzz at the show.
The campaign included direct marketing to the executives of our target audience - it was a lucite tombstone that had our chip embedded in it announcing the birth of this new technology. We did PR, got press in the New York Times and other big trade publications. As a result of all this marketing, Steve Jobs went to one of his audio engineers and told them to check us out. Apple is one of the hardest companies to sell technology into, because they'd just rather invent it on their own.
We got designed into the iPhone 4, and our company went public on that design win.
Now, I remember a relatively quick win we had in HackerRank, when COVID shut everything down. Nobody wanted to buy HackerRank’s Interview product because recruiters and hiring managers were used to doing the whiteboarding and technical interviews by inviting candidates physically into an office so this product had pretty low adoption.
All of a sudden the market and the world changed overnight, literally. There was increasingly more demand for technology and software engineers because all these companies had to do something different when everything in the physical world was shut down.
It was all remote, and we had a great installed base, so we could create a win-win for our customers. Make it easy for them to adopt it, use it, and worry about compensation later.
It took getting all the different teams - the product team, the marketing team, the sales team - aligned to shift all our priorities and respond to this opportunity we had. We were originally on the path to launch an end-to-end hiring solution, and we now completely shifted focus to interviewing alone. It took us only two months, we launched all these new improvements in May after the world had shut down in March. We did a webinar in May, allowed unlimited access for free till August and then started converting to revenue in September.
On advice to young professionals
Fill the gaps.
What I mean by that is so many people - and I think this is counter to what young people are hearing today about taking frequent breaks and setting up boundaries - are working for a business and are in a unique position to spot things that could be done differently. So, when you spot this, I encourage you to go ahead and attempt to make a change or innovate.
The reason why getting young talent in the door is so valuable to a company is to have fresh eyes. They see things differently than the people who have been doing it forever and aren't stuck in boxes, but I’ve unfortunately seen a lot of them reject these opportunities to bring in change.
“This wasn’t the job that I was hired for.” - you have to expunge those words from your brain when you’re young. You have to actively look for missing pieces in your company and then in a constructive way (because you don't want to piss off whoever's responsible for that) fill the gaps.
So much falls apart because of the cracks in between organizations in business, and you have to be open to finding and fixing them, to make sure that the customer experience is great or that your product works well or that your marketing program runs smoothly.
You obviously don’t want to start turf battles, but you also don’t want to have a bunch of people around you sitting back, saying “that's not my job.” or else the business is likely to fail.
On marketing being taken seriously
I recently ran into an engineer I worked with, almost 15 years after I'd worked with him. He's a bright PhD, worked as a professor at UCLA, and wound up in an early stage audio company that I worked for and he was the head of engineering there.
I ran into him and he said, “Jennifer, I have to tell you that I used to think marketing was fluffy and a waste of space but then I learned from you that you can have all the great technical ideas in the world and the best product, but if no one knows about it, it doesn't matter.” and he followed that up with “You made me famous.”
What had happened was - he was flying from New York to San Francisco and there was this 16 year old kid sitting next to him and he had a copy of this audio magazine and on the cover, was our product. He said to the kid, “Hey, what do you think of that?” pointing at the product.
The kid is like, “wow, that looks really cool.” and he opens up a page in the magazine and he’s quoted in the article so when he tells the kid that it’s him, it blows his mind.
And he said to me, “You know, you got that product on the cover of this magazine.”
So, marketing absolutely matters and it comes in when you have a good product. I can’t market my way around a bad product. My job is to make sure that I'm getting you a lot of attention from the target audience that you have, and communicating to them in a way that's in touch with their reality and in touch with what the product can deliver.
I'm working with a nonprofit right now, called the meth project, which is a methamphetamine prevention program. We recently got some big donors to run this art contest in the state of Montana, and when we were writing up the results, I said to my team, "Look guys, you need a section at the end where you talk about the strategy we executed, because it wasn’t all serendipity; there was thought behind it and it's a marketer's responsibility to make sure that all of your constituents understand that.”
At the end of the day, results are results, but as a marketer, you need to get people to understand how you got there.
Jen and my conversation was filled with many more such nuggets of wisdom, that I know I’m going to immediately put into practice. If you look up to someone, here’s me highly recommending sitting down and speaking with them about their journeys, because you’d likely feel a boost of passion for your practice, and see it from a new perspective. I know I do.