VP of marketing Diane Brink talks about marketing’s role during a transformative period for a business icon

By Michael J. McDermott

At its core, IBM is really about large-scale progress, says Diane Brink, the company’s vice president of marketing for Global Technology Services. Big Blue is approaching its centennial anniversary in 2011 and has a history of producing breakthroughs that have had a substantial impact on how the world works and people live — things like bar codes and tunneling microscopes. “We are about figuring out how to leverage and integrate technology into business for better outcomes, and that’s something we do every day, around the world,” says Brink, who drove home that point during her presentation at the Masters of Marketing Conference. “That’s the mission we’ve had since we started, and it remains our mission today, although IBM as a company continues to evolve in order to support it.”

For IBM, evolution is an enterprise-wide undertaking, and that includes the marketing function. For nearly a century, the company has been adapting to change. It has dealt with both macro-trends, such as shifts from mechanical business machines to electronic processing and from massive mainframes to cloud computing, and shorter-term trends, such as economic cyclicality. In an exclusive interview with ANA Magazine, Brink discussed the changes IBM is currently facing and how they affect its marketing.

Q. What is happening in the world right now that is driving change at IBM as a company?

A. First of all, while we’ve been evolving, the fundamentals of our values and focus with clients, with governments, and with individuals haven’t changed, but we have been executing a strategy around transforming our business to high-value services. That’s because the very nature of innovation is really changing. Given what’s happening in society and the marketplace, there is a demand for an open, more-collaborative, multi-disciplinary and global operating environment. We have to interact with many, many stakeholders in an ecosystem — clients, employees, the academic world, our business partners, community leaders — and we have taken a lot of different actions to be able to participate in that change.

 What we see over and over again are substantive examples that the world is in fact becoming flatter and smaller, but it is also getting much smarter, and that’s the thesis behind our Smarter Planet campaign. Things are becoming more intelligent. There are a billion transistors for each individual today. Intelligence has been introduced into all types of devices, and systems and processes are becoming more interdependent and connected. We’ve seen that in the financial markets recently, of course, but it’s not limited to that. We see it around natural systems, too, and around water and energy and health care and government. This whole notion of what we call a smarter planet — a world that is becoming instrumented and intelligent and interconnected — literally requires us to change the way we work. The promise of what’s possible is amazing, and it’s right in front of us.

Q. What do you see as IBM’s role in this rapidly changing world?

A. We’ve started a conversation with the world about what’s happening as it relates to this notion of a smarter planet. We have been actively engaging in the conversation — not only with large enterprises and government but with smaller, mid-sized companies as well — to work through things like supply chain issues and health care delivery. Our role is to help create, transform, and really build a smarter planet. We’re not going to be able to do it by ourselves. It’s got to be done in collaboration with partners, and this is already happening.

For example, we’ve been working with the city of Stockholm on smart transportation systems that have reduced the city’s carbon footprint, increased usage of mass transit, and improved service. It has reduced traffic by 20% and emissions by 40%, and it’s attracted something like 40,000 additional users to mass transit. We’re doing a lot with RFID (radio frequency identification) tags to track food products from farm to shelf, which has applications in freshness and inventory management but is also important for tracking back health issues. We’re working with retailers on inventory management systems to maximize product replenishment and storage and boost customer service ratings.

Q. What does this all mean for the IBM brand and the brand identity message you want to deliver to the marketplace?

A. As we’ve been shifting who we are, we’ve exited certain businesses and acquired others, but those things aren’t necessarily perceived by consumers, many of whom may still see us in the context of things like point-of-sale systems and ATM machines. But the essence of the IBM brand is in almost everything that people touch as individuals — airline reservations, retail experience, financial markets processing, medical systems. The essence of what we do — integrating technology and business — is embedded inside a lot of major enterprises, governments and even small businesses around the world. What we’re doing with our communications around the smarter planet theme is helping multiple audiences understand who we are and what’s possible by working collaboratively with us to build a smarter planet. It’s part of supporting our transformation and our leadership agenda in areas such as smart grids.

It’s important that we clarify the brand to our employees, our alumni, our investors, and young people who are our potential employees of the future. We are putting a lot of energy behind this in every medium. Traditional media channels — advertising, working with the press, working with analysts — are still important to us. But we’re certainly taking advantage of new media, such as video assets, our Web presence, blogging, virtual events, viral outreach. We are really trying to drive multiple touchpoints and conversations where we can listen and engage. We’re involved with multiple networks, such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. We do “innovation jams” where we open up topics to broad communities. We just did one with universities around pressing issues like energy, the environment, and how to leverage information. We are using a multitude of activities to create a dialogue, and we’re constantly evaluating their effectiveness to determine what the right mix is that will ultimately help us drive our business.

Q. IBM is renowned for its marketing accountability program. How has the recent recession helped you sharpen your focus in that area?

A. Being disciplined is important, but inside the marketing and communications organization we are constantly driving for a spirit of innovation. We don’t want to miss any opportunity to encourage creativity. The economic downturn has led to a tough business environment, and we’re all going to be talking about this with our grandkids. Traditional responses are just not going to be sufficient. One way we are dealing with this is by working with our clients to really focus on driving business value and, of course, acting with speed and making sure that we make the tough choices in terms of where we invest our time, money and resources. Clients are looking for a clear return on investment, and we need to be able to demonstrate that in our value proposition. At the same time, for us as a marketing organization, we too are getting maniacal about the tradeoffs and choices we make to support our smarter planet agenda so that we are delivering true business value, not independent of the climate but in the context of the climate.

Accountable marketing can help fuel sales growth. At IBM, our marketing communications community and sales and finance organizations work together very closely to make sure that marketing communications is an integral part of our success as a business. We have a series of metrics we use, and we continually evaluate them to make sure they are on point to accountability and that marketing spending is driving to the bottom line. I don’t want to characterize it as simple, because it’s hard. It’s a combination of discipline, process, communication, examination, and creativity that drives the marketing accountability we have substantiated inside and across our organization.

All big companies tend to be process-driven, and over the years we’ve gotten smarter about our marketing processes and making sure the process doesn’t overtake our actions. We always want to be encouraging creativity. We’re constantly reexamining how we do things and finding better ways to collaborate internally. Our finance colleagues are an integral part of our success, not just in terms of the funding we get, but in helping us align marketing to our business strategy and understanding our objectives and our success metrics. Using metrics allows us to show impact, and that is very helpful when you are dealing within a very constrained environment.