Beth Comstock is bringing good things to life at GE. As chief marketing officer and senior
VP of the venerable technology company, Comstock is credited with transforming GE’s culture, historically devoted to process and engineering, to one that’s more agile and creative. Comstock, who returned to the CMO role last March after a two-year stint as president of integrated media at NBC Universal, leads GE’s organic growth and innovation initiatives, as well as the sales and marketing teams. She is responsible for GE’s Ecomagination initiative, which includes investing in cleaner technologies to drive growth, as well as the new Healthymagination program, a $6 billion commitment to health care innovation. On a visit to Toronto, she sat down with Marketing managing editor Rebecca Harris to discuss her role as CMO and what’s new on the marketing front at the 130-year-old General Electric Company.
Fast Company once dubbed chief marketing officer “the most dangerous job in business,” referring to the short tenure of the average CMO. Why do you think CMOs typically have such short-lived positions?
I think it’s because marketers are the drivers of change and change takes time and needs patience. Sometimes marketers are expected to drive immediate change and it’s not realistic to expect that in 24 months the change that needs to happen is going to happen. That being said, marketers have to define success and show interim benchmarks along the way to show they’re making progress towards an ultimate goal. Sometimes that is hard for marketers as well.
What is your biggest challenge as CMO?
The biggest challenge is the scale and size of the company. It’s what’s exciting about it, but it also means we’re like a laboratory of marketing because we have marketers across a large spectrum of industries with varying customer needs. For example, our aviation business has 200-plus customers around the globe, and our GE Money consumer finance business has millions of customers. So the kind of marketing skills that we need to succeed in both areas are going to be very different. One marketing team might need to spend a lot of time working with their sales force to be more effective and making sure their territories are targeted the right way. Another marketer may be totally focused on innovation. It’s a pretty wide spectrum, so it can be a bit daunting to try to find some commonality… We’ve been on a journey this past year–we call it gold standard marketing–where we want to make sure we’ve hired the right people, we’ve promoted the right people, and that their skills are really best in class. When you have marketers in so many different situations, the good news is you get a lot of great practices.
How have your marketing plans shifted in light of the recession?
The global marketplace has affected all of GE…It’s hard for me to say marketing was affected disproportionately compared to other functions. For the first time ever across some of our businesses, we actually had to fire sales people as well as marketing people, or not hire as many because of the circumstances. We have this rallying cry that we use, which is ‘optimize for today and build for tomorrow.’ It’s making sure we’ve got the right value proposition defined, spending more time with customers, and looking at pricing. But the good news is we’re still planning the tomorrow projects. We have a whole innovation effort and we’re able to keep that alive in the tough times, which I think is important.
One of your strategic initiatives is to focus on the interaction between marketing and product development. What is the aim of this, and what exactly does it involve?
GE is a technology company, and technology breakthroughs are very important, but sometimes we think this stuff is so good it will just sell itself. What we’ve tried to do in the past few years is connect marketing with technology, so that marketing can say ‘here’s where the trends are going, this is a great technology and if we apply it in this way we’ll find a new market.’ We’ve been trying not to just say, ‘hey here’s my new gas turbine, go market it,’ but [instead ask] who are we targeting from the beginning and how do we develop the right features. It’s just getting people together at the start as opposed to at the very end.
What specific things are you doing to market Healthymagination?
We launched it in May and it was designed more in the beginning to launch with our customers in the industry space. Since then we’ve done some nice deals on the NBC side–we just announced a new opportunity with Campbell Soup, for example. [The company has signed on as the inaugural sponsor, and will promote its lower-sodium soups on shows such as NBC’s Today.]
Then we’re going to do a big consumer push early next year. In fact, we plan to time it to the Vancouver Olympics so one of the things you’ll see from us is a health theme in and around Vancouver.
For any company, advertising your ecological credentials leaves you open to criticism, and sometimes charges of greenwashing. Has that been a challenge at GE , and if so, how have you dealt with that?
It’s a great question and it’s certainly a concern we had when we were planning Ecomagination. GE had somewhat of a public history of having some issues, specifically I’m talking about the Hudson River and the PCBs [more than a million pounds of PCBs were dumped in the Hudson by GE before they were banned in 1977]… We felt we had to make ourselves very transparent and we needed third-party sources that could validate that we were actually doing this. We had to be authentic in what we were trying to do. The goal was to have cleaner technology because our customers demanded it. We also said we expect to make money on [clean technology] and our customers have to make money. It was very important in the beginning to say ‘make no mistake, this is about sustainable business, it’s not just about being sustainable for green’s sake.’ That helped us because it was authentic. It’s who we are.
