Transcripts

Bennie F Johnson

Hello, and thank you for joining us for this episode of AMA’s Marketing And. I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson. In our episodes, we explore life through a marketing lens, delving into conversations with individuals that flourish at the intersection of marketing and the unexpected.

We’ll introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not yet have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know. Through thought-provoking conversations, we’ll unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. Today, my special guest is Eugenia Blackstone, the Chief Marketing Officer for Iris Powered by Generali, or as she refers to herself sometimes, Chief Magic Officer, or champion of removing obstacles.

As the rest of the world refers to her, one of Forbes top entrepreneurial CMOs. She’s experienced in building and leading high performing multidisciplinary teams and developing, launching and marketing products in the B2B and B2B2C environments. Eugenia leads the development and execution of strategic marketing programs for the identity and cyber protection services businesses. It’s through her partnerships of global business executives and product management and sales team that she’s helped to lead growth and change across industries. Eugenia, welcome to the podcast. 

Eugenia Blackstone 

Thank you for having me.

Bennie

It’s so fun to read through the bio and we talk about the formal accolades, but I think nothing really speaks more than those names that grow from our experience. So tell me a bit about what it is to be both the chief magic officer and the champion of removing obstacles. Let’s talk about that, my friend.

Eugenia 

Yeah, it’s funny that you say that because when you were, when I was listening to you say that, I thought, I don’t know that I’ve officially given myself those names, but they’ve come up in context of really the career that I’ve had, the work that I’ve done over the years. And for Chief Magic Officer in particular, it kind of started out.

I don’t want to say as a joke, more of anybody that’s worked in marketing for a lot of their career has probably had the experience where you’re sitting in front of a counterpart that probably is not in marketing. And they’re like, oh, well, we can just do your marketing magic thing. Your marketing spin on it, that sort of thing.

Bennie

Okay.

Eugenia

 And sometimes, depending on the conversation, it can come across as feeling a little condescending, a little like, oh, you just do some magic, figure it all just kind of happens, but just put some magic on it, like fairy dust or something. But there really is a lot of thought and strategy. And there’s a lot that goes into doing good marketing, especially so good that it seems like magic, that it doesn’t look like that much effort went into it. And I was having a review with my current boss, our CEO, and…

Bennie

Right. Right. Right.

Eugenia 

We got on the topic and she said, no, I think you’re misunderstanding me. Like I genuinely see that as the magic that you’re able to do that other people can’t. And so I’ve just started to kind of, you know, really embrace, embrace it and not take it necessarily as a potential, a potential negative. And I kind of mentioned it to some other counterparts.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Eugenia 

In a marketing meeting like, yeah, we are, you know, let’s own this. Yeah, we are pretty magical folks. And so it kind of went from there. Yeah.

Bennie

Yeah, you know, in many ways, magic is for marketing is unexplained exponential value, right? That’s what it kind of speaks to the things that we can’t see why others can’t see why it makes sense, but it happens and makes us better, right? 

Eugenia

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yep, absolutely.

Bennie

It’s so yeah, I think, I think we lean into that space in there, but, you do talk about a bit of, you know, marketing has always been shrouded in kind of mystery for many of our business counterparts, you know,

Eugenia 

Absolutely. I think as we’ve gotten into, and not any one industry or business, but the world in particular, everybody wants to be the number one company out there in any given space. There are so many more startups and venture cap funding and all of these things. Everybody wants to be the next billion, trillion dollar company. 

Bennie 

Mm-hmm.

Eugenia

And so I think as that relates to what’s happening within the discipline of marketing, there is this thought process where it feels like marketing is being pushed into this realm where we need to tie every single effort back to some particular return in revenue. And I mean, we’re stakeholders in the business, so we do have some responsibility to do that. But because marketing does have this air of mysteriousness to it and it is not, you know, one in equals one out sort of thing. It can feel a little constraining to be bottled in that way and to say, okay, if we do this, you have to tell me exactly what that’s going to result in and at what period of time and how that’s going to work. Again, I’m not saying, you know, take all the guardrails off or not have any metrics or things like that. But I think you do have to give marketing a little bit of freedom to maintain that mystery a little bit to understand that sometimes two plus two equals six in the world of marketing that even though you’re not seeing the yield or the return in one particular area overnight, it doesn’t mean that it’s not working and it doesn’t mean that you don’t need it. And eventually, if you stop doing it, you will feel the impact of it.

Bennie

Right. So what advice do you have for those to expand, to create a more expanded set of KPIs, right? Because I often see the basic KPIs really do what you’ve said. They lock you in to not really seeing that unleashed value. But if we take the time to kind of think of a more expanded set of KPIs, we can start to predict where we see this impact happening, which surprises our counterparts. What’s your advice on finding KPIs that matter?

Eugenia

Yeah, so the first thing I think as it relates to that is some of it’s introspection. You’re going to have to look at the particular business you’re at, what makes sense for your business. Sit with yourself alone for a little bit and say, all right, if this was solely my decision, here’s what would make sense for me to be measuring. And here’s how I would be able to speak to how the work that myself and my team is doing is contributing to the success of the business.

And then from there, you really have to get outside of yourself and go and talk to your other counterparts, the other stakeholders of the business, and have a conversation with them and make them understand how what you do contributes to their success. So that means I have a very good relationship with our chief technology officer. I have a very good relationship with our chief revenue officer. And I think because I’m having these conversations with them on a very regular basis, we’re able to really come to a place where we’re all in agreement on, Hey, I can’t say with certainty that this particular thing that marketing did brought us X dollars, but I can tell you, we closed six deals last month where we had to pull out that particular piece of information or we had to, having that

Bennie

Right.

Eugenia 

Shut down a hurdle to a conversation to keep a deal from being done. know, those sorts of things need to be articulated. And I think if you’re in, if you don’t have those relationships with those other stakeholders, you, there isn’t another person speaking up for marketing, almost validating. No, no, no, no, no, we, do need that. That helps me. I can’t, that made my job 10 times easier. And because I was able to close that deal,

Bennie 

Right. Right. Right.

Eugenia 

I can now move on to the next and close the next deal and so on and so forth. So think a lot of it is really just about being able to have those conversations with your counterparts and figure out, hey, how do we align on what’s important to the both of us and the value that we bring? think in particularly, historically you’ve seen or you can see there’s this kind of love hate relationship sometimes between sales and marketing. 

Bennie

Right.

Eugenia 

And I think that I have really made it my mission in my career, particularly as I’ve been in leadership roles in my career, to always maintain a very good relationship with our sales organization. And that’s because it really cuts down on the finger pointing and it’s like, how do we get on the same side? We all want to accomplish the same goal. So how do we do that in a way that props the other side up that much more, that makes the other side easier, know, the life that much easier.

Bennie 

Right.

Eugenia 

And I’m not going to say that it doesn’t come without its challenges because very recently I had a conversation where sales brought back some feedback to marketing and my team wasn’t necessarily delighted to hear it because it meant we were gonna need to change some things and rework some things. But ultimately I think I was able to articulate to them, hey, no, this is what we want. We really do. This means we have a healthy organization that they feel comfortable enough to come back to us and say,

Bennie

Right.

Eugenia 

Hey, I know we thought this was going to work or we thought this made sense, but I’m actually out here talking to people and it’s not hidden like we thought it was going to hit. Like we need to change direction. Of course, correct here. And to me, that’s the best you can ask for. can’t, you if you’re not, you have to take risks, you have to try things. If you’re not trying things, you’re never, you know, you’re not going to advance. That’s how things get better. That’s how you have growth. and usually transformative growth comes for it from those risks, right? 

Bennie 

Right,

Eugenia 

But, you have to be willing to get what comes back on the other side of that risk, which is feedback that you don’t always like. And so how you receive that is what keeps a healthy relationship between marketing and the other parts of the organization. really coming back to where we started, figuring out how to align those KPIs, conversations. You really have to be in a place where you can communicate. And that means listening, more importantly, listening than talking and getting the feedback.

Bennie

So, you know, the other part of your extended title outside of Chief Marketing Officer was Champion of Removing Obstacles. And that’s really provocative for our conversation, both in metaphor and in practice. So talk a bit about, you know, building the relationships across your executive table as one. I definitely can hear that in a voice. Talk about the other spaces where you as a leader and you as a marketing leader helped to remove obstacles in the work that you say.

Eugenia 

Yeah, I think, you know, this is one that I will say is a bit more self-proclaimed for me. I got, I have the fortune of working for an organization where it allows me and sometimes requires me to wear, you know, a number of different hats. And so because of that, marketing at most, at almost all organizations, it’s kind of the last step out the door, right? We are, we’re…

Bennie

Right.

Eugenia

Presenting the brand for the rest of the world or our audiences to see. And so for me, that comes with the responsibility of I need to make sure that what I’m presenting is authentic. I need to make sure that what I’m presenting is accurate, that it’s true. And so if I feel like that is not the case, or I don’t know if that’s the case, then the nature of my personality is one that I have to go make sure I have to go find out. I want to be certain that if I say we are…

Bennie 

Right.

Eugenia 

The best at whatever, I know that to be a fact. I can say that confidently. And so sometimes that means I have to kind of go digging up in other people’s backyards a little bit and say, well, show me how that actually works. Like, why are we better at that than our competitors? And sometimes that delves into conversations that are like, I mean, that’s a little better, but not that much better. Like, can it be even better? Like, can we really lean into that sort of thing?

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Right. Yes.

Eugenia

And usually when you’re asking people to rethink things or make change, the first thing that comes up is all the reasons why you can’t do that or all the, you know, so obstacles appear. And so my job is to start removing those obstacles because if you want me to, again, be out here telling a story, which we all are, right? As marketers, we’re telling stories. If you want me to be telling a story, I need to feel confident that the story I’m telling is true.

Bennie

Right. Right. All right.

Eugenia

And so that’s really what that was born out of is any time that there’s change and we’ve had to manage, know, we’ve been in the identity and cyber protection space for 20 years. So before the average person knew what a data breach was or had ever heard of a data breach, we were doing this sort of work. And so because of that, you can imagine over our 20 year history, we had our 20 year anniversary last year, there have been a number of obstacles that needed to be removed.

Bennie

Right.

Eugenia 

And so, I’ve never been one of those people that felt like, well, that’s not my job or that’s not marketing’s area. Because really all of it’s marketing. If you want me to talk about it, if you want me to market it, you’ve now made it my business. 

Bennie 

Right. Okay.

Eugenia

You’ve made it my responsibility. And so I have to, again, just part of my personality, I need to know that I know. I don’t like to not be sure about things.

Bennie

So I often am fond of saying it’s not the noun that matters, it’s the adjective that does. So, you know, it’s one thing to be a marketer, yes, but it’s something to be a good marketer, right? It’s all in that space of it. So I’m gonna ask you this, what does it mean to be an entrepreneurial CMO?

Eugenia

Um, for me, that means…

You’re almost. I don’t want to say figuring it out as you go along, but you really need to operate from a space of, am not the expert in anything. I’m always going to be learning. always, I don’t ever, you you always hear people say, I don’t want to be the smartest person in the room. And it kind of comes off like, okay, well, sure you don’t, you know, but really coming from a space of, I don’t ever believe that I know everything. And I don’t, and when you operate like that, keeps you.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right.

Eugenia 

entrepreneurial in the sense that there is constant room for improvement. And I think when you look at a lot of what people traditionally think of entrepreneurial upstarts, I’m starting my own business, that is that kind of scrappiness or that tenacity that they have that is like, all right, I’m figuring it out. I got to get in here. I have to learn it. And I’m the same way, even though I’ve been with the company as long as I’ve been, or we’ve been in this space as long as we’ve been, I think

Bennie 

Right.

Eugenia

Our entire organization operates and it makes it easier for me to operate like that from a place of marketing, that there is more to be learned. The world is constantly changing, things are evolving. And so you have to stay hungry. You have to stay in a place of humbleness. You have to stay open to being wrong. To me, that’s entrepreneurial, is saying.

Bennie

Right. Right.

Eugenia 

I don’t know it all, so I’m going to need to go and figure it out and no one’s going to come and just kind of hand me the answers. There’s not going to be a playbook for how we do this. And experience is helpful. mean, experience is absolutely a good teacher, but I think to solely rely on that will leave you some blind spots.

Bennie

I know.

Bennie

So what are the lessons you take from market to market? You’re truly in a global space in which the regimes around identity and privacy are different. And I think you’re in, you do work in what, 100 plus countries right now. 

Eugenia

Yeah. Yep. Yeah.

Bennie

How do you keep the lessons learning across corner of the world, across privacy regime, across technical standards? How do you keep the learning alive?

Eugenia

Yeah, I think a lot of it again goes back to what I said earlier about relationships. It’s really forming a lot of good relationships and knowing again that you don’t know everything. So you need to be able to know who to go to tap into to find out things. I like to read. have two toddlers. So I’ve not had the opportunity in months to like sit down and read a proper book, but I read a lot of blogs. I listen to a lot of podcasts. I

Bennie

Right.

Eugenia

You know, I engage with people, I talk to people. And so I think, you know, that keeps me constantly learning. So just staying on pace with, you know, understanding what’s happening across the globe, I’m one person. So I’m not going to be able to kind of keep a pulse on it all by myself. So it’s really being able to tap into all of those different people to say, who do I know that knows something about this space? Or who do I know that is the expert over here? Or I remember I talked to somebody a couple of months ago and they were like all excited about this particular topic and now I want to know more about it. So let me call that person. Yeah. so I think, you know, that that’s, a big part of it. And I just, I genuinely am one of those people that like to learn. I genuinely like to learn. I like to talk to people, so I think that helps as well.

Bennie 

I think it really does as you kind of talk about the space. So your company has always been on the cutting edge, of the cutting edge, of the cutting edge, right? Continually shaping that space in there. And you talked a bit more about change usually causes fear. How do you manage fear of change within your own organization?

Eugenia 

Not to quote Nike, but just do it, really. It is this attitude that I was talking to someone else about this a couple of weeks ago, but I had a bad experience with water as a child. So I did not- trip to Disney World, didn’t go well anyway. I won’t give you the whole backstory, but for a long time, I was afraid to swim. And the high school I went to, we were required to pass swim in order to graduate from high school. So I had to. 

Bennie 

Yeah.

Eugenia 

And one of the ways to pass swim is you have to swim a certain number of laps and you also have to jump off the diving board into the deep end. And so this has become a metaphor for my life when it relates to change. There were a number of days where I had to get up there, climb up this long ladder to get to the top of the diving board. And if I stood there too long, I talked to myself, I’d stand up there looking and there’s a line of you know, other teenagers that are waiting for their turn so they can, you know, finish their stuff and go blow dry their hair and get to their next class.

Bennie 

God.

Eugenia 

So I’m holding up the line and I will come back down. I can’t do it. I can’t do it today. And I remember my swim teacher told me one day, why do you stop? You just get up there and jump. Just do it. The more you stand there and think about it, the more in it. And one day on the way up the ladder, said, all right, I’m just going to go up here and I’m just going to jump. Like I’m not going to pause. not going to, I’m just going to jump off. And I did.

And I’m still here. You know, I made it. And there were many other times that I had to get up after that and jump off the diving board. But each time it got easier because I just, it was something that I knew that I had to do. And so I just had to do it. And each time, to me that you have to deal with change, it just gets easier to deal with change. If you sit around long enough, you can talk yourself out of anything, right? Even good ideas, great ideas. 

Bennie 

Right. Right. Right.

Eugenia 

If you sit there long enough you will talk yourself out of them. And so I’m not saying don’t do research, don’t do your due diligence, all those things, but at some point, once you make a decision or a decision is made for you, that change needs to happen. The best thing to do is literally rip the band-aid off. Like just start changing, just do it. And then it just happens. And maybe again, some of it could just be my personality type, but I’m one of those people.

Bennie 

Right.

Eugenia 

Having a little pep talk with myself and I’m like, all right, roll up our sleeves, we’re doing this. And I think that I function that way with my team. Like, hey, if you don’t like this, we can talk about it. We can have a conversation. And then if the decision is we still need to do it, next conversation is, all right, so how are we making it happen? Like, what are we doing here? And I find, again, that the more you have to do that, the easier it becomes. I started my career at Caterpillar.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Eugenia

And I had five different jobs in the five years that I was there. I moved several times and every time I got somewhere, and this was by design of the program that I was in, but I was either finishing something that someone else had started or starting something that someone else would be finishing. And I think operating like that for five years or the better part of five years gives you a certain amount of respect for how you start and finish.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Wow.

Eugenia

things because somebody you may be the recipient of what someone else has started. You know what I mean? Or you may have to, you know, those sorts of things. And so I think from that perspective, when I think about change, I, I, I respect it. You know, I respect that, there’s a way to go about change properly, but I also know that it’s best to just get it done. Just do it.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Right.

BREAK

Bennie

Right. So we’re going to have a little bit of a moment of how it started and how it’s going. So we started off by having a shout out of Aggie Pride. So talk to me about that experience of, know, for those who are listening in who didn’t catch the nod there, Eugene is a proud, proud grad of North Carolina A &T.

Eugenia 

Yes, Aggie pride. Very proud.

Bennie 

And so talk a bit about your experience, about that college experience and how that shaped the CMO you are today.

Eugenia 

my gosh. So to really explain this, normally this would not otherwise come up, but it is really important to the story. I got skipped twice when I was younger. And so when I left to go to college, I was 16 years old. I was barely 16 years old. 

Bennie 

Mm.

Eugenia 

And my mother did not want to let me go away to college. My dad’s mom was very integral in her letting me leave. So I actually didn’t start at A&T. I started at Alcorn. Big shout out to Alcorn as well. But I had some family friends that went to Alcorn. And so my mom, the only way she would let me leave is if I went somewhere where I knew someone. And I knew I wanted to go to A&T. I went on a Black college tour. I knew A&T was where I wanted to be. But she was not going to let me go. And so I left going to Alcorn knowing I was transferring. And that’s exactly what I did.

Bennie

Okay.

Eugenia

But God definitely helped along the way. The secretary for my honors advisor at Alcorn knew the dean of the business department, Dr. Dean Craig, God rest his soul, he recently passed away. connected me with him and he became like a second father to me and really kind of shepherded me on making my way from Mississippi over to North Carolina to A&T. And every counselor, instructor, professor, everybody that I encountered at A&T really impacted the marketer that I am today. They prepared me for how to conduct myself, how to shake off imposter syndrome, how to, you know, so many different, there are things, I’m sitting in meetings sometimes today and a little thing will happen and it’ll make me chuckle because a professor will have, you know, said, be careful for this or this thing will happen or things like that. And I think for me, I needed to see, I grew up originally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and I needed to be in an environment where I saw a lot of educated, successful, interesting black people, you know, that really just cared about nurturing into other people. 

Bennie 

Right. Mm-hmm.

Eugenia 

And I just, I, I can’t even, it’s hard. I’m never at a loss for words, but it’s almost hard for me to articulate how much that I wouldn’t trade it for the world. It really, really shaped who I am from a professionalism standpoint. But I think more internally, the confidence that I have in myself, the ability to step into a room and know that I belong there because I’m prepared and I’m destined to be there and all of those things that really come from just a God given place, but as a young black girl, you may not be able to recognize that unless someone else has pointed it out into you. And I had a professor that I was close with as well. She’s, she’s passed on Dr. Reagans that was key and kind of my maturation during those years as well. And it really was the people that poured into me and, and said, you, I see so much talent in you. see greatness in you. My mom actually got laid off my junior year and I didn’t think I was going to be able to come back. 

Bennie 

Mm-hmm.

Eugenia 

And Dean Craig was like, no, no, no, no, no. You will be back. You are going to finish. You’re going to get a job. You know, all these things he really, you know, made me recognize just that I was destined to really go out and accomplish every dream that I had for myself. And so, yeah, I know that those are not like super specific things, but I think it really is just it warms my heart to even think about it because…

Bennie 

Right. Right. Right, right.

Eugenia 

I don’t even know how to articulate. I was supposed to be at A&T. I’m absolutely certain of that.

Bennie

Right. Right. These, but you know, these are the things that it’s powerful to even think about articulating and taking your back that prepare you for where you are and having mentors around us that can see into the future, that see things that we can’t see in ourselves. You know, we.

Eugenia 

Yeah, can’t see. Yep. I was going to say one other thing. If I think about how it’s impacted me the most career wise, actually, I don’t know that it’s necessarily been in the discipline of marketing per se, but I can say it has had a huge impact on the way that I build teams and on the way that I manage teams because I…

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Mm. Mm-hmm.

Eugenia

I am looking at from junior level people on my team to senior level people on my team, understanding that most of us spend more time at our professions than we do with our own families. And me as a leader of a team, I have a responsibility to that entire person and their goals and desires and hopes and dreams is, you know, kind of Pollyanna-ish as that sounds. but to all of those things, not just the work that they come in and do every day. And I think because I manage in that way, because I lead in that way, my team has a long tenure. have very low turnover on my team. They tell me they’re happy. So I’d like to think that they’re very happy. I’m very happy with them. And I think it’s really yielded better marketing for the organization as well, because we have a level of kind of trust, transparency because of the way that I’m able to kind of build and nurture and manage that team. And I don’t mean nurture from a mothering perspective, but nurture in the sense of how do I figure out what the individual needs and also align that with what the team and what the business needs.

Bennie 

I think it’s powerful even when we expand our language, right? So nurture really also means to protect, to steward, to invest in. These are all the things you do to help strengthen and protect your talent. And the data has always shown, engaged teams are higher performing. 

Eugenia

Yeah. Perform better.

Bennie

Right. And so if we talk about those measures, those key performance measures that extend beyond the work that we do, yeah, I think it’s incredible. And I’m going to still tag that with marketing.

Eugenia 

Absolutely.

Bennie

It’s leadership and development, but it’s marketing. So I’m going to ask you a bit of this to lean into this superpower that you kind of alluded to. Talk about the role of preparation in the work that you we talk a bit about that early experience in teaching you to value your preparation. But as you lead in these globally dynamic change focused space, talk about what it means to be prepared as a leader and as a team.

Eugenia

Yeah. Yeah. So I think what it means to be prepared has honestly evolved for me over my career. I would say as a much younger person in my career, being prepared meant to, anytime I started a new job or a new role, I literally looked at it like school. Like I poured over, I read everything.

Bennie

Mm-hmm.

Eugenia 

When I first started out at this organization for a long time, my job was writing our RFP responses. And I say, there’s no better way to learn about a company than to read our fees. And it is not the most exciting read, but you will know the ins and outs. if you read a comprehensive RFP response from a company. And so I would say preparedness for me initially was a lot about really just knowing all of the information. If we were having a meeting on something, I was.

Bennie

Right. Right.

Eugenia 

You know, trying to find out every shred of information about whatever that topic was before the meeting. I think as you advance to an organization though, or, you know, particularly into leadership roles, you literally just don’t have the time to do that in that way anymore. So for me being prepared now is a lot more about understanding what is the key information here that I need to know, being able to know what to delegate, again, empowering my team.

And being able to lean into them and say, all right, what’s paramount here? What things do we absolutely kind of need to know what things can kind of go by the wayside? Tapping into who can kind of assist with kind of going out and getting different pieces of information versus me going out and gathering it all myself and doing that and getting that information back and still being knowledgeable on a particular topic, but leaning also into your experience on that.

Bennie 

Right. Right.

Eugenia 

And again, I go back to what we talked about earlier, leaving room for the fact that you will never be so prepared that you won’t think of reasons why that’s not a good thing to do or second guess yourself or whatever. At some, at some point you have to say, all right, I’ve had access to the best information on here, you can have, you know. This is the best set of data I have about this. And now I have to use my judgment and my experience and my gut.

Bennie

Right. Right.

Eugenia 

Which gut is also very important, use these things altogether. And depending on what the decision is, it may be less gut or data, may be a combination of weights, depending on what you’re talking about, but being able to tap into all of that. I think earlier in my career, preparedness was literally just about knowing the information. I didn’t have enough experience or maybe even confidence in my gut to trust in that. And so I think as I’ve…

Become more mature in as a leader and in the organization and in the discipline. I’ve learned that preparedness also encompasses, you know, the things that I just know without a shadow of a doubt inside myself. And then also being realistic enough to know that there is no such thing as being, you know, 100 % prepared. Like, you know, the things will always be changing. And so what you were prepared for yesterday, you wake up and, you know, who could have prepared for COVID?

Bennie 

Right.

Eugenia 

You know what I mean? Things like there’s always going to be a thing where you’re like, we had no clue. Like we could have never seen that coming. And so the best you can do is stay nimble, be open to change. I think preparedness that kind of actually is a good point there that a lot of preparedness now is about understanding that you’re never prepared enough. And so you have to be open to seeing where, you know.

Bennie 

Right. Right. Right? Right. Right.

Eugenia 

This takes you and how do you stay on your feet and stay nimble with that.

Bennie 

Great. So I’m going to ask you that question because you’ve had about five to six reps now as being the chief marketing officer. So you’ve gone through the beginning of the year cycle, your first year, your second year, your as we go and do the math, you’re going into your sixth year. What are the things that what are the areas you’re looking through that may cause the most disruption for B2B and B2B to C marketers this upcoming year?

Eugenia 

Yeah.

Eugenia

Yeah, you know, it’s funny because in marketing, you can easily get like shiny object syndrome. There’s always something new. I mean, you could go back to the madman days and then there’s the advent of television and then there’s, you know, social media if you fast forward and now we got AI and, and that’s just kind of like generally, if you start to look in with within particular industries, you know, there was.

Bennie 

Right. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Eugenia 

Talk of machine learning all over the place a few years before this and all of those things. And so it can be very easy to get caught up in the next new thing all the time. And so I think it’s a little bit about being open to investigating those things, but not necessarily taking the bait or the pressure to say, because everyone else is doing it.

Bennie

Mm-hmm.

Eugenia 

That’s what I need to be doing. And so I think for me, I almost hate to say the word, but I say AI in the sense that, because I feel like everybody’s worried about AI right now, but particularly in our industry, AI has the capability to make fraudsters, scammers, even your most elementary of folks, very, very skillful at being able to execute scams and frauds, to levels that have, you know, haven’t been seen before.

Bennie 

Bye.

Eugenia 

So I think from that perspective, when I’m thinking about how that’s going to impact marketing going forward, I have to think not only as the marketer marketing the services, and tools that we provide, but also how that’s going to impact the people on the other end of those services and tools that we provide. So, you know, we think a lot about how do we also make these services and these tools easy for people to use? You know, it’s one thing to tell a person, yes, I can provide something that will help protect you from X, Y, and Z, but if you have to take 55 steps before you can activate it, or you have to, you know, take 55 steps to log into it every time before you can actually get it to start working, who’s really gonna use that? So we think a lot about accessibility, what the average person’s real life looks like, and how do they incorporate our services and products in a way that is easy for them, that feels natural to them, that feels automatic for them, so that they actually use it and help to protect themselves. So when I think about how these things relate to marketing, I’m really looking at it from that angle, honestly more than I am thinking about what job potentially is AI going to take from a marketer on my team or something like that, or from the discipline.

Bennie 

Right.

Eugenia

Again, I think there are lots of great uses for AI, but I know that there are potentially going to be some negative impacts to it as well, particularly in this, again, the space that I work in. And so we need to be mindful of that and help to educate consumers and our clients and their customers about what we’re doing to help in that area.

Bennie

Wow, thinking about what’s next and what’s now in that space. You talked a bit about, your space really deals with identity and cybersecurity and scam space. I remiss if we didn’t talk about how, you know, we’re always looking at the customer first, but scammers are also looking at the customer first too, and how they’ve evolved and kind of massed some of our marketing practices.

Eugenia 

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Bennie 

You know, how do you take that insight from being a really good marketer in today’s world to using that to help your company protect others against that? Like seeing some of the techniques that we’ve perfected as marketers now see scammers adopted.

Eugenia 

Yeah. Adopting it. Yeah, I think the first thing that I keep in mind is one of the things that, you know, when I’m talking with people about the risks associated, one of the things that I say now always is there used to be a saying, you know, trust but verify. And I say verify then trust, is the is kind of the area we’re in now because of the way how sophisticated things have gotten.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Right.

Eugenia 

And so I think from that perspective, I have to understand that it’s natural because I’m teaching consumers to be wary and to be mistrustful to a degree. 

Bennie 

Mm-hmm.

Eugenia 

And so I have to understand that that is a double-edged sword, right? If just on a surface as a marketer, yes, that can sometimes make my job much harder because now I’m saying, be careful about giving up your information, but as a marketer, I want your information, right? And so how do I balance making people understand that there are positive, healthy, good uses for some of this information while also knowing that there are a lot of people that are going to use it for the wrong reasons or trick you out of information that you didn’t intend to give or, you know, all of these sorts of things. 

And so it’s something that we honestly tackle on a very regular base almost daily is how do we figure out there are campaigns that we’ve done in the past that were successful that we can’t do now. Yeah, you can’t do today. And so I think, yeah, it’s something that we encounter.

Bennie 

You can’t do today, right?

Eugenia 

 And there’s as a person or employee in the identity and cyber protection space, that actually makes me really proud. Like, oh, you know, we can’t do that. You know, that makes me happy that we’ve gotten to that place, but then it makes my job more complicated, right? So then we have to, so I think a lot of it is really about saying I have to put myself in the seat of the consumer, in the consumer that I would want myself to be, right? A lot of times I think of my mom, what advice do I give her? And say, you know, if she were the target…

Bennie

Great. Right.

Eugenia

How do I talk to her in a way that is going to feel, still feel authentic, accomplish the goals as best we can, but also not set her up to be potentially taken advantage of by someone else, leveraging this same sort of tactic, so to speak.

Bennie 

Right.

Bennie 

And I think conversely, as we think about the future, how do we think about what we set in frame today so that our kids…

Eugenia 

Absolutely. Yep, absolutely. And as a mom of two toddlers, I am constantly thinking about that because you’re trying to limit their exposure to things and that’s a whole nother topic that can really just be frightening. in general, yeah, it’s all of those things. What is my responsibility, not only as a marketer, but as just a human being?

To help people protect themselves and how do I make sure that what I’m doing is not somehow having this negative unintended consequence. And I think honestly, if we all thought like that, we would be in a much better place.

Bennie 

Right. Which I think is powerful advice and direction. We’ve talked a bit about pride the entire way through and that sense of your face lights up when we say that, when we talk about these moments in your career. So I wanna leave us on sharing when you think about across your career and a career you continue to build, right? What makes you most proud today? And what do you think that 16 year old…

Eugenia 

Hehehehe

Bennie

College student would be most proud of?

Eugenia 

I think what makes me most proud today really are the relationships I built. I mean, it really, I think about people that I’ve had the opportunity to meet that I never thought that I would, you know, meet people that knew so much information about one particular thing or not even just with this job.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. All right.

Eugenia 

But even if I go back to my Caterpillar days, I mean, meeting people that knew more about construction equipment than one ever thought was humanly possible and just their joy and passion around that. And so I think it’s really about over the course of my career, having come across people that really have been a joy to know, that have taught me things that have impacted me way beyond the work. I think that’s probably one of the things that I’m, I’m most proud of. I consider myself to be one of those people that can work with pretty much anybody. And I have, you know, I’ve worked across a number, every job I’ve had, I didn’t know anything about the industry when I started it. And so I think approaching work with that openness and desire to learn really allows you to come across some really, really cool people.

Bennie

I think that’s a great way to end our conversation, my friend. Thinking about coming across really cool people who I definitely consider you one of… Thinking about, you know, your growth and your presence as a dynamic chief marketing officer, whether we call you a chief marketing officer, a chief magic officer, or a champion of removing obstacles, you really are a chief leader. You’re a champion for people in your team.

Eugenia

Thank you. Thank you. Same here.

Bennie

And a wonderful example of how we make relationships matter in the work that we do. So thank you, Eugenia, for being a part of this podcast conversation. Thank you for sharing your story and your journey. And thank you all for listening to this episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. Once again, I’m your host, Bennie F. Johnson. Please check us out at AMA.org and check out our other episodes in our CMO series. Thank you, Eugenia.

Eugenia

Thank you for having me.