CANNES—At LEGO Group, marketing people are the “uber conductors of the symphony” that drives product innovation and business outcomes, according to Global CMO Julia Goldin.
This is because the musically inclined Goldin considers conductors to be “not people who just orchestrate and coordinate,” she explains in this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
“Their job is to envision a piece of music and bring it to life in a way that it’s never been heard before,” Goldin says. “They are standing in front of a very big orchestra. But you also have to understand how to bring people together, so it’s a huge leadership job. At the same time, you also are delivering to the audience behind, which is in our situation the consumer.”
It’s Goldin’s deep belief that marketing “sits at the crossroads of arts and science and the heart of the right and left brain.” She considers marketing to be “even more essential now than ever before to actually enable the business to achieve growth through real understanding of consumers, audiences and creating very strong value.”
When she talks about her “really big team,” Goldin notes that many don’t have marketing in their title. “But in some ways, I also feel that they all contribute to that same sort of cause, let’s say.”
Asked by interviewer Joanna O’Connell, who is VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, how she goes about recruitment, Goldin says it’s first paramount to define not just the role of marketing overall but within a specific organization.
“In my organization we have product design, we have a creative agency, we have brand insights, we have content developers, we have long-form content developers, we have digital platform owners.”
When you add all of those roles together, their commonality is safeguard brands and franchises, according to Goldin.
“I think it’s absolutely essential to talk to them about the role that they play because in my view they are uber conductors of the symphony that is around each one of the big themes or products or innovations that we move forward with.”
Great marketers need to understand the entire value chain. “They understand how everything happens to actually create a product or create a campaign all the way through to how it flows into the stores, into consumers hands and ultimately reaches a child and hopefully delights and surprises them.”
You are watching Beet.TV coverage of the CMO Growth Council Summit in Cannes. This series is presented by Teads. For more videos from our series, visit this page. Please find all our coverage from Cannes 2019 right here.
