Get to know our Head of Marketing & Customer Strategy

Twenty-two years ago, I moved from our parent company, Oliver Wyman, to help set up Lippincott’s presence in the UK. Now living in Chicago, I split my time between project work, building the Marketing and Customer Strategy (MCS) practice and guiding the firm’s direction as a member of the Management Team. There’s rarely a dull moment! It’s a healthy mix of the strategic and creative, helping our incredibly talented people thrive. I’m a true believer in servant leadership. 

Lippincott has been developing brands for over 80 years. Over the last decade, our clients were tapping us more and more to help translate the changes to their brand strategy into implications for their marketing strategy. So, what started out as individual projects, like introducing category marketing to Marriott following their acquisition of Starwood, has become one of the fastest growing areas of our firm. Underlying both brand and marketing is also a need to deeply understand the customers that brands are serving. Our customer strategy is based on intimate human insight gleaned from techniques like Jobs to Be Done, advanced quantitative analytics such as structured equation modelling and (increasingly) Generative AI, used to cost-effectively scale ongoing customer insight over time. 

Ultimately, for most clients, there is an imperative for business growth. MCS helps those clients derisk creative investments in marketing to secure that growth. 

When you look at how clients are served today, there are two discrete camps. On the one hand, management consulting firms can provide strategic rigor but are lacking the creative soul to truly understand the heart of marketing. On the other side are agencies that are creatively strong but anchored in storytelling without having the strategic rigor of deeply understanding the business designs of those they serve. Since Lippincott’s founding, we’ve sat at the intersection of these two disciplines. Our founders created a firm that has successfully managed to mix oil and water, art and science, creativity and rigor. It’s a unique culture and enables us to be thoughtful about creative execution while developing strategy and ensuring alignment when bringing ideas to life, whether we’re piloting a new store concept or launching a campaign. 

An enduring challenge is that many marketers no longer have a marketing strategy. They’re trapped on a hamster-wheel of delivering weekly, if not daily, targets of new customer accounts. That’s driven an over-reliance on digital, programmatic lower-funnel spending as that’s what can be easily measured in the short-term. It’s a major reason why we’ve seen the loss of creative, anthemic brand campaigns. CMO’s know that there should be a healthier balance of investment, but they often lack adequate influence in the C-suite to win permission to balance the long and short of it. A well-written marketing strategy is one tool to achieve that. 

A fast-emerging challenge is the impending arrival of Agentic AI—which will grant customers, particularly in complex or low engagement markets, the ability to delegate buying decisions to digital assistants. This changes the game for whom the marketer needs to persuade. Marketers will need to spend more time on the curation of their brands digital footprint, both owned and influenced. But today, most marketers don’t control or often even influence that. It will require a new marketing operating model and new capabilities while working at a pace of change that continues to accelerate. Our experience here is that beyond the multi-billion-dollar consumer brands, most marketers are only just starting to explore using AI within their back-office creative workflows. This presents an opportunity for those that build their capabilities early, for example, scaling personalization to win greater market share. 

We recognize that before you can influence, you need to deliver. That’s why we often start with addressing demand generation. There are almost always quick wins that can be found and a benefit that those wins can be concretely translated into hard dollars, something that every CFO loves. That short-term upside both builds credibility and frees up investment for initiatives that may have a longer pay-back period. The next step is to write a marketing strategy that provides the business case. This includes a financial framework to build credibility and KPIs as the route to generating buy-in for the belief-driven decisions that are often required for creative ‘bets’. The final requirement is to generate novel insight about customers. Marketing is often one of the few functions to take an end-to-end customer view. If you have both your own house in order and have valuable insight that’s useful for others to achieve their own goals, then you’ll be pulled into the conversation. It’s rare that marketers are strong across all these steps and that’s often where our MCS team steps in to help bridge any gaps and drive the strategic value of marketing home. 

We start by aligning on the one or two business outcomes that matter most—revenue growth, margin expansion, or retention improvement—then trace the causal pathway from marketing activities to those outcomes. That involves hypothesis formulation, experiments or lift tests, and attribution modeling to isolate impact. For every KPI we recommend, we document the assumptions, confidence intervals, and a realistic timeline for when leaders should expect to see changes. The result is a clear, auditable line of sight from day-to-day marketing work to the P&L, which makes investment cases and trade-offs much easier to defend.

While the need to acquire new customers will remain a priority, the mechanisms to do that are radically changing. Creativity is still essential, but it will need to be grounded in a deep understanding of AI both as new technology and as a “new consumer” of marketing to facilitate more efficient and personalized marketing funnels. Marketers will also need to win credibility with their peers to influence the end-to-end experience as a route to developing domain authority with today’s LLMs and tomorrow’s reasoning engines. It’s very much a “yes, and.” Marketers need to be not just masters of human insight, but also agentic insight.

There is no single right answer to this. At this year’s ANA Masters of Marketing event, we heard success stories using both strategies. GM has developed Metropolis, an AI platform tailored to the unique needs of their workflows. Newell has found good success adapting their workflow to use Adobe’s Firefly. Applying an existing tool has the advantage of speed and can be done with little expertise in how the mechanics of AI work. It also benefits from a lower cost of entry. Building your own “middleware” requires investment and expertise—but enables you to contour the technology to your existing workflow and will enable you to plug-in/plug-out which AI technology you use over time to prevent being locked into any single provider. In essence, it’s the difference between being AI-adjacent (buying in) to becoming AI-native (building your expertise). We believe AI will be sufficiently transformative that for most companies, the long-term benefit of becoming AI-native outweighs the short-term agility from being AI-adjacent. It’s a major strategic decision that every CMO should be intentional around. 

Growth is at the heart of most MCS engagements. That could be developing a new audience strategy; designing a new proposition; maximizing the return on marketing Investment; or evolving the marketing operating model. Whatever the need, there are usually three broad chapters to any engagement. The first chapter is to get clear on what success should look like and the objectives and metrics to deliver. From there, we develop hypotheses for alternative paths to deliver those objectives and what we’d need to know to choose the most effective path. The second chapter is one of evaluation and selection of a preferred path, usually made through a combination of outside-in and inside-out research for feasibility of execution. There is rarely a “winner” to pick, so evidence-informed management of stakeholders to reach alignment is key. The last chapter then sees theory put into practice with creative development to drive tangible business impact. This is where we benefit from being able to build pilots, whether digital or physical, for an end-to-end solution. 

We work in every industry where marketing has a role, both B2C, B2B, B2G and combinations of all of those. Each engagement is customized: the tools and cadence differ by industry maturity, data availability, and organizational complexity, but the core playbook remains the same.

We are entering a period as transformational as the introduction of the internet. Today’s Marketing Operating Models aren’t designed for what’s coming. CMOs need to be preparing now to build the organizational agility and expertise to take advantage of the changes that will come to customer behavior. Most will fail, so for those prepared the opportunity will be substantial.