When we launched The Generation, our mission was simple: to share the hard-earned wisdom of financial services’ leading marketers to those looking to follow in their footsteps.

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Recently, I had the privilege of sitting down with three leading CMOs – Hannah Grove, formerly of State Street, Alex Craddock of Citigroup, and Johan Jervoe, once Group CMO at UBS – each with a track record of steering multi-billion-dollar FS giants to new heights.
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Across these conversations five key themes emerged, revealing what it truly takes to be an elite CMO in today’s market.

They set the bar so much higher than yours

It’s not about chasing short-term success. It’s about the work’s legacy. Good CMOs create work that solves the problem of connecting their brand to target audiences and hits targets. Great CMOs create work that lasts beyond their time. Often, that means transforming how the company presents itself. 

At State Street, for example, Hannah completely reframed how the organization communicated with clients. Initially, the company’s messaging focused on its long history and vast assets, but she quickly realized this wasn’t resonating with clients. “Our message was, ‘We’re really old and we’re really big,’ but that doesn’t tell the client what’s in it for them.” By partnering with TED Talks and putting State Street employees on stage to share personal stories, she humanized the brand and deepened connections with both employees and clients. The campaign went viral, with over 3.5 million views, but “It wasn’t about going viral for the sake of it – it was about driving meaningful change.”

Alex Craddock did something similar at iShares. “We narrowed down on a younger audience [...] where the growth was going to come from,” he told me. The decision to target millennials was based on extensive market research, which identified this group as a key driver of future growth. Understanding where the market was heading allowed Alex and his team to craft a strategy that was both forward-looking and grounded in solid data. 

As companies grow, maintaining that standard – what Johan Jervoe calls “stopping power” – only gets more and more difficult, especially when the number of marketing channels continues to grow too. Johan has a solution here: ditch the channel-first approach. If you’re at a company the size of UBS, you can’t create great content in a silo, one for TV, one for social and another for SEO etc. You need to create a flagship piece. “Your attitude should be: let's find that big idea and that golden asset that is the cornerstone of what you're trying to communicate.” 

Once that asset is established, it's about working out how to replicate its impact across all channels, ensuring every piece of content comes up to scratch and amplifies your theme. 

They’re the ultimate empaths

“The CMO has to be the voice of the client in the organization,” said Hannah. “And in order to be the voice, they have to be listening to and understanding and act as a conduit of client data.”

While every member of the C-suite needs to be tuned into customer needs, the role of the CMO is unique – they are responsible for translating those needs into marketing strategies that build trust and establish emotional connections.

That’s all the more important now that CMOs are increasingly being viewed as general managers, responsible for driving business outcomes across customer experience, data analytics, and technology integration. They are responsible for making sure the customer’s voice is heard – and acted on – throughout the business.

For Alex, that means looking beyond the numbers. “Data can be incredibly revealing, but going out and still talking and interviewing people is where you really start to get to those human truths that you can activate around.”

That empathetic approach extends to partnerships too, Alex told me, helping you to “find that sweet spot where you understand what you've got to do to be able to drive value for the partner and value for yourself.”

They tune in to the world, not the industry

Great CMOs know that the real magic happens when they engage with the world beyond their immediate industry. It’s not just about what’s happening in the financial world but in wider culture. They tap into how people are feeling about everything, not just money. 

This broader outlook enables them to bring fresh perspectives and innovative methods into their work, often borrowing successful strategies from entirely different sectors to revolutionize how their industry communicates.

Before he joined Visa in 2002, Alex’s experience had predominantly been in the motor industry. An experience that has made him a more versatile and innovative marketer. “If you move around industries, you can't assume anything. And you realize very quickly there's a lot you have to learn. It's forced me to ask a lot of questions about the business, about client segments. And that’s been a real sort of catalyst for me to have these aha moments around how we’re marketing and what we could do a little differently.”

This understanding allows companies to truly connect with people. In an industry as old as finance, it can be too easy to play it safe. Every successful financial CMO I’ve spoken to has understood that success in the sector comes from meeting customers on their level. Take most banking content. As Johan (and anybody with eyes and ears) sees it, most banking is missing emotion. “People are afraid that you can’t laugh about it. I'm not laughing about money. I'm making sure you have a warm moment looking at what we communicate. And that will make a difference.”

Emotion is everything. It’s hard to do, but executed well it means you cut through the noise. Yet finance brands rarely do it, because they think that they're serious and professional and people trust them with lots of money. But trust is built when you can show you understand the customer.

And that doesn’t just mean humor. As Johan pointed out, campaigns like UBS’s “Am I a Good Father?” resonate because they touch on universal human questions, creating stronger emotional bonds and driving real business value.

This approach elevates the work as they’re not just comparing themselves with other FIs –a pretty low bar– but the biggest brands in the world. They don’t think: is our ad better than this bank’s or that investment platform’s? They ask whether it’s better than the content Apple or Adidas put out.

They are allergic to vanity metrics

For the best CMOs, the numbers that matter are those that tell the story of real change, whether that's in customer behavior or business growth. These are the numbers that demonstrate you’re doing the job well. “I think marketeers can get very focused on delivering outputs. [...] Where metrics come in is in outcomes, what happened as a result of,” Hannah said. According to Alex, the higher-ups in the company don’t care about email open rates or post views. “They care about [...] what that’s done in terms of perception and, ultimately, behavior and desire to buy my product?” Metrics need to dovetail with your key performance indicators.

This focus on commercial outcomes doesn’t mean ignoring other metrics, but understanding their role in the bigger picture – steps toward achieving larger business goals.

They talk business, not marketing

Top CMOs are not just marketing experts, they’re business strategists. They secure buy-in by speaking C-suite and focusing on financial outcomes. “My greatest partners in my career are the CFOs,” Hannah explained. If the role is all about growing the most valuable metrics, CMOs need to work in tandem with the other leaders driving that growth. Along with the Head of Revenue and a Head of Sales, “it's a really critical partnership. [...] Together you can determine what are those important outcome metrics.” 

This collaboration, Alex said, is increasingly the norm as the role of the CMO evolves. “Traditionally it was marketing and advertising,” but now it’s a far broader brief “that embraces data, technology, customer experience, all in pursuit of business growth. It’s not just about turning out great ads. It's actually about the business of marketing.”

Elevating the CMO role

The CMO’s role is becoming about so much more than crafting campaigns – it's increasingly defined by emotional connections with customers, visionary leadership across the organization, and driving real business outcomes.

And aspiring marketing leaders could find few better teachers than Hannah Grove, Alex Craddock and Johan Jervoe.

Listen to the full episodes here. Or get in touch to talk about how we can help you shape the future of marketing.