CMO Chats with Lisa Ortner-Ghouze, Global Head of Marketing, Financial Markets and Sustainable Finance for Standard Chartered Bank

Could you please introduce yourself and provide a quick background about your role and your company?

Hi Neil, very delighted to be here. Yeah, my name is Lisa Ortner-Ghouze. I’m the Head of Marketing for a division of Standard Chartered. Standard Chartered is a large international bank headquartered in the UK, but we have a historically large presence in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. I’m based in Singapore. I’m actually an Austrian national, but I’ve been here in Asia for 11 years. I have lived in London and New York before, and I’ve always worked in the financial services field, so that’s part of my core expertise. As a bank, we provide retail banking, private banking, and corporate and investment banking services to our clients, and my marketing remit is really focused on the B2B space or the corporate and investment banking portion of Standard. 

What’s your main marketing focus at the moment?

If I had to summarise it, there are three main areas that we, my team and I, really focus on. So, if I split it up from a client segment and geographic perspective, a really, really big priority for us is to grow market share and mind share with investors in the West. Investors, I mean asset managers, hedge funds, pension funds, and open wealth funds that are based in Europe and the US. 

From a thematic and deal perspective, we are really laser-focused on promoting our services around sustainability and ESG. That’s a big focus for us as a bank and clearly for many, many other banks and many other organisations. As marketers, we spend a lot of time promoting our sustainable finance and transition finance capabilities. We talk about how we partner with our clients across specific sectors, for example, oil and gas, aviation, shipping, clean energy, and renewables, and how we help them move to greener practices. 

Lastly, from an innovative product perspective, digital assets are a big differentiator for us. By that, I mean things like blockchain, tokenisation, crypto trading, and cryptocurrencies because not many banks or large international banks have this offering at the moment.

Fantastic. Well, they’ve all been booming in the last couple of weeks.

Yeah, not only because we had some interesting elections in the US but also because clearly the industry, I think, is at a maturity level where they’re going to really skyrocket.

The large question now: How do you define success in marketing?

For me, it comes down to really being seen as a business partner— understanding the business intimately, being able to speak the language of the business, and really being a partner in crime to them, not just some logistics coordinator. It’s a real pet peeve of mine. I see a lot of colleagues in other organisations just staying very much at the surface. Successful marketing is when you really join forces with the business to grow market share, defend market share, and really help them move the needle commercially. That’s how I define the success of marketing. 

What would you say is the biggest challenge that marketers face? 

At the moment, it’s a perennial big challenge to measure your return on investment, especially in the B2B space. That is really difficult. When I think of more traditional marketing techniques, let’s say events, we chatted a bit earlier, you organise large events. How do you really measure the ROI of an event in commercial terms? How many deals happened as a result of an event? Usually, there’s good client engagement, but what really happened commercially after that? Unless you have a really strong CRM system in place where you can really track this over a long period of time, and in B2B sales cycles are really long, they can be years long, so that’s really difficult. But also, from a digital marketing perspective, of course, we have metrics like click-through rates and view rates, like how long a person stays on watching a particular video, where they go after, but again, what does this mean in commercial terms to the business? I can have these marketing metrics, but they rarely mean anything meaningful to a banker. So, it is translating what we do into tangible business outcomes. As a result, measuring ROI is really challenging. 

Let’s talk about the marketing’s relationship with sales. Out of all the marketing incentives that you’re in charge of, which one has your sales department traditionally been more grateful for or excited about? 

In the bank, it’s going to be the events. Events are physical touch points with the customers; that’s where they can feel that marketing is something really, really tangible for them. I think that’s what they’re probably most appreciated with. Content and digital marketing is a bit more aloof for the point I just shared earlier. It’s just harder for them to quantify the impact it has.

But I’m going to go back to a few years ago when I worked for a different organisation: as an asset manager, we were running and rolling out a big brand campaign. And I don’t know what your world is like, but in my world, it’s always really difficult to justify a big investment in a brand campaign and what the tangible impact is really like for a salesperson, as you called it. So I thought we were quite clever around it. It turned out to be a really, really successful campaign because we had a limited budget, but we decided to actually involve the salespeople in part of the brand campaign; they became our talent. We saved on talent, and they starred in the videos and in the ads. They see themselves in digital ads, in Singapore on MRT stations’ big ads, and they are all visibly involved in the brand campaign.

It was extremely successful because they were so proud of it that they would talk to their clients about it. As a result, it has really allowed me to articulate a better message to my clients about me and has helped me in my client relationships. I thought it was clever. I would highly recommend that anyone planning big brand campaigns really think about whether there is an opportunity to involve their frontline and make them part of it. 

It definitely flashed through a couple of adverts in my mind as well, and I know that with people within the organisation, that works very well. That might tie into my next question: Which marketing strategies have wielded the most success in terms of engagement and lead generation? Was it this, or what other ones would you say? 

This, of course, is super high on the list. So I would say this was a very successful campaign lead, yes, but also, people were really proud of it and talked about it for years. I think I can’t ask for more than this. Again, in the banking space, it’s a very, very important part of the course; it’s a much more hyper-targeted approach. It has better results for us rather than mass marketing. So, there are very targeted, very exclusive client engagements. I mentioned to you earlier that a big focus of us is really targeting investors. So, these are sophisticated clients, and they want access to equally sophisticated people who can provide them with unique insights. We organise, for example, a very exclusive thought leadership dinner series for the top investment officers, portfolio managers, and, again, some very senior people also in our bank. I’m talking 20 to 30 people, but clients come because they get access to again insights that they wouldn’t necessarily have access to otherwise. It’s very bespoke, and it’s pretty straightforward to monetise these conversations afterwards. Rather than going mass, going very sharp and focused, I would say, has been a very, very successful tech technique and tactic. 

Nice. Anything that you get that excitement and buy-in from the internal team for is way more powerful. You were talking about the small dinners that you’re doing. Does your ICP sort of change with every dinner, or do you have a key target that you’re looking at? 

For these very intimate dinners, they were always going to be very senior portfolio managers, chief investment officers, or chief sustainability officers. That doesn’t change very much. For the broader campaigns, we have a much broader range. It’s the broader campaigns from a digital marketing perspective where we have a less focused and broader range. But for the intimate dinners, that’s where we stay focused. A lot of marketing and sales is really keeping at it, right? The focus and the prioritisation are so that you can really see the movement of the knee. It takes time. It’s not just one event. It’s years of going after a particular segment in different markets. If you have the discipline of really saying no to certain things, be very deliberately focused on a particular segment and geography over a long period of time—and by that, I mean certainly multiple years. That yields better results than trying a bit of this, trying a bit of that. It’s just here, there, and nowhere at the end of the day.

Banking and insurance have always taken the lead on working dinners and things like that. They’ve always been very strong in their focus on that and just keeping up with that because they know how key those relationships are. To the small-scale events that you run, what are the significant challenges that you face when hosting these types of events? 

We have a very, very interesting speaker set up. So that’s not the challenge. I’m not going to mention how many people work for Standard Charter as we’ve got around 85,000 staff, so it’s a larger bank, and we have a larger marketing team. And so, there are many events happening all around the world or even within certain markets. Let’s say Singapore, where I’m based, could have a couple of events happening in the same week. I think the challenge often lies in knowing what the broader bank is doing and what the broader teams are doing, not cannibalising the purpose of our own event, and just being much more connected.

It’s easier said than done when you work for such a large organisation because there are so many different teams and segments, as I explained. There’s a retail bank, private bank, and institutional bank. I think that is probably the hardest: to do a few things really well and coordinate with the different business units and market teams, to saying what are we really gonna focus on and what does make sense to combine? Initially, everyone wants to do their own thing. But then when you look at it holistically over a period of, I don’t know, a quarter, you see, well, there’s actually a lot of client interactions that we are generating. Would it make sense to combine them? That’s kind of a process we are really going through, and I wouldn’t say we’ve solved that. We’re moving in a good direction, but that continues to be a challenge. 

I can imagine. I know people who are challenged by that, with about 2000 people in their company. Obviously, that is a massive thing to work through. In terms of being a marketing leader, what do you believe is the biggest opportunity for marketing leaders today that might not be available in the past? 

I alluded to it earlier: it’s using data that you have at your disposal much more strategically and smartly. It sounds so obvious, but it’s difficult because I’m working for a large organisation. We don’t currently have one centralised data repository, like a really well-oiled system, for example. We’re working off different systems and Excel spreadsheets. Then, you get data from media buying agencies and your own digital website performance. Bringing these all together continues to be quite a manual process. The biggest opportunity I would see is that this is fully automated. It’s a many, many, many year-long process. We are probably a couple of years into that journey. It will take us at least a couple more years to be optimistic that we’re really there. Then, of course, there’s a whole discipline of keeping the data clean so that you can confidently know that what you are seeing from your own data analysis is actually reflective of how customers are engaging. That’s a massive opportunity. That aside, I also mentioned earlier that marketing leaders and their teams should really spend time understanding the business and the industry in which they operate. It’s a pet peeve of mine. I see too many people who stay very superficial—you need to understand your customers. You need to understand the business. You need to understand how you make your money, and you need to be able to speak to your business stakeholders, sales, and executives in the language of the business. The real opportunity lies in raising the bar and becoming real business partners. Being ahead of the game, you need to understand what trends are impacting your particular sector; how could they maybe accelerate what you’re doing, how could they be massively disruptive of what you’re doing and strategising with the business of how you’re going to tackle it. That’s the biggest opportunity. 

Would you have any career advice for anyone starting in the industry? 

It’s the same, but learn about your business and industry. Be curious. Go deep and understand what you’re actually doing as a company. The second piece of advice, as being slightly more seasoned, is don’t get caught up too much at all in corporate politics. They’re a real energy sucker. Focus on where you can make a difference. Lastly, do what makes you happy. It’s just a job, don’t lose sleep over it. Put it in perspective and find a happy medium of what you’re doing and your personal priorities. 

Well said. Lastly, how would you describe the role of the global head of marketing in one word and why? 

Business partner. That’s how I would describe it. A successful senior marketer, or any marketer, is part of the business because you are there to help grow the business, defend the business, segment the business, and define who you are going after. That’s what a successful marketer is meant to be. Business partner, if the business views you as that, I think you have done a good job, and you’re gonna go very far.