CMO Chats with Matthew Heath, Chief Marketing Officer at Invesco Ltd.

We continue our knowledge-sharing mission through a series of interviews with marketing leaders from all over the world. My name is Christina, and I’m one of the Client Directors at The Ortus Club.

I’m Matthew Heath, the Chief Marketing Officer, Americas and EMEA at Invesco.

 

Could you tell us about Invesco? 

Fundamentally, in simple terms, we look after people’s money and aim to grow it in accordance with their investment goals, considering their desired investment timeframe and the types of strategies and capabilities they seek. For people like you and me, we’re basically looking after the future, particularly our retirement, which for me is a bit closer than for you. Hopefully, we’ll get there in the end, and we all want to retire with dignity, so we try to help people do that.

 

Could you tell us a little bit about your role at Invesco?

It’s probably indicative of how CMO roles have evolved quite a lot over the last 10 to 15 years, in particular. Fundamentally, the role is to bring our brand, our services, and our capabilities to life for our customers, who are largely a business-to-business-to-consumer organisation. Our customers would typically be financial advisors, but also big institutions, so people who look after our pensions, people who look after insurance, and sovereign wealth funds of different countries. We have a big range of clients, but by and large, it’s easier to think of them as other businesses.

The marketing role is really to bring everything to life in terms of what we do, to be as relevant as we can be, because our clients, probably like all of us, are bombarded every day with information, content, ideas, research, and things that other people no doubt think are fascinating for them and probably aren’t always. So we work as hard as we can to be relevant, to use marketing channels to engage with clients at a time when we think we’ve got something to say, rather than necessarily just because it’s April, where’s my Invesco newsletter? That sort of marketing belongs in the past.

Increasingly, the role is about technology, how that can come into play in the marketing environment in the broadest sense, whether that’s inevitably lots of conversations about AI, and there are lots of interesting things going on there, but also just marketing automation technology and using rich data sources in ways to be relevant to clients. The final thing I’d say is it feels to me that marketing’s role as the voice of the client or the voice of the customer is more important today than it’s ever been and is being taken more seriously in the boardroom than it ever has been. It is a responsibility of marketers to keep organisations honest to what their customers want, rather than what they want to sell them or get them to buy. So it’s a pretty wide-ranging world, which makes it fun and interesting as well as, obviously, challenging and difficult at times. That’s the nature of it.

 

Marketing used to be almost a nice-to-have, and now it’s so integral to everything. And of course, we’ll touch on AI, as you mentioned, as it comes up in some of the questions. What I’d like to know is, as of right now, in April, what are your main focuses in your role and in marketing?

There are different levels of focus. One area of focus revolves around the things our clients are most interested in at the moment, which in our sector would be things like fixed income capabilities, private markets, real estate, and private credit—other ways of investing—and ETFs, so passive investment. We will always look at the commercial priorities of our clients and our firm and try to bring those to life.

But in terms of the more pure marketing aspect, the big focus for us is on a few different strands. One is differentiation. We operate in an industry, bluntly, of pretty poor brands. It’s extraordinary for an industry of our scale that over the years, and this is changing back to my answer about what marketing does, but brands haven’t been taken as seriously as they have been in other industries, as opportunities to differentiate and capture what makes us different from others. We are working hard on a brand platform around “let’s rethink possibility,” which is really about trying to work alongside our clients as partners to find new solutions because the industry is changing so fast. The brand differentiation level is important.

Another level, which I’ve just mentioned, is how we can intelligently use our data and our understanding of clients in a useful way to be more relevant to them—to talk about the things of interest to them in the channels that we know that particular client might like to engage us in, and in a way that piques their interest. That can be a whole range of things. Sometimes, to be honest, it’s just about getting the right information in front of them at the right time. It can sound quite basic, but that’s much harder to do than it may appear on the surface. So it can just be very informational, but obviously, it can be educational. We have a lot of very complex but interesting products, and it’s absolutely in our interest, our clients’ interest, and their clients’ interests that they are clearly understood in terms of the role they can play, but also an inspirational role, like all good marketing. We are here to have ideas, to be interesting, to have a point of view, and to try to provoke discussion. We work hard on that relevance layer.

The final thing is making sure that we are as efficient and effective as we possibly can be. Every single job function, the CMO function now has a lot of pressure to be correct, pressure to be accountable, to spend money wisely, and to use technology in ways that can make you more efficient. We always try to be very alive to the possibility of whether there is another way to do something, a better way, a cheaper way that has better outcomes, or a more efficient way to look at an A-to-B process, and so on. So that’s an ongoing thing. So there are lots of strands to what we do, but it’s the intersection of those commercial priorities and the bigger levers we can pull around brand, relevance, and client engagement.

  

There’s a new pressure to be accountable and to be conscious of where you’re spending money. Budgets are always a difficult topic, especially when it comes to marketing, because ROI is so difficult to calculate in our field. That’s always a challenge. But what is the biggest challenge you are facing as a CMO this 2025 when it comes to budgeting, getting approvals, and ROI?

It’s proof of accountability. I’ve operated with lots of different brands. My background is much more in marketing services rather than running marketing within an organisation. But in some of those scenarios, particularly in bigger business-to-consumer enterprises, you could measure marketing ROI pretty accurately. It is much harder when we are hand-in-glove partners with our sales team. We don’t draw much of a distinction between the sales function and the marketing function organisation because if we don’t collaborate closely, we’ll unquestionably fail. From our clients’ point of view, we are just Invesco; they wouldn’t draw a particular distinction between different types of activities. In that environment, of course, it makes it more complicated to prove value, but we absolutely do make progress in that. We can look at the leads that we generate and whether they eventually convert. We can look at the information, the richer view of clients that we can provide to our sales teams. We look at what we would term momentum. Let’s say Christina comes to a website, we don’t know her, she gets interested in a particular topic, she maybe comes to an online webinar, and she maybe asks for some more information. So that is momentum for us towards potentially an eventual sale, or at least an eventual RFP or whatever. So we look at where our prospects are and see whether or not we’re being efficient from a marketing point of view and encouraging them to move appropriately at their own pace down what, from our point of view, is a bit of a pipeline. From a client’s point of view, which is more important, it’s just a journey of discovering what we do and why we do it. Making that as easy as possible, as interesting as possible, and as relevant as possible is a big part of what we try to do and what we try to measure.

But it is always tough in a lot of business-to-business-style engagements where there are lots of sales teams involved in selling complex products. It’s always quite hard, and probably a bit of a fool’s errand, to try too hard to pull the marketing effect separately from the sales team effect, because I don’t know why that’s so interesting. In the end, it’s the combined effect that works. You can probably get too hung up on trying to seek glory for some parts of the equation, which isn’t a very interesting use of time.

 

I run focus groups of webinars for marketers. The last topic was on ROI: how you follow an event through your CRM and the funnel, and if sales close it, is it attributed to marketing? Because maybe they saw signs somewhere that led them to the website. It’s so hard to say this came from this one campaign.

It’s really hard, probably impossible, and as I say, probably a foolish use of time to try. As long as you know the combination is effective and you have some sense of what the marketing component is doing, but not entirely separately from the sales component, we’re all good with that. If we succeed, we succeed together, and if we fail, we definitely fail together. One of the things that we really work hard at is an incredibly close partnership. To us, distribution is about marketing and sales together, not one in service of the other or whatever. It just doesn’t work.

 

This transitions well to the next set of questions, which are around sales, which we touched on a bit already. What are your sales teams and sales department most excited about when you are coming up with ideas and campaigns? As a CMO, when you’re putting together the strategic plan for marketing for 2025, do the sales team have initiatives they prefer, or are they coming to you with ideas?

Yeah, it’s a good question. The latter, definitely, they do. One of the joys and perils of marketing is that everybody has an opinion because we’re all consumers. By the way, that’s not a bad thing. I’m not one of these CMOs who puts his head in his hands every time someone comes to my office with a good or a bad idea. It’s actually good that we’re an actively discussed topic within most businesses and that people are interested in what we can provide.

In terms of your question about what they’re excited about, they are genuinely excited by this whole program of brand differentiation and what we can achieve, and whether we can actually stand out from the pack in a category where there definitely are some brands and some fabulous brands, but also a lot of bland entities that aren’t really brands. They’re really buying into the idea that we can. The culture in our business is very strong, and our clients will always say that, so trying to bottle that and capture it in a way that really encourages people to understand what we can offer, they absolutely buy into that.

The sales team is increasingly fascinated by the world of data and accurate targeting and relevance because the honest reality for us is that our clients number in the tens of thousands, if you like, in terms of clients who can make significant decisions about significant investments across both regions. It’s still a sizable audience, but when you think about the population of Europe and America and Africa, it’s a tiny group of people. So the fact that we can be thoughtful about how to reach that group of people and not waste our money talking to people for whom it’s also a waste of time—they’re probably not that interested in what we do—that is a real learning curve for them. What they recognise is that the value of their understanding of clients and the way that they can capture that and feed it back to us is profoundly useful to us and adds value to the whole distribution mechanism of sales and marketing. So we’ve worked hard to get folks to really understand that, get them on board with that, and they like that.

The final thing I’d say, which is just true of marketing, is that they like the stuff we do. Not everyone likes everything we do, of course, but they like the stuff we do. We do some quite interesting creative work and some things that are engaging. We have a product called QQQ, which is an enormous ETF product, which we just launched in Hong Kong with a drone show. It’s not that often that you necessarily get to do stuff like that. There are things that we do and events that we run that capture their imagination. That’s important because I genuinely think part of the role of marketing is to bring a bit of fun and joy and engagement into people’s lives. It’s an art and science discipline, but I wouldn’t ever want the science part of the discipline to completely cloud the art side because you just need to have a bit of intuition and take a few sensible risks around your activity to actually do something that’s a bit different. They like all of that stuff, and they’re full of ideas, and that’s fine.

 

Where did the drone show idea come from? That’s a nice combination of science and art.

This is a really substantial product. It’s one of the biggest exchange-traded funds in the world. We’re looking, obviously, to extend that franchise into other regions. It’s been hugely successful in the Americas. So it was really a way of making a bit of a statement of arrival. The day you list on an exchange is quite a big day, and just getting the right audience there and doing something which perhaps feels different and engaging, and not just someone standing at a lectern reading a speech about how fantastic the product is, but actually trying to do something with a bit of impact to then surround all of that more normal activity that, of course, you need around, as I was saying, education, but with something that captures the imagination a bit. So yeah, it’s nice to be able to do both.

 

What’s the most successful event or engagement piece that you’ve hosted?

It’s so varied because it depends so much on what it is. We definitely work hard at live events, which are still really important places to meet our clients and discuss with them what they’re interested in and see how that fits with what we’re doing. So we always try to make an impact. I have a real mantra around trying to do fewer things but doing them really well. If the clients in our industry could probably go to an event every day of the week, every hour of the day, they’re not going to choose to do that. So if we pick places and times where we believe our clients are going to be there—it’s going to be at a time of interest in what we do—then we will work really hard to engage them, to have stuff that’s not always the drone show scale, but things that are just of interest and pique interest and help us stand out from others. So that sort of live brand experience is still really important, particularly for a company like ours, where our culture and our people are a huge part of who we are. Trying to capture that is an important job for marketing.

 

Given the nature of what you do, it’s hard to get that culture and those people across. In-person events are super important as well. What are some of the challenges you face when hosting events? We touched on how your ICP is such a small group, and they’re sort of overwhelmed with the options of events they can go to. Are there other challenges you face when looking at hosting events, as obviously, they’re so spread out around the world as well? How do you pick the geography you host in?

We work hard on geography. It would tend to be the obvious financial centres where things are, where people will come. It’s a combination of location and, let’s call it, a classic financial services or investment management event. We’ll think hard about the audience, think hard about the kind of things that we do that they’ll be interested in, and then step back and say, how can we activate that in a way that’s a bit different? When it’s those kinds of events, it’s just thinking hard about your presence and, as you said, how do you capture the spirit of what you do?

When it’s the other way around, and you’re seeking the audience at a different sort of event and trying to show up—if I go back to QQQ again—we’re sponsoring quite a lot of high-end food events, for example, because we know that’s a big passion for our audience, and we can show up in their lives, as it were. Often in B2B enterprises, people forget that B2B audiences are just people as well; they might do ordinary things. So if we can show up in a place where we’re going to be relevant and still interesting, but it’s something that they’re going to enjoy, then we will also look at balancing out very classic asset management events with other places and times when we can just show up and hopefully grab their attention and be interesting without being too innovative, commerce-y, or sales-y about what we’re doing. So it is a balance for us, but live events remain important to what we do, for sure.

 

What career advice would you give to someone who was starting out in marketing now in 2025?

It’s still a great career, it’s evolved a lot, and it’s definitely become more of this blend of art and science, and a good understanding of digital and technology is now just a necessary part of life.

My overall advice, and maybe it’s generic anyway, but it’s just to be curious and be brave. I talk to a lot of our new starters, who all seem to be terrifyingly bright and interested, but I just like it when they ask questions and when they’re curious and when they challenge things and test things. New starters, younger people, are always going to bring a different perspective, and they are ultimately the future of all of our companies. People who may be 20 today will eventually be experienced, like me. So I encourage them to be curious and ask questions, and don’t be scared to challenge and be a voice because you’ve got something to say. Just because you’re junior doesn’t mean you haven’t got every right to challenge things and unpick things a bit. But I still think it’s a fun career. It’s a bit of a privilege to do this kind of work because I always feel so many people in the world don’t do jobs that they love, and we are unbelievably lucky to do a job that we enjoy, so it’s almost a responsibility to make the most of it.

 

Is there a piece of traditional leadership advice that you heard or have heard over the years that you think is now irrelevant or doesn’t really apply to the role of marketing now?

Again, maybe it’s a bit more generic, but I think certainly when I started work, work life was still much more hierarchical than it is today. So I think back to what I was saying about advice for younger people to speak up, and that was just harder, I think, and life was a bit more hierarchical, more generally. Perhaps it’s changed a lot over the last 30 years or so, but I think that sort of not necessarily spoken advice, but that sense of “No, no, you know your place,” which is to run around and type up reports and look after clients and all that—that’s just changed. It doesn’t mean that more junior roles aren’t still incredibly hard work, and you still have to learn stuff and do stuff, and it is the only way to learn, but I think that the whole world of hierarchy was falling apart. I think in COVID, it completely exploded, largely in a good way. The work environment now, when it’s right, should be a much safer place for people just to have opinions and feel like no one’s going to judge them for saying this, that, or the other, or for being this, that, or the other person, or whatever. That’s a great thing. So I think some of that, not necessarily advice, but that slightly unspoken world of “No, no, you have to earn the right to do this, or you have to do three years of this before you can do that,” I think that’s changed, and I think that’s a very good thing.

 

I saw a post on LinkedIn the other day, and it said, ‘If your CMO or marketing team aren’t coming to you with ideas that should make you feel a little bit nervous.’

That’s very true. Yeah, we are there to push boundaries a bit, not in a crazy way. I always feel that if someone else thinks they could have come up with the marketing, we’re not doing our job properly, because they probably could, and that means it’s deeply average. We should always be trying to push and move on and find new things, which is part of the fun of the job. 

 

For the next 10 years, what do you think marketing will look like?

In some ways, like a lot of things, it will change to remain the same. Marketing remains about being relentlessly driven by customer needs and wants, by really trying to differentiate your brand from others. I genuinely don’t think those things will change. I think they get more complex. The way it will evolve is through unimaginable leaps in artificial intelligence, without doubt. When you look at things such as marketing agents, there’s a lot of interesting stuff going to happen, which I don’t actually think is necessarily very threatening to human marketing workers, but I think it will be interesting. Like a lot of things, there was so much talk about big data around 15 years ago, and as usual, it was all a bit of hype ahead of its time. The reality is now we can do extraordinary things with data, both from a data richness point of view and from a predictive point of view, and lots of clever stuff. I think that will continue to accelerate. So it will be this art and science blend with significant science knowledge. But I do think the fundamentals and the tasks will remain the same; the way in which you execute them may be different. In a word, maybe “champion,” because I think we are here to champion what our customers want. Organisations work for so many different sorts of companies. Car companies want to sell cars; yes, of course, that’s fine. But what do people want and why? I do think marketing is here to constantly be that voice of the customer, the client, within an organisation, and champion what they want, of course, with commercial common sense. I want to sell the cars, too, but I actually want people to want them. I don’t want to just shout about them. So I think that role will remain important forever.