CMO Chats with Victoria Perea-Usher, Vice President for Marketing Communications Europe at JCB

Can you tell us a bit more about your journey and what sparked your interest in marketing?

Honestly, my career has not been that linear. My first foray into marketing was working for a sales promotion agency in London, in Kensington, for those who know the area, and I was 19, coming out of college. It was probably one of the most fun jobs I’ve ever had. Our clients were either in the alcohol sector or the confectionary sector, any kind of FMCG products, and so at any given time, we had a cupboard full of lots of goodies that we loved. Our campaigns were regional, and we’d go into pubs, clubs, and restaurants, and we’d have all these great campaigns and great learnings that lasted about three or four years. I got the travel bug, and I came back, and I thought, “What do I want to do?” I tried a few roles and ended up temping for two weeks for this amazing woman who was then head of the brand at my previous company. Two weeks turned into five months, into five years, then 12 years. That was my role in marketing. So I’ve always worked in financial services marketing in different regions and with different groups and expertise, but that is my foray into marketing; not so linear, but Financial Services is where my niche is. 

That sounds great. And I’d love the goodies that you haven’t let you know was going to sort of not be very healthy in my later life. No, it sounds absolutely fantastic. Now, what does your company do? 

JCB is one of six global payment networks globally. We are in the financial services sector, specifically in payments. JCB is headquartered in Japan, and we are both a card issuer to consumers and a merchant acquirer, so generally, where customers will want to spend their cards. It could be a luxury retailer, hotel, airline, etc. So our role is to make sure that when our customers want to travel anywhere in the globe, they’re able to use their card. Our organisation is related to payments, so the consumer, the retailer, and the processing of those things.

Perfect. Thank you so much for explaining that. As the Vice President of Marketing and Communications at JCB, what is your current main marketing focus? 

It’s important to bring you on a bit of a journey because context is really key to these types of questions. I was the first hire at JCB Europe from a marketing perspective, and it took me a little bit of time to do my orientation, so I had to really immerse myself into who our customers were, who our target was, what type of organisation we worked in, and how we build a marketing strategy. So, I began by really thinking through what that orientation looks like and developed a marketing strategy. I started to build a team that brought in an agency roster and some of the marketing stack that we needed. However, the biggest learning in the orientation is that while we are a very recognisable brand in Asia, people know who we are; we don’t have the same resonance in Europe. So, brand-building activities are really where my focus for the last four years has been and definitely is currently. Now, 70% of my budget goes into brand-building activities. So, yeah, that’s where my main priority lies right now, and that is where my main budget is being invested in.

All right, fantastic. Can you tell me about a particularly innovative or successful marketing campaign your team has recently executed?

With the orientation and the research that we did, despite all the micro-challenges that we’re facing, our organisation invested in building a very specific advertising campaign for our target audience here in Europe. And I must explain that my role is actually just European; it’s not a global role. The ethos of Japanese customer centricity is called Omotenashi, and our campaign is very much based on those principles. It’s not a new principle; it’s just a different way of articulating that. 

Our current brand campaign is called #BetterWithOmotenashi, and I think the reason why it is particularly innovative for us is because we’ve done a number of things. First of all, it is the first brand campaign that we have rolled out in Europe, but it has a modern twist. We did benchmarking against all of our other competitors, and we’re not using people in our images. We’re actually using illustration. We’ve partnered with a very famous illustrator to emulate Japanese strokes and use really beautiful imagery in our advertising. And for us, it’s important because it is a digital campaign, first of all. So when we first started with our metrics, you know, we thought it would do well, but actually, it’s done 10 times better than we thought. So we’re constantly pivoting tactics to learn from the data, but I think even we were surprised at how well received it’s been. The reason I think it’s particularly successful is because it was curated with and for our target audience, so nothing goes out that door until our customers see it. So if they understand it and resonate with it, bear in mind that because we work across regionally, sometimes something might work in the UK that doesn’t work in Germany or Austria or Italy or Spain. So we’re having to constantly think through all of that. Our campaign has to transcend those values across the region. So that’s the most recent campaign that we’ve delivered, and it’s doing really well for us.

It’s very interesting. I did see that on your LinkedIn profile, #BetterWithOmotenashi, and I was wondering what it actually meant and what was behind that. Thank you for explaining that. That makes a lot more sense now. What are your biggest marketing challenges at the moment?

Oh, I don’t think I’m unique, darling. You’re probably saying that we’re all a bit worried, aren’t we? My biggest concern is we have a very small team, and there’s a lot on their plate, so my first concern is to make sure that they’re okay with the work that we have to do. There’s a lot of work that we have to do, so we’ve got to prioritise, and sometimes we have to say no to certain things, so I have to make sure that we’re focused and that we’re working with our agencies to really build that internal focus. My immediate priorities are my team and making sure that we’re okay. However, from a big-ticket item, there are a few challenges working for a global company that’s been in business for around 60 years, and at the top of that list is digital transformation. If I’m honest, we have a lot of legacy systems, and we have to bring in that change. Do we have the right people to make that change, or do we have the right kind of tech stack to do that, even some of those little changes? Some of that prioritisation sits with me, and we are the change agents for that digital transformation. So I have to again look at my team’s resources and make sure that we’re able to do that. So that’s top of the list. And I think probably more important than that is the articulation, the measurements, and the efficacy of what we do. We do have a responsibility to be able to translate back what we’ve learned, how we’ve learned it, why we’ve done it, back into the business, and the outcome that brings, so for us, it’s been a bit of a journey, if I’m honest, because not everyone has the same aptitude. We’re working as a global company. We’ve got to bring different stakeholders together. How we message certain things to different groups is pivotal to us as it makes sure that the measurements they want to hear are relevant to the way we want to message them. Translating that back to the business is always a challenge, and making sure that, again, we’ve got the right platforms to be able to do that and bringing one source of truth, because our data sits in many different places, so we’re able to build that together and that’s taken a little bit of time.

How does JCB stay ahead of its competitors in terms of marketing?

Having worked in various organisations, I think it’s a number of things. First of all, I will say that because there are six global networks in the world, we actually partner a lot of the time together. We’re not necessarily natural competitors. In that sense, we build together. We might work in the States, Australia, or Asia, building either a merchant community or a consumer community. In that sense, we partner very well together, but when it comes to obvious differentiation. So why would you work with one organisation versus another? I think that’s where our role is a little bit different. Because we are Japanese headquartered, and we’ve been established for around 60 years, we do both issuing and acquiring when we speak to our partners in Europe, specifically the richness of the Asian consumers, what they want, right? They want to welcome back those who spent post-COVID. 

Our role is to be able to articulate that value story to our retailer and to our bank acquire audience. What do the Taiwanese card members remember? What product do they have? What’s their average transaction value? What insights can we bring to them? So that’s one way that we do that. And we’ve got around 160 million card members, so the base is diverse, and that’s one way we do that. There are obviously a lot of products and services that are linked back to that and that are differentiated across different markets as well. But I will say for me because my role is B2B, which is being intrinsically aligned with a commercial organisation. There are not that many organisations that do that well, and from day one, I made sure that we brought people into that journey. So when we look at things like, for example, what’s the messaging that we want to tell our external audience? I call it marketing sales and marketing alignment. We build case studies infographics, and we share them with the teams. We get them to buy into the story, and because they are a main distribution channel for us, they need to be able to articulate the brand story. We’ve made them into individual storytellers if you like. I think that’s another way that we particularly differentiate throughout brand positioning. 

One of the key tenets was that we’re really great at building relationships, and it’s important for us to continue to evolve that. And I think the third one that I mentioned before is the Omotenashi campaign from a marketing perspective. We do not use people in our imagery. We use illustrations, and it doesn’t make you stop in your tracks. That kind of benchmarking that we did was pivotal. So those, I say, were the probably three biggest things that we do in Europe that kind of support that story and that evolution.

Very interesting. Is there a reason you don’t use people? 

Because everyone else does. If we want to be differentiated, we did a benchmarking exercise with all financial services companies. Blue is a colour that comes up with probably most financial services organisations that you know. And if we want to differentiate, we should not use that colour. For example, people, people on beaches, laughing in cafes, or whatever, different types of things. So again, if you want to be different in a crowded market, you need to think differently. And that’s where we thought that. And because we have a Japanese heritage, we wanted to bring that Asian flavour into what we do in Europe. So again, that illustration really shows that.

Thank you. In your opinion, what does the future of marketing look like?

Did you know that when I saw that question, I loved it? Because we’re in it. We are actually in the future right now with AI. I know, I know, everyone talks about it, and I think we’ve just scratched, or we are just scratching the surface of that from our perspective. The thing that I think AI will do really well is process efficiency, and especially with teams like us that are quite nimble, it will help us prioritise some of those things from a B to B perspective. The other thing that I’ve seen from a channel perspective and content is video. The video’s just gone up. I mean, our results with video are staggering, and I’m always kind of really surprised and pleasantly surprised at how well that’s doing. And it wasn’t necessarily part of our channel strategy two years ago, but it definitely is now, and because I think we’ve suffered in B to B marketing as the boring guys or the niche guys, or the whatever, you know, B to B is half the economy, and I think that we haven’t done ourselves the best justice when it comes to creative storytelling. Watch this space. It will be the B2B decade because I’m now starting to see real creativity in that space.

Great. Thank you. If you could describe the role of the CMO in one word, what would that word be and why?
They’re an alchemist, aren’t they? Let’s face it: it’s the mix of science and creativity, problem-solving creatively. It’s the emotional connection to the customer. It’s taking calculated risks and experimenting. You know, I’m constantly pivoting tactics, and I’m pretty sure that Chief Marketing Officers are as well. They bring that kind of holistic integration with the 4Ps and that kind of learning from the data. Like I said, the scientific aspect of it, if you like, is to bring better business outcomes. And I think the really, the thing that underpins the alchemy is that storytelling piece. You know, they’ve got to be great at articulating what they do and bringing that generation of marketers behind them and their organisation. So, ‘Alchemist’ is the word that I would use.

I have to say this is my favourite question because we always get so many wonderful answers, and I haven’t heard of’ alchemist’ before. I love that, and I find it extremely intriguing. Thank you for that. My last question now is, what career advice would you give to other upcoming marketing leaders across your career?

You’ll be given lots of different advice. And I think the one that’s always really stuck with me, and it’s one that I always talk about, is to have courage in your conviction. You know, we have so many obstacles thrown at us, and I think if you’re able to articulate your ‘why,’ then you’re absolutely winning. So, have courage in your conviction. Don’t let the ‘no’ sidetrack you, and you know, think, ‘Oh, why?’ Let that fuel your passion. And then have courage in the thing that you want to get to. And I feel that that will help any marketer, or anyone really, in whatever role they’re in.

As VP of revenue marketing, what is currently your marketing focus?

My main focus is two things: at the simplest level, it’s acquiring new customers and then growing existing customers. On the acquisition side, we do that through demand generation, other acquisition channels, advertising, paid media, and such. The website, our SEO, and the self-serve funnel, as well as field marketing and events, are all focused on bringing in new customers into the funnel.

On the growing existing customer side, this is more of your growth marketing process. We’re testing and iterating across onboarding and lifecycle marketing, working with sales, and trying to create opportunities for self-serve accounts that are coming in with the opportunity to grow. I also oversee the marketing tech stack and all of our marketing operations and systems. What I try to do is get these things working in harmony. Because all of these are kind of squarely placed against the customer life cycle where we’re bringing them in, we’re nurturing and onboarding them all digitally, and then as they adopt the product and as they use more of the product, we try to grow those customers and introduce other features and products to them.

Can you tell us about a particularly memorable marketing campaign, whether it was particularly challenging or especially successful that you’ve executed recently?

Prior to DigitalOcean, I was at Google for seven years, and one of the things that really has stuck with me in, really, my whole career was during COVID when I was on Google Workspace. Team workspace is, you know, Gmail, Calendar, Doc, Slides, Meet, etc. This was when Zoom and the surge of video communication began; all of us were locked at home, and all of the chaos was going on. It was a great opportunity for Google to strategically bring Google Meet into that conversation. At the time, I was leading growth marketing for the workspace team, and we created a master class on how to get a team focused, mobilise that team, give them strategy, give them structure, and ultimately execute a really big vision.

We had maybe 50 people coming in and out of this work, streaming across daily stand-ups, regular syncs from a program management perspective, looking at metrics and reporting to leadership, and a full project scope. We had people from brand, media, the UX team, research, product, product marketing, growth marketing, sales, and even engineering sometimes. What was really, really amazing to me was that it could have been utter chaos. It could have been a complete disaster, right? You have that many people that many opinions, and that many agendas, and it wasn’t. It was just that everybody was so focused on what we were trying to do. Each person was completely content with their work stream, their tasks, and what they needed to do, and everyone had the autonomy to sort of own their own lane in the pool. That, in itself, was just amazing to be a part of. I’ve taken that with me and thought through it whenever I’m building a project team.

But the thing I was most personally proud of was on the growth side. What we did was figure out how to introduce Google Meet to existing workspace customers. So these were customers that were heavy users of probably Gmail and Calendar, maybe even docs and slides, and some of the collaborative document types. What we figured out was a way to extract some of the signals of what these customers were doing in these apps and then feed that into a predictive formula that would then introduce Google Meet at the right time. An example of this I’ll share is: let’s say you and two other folks in your workspace account are all in a document at the same time. Maybe you’re editing; you’re sort of interacting with each other. That’s a great opportunity to say, “Hey, did you know you can actually take this document and share it directly and meet and have a quick huddle? ”You can see each other. You can have a conversation. Maybe that makes your collaboration a little bit easier. There were dozens and dozens of these experiments. But it was new. It was the beginning of what would later become a more solidified, cross-functional growth process. It was just a really profound opportunity to be a part of that when the world wasn’t at its best. We all found some solitude in that process.

What are your biggest marketing challenges at the moment?

I’ll share something I think is kind of general for the industry because I think that might be more relevant. I certainly face some of these, and I think a lot of them. When I talk to friends and colleagues in marketing positions, we’re all kind of hearing and saying the same thing. But I think what’s happened is that, particularly in B2B, the buyers that we’re trying to market to are extremely fatigued. In some cases, they’re annoyed, right? They’re tuning out our marketing. I think you see that in the data. You see website traffic start to go down, and you see impressions go down. You see advertising costs go up. It’s ultimately just harder to get in front of our buyers, on top of even just understanding who our buyers are.

The second thing is that I think over the last few years we, as marketers, really kind of overdid it. We had this surplus of budget and desire to grow during COVID. And so, what did we do? We did tons and tons of webinars, tons of digital content, tons of digital media, and tons of messages nonstop. We were able to distribute this on a scale we never had. Unfortunately, what we did was just saturate the market, and now, as a result, we’ve got these buyers who are engaging less with marketing, and I think, ultimately taking the sales process into their own hands. You see all these stats where the average sales deal the buyer has already completed, like 60% of the process before they even talk to a salesperson. In some cases, they want to do it all themselves. They want to go to a review site, they want to talk to peers, they may join a community, they look at social media, and they’re already formulating their opinion before they even talk to you. That’s a key sort of risk for marketing, where we typically try to influence that thought process before they talk to sales.

On top of that, you see budgets are down. Marketers are facing lower budgets, and they’re trying to do more with less. But also, for the companies that we’re selling to, their budgets are down, right? They might be investing less in certain types of software or certain types of processes. And so, all of these things happening at once kind of create this perfect storm where it’s just become a lot harder to market, is what I think. As a result of that, I believe it’s forcing the marketers to get back to some of the basics. We need to understand who our customers are and what pain points they’re trying to solve, and then creatively explain what our product or solution does to them. This is where you’ve got to find something unique and just simply use the channels that every other one of your competitors is using in a kind of mundane way. It’s just not going to cut it, right? You really have to focus on the customer and what they’re looking for, and then build around that.

What are some common trends that you have noticed different companies capitalise on to stay ahead of their competitors in terms of marketing?

Right now, I see two things really growing: One is the rise of the B2B social influencer. You go on LinkedIn now, and it is, it’s all; it’s either founders, CEOs, CMOs, or some sort of C-level that is positioning themselves as an influencer in their industry.

Then the second is communities. You can see how these things can actually work well together. But a lot of companies are investing in the community. I think the ones that had this sort of strategy in their DNA as a company before are doing really well because they’ve already got this built-in audience. And so, as I mentioned before, it’s getting a lot harder to reach that audience through media, essentially renting it from LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, or whatever you’re using as an ad platform. If you have that built-in community, you now have a leg up. You have a community of, hopefully, your prospects and customers that you can learn from. You can do research, understand what their pain points are and what they’re looking for, and then design products, solutions, and marketing around that. So, I think influencers and communities are really important right now.

But I think the catch here is that it’s like content. Simply creating content doesn’t drive growth or performance—it has to be good content. And so, on the influencer side, I think you see some who have kind of stumbled into this, and their posts just look like promotions for their company or their product, not really creating any value. You have to be a part of the conversation; you have to join the conversation and add value to it. It’s the same thing with communities, right? If you build up a community and all you do is advertise your product to them, you’ll likely not have a community very soon. I think it’s all about how you create value across these two channels and, ultimately, how you build and win the trust of your customers and position them to consider doing business with you.

In your opinion, what does the future of marketing look like?

Oh, I love this question. I think the answer is that it’s different. It’s going to look different. I’ve already made some, like, I guess, predictions you could call them from, say, six months ago, that are stale already. I think the big thing is that AI is obviously going to change a lot of marketing. But what I’m excited about is where AI strategically gets placed in your marketing supply chain. If you think about the entire marketing process across brand, creative, demand, generation, and operations, and how you’re showing up to meet buyers in their hypothetical journey, I think that’s the key. There are so many places where it can be valuable. And what you see now is kind of the first foray into AI, which was messaging and creative. You can now build content and copy and visuals and videos and audio just super, super easy—almost too easy—to an extent, where we really do run this risk of over-saturating and already saturated market content is just becoming a lot easier to create, but also harder to find and harder to consume.

The second area is workflow management with AI agents. This is where I’m really excited because you think about all of the mundane commodity tasks that a marketer might do, even just preparing a social post. They historically, maybe, went to a copywriter to get the copy, they went to a designer to get the design, and then they went to maybe a channel owner who’s going to craft all that together and put it into the channel, click Post, and then you’ve got a person who’s going to report on that. You’ve got agents now that can do most of that, and then you’re sort of managing these agents. I think that’s really cool. It also comes with some responsibility, right? If you’re sort of hyper-accelerating with crappy messages, it’s not going to do you well, right? You still need to be creative, but what you can do is speed up the delivery process.

Then the third one I think I’m particularly fond of, and I’m really keen to learn more about, is just predictive analytics and better insight creation through AI. In my career, a kind of pre-chat GPT coming up with insights requires a data scientist. Building a predictive model required a data engineer, a data analyst, and a lot of resources, and the results were great, right? You can really understand a lot about your customers by looking at that data, but I think I imagine a world where a lot of that is automated and streamlined. As you launch a campaign, you basically feed that campaign into some machine learning or predictive model, and it’s now looking for all the things that you’ve trained it to look for. As a result, it’s giving you much faster, more real-time insights that you can take action on. It could be simple things like changing creative or changing messaging, or it might be something more along the lines of, “Hey, your most valuable customers are doing X, Y, and Z before they take that action.” And so, it’s starting now to help you understand what the buyer journey is and doing that at a way more granular level. All customers are created equal; they’re all very, very, very different. Now you have this proliferation of buyer journeys that are driven by insights, and then you can take action on that, personalize messaging, and do all that fun stuff.

If you could describe the role of a CMO in one word, what would that word be? and why?

I love this one. I think I just sort of came across this as an aha moment, but the word is servant. There’s a common description of servant leadership. As a leader, are you serving? I really want to understand what this means. There’s the leadership side, but even as a marketing team, you have to think about your role of serving customers, those on your team, your organisation, and then other areas in the company, right? Most businesses don’t succeed just because of marketing. I think you really need to be okay with that; you need to be humble that your role is to work with products, to work with product, marketing, sales, engineering, operations teams, and strategy teams, to bring the brand to life in the market, or to bring those products and solutions to market in a creative way. For me, the times where I felt the most successful are when I’ve been really tuned in to these other teams and really understand what they’re working on and what their goals are, and then I can bring that marketing perspective. Whatever it is, whether it’s from a creative side or it’s from more of an operational and growth side, either way, you know the value that you bring, and you’re working with these teams to execute.

What career advice would you like to share with other marketing leaders out there?

I thought about this one a bit, and where I landed was to control what you can control. Thinking about where I’ve been successful or felt the most successful is in the places where I didn’t get caught up in either politics, drama, changes in the organisation, or things that I just couldn’t control, right? Like, maybe the market’s down. I can’t really control that, right? But what I can control is my little slice of marketing, my team, and the people I work with.

In some cases, as I’ve personally grown through my career, most of my role changes were the result of reorganisation and new organisational design, which most people kind of commiserate around. “Oh, I don’t want this change. I don’t want to do that and this and that.” You can’t control the fact that it changed. But what you can control is how you show up, how you work with your new leader, and how you transition from the old leader. If you’re getting a new team or joining a new team, you can control how you show up there, and you can control your personality and your outlook. Those types of things, I think, go a really, really long way. I’ve tried to think about this and even the day-to-day. You can very quickly at work; just get thrown into a bunch of things that you realise you really have no control over. But find the thing you can control and just run with it. Do what you can do as well as you can, and block out what others are doing and the things that are out of your control.