Christine Heckart
Anna Gilligan: All right. Well, I wanted to begin by asking you to tell me a little bit about your marketing background.
Christine Heckart: I think one of the unique things about my background is I’ve got to see the High-Tech industry from almost every angle. So I’ve been on the services side. I’ve been on the consulting side, on the hardware and systems side, and on the software side. It gives you a very nice and complete vision and purview of what’s going on in the tech world.
Anna Gilligan: So you really have a great track record at all the different companies where you’ve worked. What is different about your approach that you think works so well?
Christine Heckart: Well,great track record is probably a matter of opinion of whoever you’re asking. I bring a very specific philosophy about marketing to the companies that I work for, and that’s mostly about giving marketers the space to do their jobs and to do it really well. My philosophy is think big,start small, move fast.
Anna Gilligan: So you said part of your philosophy is giving your marketers space, but they have to be really talented in order for that to pan out, so how do you choose the people that work for you? What do you look for?
Christine Heckart: I think it’s understanding for each individual what their greatest strength is and where that fits in on the team. So, one of the things that we look at for the entire marketing department and then for each team within the marketing department – it could be the leadership team; it could be a project team – is that you have a diverse set of experiences and perspectives and talent and a diverse set of strengths on the team so that no one person has to bring everything. But when you look at the team as a whole, you get everything that you need.
Anna Gilligan: What did you change about NetApp’s business strategy when you arrived in 2010?
Christine Heckart: What we’ve done the last couple of years in marketing is kind of twofold. One, we moved from talking about storage to talking about the impact that storage has on the success of our business customers and our government customers. So, what’s the impact of the right storage decision on the way we work, live, and play, on the competitiveness of a company and its industry or on the success of a business or a mission or an organization?
Anna Gilligan: So what is the impact of storage?
Christine Heckart: So,examples would include because of storage we’re changing the face of digital entertainment. Weta Digital is one example. Weta Digital does the animations for very high end movies like Avatar and Lord ofthe Rings.
With Avatar, in particular, Jim Cameron’s vision for that movie was 3-D, andthe underlying rendering engine required a level of technology sophistication that did not exist at the time that he was envisioning the movie. It would have taken so long to do the special effects in 3-D that it would have taken upwards of 10 or 20 years even to make the movie that he had imagined. So we created some innovations specifically for them to enable them to make that movie and to make it more quickly, and as a result the world got this incredible, beautiful movie.
We have a customer in the financial sector, Suncorp. Suncorp had a new CIO come into their business. They wanted to become a culture of innovation in IT to help their insurance company move faster in their market,bring new innovations to market more quickly to their customers, and they putin place this underlying foundation built on NetAPP – one of the examples they share is their competition had been working on a mobile banking application for years. Their company still did not have a mobile banking innovation nor did their competitor.
They put this foundation in place. They had an intern come in on the weekend, prototype out a mobile banking application, and they had it to market in less than a quarter and in it’s first month, they did over 250 million transactions on that application. So, a huge culture of innovation that they were able todrive and really impact the competitiveness for their company in the insurance sector.
Anna Gilligan: How are you raising awareness about NetApp?
Christine Heckart: We’ve got 11,000 people whose job it is to represent the brand and to represent thbrand specifically to our customers and our partners and the key influencers. It’s not any one thing. You earn and you build a brand reputation and experience at every touch point and with every conversation every day. It’s not about glitz and glamour and it’s not about big money spending on advertising. It’s really about taking care and taking pride with every single touch point that a business partner or a customer or an influencer has with this company, and making sure it’s as good as we can make it.
Anna Gilligan: So how do you spot the changes in how companies are using IT and data storage, and then really capitalize on those opportunities?
Christine Heckart: Yeah,that’s a great question. You obviously spot it by going out and talking to people, which may include your own customer base and may not.
You have to separate the false positives of which there could be dozens, hundreds,thousands – things that look like they’re going to be big, but maybe aren’t going to be big. They look like they’re going to be important, but maybe not for a sustained period of time. To do that well, you have tobreak out the feedback loop that you get for your core business, and you have to talk to people that you don’t talk to for your core business and that are doing very different things. They might be working with a substitute technology, not a competitor. Competitors are very easy to spot and competition is very easy to react to. Very few businesses get killed by their competition.
Anna Gilligan: What do they get killed by?
Christine Heckart: Their substitution. They get killed by the thing that isn’t directly in their space, but comes in from the outside. In fact, the internet itself and digitization more broadly has changed as a substitute almost every industry on the planet now
Anna Gilligan: What marketing advice would you have for companies that are trying to expand? What are some good principles to market by?
Christine Heckart: A key principle is to be different, not better. So, it’s really easy to get caught –especially as a marketing organization – it’s really easy to get caught in the better battle:our thing is better than their thing. In the end, I don’t think better matters very much, especially when it’s incrementally better. It’s kind of a big, who cares?
A lot of marketing departments fall pretty to better, and what we want to do is we want to be different, not just better. It’s in the difference that you find not just an incrementally better approach, but you find a dramatically and materially different and better approach, and that’s in the way that you solve a problem or approach a problem or apply a technology to get a much better and bigger impact than if you’re just incrementally improving on things. So one of our philosophies is to be different, not just better.
Anna Gilligan: What are the most cost effective ways for a company to market itself?
Christine Heckart: That totally depends on the environment. Are you B2B? Are youB2C? How big are you in your space? Cost effectiveness depends a lot on the goals that you have. For NetApp, what works for us is to be very surgical and very targeted with our – not just our messages, but with our activities.
So,understanding what our customers are trying to achieve, where they are at inthe life cycle of that objective, and to help get them exactly the right information that they need to make a decision at exactly the right time. It’s very easy to say. It’s exceptionally hard to do.
Anna Gilligan: What are some of the companies you look to that you think do a really great job with marketing?
ChristineHeckart:
One of my favorite examples to point to and that I consider great marketing is the creation of Fantasy Football. Vast, most creative marketing in the history of the world in some ways because it took what was a very, very local product that people in a very small geography tended to care deeply about, and thanks to Fantasy Football, it expanded and immersed people in a national experience across all the local products.
It made peopleway over in one part of the country care a whole lot about the players and the quality of the product happening in a completely different part of the country,and created an entire cottage industry and billions of dollars in revenue as a result of trying to create a more intense and immersive experience for the viewers of football. Now that is great marketing. Great marketing is truly immersive.