This week on “Marketing Today,” Alan talks with Amy Fuller, chief marketing and communications officer for Accenture. Fuller has built a career working on world-class brands like Kraft, IBM, Kimberly-Clark, Verizon, and Deloitte while working on both the agency and the client side. Before joining Accenture in 2017, she spent time in various leadership roles at Deloitte, MasterCard, Y&R, and Ogilvy & Mather, among others.

During the course of their discussion, Fuller breaks down the complexity and challenging scope of serving as the chief marketer for a company the size of Accenture while offering observations and thinking that can be applied to an organization of any size. And she discusses formative experiences — from spending time throughout her childhood on an off-the-grid river island between the U.S. and Canada and earning a liberal arts education at Bryn Mawr College to learning how to “thrive with scarcity” while working on the agency side and her experience with the Posse Foundation, which helps diverse groups of college students find academic success — that have influenced her thinking and career.

And Fuller offered her take on the future of marketing: “How you reach people, how you measure your efficacy in doing so, are technical,” says Fuller. “And they're very real and very important. But the human part is not going away. And, if anything, it is getting more important.” Fuller goes on to add, “The more technical we become, the more important the human element becomes. And I think that is the future of marketing — it is the marriage of both.”

Highlights from this week's “Marketing Today” podcast include: 

• “Lots of responsibility and no resources, which is the definition of how you learn.” How Fuller's first job helped prepare her for a career in marketing. (1:33)
• Working with world-class brands is the thread woven through Fuller's career. (2:50)
• Fuller: “Understanding what you're really trying to solve — not what you're being told to solve, necessarily, but boring into the true business problem — is the only way you can succeed in marketing. (4:45)
• Fuller discusses the complexity and massive scope of her responsibilities at Accenture. (6:39)
• Fuller: “What Accenture is extremely good at is doing the kind of analysis that builds business cases.” (13:52)
• The why and how of taking a stand on causes in this polarizing time. (17:35)
• Fuller on the articulation of the talent brand at Accenture. (20:17)
• Simple advice for any new CMO: Ask questions and listen to the answers. (24:40)
• Growing up, Fuller learned resiliency and innovation during summers spent on an off-the-grid island on the St. Lawrence River. (26:50)
• What Fuller wishes she'd discovered earlier in her career: Asking for advice and coaching is a sign of strength — and a lot less stressful. (29:19)

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