Five insights from top financial CMOs and CCOs

Welcome to Spark, a weekly newsletter from Vivace Content. We compile news signals from across the business, financial, and cultural landscape, and spark ideas to help you and your business jump on something new to talk about. Send tips and feedback to [email protected].

Hello to subscribers new and old,

It’s a delight to be back in your inboxes. I’m hitting send on this edition from my home office in Saint Paul, Minnesota, delighted to be here after a busy few weeks of travel for Vivace spent with our clients in both New York and London.

While in New York, we hit an exciting milestone for us a new agency. We sponsored Financial Narrative’s Spring Summit, which convened senior financial marketing and communications leaders and featured a rockstar line-up of speakers from Citi, Bloomberg, Betterment, HSBC, Marqeta, and more.

The event was held under Chatham House Rules, but in today’s issue, we jotted down the five takeaways we’re still thinking about.

By the way, we’re making some changes behind the scenes for Spark, all designed to make it more useful for you, dear reader. Send us a note with any thoughts or feedback you might have as we continue to evolve.

Best wishes for the week ahead,

-joel

Five insights from top financial CMO’s and CCO’s

Key takeaways from Financial Narrative’s Spring Summit

1. In order to be a trusted advisor, first you have to be trusted.
   

   An under-appreciated aspect of the work we do is the power of building relationships. No marketing or communications leader can be successful in what they do without being able to build and wield influence, which begins with trust.

   There’s really only one way to build trust: do what you say you were going to do, when you said you’d do it. Rinse and repeat. There’s no cheat code for this, and many small promises delivered on over time are going to be worth far more than grand plans delivered half-baked.

   When thinking about any new relationship with a stakeholder, be it your boss, your team, or the CEO, ask yourself how can you begin laying the foundations of trust by establishing shared expectations that you can consistently meet (or exceed)?

2. Brand is the North Star.

   Brand is one of those funny things that either you buy into fully or you don’t. For those of us fully converted, when new opportunities or challenges arise that you can’t quite wrap your head around, always get back to your north star. That is, your brand fundamentals like values, purpose, mission or vision, etc.. Especially in times when marketing and comms are trying to navigate roles and responsibilities, stop thinking so much about your internal organization, and instead ask: What’s best for the brand? 

    

3. CMOs and CCOs really can get along. And when they do, watch out world!

   Do you identify more as a marketer or a communicator? While we’ve been conditioned to believe that the two are sworn enemies, perhaps the most enlightening session of the day was held as a fireside chat between Betterment’s CCO and CMO. Their partnership should be documented, studied, and shared, as they truly have respect for each other and their complementary crafts, in a way that we’ve never really seen before. It’s helpful to think about “art of the possible” rather than “art of the what-always-happens” when building a relationship between the two functions. There are lots of ways to make it better – swim lanes, RACI models, etc. – but the place to start with this one is indeed at the top: Building a respectful and trusting working relationship between the two principals.  

4. Culture is defined by the worst behavior tolerated.

   This is a quote we’ve all heard before, but sometimes it just hits differently. Particularly when you’re in an organization or working with a brand that really doesn’t get culture, negatively impacting your day-to-day working life as a result. As communications and marketing leaders, we too often forget the power we have to positively impact organizational culture through the variety of tools in our toolkit. Instead of waiting for a better culture to be handed to you, start thinking about what you can do to build it.  

5. In our world of financial storytellers, community is key.
   

   Perhaps the same could be said in most professions, but the single biggest takeaway was simply how wonderful it was to connect IRL with and learn from industry peers. Financial Narrative has nailed something very well that we so admire: It's not just another industry organization, but a true, member-driven community. Or, as Maya Dillon, Head of Communications at HSBC U.S. wrote on LinkedIn: “Our industry is built on relationships. Thanks for this incredible platform to meet and cultivate friendships AND insights.”

📈 ON OUR RADAR

We’ll skip the rest of our normal sections today and be back to our regularly scheduled programming next week. In the meantime, here are a few things on our radar you might be interested in:

• LISTEN: We are biased, but our client Keesa Schreane is on an absolute tear for Season 3 of her podcast Climate Money Work. Episode 1 featured a great conversation with Estée Lauder’s CSO Nancy Mahon, and episode 2 has a really fascinating chat on the intersection of ESG and politics with Green Century Funds President Leslie Samuelrich alongside Steve Rothstein, founding MD of the Ceres Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

• LISTEN, pt. II: Fans of the great Matt Levine’s Money Stuff newsletter, rejoice — there’s now a podcast to complement, and it’s very good, and very fun. Can you guess the title? Money Stuff: The Podcast.

• READ: For Reuters, Sherry Madera, CEO of CDP (our client) penned this comment: We cannot win the battle of ‘planet vs. plastic’ without robust data.

• EXPLORE: If you like Spark, you’ll love Sherwood News, the newly launched media arm of Robinhood, whose charts we’ve featured in previous editions of Spark. Go explore and let us know what you think.

• APPLY: Know someone with 4+ years experience in B2B marketing, ready for their next adventure? Sent by a friend of Vivace: Insurance Insider is looking for a Marketing Manager.

Send us your shout-outs, strong opinions, and headlines to include in next week’s edition.

Thanks for joining us this week. Anything we missed? Something we should include next week? Please send all ideas and feedback to [email protected]. 

Spark is a production of Vivace Content, where we help our clients navigate what to say and how to say it every single day. Get in touch if you’d like to have a no-hassle consultation about how we can help you too. Have a great week ahead, and see you next Monday.