THE (NEW)FUTURE OF

MARKETING

MARKETING KNOWLEDGE

MARKETING KNOWLEDGE

Cambridge Marketing Press

Kevin Bishop - VP Brand System and Workforce Enablement, IBM

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It’s a real honour to be here this evening: not only is it your 14th year of these

annual lectures, it’s also IBM’s centennial year. When we started we made bacon slicers, time recording machines and punch cards. Now we don’t make those things but we make - and do - a whole lot of other things that make a difference in today’s world.

Whilst many other very successful companies that have been around for a long time thrive by perfecting the same whiskey or the same beer or the same chocolate, IBM changes what we do many times over. Tonight I’ll explain something of how we do that and why that’s been such a successful strategy for us. The lecture is called the “New Future of Marketing” for a reason, because we think the world has changed very significantly and this holds profound implications for our profession.

I want to start with something from the past:

This is what for many years we have called marketing: taking a market segment that we want to address, raising awareness that we have something to say to this segment, trying to attract interest in our product and a desire for it, and eventually prompting the action to take that product off the shelf and put it into your shopping basket - whether you’re buying from a consumer or business to business perspective. The AIDA model turns out to have been around since 1898 and, as I was preparing for this speech, I was surprised to learn that the marketing funnel, at the heart of so much of what we do, dates back quite so long.

I think we’d all agree that the world has evolved quite substantially since 1898, so we believe that it is time to look at those changes and re-evaluate the assumptions behind this model.

Kevin Bishop

The (new) FuTure oF MArkeTing

An edited extract from the 14th Annual Cambridge Marketing Lecture, presented by Kevin Bishop, Vice President of IBM’s Brand System and Workforce Enablement

Image: Kevin Bishop, IBM

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The phenomenal connection of people and devices to the Internet is one force shaping our world. Alongside that, the physical world is changing: people are moving to cities in unprecedented numbers, so what kind of work we do and where work gets done are radically different today to the way they were in 1898.• This Internet thing seems to have taken off a bit and is clearly

having some influence in how we spend our time. • If Facebook were a country, with some 750 million members

it would be the third largest country in the world, behind only China and India.

• Smart devices are changing the way we live and work: we’ve all probably got mobile phones in our pocket and GPS in our car, whilst some of us may be starting to invest in programmable washing machines or fridges, or may even allow other people to turn on or access our devices in some way. There are already, according to Gartner, some 26 smart devices per human being on the planet.

• Mobile Apps: we downloaded some 7 billion in 2009 and, according to the Wall Street Journal, some 50 billion apps per year will be downloaded by just 2012.

These global shifts are affecting the marketplace but also the companies that operate in it. In IBM all sorts of things are very different from what they were even a few decades ago: • Some 73% of our people work remotely from where their

Manager is (where remotely is more than 100 miles away and frequently across a country border); that’s a big change when you used to be able to shout to your colleagues across the office floor.

• Half of our people now work somewhere “other than a traditional office”. They work from home, they work in their client space, they’re mobile workers in some way, they hot desk through locations.

• We are truly a globally integrated enterprise with staff in the 173 countries of the world that we operate in - but now with a similar scale of workforce in India as the US.

All this means that the cultural norms by which we, and many companies, operate have changed beyond all recognition. At the same time, the voices and opinions of our global workforce have never been so clearly heard.

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For the past few years, IBM has been working with our colleagues in the Arthur Page Society, a well-respected communications and marketing organisation in the US, to understand these shifts in the context of our profession. Together with our fellow Page Society members P&G, Apple, Johnson and Johnson, e-bay, PepsiCo, BMW and others, we have developed a thesis that the old marketing model is dead. That is a big claim but we believe it’s justified: something very significant is happening. The old model no longer holds, and - most important - something new is emerging to take its place. That is what I would like to share with you this evening.

AuThenTiciTyWhen you leave here later tonight, it is going to come down to two things that I hope you will remember.The first of those is authenticity. On the slide [bottom right] are a whole series of different quotes reflecting the views and experiences of our colleagues in P&G, Johnson and Johnson and others. What these experiences add up to is that the consumer now owns your brand. It’s the consumer that is defining what your brand stands for as they comment in social media and other places about the way your brand operates, not simply the products or services they buy.

The implication of this is profound - it means we need to extend our culture beyond the firewall. It is no good simply to project who we are as a company through our actions in marketing and communications - through the media we either own or pay for - because, if some aspect of your company is out of line with the expectation that you are setting, a member of your constituency base (employee, partner, supplier, client etc.) will blow the whistle on you.

Now, there have always been people who make it their vocation to call out and comment on business decisions - whether it is sweatshops in China or Fair Trade products from Africa - but what the internet has brought is transparency on a huge scale. It has brought ease of access to every single individual that you interact with in your business to be able to share their experience or point of view with the network of people that they interact with on a daily basis - typically some two hundred people per member on Facebook (and for our children, often with over a thousand ‘friends’, we can see where the future is going).

People will share things with their network, with no knowledge or thought about who makes up their friends network (colleagues, suppliers, partners etc.) If they make a comment about something they have observed that is not authentic about your company - and others see and care about it - within hours that gap between what you say and what you do will be found out, will be publicised, will be circulated - sometimes with huge reach and scale. It may not be front page news, it may not be ‘the tweet that killed the company’ (though we have seen a whole series of examples recently of tweets that have certainly killed individual’s reputations), but it will certainly go to people that matter, people within the community that know and already care.

So, the first thing that we need to learn about in this new future of marketing is this notion of authenticity - and the first point that I want to make is that our role in marketing communications has to change: we have to move from setting the agenda externally to setting the agenda internally as well. We have to take the lead to make sure that we lead what we’re calling The Authentic Enterprise: one where what the enterprise is lined up to what is says it does. If we as marketers don’t take the lead in this, it will be us as well as other organisations that suffer - there is a reason the average half-life of the Chief Marketing Officer is something around two years.

As we think about Authenticity, and what it takes to build an authentic enterprise, we need to understand that many things have changed but some things have not. One of the things that has not changed, is that it is still people that buy stuff and that buying is still about people making decisions (whether you are a consumer, whether you are business to business). This is important because the core psychological principles behind the way people make decisions remain the same. We need to build belief, we need confidence, we need to be prompted to take action. Where the change to how we market comes in is when you probe a little bit deeper to understand the dynamics of how these things happen in today’s world.

Let us start with the notion of belief. To come to believe something, typically we need to hear it from somebody we trust, we need to see credible evidence or we need to have experienced it for ourselves. The problem is, people don’t trust the same people they used to. People no longer trust politicians, that is well documented, but increasingly they don’t even trust scientific data. There have been too many examples of things which have been proven to be wrong or at least questionable, big stories in the press that have caused the average man or woman in the street not to trust many individual sources. In government it’s called the ‘Death of Deference’. In other

The consumer now owns your brand

Image: Kevin Bishop, IBM

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areas we’ve shifted to this notion of the social conscience: we would much rather trust the many people who rated the seller on eBay as a trustworthy seller than we would any particular source… certainly much more than anything the sellers might say themselves.

We would much rather read the many stories that we can read from citizen journalists, rather than trust one editor of Al Jazeera or the BBC. We would much rather trust an aggregate picture of all kinds of collective input than any particular, singular point of input.

Therefore the notion of having to establish trust is still true: but the mechanisms by which we establish trust (and through that, belief), the mechanisms by which we provide evidence that can be shared (and therefore establish belief), and the mechanisms by which we engage people to experience first hand something for themselves, have all shifted. So the core human psychology remains the same whether it’s the individual, the group or the crowd, but the tools that cause people to believe, gain confidence and act have shifted. This is what we need to understand as we engage in building our businesses. Not building our brands - but building our businesses.

Abraham Lincoln said “Character is like a tree, reputation is like its shadow. The shadow is what we think of it. The tree is the real thing.” In IBM, we still have our roots in the US and so we have a special regard for the man behind this quote. But when we are talking about the authentic enterprise, we find that this quotation also works extremely well across Asia and India because of the power of the notion behind it. The shadow is what we think of it but the tree is the real thing. And so our very simple argument is that marketing is no longer about manipulating the shadow, it is not about manipulating a brand image, it is not about getting great lighting or good scaffolding or some really good

photography with fabulous photographers to take it and make a great piece. Marketing is now about the health of the tree. If the tree is healthy, it will cast a strong and powerful shadow; it will therefore be easy for anyone to take a wonderful photograph, because the tree itself is a beautiful thing.

This is the essence of the shift in emphasis around marketing communication, citizenship, indeed all the things that we engage with from within our profession: from manipulating the shadow (the image, the reputation, the brand), to managing the substance of the thing itself. In the words of my boss, “When a corporation and a decision-maker come together on the basis of shared purpose and values, the effect is to make the corporation a more distinct and successful enterprise and the decision-maker a more successful person and a motivated advocate”.

AdvocAcyThis brings us to the second key point I want to make tonight: the notion of advocacy. The reason that the marketing funnel is no longer appropriate is because it is no longer sufficient for somebody to desire and take action by taking your product from the shelf and putting it in their basket. Why? Because the next consumer needs to hear from their peers about what is right, what is good, what is appropriate, what they should buy. So, if the first consumer does not go beyond purchase through to active advocacy of your product, you can no longer drive growth as effectively as you could when there were only three television channels to broadcast through, only one of which took advertising; when there were only three or four newspapers, with very clear and solid loyal readership; or when there were very clear consumer advocates through individual organisations, or even collective organisations like the Which? Group. So unless we can build advocacy beyond the individual’s personal decision to buy or otherwise engage with you, we cannot operate in this new market environment that the internet has created.

Marketing is no longer about manipulating the shadow, it is now about the health of the tree

Without achieving customer advocacy, you can no longer drive growth as effectively as when there were only 3 Tv channels and 3-4 newspapers

The deATh oF deFerence

look to the Web: According To inTerBrAnd, iBM is currenTly The second MosT vAluABle BrAnd in The world

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Through all these eras of technology, it was the collaboration with our clients that really distinguished our company. We did that again through the era of PCs, we did that again through the era of software, we’ve done that again through the era of services. And as we look back at this history in our centennial year, we’ve been able to write down what has been distinctive about our company because it states who we actually are, not who we say we are.

So what I’m going to share with you now is our corporate character. This is not a piece of creative writing, it’s not designed to be a communication piece, nor is it written for any particular audience. It is an historical summary of who we are, and it says that we do 5 things:1. ‘We pioneer intellectual capital that creates new value’.

Whether that’s intellectual capital in the form of Nobel Prize winning scientists, intellectual capital in the form of engineers who develop and build new manufacturing techniques, or intellectual capital in the work of the sales, marketing and consultant teams that work with the client on their problems and find new ways of solving a client’s problems using our technology. Whether it’s new ways of hiring, training, recruiting, or developing employees, or new ways of running a global integrated enterprise, it’s part of the character of who we are, and has been demonstrably applied throughout our history.

2. ‘We apply science to the challenges of business and society.’ We apply science, the notion of scientific rigour; whether that is hard science, engineering science, management science, social science, it’s the notion of taking facts and evidence and learning by doing, by experience, by taking empirical evidence from each action in order to make the next step a better next step. Again, you can take that same approach and apply that to HR, finance and so forth just as much as you can apply it to engineering and consulting.

3. ‘We are global in presence, viewpoint and lasting impact’. We called our company International Business Machines back in 1924 but we had already opened offices in Brazil in 1914, just 3 years after we opened. We have been selling products in the UK since before we were even incorporated as a company. We have always been international in our presence but the point is, presence is not everything, it is not that you sell in 173 countries, it’s that you draw upon the insights and the knowledge of those countries in order to make choices that are right for your company and for the clients of your company for the long term. You cannot survive for 100 years, in fact you cannot survive for 10 years, if you don’t meet the quarterly success of your shareholders, of your investors. But you also

So how on earth do you do that? It’s not enough to say there’s a problem. I think you recognise the problem, certainly our colleagues in P&G, Johnson and Johnson, Apple and so forth, they all recognise the same problem. The way it manifests itself is slightly different according to the brand or the business, but the same common problem is ‘what do you do about it?’

Our view is that weight has shifted away from notions about a mission, a charter, a credo and brand attributes, to the notion of character. Any enterprise needs to have a ‘corporate character’. What do I mean by that? We’re here in Cambridge, and Cambridge University is a good example of an organisation that has a very distinctive ‘corporate character’ that it has maintained for centuries, continues to nurture and sustain, but also reinvents what that means in ways that are relevant to each new era of researchers, teachers and students. Corporate character is not about a simple set of rules or brand guidance to follow, it’s about a set of ideas that are constantly brought to life and reinvented by the participants in that enterprise. This is a difficult concept to discuss in the abstract, so I’d like to explain it a bit further in the context of IBM and our own corporate character.

It is our centennial this year. We’ve been in business 100 years. We started in bacon slicers, we started in tabulating machines, we started in weighing machines, we went through the era of building punch cards and working with people like the US government to build the social security system after the Great Depression. We went through some enormous technical innovations, coming up with the notion of the first mainframe, in itself a wonderful technical achievement but one that would be of no value if it wasn’t useful for doing something. So, therefore, we worked with all kinds of people in many types of organisations to make that mainframe useful: to get cash out of the automatic teller machine; to be able to book our tickets online through the reservation systems that started with American Airlines’ Sabre System and many other wonderful examples.

This is not creative writing, this is the historical summary of who iBM are

FroM BAcon slicers To The FirsT MAinFrAMe coMpuTer

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need to actively plan for the long-term, and we do that by constantly looking to where the future issues are. What are the issues in business and society that are occupying people’s time, presence and most importantly their money? How can we bring our intelligence, reason and technology to make those things work better?

4. ‘We collaborate as experts, dedicated to the success of others’. Every word in here has meaning, we collaborate we don’t co-operate: we actively collaborate, pool knowledge and expertise. We are experts ourselves and we see the expertise of others, whether they are our clients, our business partners, or our peers in places such as this university. We are not dedicated to client satisfaction but to the success of others, including our clients’ customers and the communities in which we live and work. We work with the hospital for the benefit of the patient. We work with the education institution for the benefit of the student. We work with the retailer for the benefit of the shopper. We work with our client for the benefit of their client.

5. And in doing all this, we make the world work better. We make a positive impact through everything we do.

This set of five sentences is how we have come to articulate the essence of what our company demonstrably has been through the last 100 years. If you’ve been looking at what we do on the web, you’ll see that we’ve released 100 curated icons of progress. 100 iconic moments in IBM’s history that demonstrate how we’ve done this across different aspects of the company’s business so that it’s about every role in the company. And now we translate that character into what that means for the IBMer. And perhaps the greatest invention of our company is this notion of the IBMe: “I am IBM, I’m an IBMer.” If we as a company pioneer intellectual capital that creates new value, then we look for every employee to drive innovation in how they think and how they work. If we as a company collaborate as experts dedicated to the success of others, we expect everyone in the company to work as a strong collaborator, not as somebody who simply loosely co-operates with others, and so on through each element of our character.

So now you can start to understand the notion behind my role - of being in charge of a brand system and workforce enablement. My role was created some 2 years ago to take these concepts and to build them into the management structure of our company so that when you look at the processes of our company, they follow the character of the company. If IBM is about where we can apply science to the challenges of business and society, do we know what those challenges are? Taking a global viewpoint and learning from what’s been achieved already in forward-thinking places, like Stockholm, and Singapore and learning from that for the benefit of other cities in the world.

‘i am iBM, i’m an iBMer’

we collABorATe, we don’T co-operATe; As experTs, we see The experTise oF oThers

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communications. But what “Thinks and Performs like IBM” are things that are new to our job. So how can we start this and integrate all elements of what it is to look like, sound like, think like and perform like our institutions as a system? I offer a very simple example - an event.

Here in IBM we are really interested in cities. Something like 1.8 billion people lived in cities back in 1980 and something like 6.7 billion people will live in cities by 2030. It’s a huge migration of people into cities. The way the systems of cities (water, electricity, public safety and so forth) work is of great importance to the world. So of course, we have a point of view around cities:• This starts with some lovely iconography and expressions like

the phrase ‘smarter cities’, with guidance round how to use these in traditional marketing.

• We then have a point of view, so that when we organise some kind of event, we consider what it is to sound like IBM, to sound like a company that collaborates with experts. We have a point of view, we have experts in our company but we don’t expect them to take centre-stage, we expect them to join in centre-stage together with practitioners in cities; people that run major hospitals, people that run major transport systems, to share in a true understanding of what the issues are. • We then consider what it is to think like IBM and to think like IBM is to collaborate. So when we run a conference around cities, it’s more like

an academic conference with active debate about what’s the nature of the issues and how do we collaborate together as the eco-system to do that. IBM is the convener of this community. We don’t seek to take the lead on the community: if we’re asked to lead we will, but if others take the lead we’re equally delighted.

• We act as the convener within this community because we believe that, when it comes to implementing something like this, people will come to the unique expertise that we have within our company – we will perform like IBM – so it doesn’t matter if we lead or don’t lead because by engaging the group of people that are actually going to make a change happen and empowering them to make the change, we believe we benefit downstream.

This is the notion of engaging people in a brand system – and the implications of the brand system concept are again significant: what you do in marketing has to extend well beyond our profession into what your colleagues do elsewhere in your enterprise. They too have to be engaged around a common idea and it will be your role to lead that.

So for each one of these ideas about what the company stands for, what the company does, we have the same notion expressed in the context of the IBMer. And I say IBMer because this is now about an HR notion of employee: whether you’re part-time or full-time; whether you’re a contractor or a long-term employee, it is about everybody that works for IBM. It’s as true for the student intern as it is for the person on a fixed contract, tied to a particular piece of business that we’ve won in our services business, as it is for somebody who signs up for 3 years in a particular profession, as it is for somebody like me, who’s been with the company for 25 years and may be one of the last to end up staying with the company for most of their working life. This notion of what it is to be an IBMer is about what it is to have a working experience at IBM, something of lifetime value. Just as coming to a university such as Cambridge is of lifetime value even though you may come here for only 3 years, do your undergraduate degree and then move on. It leaves something with you that has meaning.

So, this brand and the brand system and workforce enablement mission that I lead is probably best summed up by those five points that summarise our corporate character.

Our brand strategy is very simple, it goes with the shadow and the tree notion, it’s to be a great company and therefore, a great brand. So, it is all about actually being a great company, and to be a great company is not about what it is to look and sound like a great company - to have clear brand guidelines, a clear message, a great logo, or lovely fonts. The advertising and PR teams do not report to me, they report to a peer. My role is about how we think and how we perform. How we build and run systems that inculcate this culture into the fabric of the organisation and into the essence of the people that chose to join, that are screened for joining, that are then engaged and brought into the company on joining - no mean task when you think how many companies IBM has acquired and how many pieces of outsourcing business we have. Indeed, something like 20-25% of our workforce never chose to join our company: they joined through acquisition or through outsourcing, and yet we still seem to inculcate them into this notion about what it is to be an IBMer and make that a conscious choice.

As we seek to put this into practice we use a simpler frame – one that could be applied to all enterprises. What is it to look, sound, think and perform like IBM?

What ‘Looks and Sounds like IBM’ are things we as marketers know well and are used to owning from within marketing and

how to build advocates at scale

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But getting people through the awareness, interest, desire and action stage to buy your goods or services is no longer enough because, as we all now understand, in today’s world we need to establish advocates in the buyer’s peer group and we need to build out the number of those advocates at scale.

How do you get people to believe? How do you get them to take action? And once they are taking action, how do you build sufficient confidence that the action that is being taking is meaningful and worthwhile and delivering the return somebody wants - even if this is buying washing powder and washing all the kids’ clothes that you need in your family household? It’s still the same cycle you have to go round to the point where the individual is prepared to be and actually becomes an advocate for what you do.

This is where this bridge between the basic human psychology that we know that hasn’t changed and the significant shift in the way society engages and communicates that has changed because of the openness and egalitarianism of the internet, becomes important.

I’m going to tell this story through an example around water and it begins with belief…

…belief around water. Here in this hall, we’re drinking tap water and it may be that in most of our country, we believe that tap water is healthier than bottled water. There have been a number of incidents where bottled water has had problems and, since the Victorians laid the basis of our water supply and sewerage systems, we’ve been long staunch advocates for our water system being great here in the UK. But there are many countries in the world where it is very clear that people believe bottled water is healthier than tap water and - often because it actually is - their belief is true. The problem with tap water in many countries in the world is that it is not fit for use as drinking water. But the use of bottled water to combat that goes on, in turn, to create the middle problem. The experience and subsequent belief that bottled water may be bad for

the environment. It may be healthy for me but it’s creating significant environmental challenges through transport of the water, the glass, the plastic coming in and out of cities in many countries of the world. All in all, burning carbon, creating pollution, and depleting the fossil fuels are not good.

But what could you do about this? Could we possibly shift to a belief that says, actually, bottled water can be good for the environment?

You believe something: when you trust the person you hear it from; when you see evidence; when you experience it for yourself. So a number of water charities (and the particular example within here is an organisation called Water Equality) are building systems based on the following cycle:

Every time you buy bottled water, some of the money from that goes back in to the production of clean water in other cities nearby, and, actually, it can generate funds to be good for the environment.

Based on the evidence of money raised this way being spent on actual projects, they use the web and the social networks of a small group of active consumers to explain to other people what they need to do to act the same way.

But action is not enough because we want people to go further and advocate, so they: reassure participants that what they are doing is right and makes a difference (through more web based examples of great projects and through face-to-face events that draw people together); take the people that are most active and put them on a pedestal; celebrate their contribution; and invite them to further events, in this case with the CEO of the organisation, congratulating people on their work ito increase their confidence.

The purpose of all of this is to drive this notion of advocacy – to the point where this thing I believe in has become part of me. It’s become a part of me to the point where I wish to champion it, where I wish to share it with my friends and colleagues and I actually do. And by using digital platforms such as those shown here I make it easy for others to share. I leverage my personal network and I start to bridge between what I do in my work, what I do in my persona, my being, my beliefs. I share this with the people that I know because I care about it.

By engaging with all of your stakeholders, all of your constituencies - employees, clients, partners, suppliers – you too can engage people in a system of belief, action and confidence. You can reach the point where the people in your network start to feel that what they do in your organisation is a part of their identity and they are willing to engage with their personal networks. That way

we need To Build The nuMBer oF AdvocATes in The Buyer’s peer group

Tap water in many countries is not fit for drinking

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because of the way that people engage socially and are no longer deferential towards single sources of trust. It is critical that we take people beyond action and establish confidence that their actions were good, to the point where we build active advocacy amongst the many people that experience our products and the way we work. And whilst terms like the net-recommender score have been around for a long time as a better measure than client satisfaction, the notion is that advocacy extends beyond your client because it is equally about your supplier and your partner and your employee.

This role I have to take the IBM brand system and engaging that through all of our workforce is a new and very different role, and very intentionally named to make us think. Many of you may know that IBM’s motto for a long time has been ‘Think’ and I hope that in my talk this evening that I’ve provoked a few thoughts with you… • Do you know who you are as an organisation? • If you do know who you are, are you ready to act like it as a

whole, as a coherent unit of leaders willing to work together for the long term?

• And, if you are ready to do that, are you mobilising all of the stakeholders that you need to be successful, not only for the short-term, but also for the long-term, so you have the chance to succeed, as we’ve succeeded in doing, constantly to reinvent what you deliver, your business model, your products, whilst staying true to your values, your beliefs, the meaning behind what you do and your own corporate character?

your employees (for example) do not become brand advocates: they actually become the brand - because it’s what they are, not what you have asked them to say. They’re proud of what they do, they talk about what they do because they benefit.

Using IBM’s collaboration with clients as an example, our employees benefit from what we do because, as with their fellow citizens, we have better transport and less pollution in London through the congestion charging scheme because the integrated system of Transport for London is improving the situation, just as city authorities are doing in Stockholm and in Singapore and in the many different cities that we’re now engaging with to replicate the smarter cities’ experiences throughout the world.

To draw my talk to a close, the point that I’ve been seeking to address is that all of our jobs need to change. That is to change in two ways:

Firstly, we as marketers have to consider our role inside our company. We have always been experts in communicating what it is that we are, what we stand for, what our brand promise is, but now we have to be experts in truly collaborating with our colleagues so that all aspects of that brand promise are true, are authentic. And that isn’t just about the goods we sell. It’s about the supply chain we deliver them through, the sourcing policies we follow, the labour practices in the countries we work in and source from, i.e. all the diverse issues that our citizens and consumers care about. This notion of authenticity is key to organisational success and as marketing leaders we have to be the champions in building authenticity throughout our network. This requires intense collaboration with our peers in the boardroom and without that, our companies will not be successful. Not our brands but our company, organisation, or institution. This is what has to really change around our jobs, our role leading a collaboration of the willing across our respective enterprises.

Secondly we need to look outside and work to create advocacy. Getting through the awareness, interest, desire and action phase of a buying cycle is no longer sufficient. It is no longer sufficient

After graduating from Cambridge in 1985, Kevin Bishop joined iBM as a systems engineer. Building a career in sales and marketing, he has risen

to become head of the iBM brand worldwide. Kevin is also Chairman of the iBM United Kingdom Trust and partnership executive for all

of iBM’s activities with the University of Cambridge.

outside of iBM, Kevin is a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Marketors, and is a regular contributor to the work of the Chartered

institute of Marketing and the Multi-Channel Marketing research group at Cranfield University. From 2004-2009 Kevin was Visiting Professor of

Marketing at the University of Bedfordshire.

Advocates bridge between their work, their personas, their beings, and their beliefs. They share something with the people they know because they care about it.

Image: Kevin Bishop, IBM