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D&B CMO Rishi Dave recounts how his company looked into the mirror to find the customer

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When Rishi Dave joined Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) as chief marketing officer more than three years ago, the company — whose origins stretch back to the mid-19th century — was looking to reinvent itself.

“The big goal was to grow the company,” he told me, and to take “a consumer-like approach [to] modernize who we are and what we stand for.”

Dave said that everything was re-examined from the point of view of customer expectation. (Rishi Dave will join MarTech Conference Chair Scott Brinker for a discussion of “Reimagining Marketing’s Golden Triangle: People, Process & Technology” at our MarTech Conference in October.)

D&B CMO Rishi Dave

D&B CMO Rishi Dave

The reasons why, he said, were evident: “It was hard to explain what we do.” Although the company was well-known for providing a wide assortment of business data drawn from a database of 235 million companies, “customers couldn’t articulate what we did.”

So, D&B changed from a product-and-tech approach to a people-oriented approach.

[Read the full article on MarTech Today.]

About The Author

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.


 

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