Market First, Marketing Second
Jennifer Griffin Smith, Chief Market Officer at Acquia, has held CMO roles at six technology companies across two decades. The title change from Chief Marketing Officer to Chief Market Officer is not a nuance. It is the argument of her career: marketing that is not anchored in deep market understanding is just activity, and activity without purpose is expensive noise.
“Marketing has evolved from campaigns and leads to a strategic function. Start with defining what is core to the company and make that crystal clear.”
Jennifer Griffin Smith is the Chief Market Officer at Acquia, the open digital experience platform company, where she leads global marketing including product marketing, go-to-market programmes, brand, and communications. A British marketing executive who relocated to Boston after a CMO role at Progress Software, she has spent over 25 years helping technology companies transform from traditional vendors into trusted partners for their customers.
Jennifer grew up in the North East of England and studied Business Administration with German at university, taking a gap year in Switzerland and Germany that briefly made her consider a career as a linguist. Her first job was in customer service for a technology company, managing German-speaking markets. A visit to CeBIT, Germany’s largest computer trade show, gave her the technology bug, and she moved into marketing. She began her career at Microsoft UK as a European Marketing Manager before progressing through senior marketing roles at PeopleSoft, Information Builders, and Progress Software, where she became SVP and CMO and eventually relocated to the United States.
She has since held CMO positions at Avid Technology, Globoforce (now Workhuman), Software AG, Alfresco (acquired by Hyland), and Brightcove, building a reputation for transforming technology vendors into customer-advocacy-led brands. At Acquia, she was appointed to a newly created Chief Market Officer role in 2023, a deliberate distinction from the traditional CMO title. She is a member of the Forbes Communications Council, has appeared on the FINITE B2B marketing podcast, and was profiled in VentureFizz’s LeadHer series.
“We ungated all of our content. you cannot force people into a pipeline with a blunt object.”
“The things we execute are meaningless unless we focus on the market need first. Marketing has become too obsessed with execution.”
The distinction Jennifer draws is not semantic. A Chief Marketing Officer runs programmes. A Chief Market Officer is the voice of the market inside the company, ensuring that product, engineering, sales, and customer success are all orienting around the same understanding of who the buyer is, what they need, and where the industry is heading. Most of what marketing delivers is execution: events, campaigns, leads. The question she asks first is: are those activities anchored in a rigorous understanding of the market?
“I have never built digital accessibility into my strategy from the start. I feel a little ashamed of that now.”
Up to 20% of a brand’s addressable market is invisible to them because their digital experiences are not accessible. PDFs that screen readers cannot parse. Forms that cannot be completed by those with colour blindness. Content that excludes users based on ability or location. Jennifer’s position is straightforward: if you want to address all your audiences, you have to make sure your content and channels are accessible to everyone. That is not a legal checkbox. It is an untapped growth opportunity.
“The notion of a lead drives me bonkers. One person doing one activity on your website does not make a lead.”
Account-based marketing has been discussed for years, but Jennifer’s frustration is that most marketing teams still operate in a volume mindset. They count leads. They report on form fills. They optimise for top-of-funnel activity that may never convert because the other nine people in the buying committee have not been reached. The job is not to generate a lead. It is to understand, map, and engage the entire buying centre.
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