Understand the Customer
John Watton has led marketing at some of the most influential software companies of the past thirty years, among them Microsoft, Adobe, Yext and VMware, before turning his experience into an independent fractional CMO and advisory practice. He is a B2B marketer by choice and conviction, fluent in the long, complex enterprise sale, and an early adopter who was Marketo's first customer outside North America. His view of the craft is unfashionably steady: the channels and tools change constantly, but the fundamentals do not, understand the customer, use the data, and combine it with creativity. He argues, from the rare vantage point of someone who sold marketing technology for a living, that strategy must come before any tool.
We have to do just as much work now to stand out in a digital feed than a consumer marketer did in the 50s to make a box of soap powder jump off a supermarket shelf.
John Watton is a veteran B2B technology marketer, fractional CMO, and angel investor with over thirty years of experience leading marketing at some of the most influential software companies in the world. From Adobe and VMware to Microsoft, Oracle, Silverpop, Yext, and Ariba, he has built and scaled marketing functions across enterprise SaaS, e-commerce, and marketing technology, with revenue responsibility spanning businesses from $4 million to $4 billion.
John began his career in technical roles before making an early transition into marketing, drawn by the opportunity to shape a company's medium-to-long-term direction rather than the short-term rhythms of sales. That move proved prescient: across three decades, he has held senior marketing positions at companies that have fundamentally shaped the tools and platforms marketers use every day. At Adobe, he led digital marketing across EMEA, helping consumer brands understand how marketing technology could transform their customer relationships. At VMware, he oversaw marketing into 42 countries for a $4 billion business, running innovation challenges and building high-performing teams of more than 100 people.
A self-described early adopter, John was Marketo's first international customer, joining their beta programme while CMO of ShipServ, a 120-person SaaS company serving the commercial shipping industry. That experience crystallised his belief that technology allows even small companies to punch far above their weight on a global stage. He carried that principle through subsequent roles at enterprise scale, always advocating for strategy before technology and consistently arguing that the tools will not solve your problems without the right strategic foundation.
Now operating independently through John Watton Advisory, he provides fractional CMO services and strategic counsel to B2B technology companies, startups, and scale-ups. His advisory work focuses on resetting teams, optimising performance, and unlocking growth through the intersection of creativity, technology, and AI. He also serves as a panellist, speaker, and judge across the marketing industry, including at events like the WPP BrandZ Top 100 launch and HubSpot's INBOUND conference.
Beyond his advisory work, John is an active angel investor in cleantech and consumer brands including LettsSafari, Only With Love, TRIBE, EcoSync, Seaweed Generation, Temple, Honest Burgers, Cowboy, and Fussy. He has been recognised in the Top 100 Marketing Influencers of 2024, LinkedIn's Top 10 Most Engaged UK Marketers, TopRank's UK Online Marketing Influencers, and as B2B Marketing Magazine's Marketer of the Year. He writes regularly on his personal blog about B2B marketing, leadership, and the evolving role of AI in the profession.
You can just punch far above your weight, even the smallest company.
There has been no golden age of marketing. I think now is the golden age. We have probably too much data. Access to that is low cost. The line between B2B and B2C is blurred. And we're on the precipice of accelerating creativity with AI. It's never been a better time to be a marketer.
John has no patience for nostalgia about the Mad Men years. There has been no golden age of marketing, he says; the golden age is now. When he started in B2B technology, a marketer had a handful of moves: some PR, renting a list to post things out, an event people phoned to register for, and, if the budget stretched, an advert. Data was scarce, slow and expensive. Today there is almost too much data, much of it low cost or free, the gap between B2B and B2C has narrowed to almost nothing, and AI is beginning to accelerate the creative work. For someone who has watched the craft for three decades, it has never been a better time to be a marketer.
When I was at Adobe, we thought very much of that: the product is your marketing. The product is your advertising. You don't need to go out and put billboards. You can do it in the product. Marketing has gone from a communications function to really owning the customer journey.
In software, John argues, the product has become the main marketing channel. At Adobe the principle was explicit: the product is your marketing, the product is your advertising, so you do not need to buy billboards when you can show value inside the experience itself, through prompts, tips and training. The deeper change is to marketing's job. It has moved from a communications function, distanced from the customer and waiting months to learn whether a campaign worked, to owning the customer journey and the relationship in real time. That, he says, is what marketers always wanted, and product-led growth finally hands it to them.
When I'm interviewing people, what have they done to change things where they've been? Curiosity: I'm always amazed by the number of people in marketing who aren't interested in marketing. And risk: years ago, risk was heavily loaded. Now you can take a risk with 5K, see what the results are in a couple of days.
When John hires, he looks for three things. Change: what has this person done to change things wherever they have been, because technology moves too fast to stand still. Curiosity: he is repeatedly surprised by how many marketers are not curious about marketing, when the good ones are forever noticing what others are doing, on television, in their own lives, at events. And risk: a generation ago a campaign meant betting the budget and waiting six months to find out; now a test costs a few thousand and reports back in days, so there is little excuse not to try. Above those three he prizes the generalist who can join the dots over the deep specialist, because the specific skills keep changing while the ability to see the whole picture does not.
To all those CMOs: don't go out and buy more. I used to work for a MarTech company. And I will say the technology will not solve your problems. It's your strategy and then using technology in service of that. We've got a lot of headroom in automation, in behavioural marketing, in personalisation.
Having sold marketing technology for a living, at Adobe, Silverpop and Yext, John offers CMOs an unexpected warning: do not go out and buy more. The tools, he says plainly, will not solve your problems; strategy does, with technology in service of it. Most companies have barely scratched the surface of what they already own, and decades of powerful targeting, automation, behavioural and personalisation tools still have not delivered the relevant, personalised experiences they promised. AI, in his view, should amplify that unfinished work rather than become the next shiny thing to buy. The headroom is not in more software; it is in making the software you already have work.
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