Persona — Marketing

Marketing is persona #6 in the Six Personas framework. In B2B distribution, the Marketing team is often small, under-resourced, and fighting for relevance. Their domain is brand, product content, and demand generation — all of which are foundational to eCommerce success. They are your natural ally on product content quality.

Who They Are

• Titles: CMO, VP Marketing, Digital Marketing Manager, Marketing Director
• Often a small team: email, website, some social — rarely a full demand gen operation
• May or may not have a seat at the eCommerce decision table
• Cares deeply about brand consistency and product content standards
• Can be a powerful internal advocate for eCommerce when properly engaged

What They Care About

• Product content quality — accurate, rich product data drives both SEO and conversions
• Brand consistency — digital channel must match brand standards
• Demand generation — driving customer awareness and engagement digitally
• Customer communication — email, promotions, campaigns to drive adoption and reorders
• Attribution — proving that marketing activity drives revenue

What They Fear

• Poor product data undermining the customer experience
• Being excluded from eCommerce decisions and then blamed for poor content
• The digital channel launching with bad content that hurts the brand
• Marketing doing the work of content enrichment without the tools or budget
• Irrelevance: being seen as “just” the email team while Digital leads the strategic initiatives

How to Engage Marketing

Do:

• Include them early in discussions about product content strategy
• Show how your platform makes their campaigns more effective (email → site → conversion)
• Position product content as a marketing asset, not an IT problem
• Give them analytics that prove marketing’s contribution to eCommerce revenue

Don’t:

• Treat product content as a technical problem Marketing doesn’t care about
• Exclude them from platform UX discussions (they often care most about UX)
• Underestimate their influence with the CEO on brand matters

Marketing’s Role in Customer Adoption

Marketing is a critical lever in the customer-adoption-framework:

• Traffic — email campaigns, digital promotions, SEO (product content → organic search)
• Conversion — page quality, brand trust, promotions
• Retention — post-purchase communication, upsell email sequences

Marketing launches campaigns but often moves on. The adoption challenge is sustaining engagement, not just launching.

Product Content Connection

Marketing and the Digital Leader often share ownership of product content:

• Marketing wants content that tells a story and supports brand
• Operations wants content that reduces inbound support calls
• eCommerce wants content that converts
• All three are right — and a PIM system is how they stop fighting about it

See: pim-systems | 01-Concepts/technology-systems — product-content context