CMO Spotlight | Brett Hannath - Intel
The CMO Spotlight offers an inside look into the minds and journeys of high-performing marketing leaders.
Setup CEO + Founder, Joe Koufman, sat down with Brett Hannath, the Corporate VP, Global Marketing of Intel, to talk problem solving, transparent leadership, the bricks-and-mortar experience, and more.
“I encourage anyone in marketing and in tech: get embedded in the tech, because that’s where it happens.”
Watch + Read the Recap Below
Q1 | What advice would you share with marketers?
Hannath found value in understanding all realms of a business to fully comprehend the background of projects, and he also urges people, especially in the tech world, to dig into tech.
“Certainly in the IT space, knowing tech really helps. One, you can quickly keep up with what your business unit or your products are doing. And knowing it at a deep technical level has certainly helped me.”
Q2 | What is your superpower?
“I like solving problems. So a lot of my career has actually been trying to solve problems.”
Hannath prides himself on his ability to problem-solve and unpack a situation. His strength is “Being able to compartmentalize into pieces that can solve individually, that add up to the solution to a whole versus a hairball.” Over the course of his career and education, he has learned to piece together elements to solve a problem. Most of the time, however, problems are much deeper at the core. “As you go through business, it's not just a marketing problem to solve. It's a business problem to solve, or a budget problem to solve, or a relationship-with-the-CFO problem to solve.”
Q3 | What values are important to you?
Transparency and accountability are the most important values to Hannath. He goes as far as being fully transparent with his budget so that the world can see that there are no hidden agendas. “I'm transparent about where we need to focus.”
“Transparent in vision, transparent in what we need to achieve together—but let's hold each other accountable, as an individual and also as a team.”
Hannath emphasized that accountability is not a negative thing. “It's actually a positive thing—raising everyone's vote as opposed to calling people out when maybe their piece isn't performing the way that it needs to.”
Q4 | What brand do you admire?
Hannath has a lot of respect for Macy’s because, particularly in bricks-and-mortar retail, the competition is fierce. He finds that brands like Banana Republic and Macy's, despite the challenges of COVID and despite the challenges of being driven to an online model, really understand their customer and what they're trying to do, and are recreating some of their brick-and-mortar experiences to bring people in.
“I'm a shopper. I love shopping. I find that companies with a long legacy, having to reinvent themselves—some of them don't succeed.” He puts himself in the shoes of retailer CMOs who have to try out different models - online versus physical - and compete with competitors who have similar models across a spectrum. “Not always successful, but you see their revenue starting to tick up, their store year-on-year performance starting to tick up. So their long-term goals as marketers, as e-commerce managers, it's starting to work. So I admire that.”
He also appreciates the retail experience of JD.com (the Amazon of China). “They've created a brick-and-mortar experience, but what it is is a mall experience with the major brands creating a store within it. So they host the environment, but their primary suppliers online create their little stores in the mall experience. It's really a physical manifestation of their online presence, projected into a mall. So it works both ways.”
Hannath appreciates that people are trying to create these physical experiences to be human again. “For me, the biggest thing is people say, ‘Oh, the mall is dead. Brick-and-mortar is dead,’ but here are these brands that are surviving—not quite thriving again, but getting there. And I love those underdog stories.”
For more marketing leadership advice and insights into the mindset of marketing executives in various industries, be sure to watch the full interview with Brett Hannath, and keep an eye out for more thought leadership from our CMO Spotlights.
If you know an impactful marketing leader who would be a good candidate for the #CMOSpotlight series, nominate them here.
Watch the Full Interview to the right.
Setup CEO + Founder, Joe Koufman, sat down with Brett Hannath, the Corporate VP, Global Marketing of Intel, to talk problem solving, transparent leadership, the bricks-and-mortar experience, and more.