CMO Spotlight | Ron McMurtrie - Honeywell
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 Ron McMurtrie, the CMO of Honeywell, to talk about purpose-driven leadership, having a team-focused mentality, starting with why, and more.
Watch + Read the Recap Below
“You come in as a team and you win as a team.”
Q1 | What advice would you share with marketers?
McMurtrie has two main pieces of advice that have carried him through his career:
Be Courageous
Experiment
Q2 | What is your superpower?
McMurtrie’s superpower is navigating complex problems.
“It's my heart. I can look at very complex things and boil them down to what's the outcome and how do we need to solve that.”
He also “gets stuff done.”
McMurtrie is someone who can assess challenges, organize teams, and drive solutions.
“Let’s say those are my two marquee points—seeing around corners and figuring out how to navigate, and then making stuff happen.”
Q3 | What values are important to you?
Winning together is an important value for McMurtrie.
“You come in as a team and you win as a team.”
He also believes in customer centricity and basing strategy around that data. “I think customer obsession [is important] as a marketer... It's where I start with everything. What are we doing? What's the outcome for them? What are their needs? And then I align that way.”
Q4 | Tell us about an impactful marketing campaign.
McMurtrie said that when he moved from payments to the virtualization space, he joined the joint venture VCE, created by VMware, Cisco, and EMC. The goal was to integrate the strengths of those companies into use cases by offering a single rack with virtualization, storage, and compute preconfigured for customers. He explained that this provided economies of scale and a fully integrated value proposition, unlike competitors who only offered reference architectures.
He noted that the business became a unicorn and credited the success in part to dedicating more than two-thirds of the budget to AR and awareness, building global engagement with audiences. He said this campaign helped shift how CIOs thought about purchasing data center services.
McMurtrie emphasized that the accomplishment was due to the entire organization, especially the engineering team, and highlighted the importance of connecting with buyers and leveraging third-party references. He added that working in a joint venture with three parent companies offered both advanced technology and valuable lessons in managing multiple stakeholders while staying focused on customers.
Q5 | What brand do you admire?
Patagonia is one of his favorite brands because they are very purpose-driven.
McMurtrie believes that Patagonia’s treatment of customers is second to none–in the quality of their products, their environmental practices, supply chain management, and the overall purpose behind what they offer.
“It's a very focused brand around outdoor wear, but if you do a little read of their founder’s book, it's this work-life balance and what they do. I don't practice all those things. He's just built a great company that's very purpose-driven and value-driven, and I think they hold to their brand in a very true way.”
For more marketing leadership advice and insights into the mindset of marketing executives in various industries, be sure to watch the full interview with Ron McMurtrie, 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.