CMO Spotlight | Stefano Marrone - Siebert Financial
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 Stefano Marrone, the Chief Marketing Officer of Siebert Financial, to talk about creating processes, being both left and right brain, creative brands, and more.
“A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, I want to do this mega, fantastic campaign, and I can see myself being great and recognized and famous.’ But the question is, do you know what’s behind it and what it takes? You better enjoy the process.”
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Q1 | What advice would you share with marketers?
“Never mistake a spike for a trend.” Marrone shared some experiences where he got ahead of himself thinking that high performance on some campaigns meant great success, when really it was a spike. So his advice is to think realistically and strategically. Form successful actions into a process.
“To create a pattern, to create that consistent aspect of what you’re doing, you can get lucky once with a campaign, with something that you create, with a piece of content that is great. You should celebrate, but it doesn’t mean much unless you understand how to turn that into a process and how to turn that into a formula that repeats itself.”
Even after the rebranding of Siebert, Marrone shared that the stock went through the roof in the following 12 months. “I’m very proud of what we did by basically building up a marketing and PR team that didn’t exist. But at the same time, I think it’s important to watch something that is a success and ask yourself, ‘Okay, how do I replicate that?’”
He went on, “It’s easy to do something fresh once—in order to keep that success ongoing, to be sustainable over time, that’s a challenge that needs to be taken on with the right amount of consideration.”
Q2 | What is your superpower?
Marrone prides himself on being a left and right brain thinker and translating ideas across departments, teams, and organizations.
“[You have to] translate what your incredible creative idea is to economic value or a way to impact the business, or it doesn’t matter if your idea is fantastic. I’ve seen plenty of amazing creative ideas not travel far enough in an organization because they were not translating into the language of business.”
He admitted that some people think that this may be a weakness, but he sees it as a strength. “There is all this narrative of specialization and hyper-specialization and becoming the best at whatever you are, and that is often interpreted as a vertical thing. But I think that you can also be the best horizontal thinker ever. And now that production and a lot of the tasks that were the tasks of the expert can actually be automated, the world needs more horizontal thinkers that are able to have that left-brain, right-brain conjunction.”
Q3 | What brand do you admire?
Marrone loves Liquid Death because of their guts to pursue their own creative ideas and to create their own category. “Most of the ideas are generated internally, and then they make it happen. They created a category that basically didn’t exist. It is like, let’s have somebody sipping water in a club looking as cool as the guy with a vodka tonic—that’s absolutely genius. They’re fantastic.”
He also admires illy as a brand because of the quality of their product. “I’m a coffee lover—I absolutely love illy as a coffee. And they do very cool, artistic depictions and interpretations and collaborations with artists, and that’s one of the most interesting things.” He is so delighted by the brand, taste, and history, that he mentioned that even if their marketing were to change, the quality of the coffee is so good that it would still sell.
For more marketing leadership advice and insights into the mindset of marketing executives in various industries, be sure to watch the full interview with Stefano Marrone, and keep an eye out for more thought leadership from our CMO Spotlights.
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Watch the Full Interview to the right.
Setup CEO + Founder, Joe Koufman, sat down with Stefano Marrone, the Chief Marketing Officer of Siebert Financial, to talk about creating processes, being both left and right brain, creative brands, and more.