Breathing new life into a 173-year-old brand like Dun & Bradstreet is not something taken lightly by its new chief marketing officer, Rishi Dave, who will be a keynote speaker at Oracle’s Modern CX Conference in Las Vegas on March 31.
The company’s principal business—providing corporate data and insights to people working in companies—is largely unchanged. What has changed is the company’s emphasis on people. “Whether you’re a consumer company or a B-to-B company, you need to really understand who your customer is; you have to understand their pain points,” Dave said in a recent interview.
And working with nearly 90% of the Fortune 500, Dun & Bradstreet certainly views its role as a sort of collaborator and relationship-builder; or as the company is keen to point out in its new tagline, it aims to grow “the most valuable relationships in business through data.”
“Most companies and most CMOs focus only on the external brand piece. We actually focused, first and foremost, on the internal employee culture piece, which helped guide our brand work,” he said.
Technology is of course a critical part of Dun & Bradstreet’s business. It uses a database of some 240 million businesses to help customers discover who their best customers are—and which other companies to target—as well as to manage vendors and supply chains, and ensure that their partners are in legal and regulatory compliance.
“We use that [data] and provide analytics and all types of predictive modeling to help customers across all their relationships, whether it’s vendors, customers, partners, etc.,” he said.
C-Suite Collaboration
Given the nature of cloud computing, CMOs like Dave can assemble their own portfolio of vendors and agencies. That has changed the nature of the role of IT, and the relationship between CMOs and CIOs, said Dave.
“But ultimately, the owner of all the data is generally the CIO, who’s ultimately building that integrated view of the data across the enterprise, tying it all together and protecting it and creating and scaling it up as the data needs increase.“
To offset the perception that Dun & Bradstreet is almost robotically transactional, Dave is attempting to change perceptions about the company by changing the company’s culture.
It’s why he’s partnered closely with Dun & Bradstreet’s new chief people officer, John Reid-Dodick, to develop three core values that he hopes will animate the company, both literally and figuratively. The three core values: data-inspired, relentlessly curious, and inherently generous.
Modernizing the brand around people is a critical step Dave believes will help inoculate Dun & Bradstreet from the disruption inherent in today’s business environment.
“Many people think that the people piece is less important now because you have technology, data, and analytics. I actually feel it’s the opposite. You need to create a culture that doesn’t lose the human element in the interaction, which requires a significant investment in your people strategy,” he said.
For Dave, data is still the starting point. “It is about getting inspired and starting with facts and data.”
Respect for Customers
Being relentlessly curious and inherently generous is all about the customer—being curious about who they are and the problems they need to solve, and generous in terms of empathizing with them and being sure to not to lose sight of the person-to-person relationships that actually drive business.
Dun & Bradstreet’s business is “not just about the data and not just about the analytics; it’s also about the relationships you create based on what the data and analytics tell you. That’s ultimately what becomes your differentiator in the marketplace—how you manage the ecosystem of relationships on top of what the data tells you,” he said.
Imbuing a company with these values requires more than simply sending a memo. Dave said the company settled on only three values because “more than three, people forget it and they find it hard to internalize.”
Dun & Bradstreet executives and trained brand representatives also spend a lot of time in face-to-face meetings with small groups of employees around the world “talking through what the values actually mean to them in their day-to-day lives—what it means, for example, to be inherently generous,” he said.
That is supplemented with chats between employees and senior executives like Dave on the company’s internal social network. “It’s a whole programmatic, multipronged approach, which is why working with the chief people officer is so critical,” he said.
The bet is that success isn’t just about data but “about the relationships that the data enabled.”
Read more about Oracle’s Modern CX Conference in Las Vegas.
