‘It’s not about the pen’: Cisco’s shift to customer-centricity

The tech sector changes so fast that it is understandable why companies operating in it get sucked into product-led marketing, but Cisco has abandoned a top-down approach that had produced a deluge of material that was mostly ignored.

There's a scene in The Wolf of Wall Street, the Martin Scorcese movie about convicted fraudster Jordan Belfort, that strikes a chord with Cisco's marketing director for EMEA. Sitting in a restaurant, Leonardo DiCaprio, playing Belfort, hands a pen to a colleague and asks him to sell the pen to him. "Why don't you write your name on that napkin for me," he's instructed. "I can't, I don't have a pen," Belfort replies. "Exactly. Supply and demand, my friend," comes the response.

The thing is, Emma Roffey told Newscred's ThinkContent conference (London, November 2017), "it's not about the...

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