OpenAI Needs Two CMOs Because It Has a Problem Marketing Can’t Solve

Salesforce beneath Marc Benioff was the grasp class in B2B brand-building: clear positioning, large share of voice, distinctive model belongings, relentless buyer success storytelling. Fleming absorbed all of it, a lot in order that ServiceNow adopted the identical playbook, and may even have utilized it higher. He is aware of precisely what enterprise patrons want to listen to, and the way usually they should hear it.

However Fleming’s Salesforce instincts will now collide instantly with the OpenAI actuality. 

Salesforce and ServiceNow offered belief as their core proposition. Their clients willingly handed on delicate information, crucial workflows, income operations. The model promise was: we’ll by no means screw you. 

That promise was credible as a result of neither firm confronted a structural battle between its client product and its enterprise product. OpenAI does. The free ChatGPT that runs advertisements is similar mannequin enterprise clients are being requested to belief with their most delicate inner information. That dissonance isn’t trivial.

Then there’s the aggressive context. Anthropic is all of the sudden the beast within the room. It’s rising sooner, smarter, cleaner, and it’s successful within the regulated industries—monetary companies, healthcare, authorized—the place enterprise offers are greatest and belief issues most. 

In the meantime Google’s Gemini is slashing costs and going after developer mindshare. Fleming isn’t coming into a market the place OpenAI can coast on model halo. He’s coming into a knife struggle with a smaller-than-expected pocket knife, and going through a man with the machete and a girl with a limiteless arsenal of throwing daggers.

The twin-CMO construction can also be a possible concern. OpenAI has cut up advertising into two roles: one for client, one for enterprise. Offered as sophistication, it’s truly an admission of battle. The patron model and the enterprise model have diverged to the purpose the place one particular person can’t credibly handle each. That could be a technique downside, and never one Fleming can simply clear up.

None of this ought to be learn as a prediction that Fleming will fail. He’s precisely what OpenAI wants. If anybody can construct a reputable B2B model on high of a messy underlying actuality, it’s somebody along with his monitor report. 

However good hires don’t all the time repair declining fortunes. They work inside them, round them, and typically regardless of them. 

The true query for OpenAI isn’t whether or not Fleming is gifted sufficient for this job. The query is whether or not the corporate is prepared to make the more durable strategic selections that Fleming will inevitably ask. About product separation, in regards to the promoting mannequin, about what OpenAI for Enterprise truly stands for. 

Hiring a marketer like Fleming is simply the beginning of the issue being sorted.