How Deloitte Uses Data-Driven Creativity in Marketing

·46 min·4 clips

Suzanne Conkle reveals how Deloitte's global CMO role balances brand power with local market agility.

This episode of Marketing Trends features host Jeremy Bergeron interviewing Suzanne Conkle, the Global and U.S. Chief Marketing Officer of Deloitte. Conkle explains her multifaceted role overseeing the global brand, marketing, communications, and partnerships for the professional services giant. She describes the Deloitte brand as the "lead cyclist" enabling the firm's various businesses to succeed. Conkle argues that B2B marketing is currently in a powerful era, able to leverage analytics and digital tools from B2C while maintaining deep, personalized client relationships. She strongly dismisses the perceived tension between brand building and demand generation as a distracting false choice. A key challenge she identifies is integrating marketing and sales into a cohesive coverage model for the market, requiring constant alignment with business leaders. Conkle shares a personal lesson from early in her CMO career when business counterparts corrected her assumption that her prior sales experience granted automatic credibility. She advocates for using data not as a constraint but as a liberator for creativity, allowing teams to be more specific and resonant with their targets. Conkle cites Deloitte's "WNBA" campaign, centered on the insight "girls who play become women who lead," as an example of creativity driven by data on women in leadership. The firm uses internal employee sentiment as a key indicator for whether its marketing makes people proud and clients loyal. With a 29-year career at Deloitte, Conkle attributes the firm's innovative bets, like early expansion in India, to a democratic culture that gathers insights from a broad base of leaders rather than a few predictors. She describes managing the firm's "tyranny of abundance"—the creative output of thousands of professionals—by ensuring brand work is a flexible "mindset, not a rule set." On artificial intelligence, Conkle sees generative AI as transformative for speeding up analytical tasks and creating derivative content, while also fundamentally rewriting work processes. She believes CMOs must be central voices in AI strategy due to their deep understanding of customer needs and brand safeguarding. The conversation is professional, insightful, and conversational, blending high-level strategy with specific personal anecdotes and campaign examples. Marketing leaders, especially in B2B and professional services, will find valuable perspectives on integrating data with creativity and aligning marketing with business objectives. Listeners seeking tactical, step-by-step marketing tutorials or critiques of Deloitte's business model may find the discussion too high-level and brand-positive.

As heard by us

Data does not replace creativity here; it gives creativity a clearer set of choices.

The episode's main strength is its plain argument that data can sharpen creative work by making the business question more specific and keeping attention on how audiences actually respond.

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Want a clear case for why data can make marketing more creative?

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