Anna Griffin Took the ‘ing’ Out of Marketing

Anna Griffin has a habit of arriving when a company needs a new sentence. Not a slogan, exactly. A sentence sturdy enough to explain what changed in the world, what the business now does about it, and why anybody beyond the building should care.

At Juniper Networks, the shift was from hardware toward software and cloud. At CA Technologies, it was a global rebrand for an enterprise-software company with decades of history. Smartsheet was helping define collaborative work management. Intercom was making internet business feel personal. At Commvault, an established backup company was widening its argument toward cyber resilience just as ransomware and artificial intelligence made recovery a boardroom question.

The settings change. Griffin’s method does not. She looks for the defining moment, follows the customer tension, and tries to connect the dots before the organization files them into separate departments.

The smallest rebrand

A job title becomes an operating system

At Commvault, Griffin’s title has evolved from Chief Marketing Officer to Chief Market Officer. It is one missing syllable and a fairly large argument. Marketing is often understood as the set of activities that carries an idea into public: campaigns, launches, events, demand. Market starts earlier. It asks what customers are living through, where competitors are moving, and how the company can become more useful.

Griffin has explained the distinction in literal terms: concentrate on the market, not the “ing.” The “ing” contains the machinery. The market contains the reason for switching it on.

“I think it’s important ... to make sure that they’re focusing on the market and not the ing.”Anna Griffin, on the Chief Market Officer title

This framing gives marketing a harder job. A campaign can be judged after it ships. Market judgment begins with incomplete evidence. It requires a point of view on category direction, a working theory of customer value, and enough internal credibility to influence what gets built. Griffin’s version of the role is less air-traffic controller, more connective tissue.

Her memorable shorthand is that product, sales and marketing must be a “one-headed dragon.” Three bodies of expertise, perhaps, but one commercial brain. When product describes features, sales repeats objections and marketing polishes slogans, customers are forced to assemble the meaning themselves. The dragon gives the company one direction of travel.

How the pattern formed

From a blunt question to a career

Griffin studied marketing at East Carolina University, graduating in 1994. Her campus life already had the markings of an operator: senior class president, student-government leadership, and leadership roles in Sigma Sigma Sigma and Panhellenic. But one of the most useful clues to her later career comes from an early job, when she asked a question so basic that organizations sometimes avoid it: How do we make money?

She knew her assignment. She wanted to understand how the assignment connected to the business. That impulse became her professional through-line. She has called marketing creative problem solving, and curiosity the condition that makes selling possible. Curiosity, in this account, is not cheerful nosiness. It is the discipline of tracing an action all the way to an outcome.

“You will never sell by not being curious.”Anna Griffin

The consumer brands supplied an education in emotional legibility. Enterprise technology supplied denser material. Griffin became practiced at finding a human consequence inside systems language. A network is not compelling because packets move. A work platform is not compelling because rows update. Data protection matters when a business can keep operating after a bad day.

Her analogy for failed transformation is characteristically domestic: putting a new tool into an old way of working is like playing Netflix on a rotary phone. The image is funny because both objects are familiar and the combination is absurd. It also lands a serious point. Buying modern technology while preserving the workflow it was meant to replace merely digitizes the bottleneck.

The synthesis advantage

AI as a way to hear faster

Griffin’s use of generative AI at Commvault reveals what she thinks the tool is for. During a period of rapid repositioning, her team needed approved product knowledge, testimonials and competitive answers to travel across a company of thousands. They built an internal conversational system around company information. Salespeople could ask for the relevant proof instead of hunting through folders or waiting for a specialist.

The more personal use case came before a board meeting. Researchers had completed hours of conversations with 22 customers. The conventional executive summary would take time. Griffin wanted the themes immediately, while she could still use them. Generative AI compressed the interviews into a first synthesis.

That distinction matters. The machine did not decide the strategy. It shortened the distance between hearing and judgment. Griffin has said synthesis is her favorite use because it frees her and her team to reach insight and act sooner. In a field tempted to treat AI as a copy factory, she treated it as a listening instrument.

“Ultimately, a lot of success in marketing is being able to connect the dots through an entire experience.”Anna Griffin

There is a useful restraint in that model. Enterprise brands operate in environments where a fast, fluent mistake can be expensive. Approved knowledge and customer evidence set the boundaries. The value comes from access and compression, not synthetic bravado.

A story under pressure

Making recovery a business verb

Commvault gave Griffin a difficult narrative assignment. Backup sounds like storage. Cyber resilience sounds like a strategy document. The lived problem is urgent: when an attack disrupts systems, how quickly can an organization find clean data, restore essential operations and trust the result?

Her language has moved toward proof. It is no longer enough to own a recovery plan. An organization should be able to demonstrate that the plan works under pressure. In 2025 and 2026, as Commvault discussed ResOps and resilience for AI, Griffin kept returning to readiness as a measurable business capability. The shift turns recovery from insurance kept in a drawer into a muscle that teams test.

That framing also connects the company’s history to the present without pretending the past was irrelevant. Backup remains underneath the story. The market consequence has expanded. AI creates more data, more dependencies and new attack surfaces. Resilience must cover the data feeding models, the systems running them, and the human decisions around both.

Power that circulates

Mentoring as a two-way system

Griffin’s public comments about leadership are less about status than awareness. In a 2018 interview after being named a Moves Power Woman, she described power as self-awareness converted into action. She spoke about mentoring women across different career stages and insisted that the exchange runs both ways: when she mentors someone, she gets mentored back.

That reciprocity fits her market philosophy. Listen closely and the other person changes your view. She has also argued that representation in advertising and media shapes the futures people can picture. “Destiny follows story,” she has said. Who writes, directs and appears in those stories is not a side question. It determines who gets to imagine belonging in technology, leadership and other fields.

At Commvault, she has co-sponsored women-in-technology initiatives and joined conversations about accelerating gender equality. The work is consistent with the operator behind the brand campaigns: awareness becomes useful when it changes a decision, a team or an opportunity.

The pattern on the table

Simplicity after the hard work

Griffin knits. It is a small biographical detail with suspiciously good metaphorical fit. A knitted object emerges from repetition, tension and a pattern understood well enough to keep moving even when the whole is not yet visible. Her career has the same logic. She joins organizations in transition, gathers disparate strands and searches for the sentence that will hold.

The temptation is to call this storytelling, then stop. Griffin’s record suggests something more operational. A story can set product priorities. It can give sales a cleaner conversation. It can help employees recognize the company they work for. It can show customers where they fit in a changing category. Words become strategy when the organization is willing to arrange itself around them.

This is why taking the “ing” out of marketing works as more than wordplay. It reverses the usual order. Do not begin with what the department knows how to make. Begin with what the market is becoming. Do not confuse volume with clarity. Listen, synthesize, choose, then build the machinery.

For Griffin, the aspiration at Commvault is plain enough to fit inside the first announcement of her hiring: make sure the world knows. The interesting part is what must happen before the telling. The company has to know what it means. The teams have to share one head. The claim has to survive contact with a customer and, in the age of cyberattack, with pressure.

Only then does marketing earn its suffix.