David Lamarche Knows the Hard Part of Transformation Is Human

The chairs were not the point. During a merger that came with an office move, some of David Lamarche's colleagues asked a question that sounded almost comically modest: would they be allowed to keep their chairs and wastebaskets? To Lamarche, the question became evidence. A change program may arrive wrapped in strategy, synergy and floor plans. The person living through it feels something closer to the ground. Where will I sit? What am I losing? Did anyone remember how my day actually works?

Lamarche has attended the meetings that produce those questions - an acquisition, a merger, multiple reorganizations. He later placed the chair story inside an essay about the three emotional enemies of change management: fear, cynicism and indifference. It is a revealing frame for a chief marketing officer whose career has moved through building controls, smart-home technology, Salesforce consulting and enterprise transformation. The products changed. The recurring assignment did not: turn a complicated system into something people can understand, trust and use.

Before the cloud, there were walls

In the early 2010s, Lamarche was director of communications, then director of marketing and communications, at Montreal's SCL Elements. Its CAN2GO products connected heating, ventilation, lighting and metering equipment inside commercial buildings. The problem was tangible. Traditional automation could require installers to open walls, pull cable, disrupt rooms and pay software-license costs that made little sense for smaller properties.

Wireless controls changed the installation math. Sensors and controllers could communicate without turning a school, store or office into a construction site. Lamarche wrote about the technology for industry publications and explained it to the green-building press in Quebec. His compact formulation was “Less wires, more value.” It worked because it translated a protocol discussion into an operator's outcome: less downtime, lower labor costs, easier expansion.

The details could get technical. CAN2GO bridged wireless and wired standards, converted devices into BACnet objects and allowed building managers to operate systems through a web interface. Lamarche argued that the customary separation between lighting and HVAC was artificial. Both occupied the same rooms. Both affected comfort and energy use. Connecting them produced a more useful whole.

That instinct - look for the expensive seam between systems - would travel well. SCL Elements was acquired by Schneider Electric. Lamarche's name later appeared alongside engineer Brian Salisbury on an international patent publication assigned to Schneider Electric Buildings. The application described ways to configure and control networked devices in homes and facilities, using context and human activity to create automated “moments.” A marketing executive listed as a co-inventor is not common. In Lamarche's case, it fits: his work stayed close enough to the product to touch its architecture.

The organization chart is not the experience

After building automation came a different integration problem. Lamarche became a senior partner, CMO and CCO at SOLJIT, a Montreal consultancy focused on Salesforce and digital acceleration. Louis-Nicolas Hamer, another partner, had first met him at SCL Elements. Hamer later recalled that they were immediately in sync, strategizing and building what he called a marketing machine. When the next venture arrived, he wanted Lamarche on the team.

At SOLJIT, the systems were customer-facing: sales pipelines, marketing automation, service histories and the connective tissue between them. Lamarche earned Salesforce's Pardot Specialist and Consultant certifications in 2020. He also wrote about the 360-degree customer view, grounding the case in a painfully ordinary interaction. A customer calls a company, explains a problem and is told it will be handled. Days later, with no resolution, the customer calls again. The second representative cannot see the first conversation. The customer must retell the entire story.

“From the customer's perspective, their experience with your company is ONE entity.”David Lamarche, on the 360-degree customer view

Inside the business, each department may have its own target and its own software. Marketing celebrates a qualified lead. Sales records a contract. Service closes a ticket. Every local metric can turn green while the overall experience remains incoherent. The customer does not care which database failed to synchronize. They only know that the company forgot them.

Lamarche's argument is more demanding than “install a CRM.” A unified record helps, but the real standard is coordination. Interactions should be consistent, useful and pleasant across departments. The company has to inspect the complete journey, not simply optimize each station. It is the same lesson as connecting lighting and HVAC: the boundary makes sense to the vendor or department, but not to the person occupying the room.

Fear has a job to do

Lamarche's essay on change management is unusually sympathetic to resistance. Fear is not treated as a defect in the employee. It is a normal response to a real or imagined threat: a working routine may stop working, expectations may shift, or a person's role may shrink. Cynicism has its own history. Employees have seen reorganizations announced with energy and completed without consequence. Indifference becomes a shield: keep doing the job as before and wait for the program to pass.

His antidotes follow the emotion. Fear needs facts, delivered repeatedly and through more than one channel. Cynicism needs participation and evidence that the change can produce a worthwhile result. Indifference needs a visible account of consequences - what happens to time, money and shared effort if everyone opts out. The framework is practical because it does not ask a slogan to perform the work of management.

It also clarifies what marketing can mean inside a technology consultancy. Communication is not a ribbon tied around a finished implementation. It is part of the operating infrastructure. A technically sound rollout can fail if the people expected to use it do not understand why it exists or cannot see themselves in its design. The chair question is not a distraction from strategy. It is a diagnostic.

The small question often carries the whole transformation: What changes for me on Monday morning?

From specialist firm to wider platform

Levio acquired SOLJIT in 2023. The deal moved Lamarche from a specialist Salesforce consultancy into a larger business and technology consulting organization serving complex transformation programs. He now holds the CMO title at Levio, working alongside an executive team spanning operations, revenue, technology, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and corporate development.

The expanded canvas includes AI, cloud, data, public-sector modernization and enterprise software. Yet Lamarche's earlier work supplies a useful warning against treating a larger capability list as a story. Buyers do not experience capabilities as a menu. They experience a broken process becoming faster, a service interaction remembering its context, or a new system gaining acceptance before the old workaround quietly returns.

There is another continuity in the record: translation across communities. Lamarche publishes in French and English. He has served on the board of Écotech Québec, the province's clean-technology cluster. He has written for building-automation audiences and for executives considering recurring software revenue. The vocabulary changes with the room, but the structure remains recognizable. Find the divided systems. Identify the human cost of the division. Make the value concrete.

This is also why “Less wires, more value” endures beyond its original product. Every transformation accumulates wiring - technical dependencies, departmental handoffs, approval loops, duplicated records and inherited habits. Some of it is necessary. Some survives only because nobody owns the seam. Lamarche's career suggests a marketer can do serious operating work by making those seams visible.

A promise that can survive contact

Corporate technology is full of future tense. Platforms will unify, intelligence will augment, workflows will transform. Lamarche's best material lives in the present tense: a room cannot be rewired without disruption; a customer repeats a story; an employee worries about a chair. These moments are not decorative anecdotes. They are tests. If a strategy cannot explain what happens in the moment, its promise is probably unfinished.

The same discipline humanizes an executive profile. Lamarche's public record includes a patent, board service, certifications and senior titles. The more interesting connective tissue is his attention to how systems are encountered. A controller has to fit a real building. A customer platform has to preserve context across departments. A transformation has to address emotion without dismissing it as resistance.

That leaves Levio's CMO with a job larger than promotion and narrower than prophecy. He has to help a complex firm say what it can change, for whom, and how the result will be felt. The cleanest answer may start where his career did: remove unnecessary friction, join the pieces that should already speak, and describe the value in language sturdy enough for the people doing the work.

Then remember the chair. It is where the strategy eventually has to sit.