Enterprise software has never suffered from a shortage of nouns. Platforms have modules, integrations, workflows, visibility, orchestration, optimization, intelligence, and, when the quarter demands it, transformation. The trouble begins when all those nouns arrive in one sentence. Ed Rusch has spent much of his career asking the sentence to sit down, catch its breath, and remember the person reading it.
Rusch is the chief marketing officer of Magaya, a Miami-based maker of freight-management software, and he works from the Atlanta metropolitan area. His route there passed through a distinctly industrial map: chemical supply networks at Elemica, heavy construction materials at Command Alkon and Sysdyne, demand and inventory planning at Blue Ridge, order management at Deck Commerce, and now freight forwarding, warehousing, and customs brokerage at Magaya.
It is a career assembled from the plumbing of commerce. None of those systems is merely abstract to the people using it. A delayed order disappoints a customer. A paper process keeps someone late. A missing status update sets off a chain of calls. Rusch's enduring subject is the human consequence inside the technical system.
An operator before the corner office
Rusch studied communications at John Carroll University from 1990 to 1994, then built the early part of his résumé in new business development and account work. At Angelica, he managed marketing and sales operations. When he moved to Elemica in 2007, his first remit again joined those two functions. The sequence matters. Long before the chief titles, he worked around the handoffs where a promising campaign meets a sales process, a database, a forecast, and the awkward question of what happened next.
He spent nearly a decade at Elemica, rising from marketing and sales operations manager to global marketing director and then vice president of global marketing. His public project list includes a company rebrand and the launch of a next-generation platform. His industry work ranged beyond promotion: he wrote about smart data, the digital supply chain, social media, logistics, and risk detection, and he convened customer conferences in Europe and the United States.
That combination explains the texture of his later leadership. Rusch is plainly interested in story, but he treats story as an operating instrument. It can align a sales team, help a buyer understand an unfamiliar change, give a customer language for an internal business case, or turn a conference into a working exchange instead of a parade of slides. The words must do a job. Preferably, they should do it without requiring a glossary and a small rescue party.
“Do you get me? Can you empathize with my circumstances? Are you speaking my language?”Questions Rusch says customer communication must answer
Listen for the sentence beneath the sentence
In a 2021 essay about the voice of the customer, Rusch described a familiar species of technology marketing: the company talks about itself, celebrates its own features, and produces a sentence so stuffed with jargon that it requires “forensics to understand.” The comic touch carries a serious diagnosis. An inside-out message tells the market how a vendor wants to be seen. It does not prove that the vendor understands what a buyer is trying to accomplish.
His corrective is practical. Ask trusted customers for input while the campaign is being made. Resist feature and function statements that have no context. Map a capability back to the customer's circumstances. Remember that businesses do not buy software in some bloodless institutional trance. People make the decision, and people bring pride, fear, ego, trust, and professional reputation into the room.
That is more demanding than swapping a few words on a landing page. Customer language reaches backward into product choices and forward into service. It asks whether the buying experience supports the promise. It also asks marketing to earn its place before someone requests a tasteful flourish at the eleventh hour.
The campaign was a team
A revealing moment came at Command Alkon in 2019. Rusch was selected for a B2B Innovator Award in the Marketing Mentor category. The recognition did not rest on a clever slogan. It described a reconstruction: team roles were reorganized, new skills and approaches were developed, new tools and methods were introduced, and support had to be won across the company.
That is the less photogenic side of marketing leadership. Campaigns appear in public; capability is built in private. Before a team can change what the market hears, it often has to change how the company works. Rusch credited the award to his team's outcomes and their effort to “reimagine what's possible with marketing.” The plural pronoun mattered.
A colleague later offered a small glimpse of that coaching instinct. Alfred Murgado recalled a one-on-one at Magaya in which Rusch suggested he move from marketing operations into growth marketing. Murgado had built a career around dashboards, workflows, and clean handoffs. Growth felt unfamiliar and risky. The assignment widened his field. Leadership, in this version, was not a speech about potential. It was a new responsibility with consequences.
Rusch's peers have described him as open to ideas, willing to challenge established practice, and able to mobilize a team. Those qualities fit the operating history. His titles expanded from marketing and sales operations to global marketing, CMO, and revenue leadership. At Deck Commerce, the brief joined sales and marketing under bookings and revenue operations. At Sysdyne, it included go-to-market strategy, channel alliances, and international expansion. The career is about communication, but it is never very far from the machinery that turns attention into revenue.
The 90-23 gap
At Magaya, that machinery operates in a freight market caught between expectation and execution. Research released with Adelante SCM in 2025 found that 90 percent of surveyed shippers considered technology extremely or very important when choosing a freight forwarder or third-party logistics provider. Only 23 percent of surveyed forwarders had digitized more than three quarters of their processes. Almost half had digitized half or less.
The expectation gap in freight forwarding
For a marketer, the gap is temptation and warning at once. It is easy to describe every manual process as a waiting software sale. It is harder to understand why the process survived, who trusts it, what disruption a change creates, and which result will justify the effort. Rusch's own framework insists on the harder work. Visibility, integrations, automated documentation, and compliance tools become meaningful only when connected to the customer's daily reality.
“We work in an increasingly digital industry, but the value of being together in the same room has never been higher.”Ed Rusch on Magaya's Momentum conference, 2026
Software, magazine, ballroom
A revealing expression of Rusch's current philosophy is that Magaya did not answer digitization with software alone. In late 2025, the company launched Momentum, an annual magazine for freight forwarders and customs brokers. Rusch described it as a collection of conversations from across the logistics community, assembled to offer lessons, emerging trends, and practical guidance.
Then the magazine became a room. In April 2026, Magaya held the Momentum conference in Coral Gables, bringing together customers, industry leaders, analysts, product experts, and partners. The agenda mixed compliance, automation, leadership, product training, and unhurried opportunities to compare notes. Technology was everywhere. So were handshakes, hallway conversations, and the accumulated relief of speaking with people who recognize the same operational headaches.
This is a tidy system for a customer-led marketer: research discovers the questions, publishing organizes the conversation, an event deepens the relationships, and the product has to carry the practical burden. Each piece tests the others. A glossy message cannot survive a poor customer experience for long. A useful community, meanwhile, creates its own editorial intelligence because people say what worries them when somebody genuinely listens.
A useful kind of ambition
Rusch has been named a Supply & Demand Chain Executive Pro to Know three times. His teams' work has been associated with recognition from Fast Company and the American Advertising Federation. Yet the public record points less toward trophy collecting than toward repeated reinvention in complicated categories. He keeps arriving where a technical company needs a clearer commercial story, a more capable team, or a tighter connection between marketing and revenue.
When he joined Magaya in 2024, he said he wanted to help bring its growth to the next level. The phrase is ordinary executive language. The career beneath it is more specific. Growth, for Rusch, appears to begin with attention: attention to the customer's words, to the team's range, to the emotions hidden inside an enterprise decision, and to the experience surrounding the software.
That may be the elegant joke at the center of his work. After two decades in industries devoted to moving chemicals, concrete, orders, inventory, and cargo, his real specialty is moving meaning. The load travels cleanly when the jargon is left on the dock.