Long before Lisa Cottrell had to explain why a map could make a utility safer or a government workflow faster, she learned what it takes to get a neighborhood to show up. The setting was Island Savings on Vancouver Island. The assignment was a branch opening. The campaign moved across newspaper, direct mail, social video and a live radio broadcast, then spilled into the street through coffee, grocery-bag and cupcake giveaways. Attendance triggered a charitable donation. Families found food, prizes and activities when they arrived.
The results had none of the fog that can settle around marketing language. Membership and insurance performance finished 60 percent above goal. Attendance came in 7 percent above plan. The charity target was beaten by 173 percent. The campaign earned a Marketing Association of Credit Unions award in 2014, but the more interesting reward was an operating lesson: a message becomes powerful when a community can see itself inside it.
Cottrell now works several layers deeper in the technical stack. As Chief Marketing Officer at VertiGIS, she leads product, digital, communications and growth marketers. Their subject is geospatial software used by utilities, governments, telecommunications providers and infrastructure organizations. The tools help people understand assets and networks through location. The stakes can be a damaged cable, an inefficient field visit, a poorly documented facility or a public process that lacks a common view of the facts.
These are products that do much of their best work out of sight. A household notices the light switch, not the spatial data behind a utility's network. A driver notices a closed road, not the systems coordinating the response. Marketing in this category asks for more than a polished launch. It asks for translation.
The craft of making the invisible legible
Cottrell's description of her discipline is compact: “I believe the best marketing is one part art and one part science.” It fits the path. The art is in finding an image, an event or a phrase that gives technical work a human scale. The science is in knowing whether the message brought the right person closer to a useful decision.
“The best marketing is one part art and one part science.”
At VertiGIS, the translation runs in several directions at once. Product marketing has to understand what the software does. Digital and growth marketing have to find and serve a specialized audience. Communications must connect separate capabilities into a coherent company story. Events must make room for customers and partners to compare what happens in the software with what happens in the field.
The marketer's route through a geospatial product: turn information into location, location into a decision, and the decision into a consequence people can recognize.
Her public framing stays close to the customer's work. The purpose is to show how geospatial technology helps organizations solve problems more efficiently, whatever their shape or size. That language avoids making the product the protagonist. Software matters because someone has a network to maintain, a site to inspect, an outage to understand or a public service to deliver.
A ladder built inside the company
Cottrell did not arrive at the CMO title through a single dramatic jump. She moved from Island Savings to Latitude Geographics in 2017 as a marketing and events specialist. The Victoria software company was known for Geocortex, a set of products that extended Esri's ArcGIS technology. In a 2018 webinar, she appeared with product director Drew Millen to discuss the Geocortex roadmap. It was an early public example of the role she would keep expanding: standing between the builders and the market, helping each side understand the other.
In 2019 she became brand manager at VertiGIS and received the company's President's Award that March. Director of corporate and brand marketing followed in 2021. She became vice president of global marketing at the start of 2023, then Chief Marketing Officer in September. Each role widened the frame, from the brand to the corporate narrative, from a corporate narrative to a global market, and from global marketing to the executive team.
The progression matters because enterprise software marketing accumulates context slowly. Customers speak in the language of their industries. Product teams speak in requirements and releases. Sales teams hear objections at the edge of the market. A leader who has worked across events, brand, communications and growth can see where those vocabularies fail to meet.
The idea worth borrowing
When a product is complex, organize the story around the work a customer is trying to complete. Features become evidence, not the opening line.
The first map was personal
There is another timeline running beneath the corporate one. In 2003, when Cottrell was a high school student, she took part in Minerva BC's Learning to Lead program. She later remembered leadership changing from an abstract concept into a personal ethos shaped by authentic expression, self-acceptance, shared experience and meaningful connections with other girls and women.
Her phrase for the result was the “Lisa-version” of leadership. It is revealing in its modesty. There is no borrowed archetype in it, no instruction to perform authority in someone else's voice. Leadership becomes a version a person has to compose, test and keep revising.
Nineteen years later, Cottrell returned to Minerva BC as a business leader in its Making Space for Youth Leadership program. The teenager had become a director at VertiGIS. Now she could take part in the next generation's exploration. She wrote that the original program gave her the opportunity to learn about herself and her values, and to connect with leaders who helped form a foundation that still served her.
The return was not her only community commitment. Her professional profile records nearly nine years with the United Way of Greater Victoria's Impact Council and application review panel, along with service as a mentor in a national credit-union program. These roles match the early career work in community relations, but they also complicate the usual distinction between a professional life and a civic one. The same skills recur: listen for what matters, decide where attention can help, and make participation easier.
A useful kind of ambition
Cottrell's visible career is less a reinvention than a widening radius. A local financial institution became a Victoria technology company. Events and community relations became brand management. Brand became global marketing. The audience grew, but the work kept circling a stable question: how do you connect an organization with the people its choices affect?
At VertiGIS, that question travels through infrastructure. In 2023 the company introduced network products for North American utilities and a locator designed to support damage-prevention work. Cottrell's title appeared on those announcements first as vice president of global marketing, then as CMO. The chronology captures how quickly her remit expanded, but it also shows the kind of company story she inherited: technical, international and tied to physical consequences.
A network locate completed reliably can prevent a strike. Better asset information can reduce repeat work. A clearer map can give several departments one view of a problem. None of these outcomes needs theatrical language. They need accuracy, context and a reason for the person doing the work to trust the tool.
That may explain why Cottrell's art-and-science formula travels so well from a branch celebration to enterprise GIS. Art makes an idea felt. Science keeps the claim honest. Community tells both halves what they are for.
The loop, not the ladder
Career profiles often reduce progress to titles, as if the point were simply to move upward. Cottrell's record offers a different geometry. The promotions are real, but so is the return to a room like the one she entered at seventeen. The executive and the high school student belong to the same map.
That loop gives the story its most transferable idea. Learn a language for your own leadership. Practice it in work that lets you see consequences. Broaden your responsibility without abandoning the original lesson. Then go back and help someone else name a version that belongs to them.
Maps are useful because they show relationships that are hard to hold in the head at once. Cottrell's path does something similar. It connects a street-level event with global software, measurement with imagination, and personal ambition with the obligation to make room. The lines are not perfectly straight. They do not need to be. They point somewhere useful.