The first clue is the empty calendar. Soon after Martyn Etherington arrived at BMC Software in 2022, marketing stopped advertising and removed roughly 200 events from its plan. It was a sharp opening move for a chief marketing officer, the sort that turns a pleasant introductory tour into a company-wide conversation. Every canceled line carried an owner, a history, and a reason someone had once said yes.
Etherington was not making a case against events or advertising. He was making a case against inherited motion. BMC's marketing function, as he later described it, behaved like a service bureau: requests arrived from around the company, and the team supplied campaigns, materials, and appearances. The menu was broad. The relationship between all that activity and growth was harder to see.
So he made the gap visible. Marketing would have an operating rhythm, a small set of priorities, and numbers that finance and sales could interrogate. Weekly standups replaced the comfort of occasional retrospectives. Monthly reviews made red indicators useful rather than embarrassing. Customer evidence took precedence over the most senior opinion in the room. A department accustomed to being judged by output would be judged by what changed.
The apprenticeship in instruments
Etherington's résumé crosses several eras of enterprise technology. He worked around IBM and Sequent when computing was sold through a mix of technical authority, field relationships, and patient explanation. He then spent a decade at Tektronix, the maker of test and measurement instruments, where a marketer could not bluff for long. Engineers and customers wanted signals, not adjectives.
A 2007 case study he co-authored describes Tektronix interviewing customers to build measures of satisfaction and advocacy, then connecting those measures to marketing and sales decisions. The method now sounds ordinary because customer analytics has become a category of its own. At the time, it was a statement of temperament: observe first, name the measure, and let the result change the plan.
Tektronix became part of Danaher, whose management culture turned Lean principles into a company operating system. Etherington has said he began as a skeptic, even a cynic. Lean had the smell of a factory method being imported into a creative function. Four strategic cycles later, he had changed his mind. The value was not a vocabulary of Japanese manufacturing terms. It was the habit of making problems concrete enough to solve.
Brands are built by employees, too
In 2012, Etherington moved to Mitel as chief marketing officer and later served as chief of staff. Mitel powered business communications, but its own name did not travel as far as its products. One response was to invite employees into the work of building the brand.
The origin story is pleasingly practical. Etherington read The Social Employee over a weekend. The book's argument, that employees are stewards of the brand, stuck. Mitel built social training that reached nearly 1,300 employees and then hundreds of salespeople. The company supplied sample posts that people could use or edit, reducing the blank-page anxiety that often follows an executive invitation to “be authentic.” Participation was encouraged, not forced.
This is one of the more human patterns in his career. He talks about boldness, but his operating moves often remove friction. If people should speak, give them training and a starting point. If teams should align, give them a shared review. If marketing should serve growth, connect work to an economic result. Culture becomes less mysterious once desired behavior has somewhere to happen.
“As a CMO, you cannot have fear, you have to be fearless.”Martyn Etherington, 2018
A career of difficult transitions
After Mitel came Jasper, the Internet of Things platform Cisco bought in 2016. Etherington's compact line from that period was that IoT was not merely about connecting things; it was about delivering services. The distinction moved attention from the technical event to the customer outcome. It also anticipated the challenge he would face repeatedly: helping an established technology business describe itself in the language of what comes next.
Teradata hired him as CMO in 2018 while the company was pushing deeper into cloud analytics. He took responsibility for brand, reputation, demand, communications, digital and social media, and customer experience. The assignment was both commercial and semantic. Teradata had decades of data expertise, but heritage can read as either proof or baggage. Etherington argued that the company was at the edge of a new growth chapter, then worked on the brand, cloud narrative, and marketing system needed to support it.
Alongside the operating roles, he has kept a line into education and peer networks. He chaired the Portland State University School of Business advisory board, joined the Wharton Customer Analytics Advisory Board, and became part of Oxford Saïd's Future of Marketing Initiative. In 2026, he added an Executive in Residence role at Oxford. Those connections fit a practitioner who likes frameworks but insists they survive contact with a budget.
Hugh Grant meets Gordon Ramsay
Etherington has described his leadership style as “50% Hugh Grant, 50% Gordon Ramsay.” It is funny because both halves are vivid: the lightly self-deprecating British charmer and the chef whose impatience is a television genre. More usefully, he says the ratio changes with the culture. Transformation does not travel on a single personality setting.
The joke also softens a demanding idea. Etherington wants teams to be comfortable showing red, to replace vanity metrics with evidence, and to accept that familiar work may disappear. That requires psychological room for bad news and enough pressure to act on it. Charm without standards produces agreeable drift. Standards without trust produce defensive reporting. His ratio is an attempt to hold both.
“Doing good matters more than looking good.”Martyn Etherington on BMC's marketing culture
The trust problem after abundance
By 2026, the technology in Etherington's portfolio had changed again. BMC was placing generative and agentic AI across products that support automation, service management, mainframes, and operations. Marketing faced the same abundance. Machines could generate more copy, more variants, and more campaigns. Etherington's public answer was to put more weight on brand trust, not less.
For enterprise buyers, trust is operational. A bank or telecom provider is not purchasing a clever sentence; it is weighing whether software can sit inside systems where interruption is expensive. A trusted brand compresses that decision by carrying evidence from previous performance. Noise cannot do the same job, however efficiently it is generated.
This is where the creative and operational sides of his work finally meet. Lean marketing asks a team to connect promise with result. Brand trust is what accumulates when that connection holds over time. One operates weekly, the other over years, but both punish the gap between what a company says and what customers experience.
The operating notes worth stealing
- Treat inherited activity as a hypothesis, not a protected tradition.
- Choose measures that sales and finance can recognize without translation.
- Make red visible early enough for the team to learn from it.
- Use customer evidence to break internal ties.
- Give desired behavior a cadence, an owner, and a practical starting point.
The productive discomfort
Etherington once advised new CMOs to become comfortable being uncomfortable. The phrase can sound like generic executive weatherproofing. His career gives it a more precise meaning. Discomfort is canceling an event with a loyal internal sponsor. It is exposing a weak return before finance finds it. It is joining a venerable technology company and arguing that its past should become evidence for a new promise, not a museum display.
The BMC reset was dramatic at the start, but its lasting mechanism is ordinary: a weekly meeting, a monthly review, a metric everyone can see. That ordinariness is the point. Strategy acquires value when it becomes a routine. A creative department becomes a growth function when learning is scheduled, decisions have owners, and the customer has a seat even when no customer is in the room.
There is a restraint hidden inside this method. A marketer with more than three decades of experience could reasonably arrive with a bag of answers. Etherington's system begins with questions instead. Which customers are changing? Which work creates movement? Which claim is supported by experience? The reviews do not remove judgment; they expose it to correction. Even his interest in “positive deviants,” the people already producing unusual results inside a company, starts from observation. Before importing a grand solution, find the small proof that the organization can already behave differently. Build around it. The idea makes transformation feel less like a foreign program and more like recognizing a capability that was present but overlooked.
Years after learning to read signals at an instrument company, Etherington is still asking marketing teams to look closely at what the system is telling them. Turn down the noise. Find the signal. Then have the nerve to change the plan.