Steve Kerdock Sells the Story Behind the Circuit Board

There is a version of the technology industry that gets photographed. The keynote stages, the glass headquarters, the phones held up on launch day. And then there is the other version - the one Steve Kerdock has spent a quarter century marketing. Resistors and capacitors. Sensors and storage. Warehouses of components moving toward factories, and the software and services that keep the whole thing coordinated. It is the layer nobody notices until it stops working.

Kerdock is senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Arrow Electronics, the roughly $31 billion distributor headquartered in Englewood, Colorado. His job, stated plainly, is to make a company that mostly sells to engineers and enterprises feel legible to a wider world. Arrow oversees brand, digital, and media assets, and he runs them - which sounds tidy until you consider what the product actually is. Not a single hero object. A catalog of hundreds of thousands of parts, a global supply chain, and a promise that the right thing will arrive at the right place at the right time.

Marketing the thing you never see

Consumer marketing has an unfair advantage: desire. Someone can want a pair of shoes on impulse. Nobody impulse-buys a reel of surface-mount components or a data-center refresh. In Kerdock's world the buyer is a procurement team, an engineer, an operations lead - people who are paid to be skeptical and who will read the datasheet. You do not win them with a jingle. You win them with clarity, availability, and a track record. The marketing is the trust.

That constraint is exactly what makes the discipline interesting. Strip away the spectacle and marketing becomes an engineering problem of its own: how do you take an enormous, complicated, unglamorous business and make it understandable, findable, and believable? Kerdock has built a career answering that question inside two of the largest names in electronics distribution.

The e-commerce bet

Kerdock joined Avnet in 2008 as director of online marketing for global e-commerce. In business-to-business distribution at that moment, digital was the corner nobody was fighting over. The big money and the big meetings were elsewhere. He planted himself in the online channel and stayed - through the years when e-commerce quietly went from a side project to the main way an entire industry researches, quotes, and buys.

By 2018 that specialization had compounded. He moved from vice president of digital marketing to vice president of marketing, broadening from one channel to the whole function. It is the kind of progression that looks inevitable in hindsight and is anything but in the moment. He did not predict where the industry was going so much as position himself squarely where it was going to arrive.

Crossing the aisle

In 2023, after more than 15 years at Avnet, Kerdock did something that reads as small on a resume and large in the industry: he crossed to Arrow, Avnet's most direct competitor, to take the chief marketing officer role. Fifteen years is a long time to learn a business - its customers, its rhythms, its unglamorous truths. Carrying that knowledge across to the rival and pointing it in the other direction is its own kind of statement.

• 2000
  Senior Director of Advertising and Online Marketing at Sage Software.
• 2008
  Joins Avnet as Director of Online Marketing, Global E-Commerce.
• 2018
  Promoted to VP of Digital Marketing, then VP of Marketing at Avnet.
• 2023
  Named SVP and Chief Marketing Officer of Arrow Electronics.

The through-line across every step is consistency of subject matter. Sage Software, then Avnet, then Arrow - each more technical, each higher-stakes, each harder to explain at a dinner party than the last. It is a career built by moving toward the essential and away from the easy-to-pitch.

Five years out

Arrow markets itself under a phrase Kerdock now has to keep meaningful: “Five Years Out.” It refers to the gap between the technology that exists in a lab and the moment it becomes affordable, practical, and everywhere. A distributor lives in that gap. It is where tomorrow's components get sourced, tested, and moved into the products people will eventually take for granted. Turning that idea - abstract, forward-looking, a little philosophical - into something a customer feels is exactly the sort of marketing problem that has no viral shortcut.

The scale helps explain the difficulty. Arrow spans electronic components and enterprise computing, aerospace and defense, healthcare and industrial, cloud and IT asset disposition. A single brand has to hold all of it without collapsing into vagueness. That is the tension Kerdock manages: broad enough to cover the business, sharp enough to mean something.

The case for boring

There is a quiet lesson in a career like this, and it runs against the grain of how the internet talks about work. The loudest corners of technology are also the most crowded - crowded with attention, with talent, with competition for both. The unglamorous corners stay wide open. Components. Distribution. Supply chain. The plumbing. Kerdock walked through that open door and kept walking for 25 years, and it led to a Fortune 500 marketing seat.

He earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Maryland and an MBA from the University of Phoenix, and built the rest of it on the job - in advertising, in the early web, in the slow craft of getting technical buyers to believe you. It is not a story with a single dramatic turn. It is a story of showing up in the same difficult territory, year after year, and getting better at explaining it.

Which may be the most honest thing you can say about the work. Next time a device turns on the first try, remember there was a chain behind it - components sourced, parts moved, a supply chain coordinated, a story told to the people who buy at that scale. Somebody markets that layer. For a good stretch of the industry, that somebody is Steve Kerdock.