Margaret Wagner, president EMEA, Merkle
Describe your career to date
It’s been a fantastic journey driven by data-driven marketing, from my early days of CRM, leading global accounts like Jaguar Land Rover, Samsung and Citi Cards, to driving growth through data-driven strategies for Merkle. All of this drove me to the role I have to today, leading more than 5,500 employees across EMEA, focused on data, digital and customer experience transformation.
What key skills or attributes do you consider have contributed to your success in this role?
The skill is an unrelenting focus on the customer; their motives, attitudes and behaviours. And the ability to put those together to drive meaningful engagement from acquisition to loyalty.
What level of data maturity do you typically encounter across your client base and what tends to hold this back?
Clients are very much in the data game; they are focused on customer knowledge and engagement. The challenge is the ability to activate in most cases. The maturity varies and is mostly activated by channel, despite the potential ability to drive it across all channels. So it’s as much about the technology and ability to activate. Otherwise it doesn’t matter how much you know if you can’t activate it. It’s a two-sided coin.
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