LA Times Billionaire Owner Plans to Take Newspaper Public
The newspaper has been under his stewardship since 2018, when his Nant Capital investment vehicle purchased it in a $500 million deal. South Africa-born Soon-Shiong helped steady the business after a clash between its editorial staff and the previous owners.
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A Conversation With Verizon Business Chief Product + Marketing Officer Iris Meijer On Synching The Product + Marketing Functions To Innovate The Customer Experiences Of Tomorrow
The marketing function is undergoing many changes in today's environment. Firstly, marketers must demand a seat at the table in ways never done before, as they are required to not just market, but ultimately act as change agents driving a company's perpetual transformation. To do this, CMOs must reimagine what it means to be truly customer-centric, while working to reinvent customer understanding. Additionally, they also must remove product development out of individual siloes and embrace it as a critical component of the marketing organization. Verizon Business Chief Product + Marketing Officer Iris Meijer On Synching The Product + Marketing ... More Functions To Innovate The Customer Experiences Of Tomorrow As a result of these significant sea changes, I wanted to speak to someone at the forefront of all of these trends, who understands the value of brand, along with an ability to use technology with specific intentionality to create customer experiences that delight and engage. Iris Meijer is Chief Product and Marketing Officer of Verizon Business. She is an industry veteran who has previously held senior roles at leading organizations such as Vodafone and Nokia. Following is a recap of our conversation: Howard: There are so many changes taking place in marketing today. One which you shared when we last spoke that I found particularly interesting was your feeling that marketing must be in the driver's seat for transformation efforts to truly be successful. Can you explain this further? Meijer: Marketing plays a critical role in driving successful transformation efforts because it possesses an unparalleled understanding of customer needs and market dynamics. As CMOs, our role is evolving to be strategic partners on the commercial realities of the business, going hand-in-hand with brand building. By being in the driver's seat, we ensure that all transformation initiatives are customer-centric, designing every journey, optimization, or new solution to delight our customers and address their evolving needs, which ultimately leads to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty. Our deep dive into data, technology, and advanced AI models allows us to go beyond surface-level insights, creating foresight into changing customer expectations. We are increasingly deploying AI and new technology tools to predict future customer behavior. For example, in Verizon Business, we're leveraging GenAI to improve customer experience and employee experience, increasing efficiency and sales velocity through data orchestration that tracks the customer lifecycle as well as through content generation, analytics, business operations, employee productivity, and coaching. This is crucial for anticipating needs and offering tailored solutions. The impact of this marketing-led approach extends beyond customer satisfaction. By driving these transformations, we see tangible business benefits such as reduced churn, increased revenue through more relevant offerings, attached solutions, and significant cost reductions due to optimized operations. This commitment to measurable improvement solidifies marketing's strategic importance in overall business transformation. Howard: Tell me about why you recently united product and marketing at Verizon Business? Meijer: In 2024, we strategically united product and marketing at Verizon Business to achieve a more cohesive and synergistic approach to serving our customers, focusing on the commercial performance of our portfolio and ultimately driving profitable growth. This decision was rooted in the recognition that a unified Product & Marketing organization can more effectively develop and deliver successful products to our customers. It creates more opportunities for innovating new commercially successful products and experiences that can truly transform our customers' businesses, whether they are small business owners, global enterprise customers or public sector customers, by delivering on each segment's distinct needs. This strategic alignment means that the feedback loop between customer insights from our marketing science teams and the continued listening by our frontline employees is immediately brought together and actioned for the ongoing development of our product portfolio. By having product and marketing teams work side-by-side, we ensure that new solutions are not only technically sound but also directly address identified customer needs and market gaps. This means products are conceived with a clear understanding of the customer problem they solve and how their value will be effectively communicated from the outset. This integration is key to accelerating our current success and aligns with our focus on customer segments to truly connect and build individual customer relationships. This organization has allowed us to ensure product delivery translates to a marketable asset to the final goal of revenue realization. Howard: Winning customer experiences and customer-centricity are key themes that drive your marketing organization. Can you share more on how you operationalize this thinking as well talk a bit about the new CX Index you recently launched? Meijer: Customer-centricity isn't just a buzzword for us; it's the fundamental principle that guides every decision and initiative within our marketing organization. We operationalize this thinking by focusing on several critical areas that directly impact the customer journey. For example, we've heavily invested in initiatives like bill simplification, recognizing that a clear and understandable invoice is a cornerstone of a positive customer experience. Our new Bill Inquiry Tool is a prime example. It's an easy-to-use chatbot that answers customers' 2,000 most-asked questions about their bills. We've just rolled it out to our service reps, who are pressure-testing it for us, and are planning to release it directly to customers in the coming months via our digital portal. Once live, the tool will allow our customers to get their questions answered immediately. This is part of our commitment to creating new moments of delight in the customer experience. To rigorously measure our progress and identify areas for further improvement, we recently launched a new Customer eXperience Index (CXI). This robust AI-powered index is integrated directly into our operational tools, providing a real-time, holistic view of customer satisfaction across various touchpoints. We no longer rely just on survey data. Instead, we now have the ability to empirically score every customer through a network, product, sales, service and value lens to ensure we are meeting and exceeding our customer promise. And in cases where we are not, we proactively take action on behalf of the customer to remedy the issue, sometimes even before the customer is aware. The impact has been significant. The CXI has already shown improved outcomes for our wireless accounts, directly contributing to a lower churn rate and a notable increase in revenue. Our overarching goal with these initiatives, driven by the insights from the CXI, is to maintain our coveted #1 NPS ranking for 2025, solidifying our position as a leader in customer experience and demonstrating how we translate customer insights into commercial opportunities. Howard: I have been talking about achieving 1:1 commercial intimacy, or personalization at scale for years, and my POV has always been centered on sharpening customer understanding, particularly through the lens of emotion. What are your thoughts? Meijer: I wholeheartedly agree that achieving 1:1 commercial intimacy and personalization at scale is not just an aspiration but a critical imperative for modern marketing. Your emphasis on sharpening customer understanding, especially through the lens of emotion, resonates deeply with our philosophy at Verizon Business. True personalization goes beyond simply knowing demographics; it's about understanding the nuances of a customer's needs, their pain points, their aspirations, and the emotional drivers behind their decisions. This is why we focus on customer segments to really connect and build customer relationships that are individual – in SMBs, we refer to it as a "segment of one" due to the need for personalization. To achieve this, we are committed to continuously investing in advanced data analytics and artificial intelligence. Generative AI, for example, has the potential to increase the scale and speed of our marketing content personalization like no other recent technology development. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 30% of outbound marketing messages from large enterprises will be synthetically generated. We have rich insights into our customers' real-time behavior and intent, and AI helps us translate that into dynamic content at scale, augmenting sales with AI as part of our Verizon Velocity Selling strategy. On your point about the lens of emotion, we are leveraging advanced AI and generative AI to gain a deeper, more empathetic understanding of our customers' journeys. Through the use of "conversational intelligence," we actively analyze interactions across all our communication channels—including phone calls, chat, and email—to score customer sentiment and track our commitments in real-time. This AI-driven insight allows us to provide more sensitive and personalized service. For example, our technology can identify signals of customer frustration, enabling our specialized teams to proactively engage and provide a higher level of care. By focusing on the sentiment around each interaction, we aim to move beyond transactional support to build stronger, more positive brand relationships. Ultimately, our ability to deliver winning customer experiences is inextricably linked to this level of personalization. When we truly understand our customers—both rationally and emotionally—we can anticipate their needs, offer proactive solutions, and provide a seamless, intuitive experience across all touchpoints, ensuring that our customers feel heard, understood, and valued.
