Ep. 49 with Mercer - Global CMO Jeanniey Mullen and Jordan Bryant on the Mobile First Podcast

Mobile First

Our Guest

Jeanniey is Mercer’s Global Chief Marketing Officer, focused on building a more agile and transparent marketing operation accountable for driving revenue growth through demand creation and strong brand reputation. She believes in leveraging innovative and digital initiatives to help achieve her goals, and her background in education fuels her passion to inspire both consumers and the teams she works with.

Prior to her role at Mercer, Jeanniey was Head of Marketing and Growth for Barnes & Noble, where she drove the transformation of the NOOK business from hardware to app based. Her previous experience includes launching the world’s first digital newsstand for Zinio, growing the business to more than 20 million active consumers. She also launched and ran the global Digital Dialogue business for Ogilvy and Grey Direct’s Global Email Marketing business, establishing the world’s first email marketing practice inside an advertising agency.

Jeanniey holds a master’s degree in teaching from the University of Pittsburgh. A recognized “Woman in Business” and an entrepreneur, she has authored three books and launched five companies, including Ringblingz and the Email Experience Council. Jeanniey was recently named Networker of the Year by the Internet Marketing Association and is the Chairwoman of their Women’s Leadership Group. She also serves on the board of MarketingEDGE and as an advisor for select high-potential start-ups.

Here are the highlights of our conversation with our guest:

• Jeanniey shares that she is at her happiest when she inspires people. She enjoys teaching new tricks and help people in general thereby she constantly finds innovative ways to do this. She mentions about a story when she was in 7th grade when she pitched the idea to create homemade fortune cookies for a bake sale. It was a smashing success (and a grand team effort) which revealed her entrepreneurial approach.
• Jeanniey shares how she loves problem-solving, looking at ways she can bring improvement, making people happy, reach an end goal or changing the world for the better. She is also a very practical person and is always excited in getting involved in anything new. This speaks as to why she had five businesses in the past.
• Mercer makes a difference in the lives of more than 110 million people every day by advancing their health, wealth and careers. This focus creates more secure and rewarding futures for their clients and their employees — whether designing affordable health plans, assuring income for retirement, or aligning workers with workforce needs. They are like the Intel Inside of HR companies. It is a phenomenal company in terms of impact as it drives organizations to provide employees a better life.
• Jeanniey is Mercer’s Global Chief Marketing Officer and her job focuses on two areas: increasing brand visibility and driving growth. They market themselves as strategic partners to their clients rather than a vendor or a solutions provider. Part of her role is to look at possibilities of digital transformations in marketing. They look at how they can integrate digital strategies, best practices and the coolest initiatives they see into what they are doing in a daily basis and how it can impact user experience.
• Their focus for growth for product and services is in user experience and how it is happening in all relevant channels. What they are seeing making a bigger impact is understanding user journey and how it starts the search for answers in those various channels.
• Time is currently their only challenge right now as they are now on their last five months in putting all of their initiatives together. They are now analyzing impacts and after that, they’ll go back to their CEO to share the results and see how they can leverage on this data for their growth.
• A few months ago, they had launched a new initiative called Mercer Digital where they are marrying all the incredible insights that they have in the people side of their house with consulting services and everything related to HR, technology and the future of work. They are creating an ecosystem which places companies ahead of the curve as far as solutions are concerned.