The Gist:
- AI as a supporter. AI should be a tool to enhance and scale marketing efforts, not replace them.
- Empathy and understanding. Applying consumer-focused principles to B2B marketing fosters authenticity and human connection.
- Cultural connection. Leveraging cultural trends can deepen authentic connections with B2B audiences, going beyond product-centric approaches.
Karna Crawford, Chief Marketing Officer at Marqeta, shares her philosophy on regaining humanity in the B2B customer experience.
In this insightful interview, part of our CMSWire TV series, “The CMO Circle,” she discusses the importance of tapping into emotional connections while leveraging data and technology to create impactful marketing campaigns. Crawford also delves into the challenges — and benefits — of integrating generative AI into marketing processes, exploring the potential of AI for enhancing productivity and scaling personalization efforts.
Table of Contents
Episode Transcript
Michelle: Hi Karna, thank you for joining us today.
Karna Crawford: So good to see you, Michelle. Thank you for taking some time out to chat with me.
Michelle: Yeah, so let’s just jump straight into the interview. You’ve been working in marketing for years, and I know that one area you’re focused on is how to regain humanity in the customer experience. Can you tell us a little bit more about what that means?
Karna Crawford: Absolutely, and I think the way that I would approach it is thinking about it more broadly in B2B marketing as a whole and then how that then impacts the customer experience. Historically, technology-centric B2B marketing is very tech- and product-focused. And even with the work that we’ve done at Marqeta, we’ve had great success in telling very product-centric tech stories to some of our audiences that are product and text-centric buyers.
But what we realize is there’s this opportunity to think about customers like people, not just companies buying technology, and therefore be able to tap into this marriage of data and insights and technology while also having a conversation that’s tapping into emotional connections for them. And obviously how you emotionally connect with someone as a business person may be different than, Michelle, how I would connect with you if I was trying to sell you a Coca-Cola.
At its core, you still have emotions tied to your business. As you get ready for every podcast, you might be concerned or worried about whether or not your technology is going to fail you or whether or not you’re going to be engaged enough with the person, and those types of feelings are things we can tap into to really make both interesting and higher impact marketing. And that marriage is really important. And as a result of that, it means that we can use technology in new ways to both more quickly understand what those opportunities are and then in a more skilled way understand how to scale our ability to tap into that with larger audiences and in larger reach.
Michelle: So what does that look like when you try to take that philosophy and incorporate it into your day-to-day processes or even the ethos of your team
Karna Crawford: Yeah, absolutely. So an example of this shift that we’ve been embarking on is a campaign that we have live right now that’s called Grow Together. And in this campaign, we’re tapping into an insight around how important and critical it is for growth and fintech companies to know that their partner is not only going to serve their needs today, but is actually going to be a thought partner and a leader that can help them grow to the next level.
While that has always been true for Marqeta, it hasn’t necessarily been what or how we talk to this audience. So the first thing we did was utilize technology in a combination of our insights and research and pulling in from our data feeds, but then also doing social listening to identify: What are the things they’re talking about? What are the things that are generating more than neutral sentiment? And that’s where we found our core insight.
Then I had the team really use that to build out the creative concept for the program. And we used this as a great opportunity to leverage generative AI to hone how we could get tighter and tighter on how we use that insight. And then also to develop a rich suite of creative assets that have variations based on who they’re going to go to that we wouldn’t have been able to do at the same scale if we didn’t have the AI technology to help power speeding up our productivity.
We then are now marrying that on the backside with the way we are looking at the data. We are measuring whether or not only if they engage differently and our conversion rates are different, but also measuring the difference in sentiment, the difference in whether they find it relevant and so therefore measuring the emotional connection in some ways. And we’re seeing really, really promising results with this shift and getting great engagement and great customer feedback or prospect feedback as a result of it.
Related Article: What Is Customer Experience (CX)? A Comprehensive Guide
Michelle: With generative AI, everyone’s trying to implement it now into their businesses to save time, save money, what have you. And when I think about integrating more technology, I feel like that takes you away from humanity. How do you get that balance of getting the benefit from it while still regaining that humanity aspect?
Karna Crawford: Yeah, I think it’s a great question, Michelle. I think the first thing is for us as marketers is not to think about these things as at odds with each other, technology versus humanity, and make sure the way that we are approaching technology is technology as an enabler of us bringing humanity into what we do.
If we use that as the starting place of our mentality, it allows us to make sure that the way we’re leveraging that technology is through the lens of: How can it help me scale? How can it help me personalize? How can it help me measure whether or not I’m doing that effectively? As opposed to sitting behind the technology and letting technology be the face and the voice and make all of the decisions without any human touch to it.
When you let that happen, and then when you don’t have your team consciously always thinking about it through the lens of your customer as a human, how are you impacting a human? That’s when technology becomes this benign thing and you lose that touch. But if the foundation of your marketing strategy and philosophy is customer first, customer sentiment, customer need, then technology becomes a tool to support that as opposed to the replacement of it, I think.
Michelle: Yeah, I see that. You know, there’s a lot of businesses where there’s these stories coming out about how they’re letting AI take the lead and then something’s happening with the customer and it creates this bad experience and it’s just, I think that balance is definitely necessary.
Karna Crawford: Yeah, you know, we at Marqeta are still, like many companies, in the early stages of how we’re operationalizing AI in the organization. And one of the balances that we’re trying to strike is the starting place of what we’re doing is only using AI on things that may drive an automation, but it still has a manual touchpoint to it so that we can ensure that we don’t put ourselves too early into a risk of AI making choices and decisions that we do not have a control mechanism over.
We will potentially get there because we will build technologies that can provide controls or at least flag from a controls perspective, but in a world where we don’t have that, I’m focusing us on how do we utilize it for automation, but not let itself run. So it may automate certain things, but there are these key touchpoints and checkpoints where we are building in human controls to double check, to make sure there’s no biases, to make sure everything is functioning the way that we envisioned when we built out the infrastructure and built out that automation, et cetera.
The Challenges of Operationalizing AI
Michelle: For this whole philosophy, to implement it at the organization, I would imagine it goes beyond the marketing team, you have to go through different levels. Can you talk about some of the challenges or any resistance that you’ve come up against doing this and how you’ve handled it?
Karna Crawford: Yeah, absolutely. So the one great thing about Marqeta is that we have always been innovators and legacy liberators, breaking old legacy ways of doing things and challenging the status quo. So the good news is from a holistic perspective, we’ve been adopting AI pretty early. In particular, we’ve been heavily focused on AI within our product and technology teams to help increase operational efficiency, productivity, streamline the work effort of both our developers and our customer developers, etc.
So as I’ve started embarking on this in the marketing organization, we’re starting actually from a really positive place as an organization. I think the place where I have run into the greatest challenges is, as I start to engage on this, helping my team not feel threatened by it and see it as a powerful liberator for them and enhancer of what they do versus being afraid of it marginalizing them. And so I’ve spent a lot of time helping my team see how we should think about AI in marketing as our scaler.
We have a small team. We invest in a very modest way and we have to make every dollar count out of it. So don’t think of it as what it’s going to do that you no longer will need to, and instead think of it as: How does it become my team? I only had headcount for one designer, for instance, but all of a sudden through this, that one designer might equal three or four. And so helping my team see it through that light of how it is their supporter as opposed to thinking of it as their competition.
The other challenge frankly is just building AI into infrastructures operationally takes time and investment. So even though ultimately it is an investment that will return dividends in terms of productivity, efficiency, higher quality work product for certain work streams, etc., it still requires an investment early on. And so some of the challenge that we face every day is where we’re investing in helping to continue to refine the role of AI in our operation versus investing on the next thing that we can get out the door now of our day-to-day.
And that’s kind of the classic challenge that any business faces with any new technology, being able to maintain day-to-day while, at the same time, investing towards the future. And so this year we’re dipping our toe in and making some early investments. We’re working with our technology team to utilize our marketing information and our marketing business data to help inform an in-house AI tool so that we are starting to build our internal investment that will make it easier for us to scale it for optimization and scale it for productivity.
Related Article: How AI Integration Can Power Better Human Experiences
Michelle: Going back to what you said about having to reassure employees about AI, it’s not going to replace them, it’s going to help them. And I think that’s a big thing because we’re always seeing these new reports, AI is going to replace this many million jobs or it’s going to automate this much of the workforce. So what does that look like on your end? Is that just an ongoing conversation that you’re having?
Karna Crawford: Yeah, I think there are a couple of ways to think about it. I don’t want to give the false impression that AI will not eliminate jobs. The reality is, it does create an efficiency opportunity for businesses. But I think from a marketing perspective, there are a couple of things to think about.
Most marketing organizations have been going through headcount reductions, streamlining, how can you do more with less, for the past several years coming out of the pandemic and facing what has been an ongoing, uncertain economic environment. So the starting place for that is, for those of us who have already done our streamlining, it’s not so much about AI eliminating existing headcount, it may be more about how we’re utilizing AI to not necessarily need to replace headcount that we’ve streamlined in the recent past.
It may not be that I no longer need the designer, for instance, that I have on the team. It may be that at some point we eliminated or we’ve been holding two or three designer roles for headcount to manage budget. And now I’m saying we may not fill all of those because we are going to utilize AI as a mechanism for scaling that. So I think there is a point where AI will eliminate roles, but we could think about it in a couple different ways.
There are businesses that are bloated, though, and AI may eliminate some opportunities there. But what I think is really important to think about is, as that occurs, it will also introduce new roles and new opportunities. I envision a world where there are going to be people who are experts in how to prompt and utilize AI, and how to do that in very specific categories of usage, and those introduce new opportunities that do not exist today. There are going to be experts in how to build out AI operationalizing inside of business infrastructures and inside of business operations. I envision a world where people are thinking about design and creativity through a different lens.
Something that I tell my teams all the time is, there was a point in time when digital was the thing everybody was afraid of. And creatives in particular were like, that digital thing, it’s not going to be a thing, and I don’t want that interfering with my television advertising creative, or whatever other traditional creative craft that I might be doing. And we look at the world now and we see that digital creative is ubiquitous, and oftentimes is leading what’s even going into some of the traditional creative channels.
So, how I want my teams to think about it is, if I’m thinking about how I am preparing myself for the future, my career development, my capability and always learning, then I might be thinking about: How do I learn how to maximize utilizing AI to deliver what I need to deliver? And the reality is, even if I am a creative oriented person, the way that I think about asking and prompting into AI or utilizing it from a generative AI perspective is going to be fundamentally different than the way I would prompt and ask if I were an engineer or the demand gen person in a marketing team, etc. So your brilliant mind still has tremendous value even in that instance and will deliver a far superior outcome than if you were sitting next to someone whose mind thought very differently than yours.
That’s one of the things I really think is going to be important in how the world shifts. And as we look at AI for operations, AI for optimization, AI for asset creation and production, I think the thought is: How do we start to think about what are the new opportunities and the new needs? I envision a whole world of AI governance and AI compliance capabilities meant to help us manage the downside of AI through new capabilities and skills that don’t exist.
Building a Learning Program for Leveraging AI
Michelle: Did you have any AI experts or prompt engineers on your team now, or do you anticipate hiring any soon?
Karna Crawford: Right now I am focused on training the talent that I have. And we are in the process of developing a learning program rooted in how we all can become experts in utilizing and leveraging AI through the different fields that each of us have. So some of it might be about prompt expertise and developing some regiments and routines on that. Some of it may be my ops team really learning all of the capabilities out there for how we can utilize it operationally and starting to really build their knowledge. That’s where I’m starting.
We are a thin but amazing team, so I’m not really focused on new roles just yet. I’m focused on how I maximize the value and the opportunity with the talent that I have.
Michelle: In the past, you’ve worked as head of US marketing for Ford Motor Company and then head of consumer activation and strategy and media for Verizon, and both were business to consumer. Now that you’ve made this shift to a B2B role at Marqeta, how has your philosophy and this idea of humanity within CX, how has that had to shift or adapt?
Karna Crawford: Yeah, I think it’s a great question. And I will tell you that shift or adaptation, I would call it more of a translation, if you will. The foundations of how I steward marketing in the B2C world are rooted in understanding your customer or your consumer better than anybody else, constantly ask why, constantly seek to understand and make every decision through data rooted in the lens of customer in or consumer in.
As I’ve shifted into B2B, I’m actually applying that same overall approach and principle, and I’m just applying it to a business customer instead of an end consumer. What I would also say is, I’m utilizing my end consumer experience to help build the knowledge and the empathy of my team to the end user that our customers are servicing.
We aren’t just servicing customers, we are enabling our Marqeta customers to power amazing things for their consumers or their business customers. And the more we think about it through that lens, the more empathy we have, the more we understand the needs, and the more we can be very authentic and human in the way that we’re marketing to our business customers about how Marqueta’s services and capabilities can help them solve their problems and grow.
Related Article: B2B Marketing Strategies: It’s Simple — Get Famous
Michelle: I think we have time for one more question. We’ve talked about AI a lot. It’s pretty inescapable. But what other emerging trends or technology do you think are going to have an impact on your role?
Karna Crawford: Yeah. I mean, obviously, you know, AI is the no-brainer because it’s already having an impact on us. I also think there’s this ongoing impact of culture on how people are engaging with mediums and channels, how they are connecting to culture differently, et cetera.
And I think that in the B2B world, we don’t spend as much time thinking about the connection between culture and our marketing and the things that we’re trying to drive with our customers. I see an opportunity for us to lean in more on that connection between culture and marketing in the B2B space and that being an opportunity to continue to grow authentic connections with our target audiences in meaningful ways, a little different above and beyond just the technology of the products that we’re selling.
Another area that I think is in mind for me is just the continued shift in customer behavior around loyalty and around engagement. In our world at Marqeta, we steward embedded finance, particularly through the lens of how we help power card programs for credit and debit for our customers. And much of that presents an opportunity for a new modern approach to loyalty and integrating loyalty and engagement into the core of their digital and inner life experiences in a way that never could happen before with classic card programs. So I see this ongoing challenge with gaining loyalty with customers as a huge opportunity for us to exploit from a modern day card issuing and embedded finance perspective for us at Marqeta.
Michelle: I think that’s a great way to look at loyalty, especially because, like you said, it’s such a challenge today. Prices just keep going up. Businesses are looking to cut costs. So I agree. I think that’s going to be an interesting place to keep an eye on.
Karna Crawford: Card programs in the past, if you think about it, the best-in-class ones that exist from legacy card programs, are the ones where the card is deeply connected to every other aspect of how I engage with the brand. And then the instances that are a little bit more challenging are the ones where I have a card program over here, like a co-brand credit card over here, and then I’ve got my loyalty card over here, and the two are very loosely connected, it creates confusion.
There’s misalignment between trying to incentivize card behaviors when your loyalty program is sitting as a separate thing. When you have an embedded card program, it inherently is inside of your digital experience and the way you can use it, the way you can operationalize it, the way you can message it, all can be a much more seamless customer experience and more dynamic using the data that you have on those customers. And so all of a sudden it can change the game of the future of loyalty card programs and the future of credit programs. That is a new way of trying to drive loyalty, retention and overall customer lifetime value.
Michelle: Yeah, that’s great. Well, that’s all the time that we have for today. Karna, thank you so much for joining us and giving us some insight into your role. Before we go, where can people find you online if they wanna follow you and keep up with what you’re doing?
Karna Crawford: Well, always highly suggest that you guys check out the Marqeta.com blog, Marqeta.com. Our blog is rich with insights, not only about payments, but about loyalty, rewards, and a number of other solutions that we offer. And then for me personally, I am very active on LinkedIn. So my LinkedIn is the regular Linkedin.com/in/KarnaCrawford. So definitely come and find me if you have questions, if you have thoughts. I tend to be very responsive. It may sometimes take a couple weeks but I try to respond to everything.
Michelle: Well, thank you again, Karna, and thank you to our listeners for tuning into this episode of The CMO Circle. We’ll see you next time.
Karna Crawford: Thanks, Michelle.
Thanks for sharing. I read many of your blog posts, cool, your blog is very good.