Marketing to customers in the digital era is both convenient and complex—convenient because of the proliferation of platforms to share stories, and complex due to the fierce competition for limited attention spans online.
Gabie Boko, Chief Marketing Officer of NetApp, believes in the power of strategic storytelling to convey the data infrastructure company’s narrative. While equipped with an array of tools and technologies, she hopes marketing technology will evolve to focus more on personal connections — echoing the essence of traditional marketing. Speaking with Frontier Enterprise at the NetApp INSIGHT 2024 conference in Las Vegas, Boko shared her insights on the shifting marketing landscape.
You’ve been with NetApp for over two years now, and before that, you were with HPE, SAP, and several other companies. Could you share a bit about your current role and observations on customer experience (CX) and digital strategy?
I’ve spent my entire career in marketing, and I’ll hit three years with NetApp in January 2025. I started at NetApp running portfolio marketing — traditionally known as product marketing — with the goal of creating a stronger connection between our narrative, brand, and product roadmap. About 10 months after I was hired, I was promoted to Chief Marketing Officer. This allowed me to broaden my role and take a more strategic approach. During this time, we developed an intelligent data infrastructure as our narrative and aligned it with our portfolio. That was the trajectory of my career at NetApp.
Even before joining NetApp, I was a marketer born and raised in sales, with hands-on experience in fieldwork, marketing, and demand generation. I specifically branched into digital because it’s the only way marketers can truly scale. At HPE, I gained experience in areas like customer experience measurement and digital experiences such as single sign-on systems.
I bring a product-focused mindset to my marketing efforts, which complements demand generation. For me, it’s critical to cover the full spectrum — from how we engage with a prospect to how they use the product and how we gather feedback. Every marketer should be equipped to take this holistic approach. It’s not just about building the market and brand — which I’m excited to do — it’s about enabling demand and creating an experience portfolio that informs and supports customers at every stage.
For instance, customers need easy access to support and opportunities to extract more value, whether through additional services or by expanding within their organisation, such as onboarding new users and workloads. This level of enablement doesn’t happen without connecting digital, product, and CX into one cohesive strategy. That’s how I approach my role, and it forms the foundation of my work here.
How are you leveraging technology to tell NetApp’s story to your customers?
I think marketing should be a very strategic partner to the business. I try very hard not to be just a creative outlet, or a service. I try very much to be a strategic partner, and that starts from that brand perspective, and telling that story that’s basically saying, ‘this is our strategy. This is how we tell our strategy. This is how we enable our salespeople to tell that strategy.’ I think what then starts to happen, then you add to that story. It’s almost like you’re developing this chapter, this set of experiences. You do that through customers, through partners, and customer references. Partner stories through communities— those are a great storytelling avenue.
I believe marketing should be a strategic partner to the business, not just a creative outlet or a service. For me, it starts with our brand and telling a story that says, “This is our strategy, this is how we communicate it, and this is how we enable our sales teams to share it.” When that starts to happen, then you add to that story. It’s almost like you’re developing this chapter, this set of experiences. You do that through customers, partners, and customer references. Partner stories through communities — those are a great storytelling avenue.
Digital is central to advancing these efforts. It’s the best platform for hosting and amplifying stories, while social media provides speed and facilitates unsolicited feedback, which I love because it keeps us agile. Video is also an incredible tool — it’s highly visual and fits today’s preference for short, engaging content. People are more likely to spend 60 seconds watching a video than 45 minutes listening to a podcast.
Ultimately, it’s about understanding and analysing which channels are working, identifying those that add value to your story, and doubling down on those.
NetApp has made quite a number of announcements during INSIGHT 2024. As a CMO, what was your thought process in centering the messaging around those announcements?
The core of all those announcements was intelligent data infrastructure, and we really worked hard on that. We launched it in 2023, but we wanted to get feedback on how to bring it together more effectively. That’s why we made two key changes: reframing it as intelligent services and solutions. These adjustments helped round out the story.
This shift also allowed our product teams and their roadmaps to align more meaningfully with how customers could build or think about intelligent data infrastructure. It became proof points to that story — it wasn’t just a marketing narrative that was pretty. It became real and valuable, so that’s where you’re going to see us continue to go.
As these products hit the market and customers start using them, their experiences feed back into the story. They either validate the proof points or reveal that we got them wrong, pointing us to a different proof point. And that’s the beauty of a strong narrative — it evolves as you tell it.
How do you see the intersection of marketing and technology evolving in the next three to five years?
I think we marketers were on a high with technology for quite some time. From the 1990s up until just before COVID, it was all about questions like, “How do you access your data? How do you connect campaigns? How do you gather feedback?” But COVID changed that momentum — it made us pause. I’ve noticed many of my peers revisiting approaches from the late ’80s and early ’90s, focusing more on physical connections because technology has, in some ways, distanced us from customers.
Events like this one, or sitting down with a customer for an interview, are becoming more meaningful. While marketing technology is still essential, I’m excited about its next phase. It shouldn’t confine us to the back office. Marketing technology isn’t a back-office function; it’s a front-office motion. It should give us better access to the market and our customers. That’s where I see the next evolution of marketing tech — pushing marketing to take the lead rather than staying in the background.
Finally, how do you leverage NetApp in your daily work?
NetApp technology is the foundation of our data infrastructure. Our marketing data is primarily stored in the cloud using NetApp storage. We’re also early adopters of much of the AI technology you’ve seen. Marketing involves managing vast amounts of content — whether it’s generated from the website, product interactions, or customer feedback — and we use our own technology to learn and improve.
It’s not perfect, but that’s what being a first adopter is like. I’m happy to be a first adopter.