Martyn Etherington, Mitel

Chief Marketing Officer & Chief of Staff

Refreshing a legacy brand is not something most Chief Marketing Officers like to tackle, but Martyn Etherington is not your average CMO.  Although he has just announced his departure from Mitel and has not yet reported his next position, Mr. Etherington’s role at the business communications company is an extraordinary example of how smart marketing can reinvent an organization and its position in the marketplace. 

Ontario, Canada-based Mitel is over 40 years old and a $1.2 billion company that focuses on the backbone of business communications from phones, voice-video collaboration and social messaging. Martyn Etherington understood that Mitel’s brand needed to be transformed an old world telephone/PBX or Private Branch Exchange company where a private telephone network is used within a business to a customer-centric software company based in the cloud and key contact center markets.

During his three-year tenure at the company, Mitel experienced a whirlwind of transformation.  The company made multiple acquisitions including Aastra Technologies, accomplished a global rebranding, established a new Americas headquarters in Dallas, was hailed by technology research and advisory company Gartner as a Unified Communications (UC) leader, and saw a rise in stock price.  Plus Etherington’s dramatic use of social media not only helped the company with customer engagement, but also enabled Mitel to understand its customers better. In addition to his CMO role, Martyn was CEO Rich McBee’s Chief of Staff.

Martyn Etherington is both an experienced and pioneering CMO with 25+ years’ experience of product, corporate, channel and field marketing in the technology sector, including work with such companies as Tektronix, Emerald Solutions and IBM, in addition to Mitel.  He’ll simply say, though, that “he’s passionate about customers, innovation & all things digital.” Without question, he has a proven track record in transforming marketing functions to be measurable and customer-centric, and, in the process, also manages to reshape an organization so that it is market-driven and produces results.

He’s been recognized by The Economist as one of the Top 25 Social Business Leaders and by Forbes as one of the Top 50 Marketers.  His work has been profiled in books on marketing, including "The CMO Manifesto" and "E-Marketing Excellence.”  He also serves as a Chair of the Portland State University School of Business in Oregon.