The Candid CMO: Wanda Weigert, Global Chief Brand Officer and Executive Director for Globant

“Being part of a growing company which went through a huge organic expansion followed by a series of acquisitions and brand mergers has defined a lot of what I do.”

For the last 20 years, Wanda Weigert’s career pathway has matched Globant’s rise from start-up to global IT services giant *. She’s progressed from writing press releases to negotiating with FIFA, managing the communications around the firm’s IPO on the NYSE and built up the company’s agency offering as well as merging multiple marketing teams that have joined the company as part of its acquisitions.

If that journey demonstrates anything, it’s that there’s no single way to guarantee the variety that a career in marketing can offer.

Wanda joined the company in 2005 when it was less than 100 strong (it now numbers closer to 31,000 in 35 countries), writing content for both internal and external audiences. One year on, she was putting her hand up and asking CEO Martín Migoya if she could build a communications and marketing department.

“From the very beginning, Globant’s founders had the vision of building a global company, so we needed a department that could properly help build the brand,” she says. “It took me some time to convince myself that I could do this and I was the right person for this role. I would actually say to my younger self to trust that I have the abilities to make it work,” she says.

Small beginnings

Initially, the goal was simply to build awareness, to explain to people why they join or hire a company that was less well known than global giants such as Accenture, Deloitte and Infosys. Since then, the team has been expanded and transformed. “There’s a lot more technology involved, especially at Globant. So, we have designers, we have developers, people that know everything around the marketing funnel, including sales,” she says.

Along the way her role has changed dramatically.

“I think being part of a growing company which went through a huge organic expansion followed by a series of acquisitions and brand mergers has defined a lot of what I do – it has been challenging especially because we have incorporated companies that have a lot of presence and their own customers value them a lot,” she says. “We adopted a lot of good practices from some of them, because some had marketing departments that were more developed than what we had at that time.”

A critical step was the IPO in 2014, which meant a lot of work in unifying the messages and numbers put out by the business. “A lot of hard work went into aligning our values and the brand, as well as understanding the business so that we could help tell the right stories.”

Making a name

“When I started, Globant was growing rapidly and our most important goal was to hire people. But nobody was picking up the phone or answering our emails because they didn’t know the brand.”

Brand recognition has become crucial to help attract both employees and clients, ultimately leading to the company building its marketing network with its own inside talent together with different agencies that joined the group, including giving rise to Globant GUT, the Cannes Lions 2023 independent agency of the year and the first creative Network reinvented by tech.

But it wasn’t until the company became a FIFA partner in 2022 as Global Platform Supporter of FIFA+, the organisation’s digital destination, that brand awareness really took off. “People were seeing our logo on screen during the matches or the campaigns that we did during the World Cup. They enabled us to get more meetings, it helped open more doors,” she says. “Our brand building and our brand KPIs started growing a lot, and so did our business.”

“Campaigns now focus on specific parts of what the company does, or specific differentiators that we want to convey, and not trying to say everything in sixty or ninety seconds.”

Entrepreneurial culture

Growing a marketing department in a start-up is different to building one in a legacy company. For a start, there’s a simple KPI: generated revenue. The result, says Wanda, is that the marketing team is trusted. “Of course we track awareness, media value, but we are mostly focused on revenue generation through leads and conversions. So we can clearly differentiate the revenue that we influence and the revenue that we ourselves generate directly,” she says.

The result is that marketing is constantly asked for more. “The board sees the numbers, they see that we are delivering and that the investment is completely translated into business.”

Part of the challenge is that as a B2B company, Globant has a powerful customer base, which needs to be shown why the company is different. “We need to be close to the business. Because that's what will make us grow, that's what will make us be more different,” she says.

Globant also stands out in that as well as providing technology services, it also now has a global network of digital marketing agencies, called Globant GUT, so that the company’s offering extends right along the marketing funnel.

Looking ahead

Working in the technology sector, it’s no surprise perhaps that Wanda believes it’s become essential learning for marketers to understand how technology works and be on top of new developments.

“Even as a strategist, even if you are not going to be building anything, you must understand how things work. Not just the theory.” And that learning process, she says, is constant. “You cannot think that because you know your stuff now, that's enough. You need to constantly be learning and testing. We are a technology company, so that mindset is embedded in our DNA.”

This drive to understand the world beyond marketing is all part of the entrepreneurial spirit of Latin America that Globant is built on and “provides a lot of value for their services”, Wanda says. “That enables us to adapt fast, to innovate and it’s really valued by our customers”.

Putting this into practice means the marketing team now also undertakes Gen AI training, learning how to build their own AI agents to help them understand what, how, where the world is and where the world is going.

*Globant was named a Worldwide Leader in AI Services (2023) and a Worldwide Leader in Media Consultation, Integration, and Business Operations Cloud Service Providers (2024) by IDC MarketScape report. Globant is the fastest-growing IT brand and the 5th strongest IT brand globally (2024), according to Brand Finance.

About WFA’s Candid CMO series

WFA wants to celebrate the world’s best marketers and explore the journeys they are on to deliver better marketing. This series helps distil some of the biggest learnings of our CMO members. As we are great believers in the power to learn from successes as well as missteps, we hope this will give our readers the opportunity to learn more about the things they are most proud of, but also about where they may have done things differently. More at https://wfanet.org/CandidCMO.

If you'd like to nominate someone with an interesting story to be interviewed for the Candid CMO series, get in touch with Camelia Cristache.