This conversation in the Institute for Real Growth’s Humanizing Growth series is with the global chief marketing officer of Google. It covers what the remote period proved about speed, how the marketing function earned its position with engineers, and how a personal purpose became a training program.
Her account of what carried the company through is not a crisis response. It is what was already in place: strong foundations, teams used to working remotely, and a culture that made decisions fast. The crisis then compressed the timelines further.
Key findings
- The speed of decision making is the thing she most wants to keep. Decisions that had taken weeks and months were made in days and weeks.
- Marketing acted across the whole company because of where it sits. Twohill’s argument is that marketing is one of the few functions with visibility across every product, team, business unit, and geography, which is what lets it connect the dots.
- Her personal purpose is making room at the table for more women and helping the next generation find their seats and their voices. It became a program, Women Will, launched about five years before the recording, aiming to train 50 million women worldwide in digital skills.
- The overlap with the company’s own mission is what makes the fit work. Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.
What the teams actually did
The improvisation was physical. People carried editing kits home and built production units in their garages so work could continue. The company worked with the World Health Organization and the CDC to put public health guidance on its homepage across 100 countries, and built kits so teachers could teach from anywhere.
How marketing moved upstream
When Twohill took the global role there was no strong marketing function in the head office. The prevailing pattern was late involvement: the marketing people were brought in a week before a product or feature launched, for a name, a video, and a blog post. Her description of that position is the poster department.
The target she set was the earliest possible point. New products get a code name when they start, and that is now where marketing comes in, helping with positioning and defining what the product will be. Product marketers who can go deep with product managers and engineers are what make that possible.
The instrument for building the relationship was an in-house creative team called Creative Lab. Because it was internal, trust was built directly with engineers and product managers, and the two sides could develop ideas together rather than one briefing the other.
The proof came from a browser launch. Nobody wakes up wanting to change their browser, so the pitch to the founders was for a large consumer campaign to make people care about which one they used. The executive she ran it with is now the chief executive, and she describes him as a true believer in marketing as a result.
Trust as infrastructure
Twohill returns repeatedly to trust, and treats it as something built in advance rather than under pressure. Close ties and trust across the management team are what she means by strong foundations, and they are what held when everyone became distributed.
The same instinct governs how the diversity work is shared. The company took three to five years to work out its approach with agencies, many of them small. It has captured the learning in a toolkit and playbook so others do not have to spend as long.
The lesson she would hand over
Asked what she wishes she had learned earlier, Twohill answers from a serious illness. She had cancer five years before the recording, beat it, and calls it a massive wake-up call. She asks openly how far her own intensity and perfectionism contributed to getting sick.
The conclusion is about the journey rather than the outcome. She argues the job is the most fun in any company, carries real pressure, and still has to be enjoyed. Her counsel to younger marketers is to stop imitating the product people. Their job is to read the outside, bring the insight, and tell the story.
Scope and limitations
This is an account from inside one company, given by its marketing leader, and the programs are described without results data. The Women Will training target is stated as an aim rather than a reported figure.
Source
This page summarises HGS #30: Lorraine Twohill (CMO, Google) talks about purpose, post-covid collaboration and diversity, by Marc de Swaan Arons.