A customer perspective helps marketers play critical role in company-wide innovation, says Ryder CMO

• Karen Jones has been EVP and CMO of transportation and logistics leader Ryder since 2013.
• Marketers bring outward-facing customer perspectives to tech innovation efforts, Jones told Insider.
• Jones has helped Ryder identify, evaluate, deploy, and invest in a variety of emerging technologies.
• This article is part of the "Innovation C-Suite" series about business growth and technology shifts..

Karen Jones, the executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Ryder, knew she could play a critical role in helping the 87-year-old Fortune 500 company transform in a transportation and logistics sector ripe for digital disruption.

After all, the company – which is known for its commercial truck fleet leasing and management dedicated to transportation and commercial supply chain solutions – still used many processes that relied on manual work. Even fax machines were commonplace as recently as eight years ago. When, four years ago, the company's CEO issued a challenge to explore and examine innovations ranging from 3D printing and asset sharing to automation and blockchain, it was clear that someone in the C-suite needed to step up.

The organization required a primary driver of innovation across the company – someone who could lead an executive team charged with identifying, evaluating, deploying, and investing in emerging technologies.

It was Jones, the CMO, who immediately raised her hand.

"I think what I bring to the table is more of an outward-facing customer perspective around technology," Jones told Insider. "Organizations can get lost in their own internal processes, forgetting the voice of the customer." With 14 years of previous experience marketing technology products at Hewlett Packard, she said, "I know how to develop and bring products to market, so I said I'd love to take this on and lead this for the company."

Ryder's priorities for driving tech innovation

Jones and her team quickly prepared to tackle four top priorities. The first was e-commerce, which, though growing fast before COVID-19, exploded during the pandemic. The growth required even more efficient supply chain and fulfillment capabilities. "We knew we needed to add those technologies in a big way to our portfolio," Jones said.

Next, with 235,000 trucks in Ryder's fleet, the company had to figure out how to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to the future of electric and autonomous vehicles. "We had to think about what kind of impact that would have on our business," she said.

Asset sharing was also a growing trend, which led Ryder to launch COOP by Ryder in 2018, a first-of-its-kind, Airbnb-like commercial truck sharing platform that connects truck owners with idle trucks and shippers in need of vehicles. Today, COOP has more than 6,000 vehicles on its platform and operates in nine states.

Finally, Jones made sure the company focused on digitizing many internal processes and building out supply chain and logistics capabilities to track shipments. "These were the areas that clearly gave us the long-term growth capability we needed to stay relevant in a market that was changing pretty rapidly," she said.

The launch of RyderVentures

Most recently, the company went to the next level of finding and funding innovation by launching RyderVentures in October 2020. The venture capital fund is actively investing $50 million over the next five years in next-generation applications.

"Any business leader now in the C-suite needs to be thinking about technology innovation," said Jones. "I think CMOs play a critical role when it comes to impacting the customer experience through data - I always say marketers were into data and analytics before it was cool."

Collaborating with the C-suite network to continue transforming technology

Yet, Jones is quick to point out that no C-suite executive works alone. When it comes to technology innovation, the role of the chief information officer becomes even more important, she explained. "Having a great CIO to work with, who can help the organization understand the foundational, architectural requirements is really important," she said. "Sometimes there can be a little bit of a tug of war between marketing and IT, but we have a great relationship and partnership."

Jones said her team is always learning. "I think we're off to a healthy start, and in the last five years, our company has matured greatly on customer-facing technology," she said. But, she added, the company is not finished "by a long shot." "While we've chosen several areas to focus on, we could wake up tomorrow and there could be another area of innovation to explore that we hadn't really anticipated," she said.