Telling stories is one thing that Jordan Liebman loves more than gym shoes. As an ad agency executive with 15 years of Madison Avenue experience, Liebman, 45, has told and sold effective narratives in the business-to-consumer (B2C) space for big-name clients such as ExxonMobil, Gillette/Procter & Gamble, Intel and JPMorganChase. That experience was followed with nearly a decade’s worth of leadership roles at Verizon Communications, where Liebman effectively led marketing for B2C and B2B.
“My teams helped to transform the way that customers, the industry, and investors looked at the Verizon brand,” he offered. Under Liebman’s leadership, gross adds grew by millions. (Gross adds represent the total number of new subscribers or customers acquired within a specific time period, without considering cancellations or churn.) “We transformed BlueJeans from a category afterthought to a quick-growing competitive threat to Microsoft Teams and Zoom,” he noted (more on that in a moment), “all the while evolving the Verizon conversation and the company’s role in the tech landscape.”
When Konica Minolta Business Solutions hired him six months ago as senior VP of marketing communications, members of the 130-person, North American marcom team he now leads had no idea how many pairs of gym shoes Liebman owns. “Someone busts my chops about my fun footwear almost on a daily basis,” laughs the self-described sneakerhead. Having been born in Manhattan and grown up in Queens, the New Yorker has thick enough urban skin to handle any razzing directed toward his stylish “kicks.” A business major in college, he studied marketing and organizational behavior upstate at SUNY – Buffalo.
When the OEM brought him on board last September, Liebman stressed that his approach to marketing is not product-centric, which is a refreshing perspective for someone coming from outside the distribution channel. He also talked about how he plans to shake up internal ROI (return on investment) metrics for managers of Konica Minolta’s business units. Wanting to delve deeper into what he has planned for 2025, we gave him a call last week:
CR: Jordan, March 4 marked your six-month anniversary at Konica Minolta. What are some of the major differences you’ve noticed in the B2B space as compared to your consumer brand-building roles, particularly your nine years with Verizon?
JL: I’d say there are more similarities than differences. Ultimately, we are marketing to humans who need to justify their rationale and feel emotionally connected to make purchasing decisions. I believe that’s where building trust through telling powerful stories comes into play. There’s the tech side, of course, in this business, but content still can serve to nurture. The biggest difference I’ve observed to date has been the overall lead-generation perspective. Falling between three and 12 months, the sales cycles are longer and more complex, and there are a lot more touches with decisions being made by large buying committees. The players are different, but they face a lot of the same challenges.
CR: What have you learned, so far, about the inner workings of the dealer channel?
JL: Our dealer partners are an extension of our brand. I think, as an industry, we have a responsibility to set them up for success. I preach to my team that marketing’s job is to drive growth, which enables our partners to grow. We have to support them not only with technology but also with pricing, promotions and collateral materials that help them to tell the best story possible. One thing I noticed at ECS [the Executive Connection Summit] in January is a sense of camaraderie among different partners. They seem to embrace the opportunity to learn from one another, which is pretty special. You don’t see that in a lot of other industries.
CR: You worked for some 15 years at NYC advertising agencies—large and boutique. How has that ‘mad men’ experience informed your thinking?
JL: One of my biggest ad agency takeaways is that a brand’s story needs to be told at every single touchpoint. It needs to be integrated . . . and resonate with the audience to compel them. It’s not a one-and-done deal. From dot-coms [websites] and emails to social media, events and speaking engagements, a common thread should tie together the messaging. I think one area where Konica Minolta can improve our brand storytelling is to showcase products in ways that focus on partner success. We need to do a better job of creating emotional resonance for end-users.
CR: What did you learn from Verizon’s BlueJeans video-conferencing endeavor?
JL: Ah, I see you did your homework! BlueJeans was a cloud-based competing product to MS Teams and Zoom. [Verizon paid $400 million to acquire the app in the early days of the pandemic.] It was part of Verizon’s unified communications portfolio, but our go-to-market decision came too late. There were tons of lessons about how to attack a challenger brand and leverage a vast partner network. Strategic alignment of an entire product portfolio is pivotal to long-term business success. The competitors had a six-month jump on us, so the biggest thing I learned from that experience is that timing is everything.
CR: What other lessons did the COVID-19 global pandemic teach you about market disruption?
JL: It’s crazy that we are four years post-COVID now. We’ve come out from behind our masks, having learned a plethora of lessons! The pandemic created an unprecedented natural experiment of adapting to sudden marketplace disruption. We learned about the plasticity of customer behavior. I mean, think about how event marketing was reinvented virtually. Digital transformation [DX] became essential; it wasn’t just ‘nice to have’ anymore. We also learned that, to be resilient and to thrive, disruption preparedness and crisis communication need to be built into marketing strategy. COVID-19 won’t be the last major disruptor. Are we ready for the next one?
CR: You’ve said that you want to make printing ‘cool’ again and deflect focus away from the speeds-n-feeds mentality. How will print’s role continue to evolve in the office?
JL: Print is not dead, but we do need to think about printing in a non-traditional sense and leverage technologies that bridge print and digital. From financial services to the manufacturing supply chain (think “smart” labels), there are so many opportunities for innovation. That said, the print medium has transformed into a more strategic, targeted tool and continues to evolve. Print offers certain benefits that screens alone cannot provide, and we need to drive this thinking into our industry.
Part of Liebman’s passion for print stems from his artistic side. So, if and when you meet him in person, don’t forget to look down at his toes to see his shoe choice du jour. The vast collection in his New Jersey home consists of some 50 pairs, about 12 of which are in rotation at any given time.
“Listen, I’m a marketing guy,” he explains, “and we tend to be a little different. My shoes are a way for me to be expressive,” an extension of his creativity. “For me, the shoes are artwork,” concludes the former athlete turned husband and father of a teenage daughter. In closing, he mentioned those Reebok “Pumps” from the early ’90s that NBA basketball star Dee Brown used to hype. “Man, how I wish I still had those shoes!”
