Feature
Jahia has named the former CMO for Magnolia its new senior vice president of worldwide marketing.
Christopher Justice, who officially left Magnolia in late April, will take over what he described as a hands-on role at Jahia.
He told CMSWire his goals are to make sure that Jahia’s leads and marketing strategy are built around effective lead development and follow-up. More importantly, he said he wants to ensure there will be human engagement with everyone that touches the Jahia brand.
The fact that Jahia appointed someone with such a practical approach to market development is no real surprise. Over the past two years, CEO Elie Auvray has consistently described this as key to Jahia’s business strategy.
Global Experience
Justice has experience in the tech industry in both the US and Europe. On his LinkedIn profile, he describes himself as someone who is “open-minded, approachable and responsive, with effective management, negotiation and communication skills."
He also cites extensive experience in channel enablement, lead generation, community development, partner marketing and customer retention and technology business strategy development.
To find out more, we talked to Justice in Basel, Switzerland, just two hours up the road from Jahia's Geneva headquarters.
Justice graduated from the University of North Carolina with a degree in Computer Sciences. He started his career as a software engineer, working with both the US FBI and Securities and Exchange Commission.
In 1996, he took a position with IBM, switching his focus to sales and marketing, including strategic planning and development, branding, market research, customer service and sales management across global markets.
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He worked for Vignette from 2003 to 2006 before OpenText bought it. During his tenure, he took over the strategic direction of enterprise content management, integration and collaboration products, ias well as implementing between 300 and 400 websites and migrations.
Moving To Jahia
Justice joined open source Java CMS vendor Magnolia as CMO in March 2014. But he said he was "kind of disappointed" at his career path at Magnolia. He officially left Magnolia at the end of April, he effectively left the company early in April.
"It was my intention to go back to the United States and run one of my other companies and then I got then call from the funding company that is involved with Jahia,” he said. "They basically said come over and talk with the team. From day one, I was stunned. Not only do we share the same values, but we have the same approach to marketing and leadership and the overall mix is perfect for me."
He said that the culture at Jahia is similar to the culture he had come from in the US, where you have small, dynamic software companies that are actively pursuing growth.
He thinks Jahia has a strong customer and employee focus, and a good management team in place that is "perfectly aligned with key industry players."
"We’re not going to fill-up the leadership team with figureheads. Everyone here is grassroots. I’m not going to ask an intern to implement my marketing campaign. I going to be down in the weeds. I’m going down in the weeds, making sure we’ve implemented, segmented the leads properly and that we are constantly doing human engagement with everyone that touches the brand."
