I'm Erica Bartsch, and as a customer marketing professional with over 15 years of experience—now leading efforts at JPMorgan—I’ve had the privilege of seeing how impactful authentic customer advocacy can be.
My journey spans industries and organizations, each with its own challenges and opportunities, but the core truth remains the same: advocacy is built on relationships and storytelling.
At JPMorgan, we’re redefining customer marketing by focusing on meaningful, long-term engagement with our clients, prioritizing authenticity, and tailoring our approach to fit their unique needs.
In this article, I’ll share the lessons we’ve learned, the strategies we’ve embraced, and the steps we’ve taken to transform advocacy into a collaborative, customer-first effort that drives real results.
Defining customer marketing at JPMorgan
At JPMorgan, we define customer marketing and advocacy as a programmatic approach to engaging, nurturing, and cultivating client relationships. The ultimate goal is to integrate our customers into our sales and marketing activities in ways that drive credibility and advocacy for our brand and products.
You may notice that our definition doesn’t emphasize sales impact, pipeline growth, or direct revenue generation. That’s intentional. While those outcomes are certainly important, our current focus is on building a solid foundation for advocacy and fostering meaningful relationships with our clients.
To distill it even further, when liaising with stakeholders unfamiliar with this discipline, we describe it as: Building real relationships with real clients to tell real stories, making buying decisions easier for our audience.
This concise explanation underpins everything we do, aligning our efforts with the broader needs of our organization. Whether it’s product marketers strategizing or sellers engaging with prospects, our work reflects and supports their goals.
A focus on relationships and advocacy
Our efforts include a variety of traditional and innovative customer marketing initiatives. While we manage references, create case studies, produce videos, and integrate campaigns, our true focus lies in relationship-building and advocacy.
Currently, our reference program is manually managed. It’s a far cry from the sophisticated platforms many organizations use today—we rely on an Excel-based system reminiscent of my early days in customer marketing back in 2008. This approach, while not the most advanced, is highly managed and tailored.
Our team serves as a central point for requests, ensuring that every interaction is intentional and aligned with our goals.
We also support our sellers in deepening their client relationships, positioning our team as an extension of their efforts. Beyond references, we create traditional assets like customer case studies and experiential content but also explore unique opportunities such as a magazine collaboration with Wired, tier-one event integrations, and experiential activations at key events.
Harnessing the power of advocacy
We’re spending the majority of our time with customer advocacy. It’s where we see the true value of our work come to life. By cultivating relationships over time, nurturing them, and supporting account teams, we are unlocking the potential for deeper, more impactful customer connections.
These relationships don’t just happen overnight—they’re developed, nurtured, and supported through thoughtful, deliberate programming. It’s through this long-term approach that we’re seeing real results, building credibility for our brand, and making a tangible difference for our teams.
