BtoB Magazine has named its top 25 marketers of 2009 in a supplement you can download here.

It’s fascinating to note just how many of the top 25 to have made the grade are technology brands, or brands from closely-related industries. More than half (15 of the 25) fit into this category. CMOs from Oracle, Avaya, Cisco, AMD, Siemens, SAP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, HP, Accenture, AT&T, Verizon, Motorola and Sybase are all named in the list.

I’d highly recommend downloading the supplement and looking at how these different CMOs are tackling their marketing challenges. It reveals why AMD have reduced 900 global campaigns down to 4 core ones, why FedEx chose to drop its spots at the Superbowl in the face of the economic downturn, through to how an ex-Disney marketer is using the web at HP and will soon be leading a repositioning of the brand. From IBM’s focus on smarter planet technology, the Sybase CMO’s provocation-based marketing strategy and Oracle’s organisational focus on delivering opportunities to the sales force, there’s a lot to ponder. There’s also interesting insight from companies such as UPS, General Electric and Aon for a bit of non-IT inspiration.

A couple of choice quotes from the piece:

• Judith Sim, Oracle’s CMO saying, “There is no doubt, at the end of the day, that with Oracle marketing – and this is direct from Charles Phillips – we win when the cash register rings. We know what our end goal is, and that’s to support the sales organization. It’s not as much about winning those brand awards.”
• Mich Mathews, Microsoft’s VP Central Marketing “In the case of our business campaign, it was working; but we thought it could work harder,” she said. So Mathews and her team talked to customers and got feedback from Microsoft’s global subsidiaries and, ultimately, decided to retool the campaign, which targets business and IT decision-makers. In just 21 days, the company update various campaign assets—focusing messaging on how Microsoft technology can help people run their businesses successfully, particularly in a down economy.”
• Jeff Hayzlett, CMO, Eastman Kodak “In tough times you have to focus on the value proposition. The fluff, the funny campaigns, go out the window.”
• Mark Wilson, VP Sybase “We had a very compelling value proposition around risk management and risk analytics. If you looked at capital markets at the time, they were going through huge turmoil. Instead of asking companies what keeps them up at night, we would tell them what should keep them up at night. It was a very different way of selling.”