For more than a century, General Motors (GM) has shaped the contours of American industry and culture—from pioneering mass automobile production to redefining design, safety, and scale. Today, as GM accelerates into an all-electric future, the company is once again undergoing profound transformation, rethinking not only what it builds but how it connects with consumers in a fast-changing marketplace.
At the center of that evolution is GM’s chief marketing officer, Norm de Greve. In a conversation with McKinsey partner Robert Tas, de Greve unpacks how GM is working to align marketing more tightly across the C-Suite by tying creativity to business outcomes, ensuring the voice of the customer remains central to decision-making, and embracing the promise of AI to reshape how teams operate. This is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Marketing’s remit
Robert Tas, McKinsey: What are some ways that marketers can reconcile long-term brand investments with short-term performance pressure?
Norm de Greve, GM: The ideal is a set of marketing activities that both build the brand and drive demand. Every time you put something into the market—a campaign, an ad, a piece of social content—it should be double duty. If it’s designed thoughtfully, there’s no reason it can’t both convert and reinforce the brand. Yes, you still need broader brand investments that build meaning and distinctiveness over time, but a large portion of impact today is in the middle ground where brand and performance can and should reinforce each other.
The marketer’s job is to drive growth. Creativity is a powerful lever for that, but on its own, it’s not enough. Marketers must align creative expression with business outcomes. That means delivering across what we call the three D’s: distinctiveness, desire, and demand. When marketing meets all three, it becomes a business asset that drives more efficient and profitable growth. At GM, creativity and design are core to the company. That’s why our bar for creativity is so high—our design center is the largest in the world, filled with artisans and engineers working side by side to craft products of substance and beauty. We see creativity as a growth driver, and marketing here must reflect that standard.
Robert Tas: How do you ensure the voice of the customer remains central among leadership?
Norm de Greve: When you’re a small company, the customer is your lifeline. But as a company grows, its center of gravity often shifts inward. Leaders start focusing on internal metrics, politics, and data. It becomes easy to lose sight of what’s actually happening in the market. That’s where marketers come in. Part of our job is to pull the organization back outside—to reflect the real world, not just the boardroom. Data and research are helpful, but nothing substitutes for ethnography. Getting out into the field ensures you never forget the customer. And it shouldn’t just be marketing’s responsibility. Marketers should bring other leaders with them into research sessions, dealers, store visits, and customer calls. There are three roles that must stay deeply connected to the customer: the strategy lead, the marketing lead, and potentially the head of research. All are focused on defining who you’re targeting, what value you’re offering, and how you communicate that value. These leaders typically sit high enough in the organization to influence the agenda so they have a responsibility to keep the customer front and center across the business.
You have to start with the strategic foundation: What does growth look like for your brand? What choice drivers matter most? Which equities do you need to strengthen to increase relevance and distinctiveness?
Robert Tas: There is often a gap between what leaders say they should do to drive growth and the actual behaviors and actions they put in place. How do you ensure growth is more than a mindset in your teams?
Norm de Greve: This starts with how you define marketing’s role. There’s a big product component. Growth often comes from developing offerings that open doors to new customer segments. For us at GM, electric vehicles (EVs) have been that lever—particularly on the US coasts, where some of our legacy products have underperformed but our EVs have gained strong traction.
Within marketing, though, there’s a built-in tension: the most efficient marketing tends to target people already on the verge of purchasing. That’s often where companies focus because the return is immediate. But true growth requires looking beyond that. The real opportunity lies in reaching people who are only lightly considering your brand, or not yet at all. That’s less efficient in the short term but critical for sustainable, long-term growth. So marketers need to do both, and that means balancing the easier way to get growth with the thing that’s going to drive more customers into your business.
Another essential part of a growth mindset is separating tactics from strategy. When marketers jump straight into activations without a clear rationale, it often leads to fragmented execution and weak returns. You have to start with the strategic foundation: What does growth look like for your brand? What choice drivers matter most? Which equities do you need to strengthen to increase relevance and distinctiveness? For us, every brand has clear equity goals tied to growth. Those inform the tactics, not the other way around.
C-Suite Growth Talks
A seat at the C-Suite table
Robert Tas: How do you help the leadership team at GM understand the complexities and the opportunities of marketing?
Norm de Greve: When you’re working with senior leaders, you have to boil things down to make it digestible. For us, that means grounding the conversation in the consumer journey. Everyone can understand that. It’s not marketing speak; it’s behavior and opportunity.
Take the auto industry, for example. Most consumers aren’t thinking about a vehicle until they enter the market, and when they do, they usually form an initial consideration set of vehicles. Two-thirds of the time they buy from that initial list, so being in that initial consideration set is crucial. That framing makes it easy to see where marketing can have real impact—how we create awareness, how we influence that first list, and how we stay competitive during the shopping journey.
Once we anchor the discussion in that journey, we can walk through the series of activities we use to influence it and why we believe those activities drive results. That opens the door to talking about why you believe in those activities, how you test to make sure they demonstrate value, and what your metric system is to measure your progress. Having a system in place brings discipline, and discipline is what leadership teams are really looking for. What they want to know is, “Are we making thoughtful, strategic decisions or just doing what feels good?” A clear framework, even if imperfect, signals rigor and intent.
Robert Tas: There’s often a disconnect between finance and marketing. How have you worked to bridge that gap?
Norm de Greve: At GM, I’ve built a close partnership with our head of finance to help build out our approach. They’ve been fantastic because they understand more deeply what we’re trying to accomplish, why we do the things we do, and how we measure that return. But there are obligations on both sides: finance can’t believe that marketing doesn’t work and then say that marketing is a reason for poor growth. And if finance believes marketing works, then they can’t treat it like the ATM for the corporation whenever they need to cut costs.
And for their part, marketing must demonstrate discipline, evidence, and a mindset that prioritizes company growth, not just budget protection. At the highest level, marketing should be measured by one thing: did it drive sales? Too often, that gets confused with return on ad spend, which is an efficiency metric, not a growth metric. You can be really efficient and have minimal growth, which can be confused with near-term sales. But if you back up and say, “I have a certain amount of money. How do I drive the most growth over the next two years? And what’s the best allocation of that money to do that?” Then finance is all in. The CFO will usually support your strategy if they understand the long-term intent and believe it’s grounded in discipline and realism.
Robert Tas: The need to validate results is a recurring challenge marketers face. Can you share advice for how to best navigate this?
Norm de Greve: Marketers often feel frustrated when asked to prove what “obviously works.” In my experience, it’s best to be honest about the difficulty of attributing consumer behavior to specific marketing efforts, and to help your colleagues see that marketing success starts with the product itself. With cars, 75 percent of what will drive growth is the car itself, and the context around it: Is it well designed? Is it beautiful? Is it in demand culturally? Is it superior to competitors in the marketplace? If you claim credit for growth because you did the marketing, you lose credibility. But if you’re honest that we can’t know exactly how much growth is driven by marketing, and help people see that marketing is tied to everything else, you build credibility and create partners in others who will then believe in what you’re doing and go forward with you.
AI integration
Robert Tas: What impact is AI having on the speed and efficiency of your marketing operations?
Norm de Greve: I’m stunned by the pace of AI adoption, especially generative AI, which has far exceeded our expectations. We began the year with maybe one or two exploratory projects. Now, without any formal direction, we’re up to 20. It’s happening organically, everywhere, across the organization. Teams are applying AI across the full spectrum of marketing, from insights and copy testing to brief writing, creative development, media optimization, and measurement. What’s remarkable is how quickly each function is embracing it. The momentum is real, and it’s accelerating.
There are some clear drivers of this adoption rate. One is speed. People love that they can go so fast. I can get an insight immediately, such as seeing that something didn’t work, or what a segment really wants to hear. I can test my copy immediately, and I can see the creative testing. A second driver is the cost of adopting AI, which is just very low. And a third is curiosity. People are excited to develop what’s next. They’re motivated to try new things.
Robert Tas: Where do you see AI scaling the most, and what do you think marketers need to do to get ready?
Norm de Greve, GM: When you look at how AI is scaling in marketing, it helps to trace where it started. It began where there’s data—media and targeting—because those functions were already wired for optimization. They also had teams comfortable working with it. That’s where adoption was fastest. Now, we’re seeing rapid acceleration in generative applications that are moving into insights, integrated campaign development, and even creative execution. The rise of agentic AI is a breakthrough. I saw an example recently where multiple agents were talking to each other across the entire process, from insights to brief writing to query development to refinement. The asset being developed was a 30-second ad and the AI agents produced 60 percent of what I needed. It’s TV quality.
Of course, some categories are more complex. Cars, for example, pose challenges in rendering detail, but we already have full computer-generated imagery models that make this possible. AI is fundamentally changing the marketer’s job. What we need in our marketing teams to keep up is people with the curiosity, drive, and interest to get hands-on with these tools. We may still buy platforms or partner with creative agencies for nonlinear creative thinking, given that today’s AI is looking for the most likely answer so it gives you something that’s fairly expected, and creativity is just a different thing from that. But it’s just a matter of time before AI can handle the nonlinear creativity too.
