Emily Fink joined Sedgwick as chief marketing officer almost a year ago and ever since has been on a mission of growth.
As a brand marketer with more than 20 years of experience at brands including Liberty Mutual Insurance, Colgate Palmolive and Pfizer, Fink was excited to join the growing company, which is a global provider of claims management, loss adjusting and technology-enabled business tools.
“Growth means opportunity. It means trying new things. It means learning opportunities for the team,” explains Fink. “Their high growth rate for the last 20 years, they continue to expand into new business verticals and new markets—they’re in 80 countries now. The business has been growing long before I started at these really strong growth rates. But the marketing opportunity has been relatively untapped.”
Fink is excited to push marketing to the next level and let it drive growth for the business. “There’s not just a lot of growth in the company, but there’s a lot of potential for future growth based on all the things that marketing can do to take the business to the next level,” she adds. “There’s just a lot of opportunity, and that makes me excited because there’s always something to do.”
Brand Innovators caught up with Fink from her office in Memphis to talk about the CMO role, innovation and storytelling. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you talk about the growth and how you’re taking that into the marketing for the company?
I come from a B2C background. And in B2C, if you’re not spending money, if you’re not driving leads, then your product or service isn’t selling. In B2B, a lot of times marketing is more like sales support.
What I’m doing is taking a lot of the B2C experiences and capabilities and bringing them over into this B2B world to really be an independent growth lever that can empower sales differently. Some of the things we’re thinking about are: how do we build a brand that everyone in the business community knows?
Sedgwick has 78% of the Fortune 100 as clients, about 60% of the Fortune 500 as clients, but you probably never heard of Sedgwick before we got on the phone today. We have a lot of strong relationships, but we’re not a well-known brand in the business community yet, like a Salesforce would be. So that’s one thing we’re focusing on—how do we build a brand?
The other thing is how do we generate leads for the business? Prior to relatively recently, most of the lead generation was driven by sales—going out and making relationships, almost like captive agents in an insurance company. What we’re doing is really leaning into all the digital marketing techniques, like the same things that you would do.
I come from an insurance background. In insurance companies, we would do programmatic media, paid search, and digital marketing to bring in leads. And we’re doing something similar here.
The third thing is really understanding the voice of the customer, the voice of the client. In B2C, you have a well-developed insights function because it’s easy to do focus groups, surveys, and find out what people want—how they want to be communicated with, how they want your products and services to evolve, and what they think of your technology.
That’s sometimes harder in a B2B environment because if your client is Amazon or Walmart, you’re not going to pay them a couple hundred dollars and offer them a bowl of M&Ms. It’s not the same as dealing with a consumer to get them to come into a focus group.
We’re really being thoughtful about how we build out some of those same capabilities to gather insights in a way that makes sense in this environment.
Can you talk about how you’re thinking about innovation in 2025?
It’s rare to have a lot of B2C people moving into a B2B company at one time. I come from B2C, from insurance—I worked at Molly, I worked at Pfizer—so CPG, pharma. The people we’re hiring include talent from Amazon, Walmart, CVS, and Hilton Hotels. We’re bringing people from large consumer-oriented brands into a B2B space.
A lot of innovation is coming from figuring out how to take the way that these B2C brands have gone to market and apply it in a B2B space. In B2C, you generally have better insights because you can do focus groups and surveys more easily. You also have more marketing spend, and when you have more marketing spend, you attract top talent and build stronger relationships with platforms like Meta and Google.
These platforms invest in companies with big budgets by offering training, brand day workshops, and competitive assessments.
When you take all that expertise and put it into a B2B environment that hasn’t seen the same level of capabilities, it unlocks a different level of marketing impact. That’s where a lot of our innovation is going to come from.
Can you talk about your brand mission and how this shows up in your storytelling?
Our mission is to enable our clients to thrive by helping them navigate the unexpected.
We lean into storytelling in two ways. First, we help our clients navigate the unexpected. We have a lot of data—data on hurricanes, wildfires, workplace accidents, mental health crises, and other unexpected events. We’re focused on not just using that data to help clients today but also predicting future challenges so we can be strategic partners in their preparedness.
The second part of our storytelling is for employees and prospective employees. It’s about showcasing the meaningful work they do. When crises occur—wildfires, workplace accidents, hurricanes—we tell the stories of how we help people restore their businesses, communities, and lives.
Who are your target audiences and how are you getting the message to the end user?
It depends on the product. Some products target risk managers, others target HR managers. We aim to deeply understand each buyer—what they care about today and what they might care about as the environment evolves. We spend time in one-on-one conversations, facilitate discussion circles across industries, and leverage our data and expertise to help clients anticipate potential challenges.
We’re the world’s leading provider of risk and claims administration. We handle claims administration across multiple verticals and also manage product recalls and class action lawsuit administration.
What are the biggest challenges in your role and how do you overcome them?
The biggest challenge right now is recruiting. We’re a young marketing organization with a lot of exciting work ahead—building the brand, generating leads, understanding the voice of the client, and operationalizing insights. Finding the best talent and getting them onboarded quickly is a process.
How have your past experiences shaped your current role?
I’ve worked in pharma (Pfizer), CPG (Colgate), and financial services (Liberty Mutual). My most relevant roles were in brand management and general management, where I had P&L responsibility.
Marketing works best when it’s an extension of the business strategy. If marketing is aligned with business priorities and focused on driving key KPIs, it’s successful. If it operates in isolation, it fails.
What marketing predictions do you have for 2025?
Client expectations will continue to rise. People compare experiences across industries, not just competitors. If they interact with Amazon and Uber daily, they expect that same level of digital experience everywhere. AI and automation will continue reshaping marketing. Personalization will become more sophisticated, with data playing an even bigger role in targeting and messaging.
