When Emily Ketchen tells you she’s been in tech for 35 years, she doesn’t lower her voice or soften the number. Instead, the CMO of Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group and International Markets leans into it with the kind of confidence that comes from watching an entire industry transform—and helping to shape that transformation along the way.
During our conversation, what struck me most wasn’t just her strategic vision for one of the world’s largest tech companies—though that’s certainly impressive—but her genuine commitment to paving the way for other women in technology. With over three decades in her career, Ketchen has witnessed the industry’s evolution from the pre-internet days to our current AI revolution, and she’s not shy about leveraging that perspective.
As we settled in for our chat, it became clear that this wasn’t going to be your typical corporate interview filled with buzzwords and carefully crafted soundbites. Instead, Ketchen opened up about everything from age-positive messaging to Lenovo’s ambitious plans for category creation around AI. Her approach to marketing feels distinctly human—something that’s increasingly rare in an industry that often prioritizes algorithms over authenticity.
What follows is a conversation that spans global strategy, generational insights, and the delicate art of building genuine connections between brands and consumers. It’s also a masterclass in how experienced leaders can drive innovation while staying true to their values.
Introduction & Career Philosophy
Helena Stone: You have 35, 36 years in your career. You can’t fake that.
Emily Ketchen: I love that attitude. It’s important to own it and pave the way for other women to not feel … How many women do you go to a meeting with and they say “I’ve been doing this for 20 years…” It’s very different, right? We can’t go back. We can’t make it up. And I have two daughters and I’m telling them, you have to be age-positive. They’re 16 and 21, so they’re like “Sure, mom.” But it’s great advice because no one told me that when I was 16 or 21.
Role and Responsibilities at Lenovo
Helena Stone: Tell our lifestyle-focused readers about your role and current focus at Lenovo.
Emily Ketchen: Yeah, sure. So, in leading marketing, I think about it in two frames. One is, I do it for Lenovo’s Intelligent Devices Group worldwide – including, Motorola. If you think about lifestyle, a lot of our products from the Lenovo Yoga perspective, the Legion gaming perspective, the tablets you may have seen this afternoon, and then also everything Motorola, are very much geared to lifestyle and to consumers. So, that’s sort of the consumer side of our business. I also have responsibility for B2B which includes the ThinkPad and ThinkBook.
The other part of my job that I think is unique and really important is serving our international markets. And as a CMO, I am very insistent upon being attached to sales. I see myself as a chief growth officer, not necessarily just a marketing officer. And so, to do that really effectively, you have to be super connected to the sales organization to understand, what are they facing? What are the different things that they’re doing? Are they selling through retail, through channel, or direct?
So, you have the product, the positioning, the differentiation, understanding our customers and consumers, speaking to them so that you can land your message, but then also being really connected to sales to understand, what are they facing? What are the barriers that they have? And it’s worldwide. So, I have all of the geographies as well.
Current Focus: AI Innovation
Helena Stone: What project excites you most right now?
Emily Ketchen: I think the most exciting thing, and from my perspective it’s a once-in-a-30-year opportunity, is really category creation around AI.
I’ve lived through generations where there were no smartphones. If you think about how that revolutionized things, I was actually in the workforce before there was an internet, just to be age-positive. And I remember people saying, “oh, what’s that? How is that going to work? Oh, that’s going to be dreadful. It’s going to be the end of mankind,” right? And actually, now, the internet is oxygen. You can’t live without it. Go somewhere and you’re not able to get your bandwidth and you lose your mind, right?
So, we have this unique opportunity to be able to represent what AI means for our consumers and for businesses by creating demand for a category around AI PCs and AI phones that starts to tell the story of, why do you want this and why do you need this? Why is it important to future-proof? What can I get out of this particular product that I can’t get out of any other product? And we don’t want to be in a sea of sameness.
We want to differentiate Lenovo in the way that we approach AI.
And you’ve got the gamut of all audiences from Gen alpha to Z, and also, then, all of the businesses that are looking for, what is the right strategy for me when I’m thinking about devices and AI? Who in my company should have an AI PC versus not? How do I future-proof my workforce? So, that portends all kinds of implications for a marketer. But what a great opportunity, and I am super enthusiastic about that.
Global Strategy and Localization
Helena Stone: How do you adapt strategy for different global markets?
Emily Ketchen: Yeah, you want to make sure you’re relevant, right? I mean, I actually think that’s the new frontier. People talk about being personalized, which I think is absolutely right, but I think the frontier is really all around relevance. So, yeah, you can’t communicate with somebody if they can’t hear you, right? So, you might tweak the way that you speak about things.
We have a way that we do that at Lenovo. We have something called ‘Global Might and Local Fight.’ But the way that we think about it is, if you produce concepts and content at the center, it isn’t enough to just push it out. It has to be meaningful in France, or in the UK, or in India, or in Japan. They’re maybe in a different place on their bell curve of technology adoption. There are differences.
And so, we want to be really thoughtful about that. And we test our creative quantitatively with our audiences. Because oftentimes, I’m not the audience, right? I mean, I would love to be, but I’m not Gen Z. And so, we actually have a methodology that we use to tell us, for Gen Zs in India, does it resonate as well as it does for a Gen Z in the UK? It’s super important to have a message that resonates in the geography that you’re in.
Gen Z Engagement and Work for Humankind
Helena Stone: How do programs like Work for Humankind and your Gen Z advisory board build authentic brand trust?
Emily Ketchen: Yeah, I think those two things are quite connected. We’re in our fourth iteration of Lenovo’s Work for Humankind initiative, which is all about showing how we’re using technology to do good in the world. While we do the quantitative work, we wanted to make sure qualitatively the messages were landing as well. Because Gen Z is moving on up the line, they’re getting older, and they represent a huge amount of purchasing power. So they’re super important to us. They’re the first generation ever to be completely immersed in technology.
So what we did is we went out and spoke to a number of different thought leaders around Gen Z. Jules Terpak, for example, she’s super well-known. What we did is we then realized we could iterate on that and turn that into a board. So we have a permanent board of Gen Z-ers who understand what we want to do from our brand perspective. What do we want to do with the brand, and how do we connect with Gen Z-ers? They’re pushing, they’re testing, they’re vetting, and what we’re doing is putting our ideas in front of them before we take them live.
In the latest one that we did, we conducted research. What we found is that for 60% of Gen Z-ers, they identified as being quite different online to who they are in real life, and that caused them a ton of stress. “I can’t really tell my family who I am online, which is a big part of my identity” – and so we heard that feedback, and we listened to that angst, and what we did is we worked with two heroes, two global Gen Z participants, one from the UK, one from Japan, to create a fully AI-enabled avatar of themselves, scraping from their social media persona, with their permission, and then creating a digital version of their body, their movements, and inviting that avatar to have a conversation with their family members in real life to talk about tough topics they didn’t feel they could do on their own.
So our hero in Japan, for example, a woman named Chinatsu, she had been a plus-sized model in Japan, secretively, without telling her mom and her family because she felt a sense of shame and there’s not a lot of body positivity there. So we created an avatar of Chinatsu and invited Chinatsu in real life to have an open conversation with her mom [through the avatar], and it was just extraordinary to see this interaction. We filmed it and put it out there, and then Chinatsu got to reunite with her mom, and her mom saw her in a whole different light, and a lot of that pressure was diminished.
Most Gen Zers have more than one Instagram account because they even just want their smaller circle of friends to know who they really are, right? How do you tell those stories? And as a brand, when you do that, you engender trust. It’s not about necessarily just selling our technology. It’s about connecting with a generation, and a lot of that was shaped by the board.
Sports Partnerships and Gen Z Connection
Helena Stone: How do partnerships like F1 help you connect with Gen Z?
Emily Ketchen: I think that the world today is very much at odds with itself. There is tumult behind every door and in every corner, and what we have seen through all of the research that we have done is the great unifier on the planet is sports. We can come together. We can root for the team. We can be a part of it. It’s so much the unifier, in spite of all of the other things that may be happening.
So when you think about that, and you think about the role of sports drawing people together, if you think about something like the F1, the fastest growing cohort watching the F1 is Gen Z. So we want to be there. We want to be relevant. We want to show how our technology powers the F1. Why are we a part of that organization? Why do we celebrate sportsmanship and winning and the thrill of it? And obviously, F1 is incredibly technical. You could say it’s the most technical sport in the world.
Walking away from this conversation with Emily Ketchen, what stands out most is her ability to balance corporate strategy with genuine human insight. Her approach to AI—not as a tech buzzword but as a once-in-a-generation category creation opportunity—demonstrates the value of experienced leadership in navigating transformative industry moments.
Lenovo’s Work for Humankind initiative, particularly the AI avatar project helping young people bridge their online and offline identities, exemplifies how brands can use technology for meaningful social impact. It’s marketing that goes beyond selling products to actually solving human problems.
Perhaps most importantly, Ketchen’s “age-positive” philosophy and focus on relevance over mere personalization offers a blueprint for authentic brand building in an increasingly fragmented world. As Lenovo continues expanding its AI strategy globally, they clearly have a leader who understands that the most sophisticated technology means nothing without genuine human connection.