New Ingram Micro Senior VP of Marketing to Tackle VAR Initiatives

Jerry Lumpkin, senior vice president of marketing for North America, will be leaving to join FrontRange's team as senior vice president of marketing. Lumpkin's position will be filled by Cathy Eckstein, who has been corporate vice president of worldwide marketing and strategy at Ingram for the past year.

For the past year, Eckstein has been working on global issues, as well as charting the development of strategies for each of Ingram's regions, according to Pat Collins, senior vice president of sales, North America

"She brings more of the outside view and an understanding of the development of market strategies--an understanding of how manufacturers leverage a channel strategy and how they want to go manage demand," says Collins. "So, the good news is we've got someone of Bob's [Stegner, vice president of channel development caliber who understands the players in the channel, history of the channel and how to get things done. And the new thinking on what we can do to continue to enhance the channel's value proposition, how we can position Ingram properly and the channel in it; it's a great balance."

Stegner, who has been working closely with Eckstein on a lot of market research, says they will be tackling new initiatives together.

"One is helping to understand VARs and their customers more closely," he says. "Also, Cathy has been working on the branding effort for the development of our channel program which is under an umbrella, and then getting Ingram Micro more involved in that."

During the transition Ingram will be reorganizing the product marketing groups--those who work most closely with the vendors on what kind of Ingram programs can best help them execute their channel strategies,and combining them with channel development.

"Bob will have the channel piece and then the product and vendor facing piece," says Collins. "And he'll also have our e-marketing tools. So we have a small group that manages the development as well as what I call the 'care and feeding' of those e-marketing tools."

"It's a lot of the electronic offerings we offer our vendors, all our electronic tools, electronic newsletters to our reseller partners, those types of things," says Stegner.

"We think it's the right thing to do from the standpoint of integrating what the marketing and product plans are from a vendor perspective into what our channel plans are," says Collins. "At the end of the day that's what our vendor partners are interested in, it's how they can leverage our strong channel presence and our strong channel programs into something to help them be successful with how their marketing mix is set up. So, putting it all under one roof makes sense."