Inside the Goldman Sachs marketing push that has some execs perplexed

In early August, Goldman Sachs rolled out a fresh look.

The Wall Street bank updated its website to reflect a new color palette, replacing its iconic blue-and-white color scheme with more neutrals, blacks, and whites. It also unveiled a new logo with a softer, rounder typeface and — in perhaps the biggest change — connected the G in Goldman with the S in Sachs.

The redesign was subtle. Outside Wall Street, it barely registered. Inside the halls of Goldman Sachs, however, some people were perplexed.

In 2020, Goldman made a show of disconnecting the G and S in its logo to modernize its look. Why, bank insiders were asking, had the firm just spent millions of dollars over several years to revert back to a logo it had ceremoniously ditched just four years earlier?

The rebranding effort has spotlighted the executive who spearheaded it: Fiona Carter, the chief marketing officer. Since Carter joined Goldman in 2020 from AT&T as the bank’s first CMO, her team’s work and its spending have become a topic of conversation inside the 150-year-old bank.

Carter expanded the marketing team to more than 100 employees at its peak, up from about 15 to 25, and upped spending on glitzy sponsorships, according to current and former Goldman employees.

Despite going public in 1999, Goldman is still run as a partnership, which can lead senior leaders to feel empowered — in some cases duty-bound — to seek to influence the company’s spending and strategic direction. Several high-ranking officials told Business Insider that they questioned the cost and efficacy of the bank’s marketing efforts under Carter.

BI spoke with 18 current and former Goldman employees, including some supporters, about Carter and her team’s role at the bank. Some of these people were granted anonymity since they were not authorized to discuss company matters.

Carter did not respond to a request for comment. However, she addressed the skepticism she’s faced in an interview with Forbes earlier this year, saying that some of her Goldman colleagues have been reluctant to embrace marketing.

The complaints echo earlier tumult around CEO David Solomon’s ill-fated push into consumer banking, which led to criticisms, including from powerful partners, that the bank was spending at the expense of core businesses like investment banking and trading. Speculation over Solomon’s own future died down in 2023 after it became clear that shareholders — and the board — backed him.

In recent months, talk has swirled inside the firm that Carter’s team could be thinned through head-count reductions.

Top Goldman officials denied any plans to cut Carter’s department and said she had upgraded Goldman’s marketing capabilities. What’s more, they say, the division she has built is vital to growing the company’s asset-management and private-wealth businesses, which have become an increasingly important source of revenue in light of the consumer-banking retreat.

Goldman’s assets under supervision have increased more than 50% since Carter joined the firm in 2020, rising from about $2 trillion to over $3 trillion at the end of the third quarter. And despite the consumer-banking setback, Goldman’s stock is up more than 160% since Solomon took over in 2018, compared to a gain of 104% in the S&P 500 index.

“It sounds like a few people have a quaint understanding of marketing at Goldman Sachs,” a Goldman spokesman, Tony Fratto, said. “Our head count and spending are a small fraction of our peers. It’s not remotely close. The culture of Goldman Sachs is to be lean, effective, and commercial, and marketing meets that test.”

Goldman never had a chief marketing officer before Carter. Talk to any longtime Goldman dealmaker, and nine out of 10 will speak with pride about how Goldman grew to be a powerhouse investment bank by virtue of its service to clients — not splashy sports sponsorships.

In 2020, however, Solomon aspired to make Goldman a household name. To do that, he and his deputy, the chief operating officer and president John Waldron, planned to upgrade Goldman’s marketing game significantly.

The men discussed building a marketing operation worthy of a tech giant like Google or Apple, multiple people familiar with their vision said. They turned to the consulting giant McKinsey, which recommended Goldman increase its marketing budget and hire a chief marketing officer, these people said.

As AT&T’s chief brand officer, Carter handled sports sponsorships, advertising, and diversity messaging in a division headed by the telecom giant’s global marketing officer, Lori Lee.

With her refined British accent and commanding presence, Carter evoked a level of glamour that some said reflected Solomon’s own leadership style, though he pulled back on his celebrity DJing in 2023 amid a backlash. She was praised in on-camera interviews and in the press for initiatives to advance women’s equity in advertising. She was photographed at AT&T-sponsored events with Hollywood stars like Robert De Niro and Katie Holmes.

Carter joined the firm in September 2020 as a member of the bank’s vaunted partnership. Her team was housed in Goldman’s executive office, a group of public-facing units that support Goldman’s C-suite, including media relations, investor relations, and marketing.

In a break from tradition, she did not report to the head of that division, John Rogers. She reported instead to his boss, Waldron, the COO. The shake-up of the traditional hierarchy didn’t sit well with Rogers, said executives who spoke to him about the new reporting line.

“He didn’t like it,” said a former executive in the department who worked with Rogers. “He lost something, and that had never happened in any significant way.”

Fratto said that Rogers “was the one who recommended that marketing report to John Waldron. He supported that structure and still does.”

Carter quickly set out to reorganize and grow Goldman’s marketing operation.

She assumed control of the 15 to 20 marketing executives who had been reporting to Goldman’s global head of communications, Jake Siewert. This marketing team, which was housed in the executive office, focused on companywide initiatives like arranging social-media posts, managing the website, and Goldman’s weekly podcast.

Goldman also had marketers stationed within the firm’s individual business lines who were responsible for division-specific products and services. Prior to Carter, these business-line marketers operated their own fiefs, reporting up to the heads of their units. One byproduct of this was a lack of cohesiveness in branding materials, including web pages for specific business lines that looked different from the rest of the website, a former senior marketing executive recalled. Carter set out to eliminate these issues and streamline Goldman’s look and messaging.

Carter hired aggressively, and Goldman’s marketing operation soon swelled. People who worked in the executive office at that time said an oft-repeated mantra was that marketing was building an “army” — so much so that employees of the media-relations team had to be shifted to a different area of the 29th floor of Goldman’s New York City office tower to make room.

“They’re like: ‘Our budget is never-ending. We just added another team. We added another 20 people in a night,'” one former executive-office staffer said. “It was crazy.”

One hire that riled some Goldman insiders was that of Maria dal Pan, a communications industry veteran who was tapped in part to write speeches and talking points for the CMO. Goldman insiders told BI it was unusual for executives other than the CEO to have such a staffer.

Fratto told BI that “everyone who heads a function has that kind of support available to them,” but the executives who spoke with BI said speechwriting was typically handled by subordinates on an ad hoc basis. Dal Pan, who left Goldman in 2023 after little more than a year, declined to comment.

Carter erected new teams, including an internal ad-buying team. She ramped up the use of outside agencies to focus on branded content and website development and championed sports sponsorships such as the one it announced in 2022 with the carmaker McLaren’s Formula 1 racing team.

Carter used clichés that puzzled some colleagues, according to a former senior-level marketing executive. This person recalled Carter saying, for example, that marketing would be “the rocket fuel” that would vault the Goldman brand “to the stars.”

In meetings, she often name-dropped Waldron when discussing her game plan, two senior executives said. The goal, these people added, was to send the incontrovertible message that her vision had been blessed straight from the top.

Goldman also came close to rolling out a dramatic logo and brand upgrade in 2022, according to two people familiar with the effort. The redesign, known internally as “Project Richmond,” would have added orange to Goldman’s brand colors, one of these people said.

The project was scrapped as performance slumped amid a tenuous dealmaking environment that was followed by layoffs.

Since Goldman’s consumer-banking retreat in 2022, the marketing team housed within the executive office has shrunk to about 85 staffers, according to multiple people with knowledge of the division.

Carter, meanwhile, has shifted focus to the marketing needs of the asset-and-wealth-management division, which manages money for wealthy people, pension funds, and other large investors.

Matt Gibson, Goldman’s global head of client business for asset and wealth management, told BI that marketing had become so important to his division that it planned to double the number of marketers it employs over the next two years.

“I would like to significantly grow our marketing resources over the next few years, and that’s because I think it’s so valuable,” he told BI. “We all live with scarce resources, so I can’t do all of that overnight. But if you were to ask me what my top three longer-term priorities are to help grow the business, this would be one of them.”

Waldron pointed to Goldman’s sponsorship of McLaren’s F1 racing team as an example of the CMO’s vision benefiting the bank.

Waldron told BI that he was initially skeptical of the sponsorship, which Carter spearheaded and which has led to the bank’s logo being emblazoned on the team’s vehicles at competitions. It has proved successful among clients, he said, because Carter structured it so they could get up close and personal with McLaren’s technology versus sitting in the stands watching cars zoom around a track.

“What she’s been able to put together with her team is something that’s much more personal,” he said.

Waldron called her “one of the best marketing executives out there” and said the bank heard this sentiment from clients as well. “She has upgraded our capabilities monumentally,” he added. “Our events and branding are materially better under her leadership. We made the right decision by bringing her into the firm, and we are lucky to have her.”

In recent weeks, Goldman’s marketing team has suffered more departures.

Jason Hill, the chief operating officer of the global marketing division who became one of Carter’s most important lieutenants, left Goldman in October after snagging a CMO job at the law firm White & Case. Goldman plans to replace him, a person familiar with the matter said.

The bank’s New York City office, meanwhile, recently lost roughly half a dozen members of its social-media team, multiple people said.

There’s been no shortage of internal speculation that the marketing team could be pared down further.

Some people traced the chatter back to comments made by Russell Horwitz, Goldman’s chief of staff and head of the executive office. In meetings, Horwitz has said the executive office operates better when head count is leaner, which some people took to refer to the marketing team because of its size.

Horwitz told BI there was currently “no plan to reduce marketing” in the executive office. He added: “Generally speaking, we’re in the right place.” Horwitz said his comments about head count were not about any specific team.

In the interview with Forbes earlier this year, Carter said her job involved convincing an “often skeptical audience” of the merits of marketing. “The race goes to those who persevere,” she said, adding that her Goldman colleagues were “beginning to acknowledge marketing can be a revenue generator.”

Emmalyse Brownstein contributed reporting.

Are you a Goldman Sachs or Wall Street insider? Get in touch with this reporter. Reed Alexander can be reached via email at ralexander@businessinsider.com or via the encrypted messaging app Signal at 561-247-5758.