Asia-Pacific Power List 2024: Siew Ting Foo, HP

Siew Ting Foo

Global head of brand and insights
HP
Singapore
Returning member

2023 was the year that Foo put her purpose and practice into play in a way that she describes as being a “Da Vinci CMO." This title refers to certain qualities and attitudes that leading global CMOs should have, which include—servant leadership, leadership through inspiring and courageous storytelling, speed, being impact obsessed, staying connected and collaborative stakeholder management skills.

For Foo, this has meant building a small and nimble brand team that has created a multi-stakeholder brand narrative to help position HP for its future growth strategy, anchored in its heritage and purpose. It appears to be working, as Newsweek ranked HP as its most responsible company in 2023 due to its positive performance across ESG while maintaining healthy profits.

Having been promoted to the new role of global chief brand and insights officer for HP Inc in December 2022, the past year has seen Foo go on a journey to re-frame the internal narrative of the insights function.

Foo approached insights with a fresh approach and a determination to create business impact. She wanted to shift the team beyond just a team of researchers but rather, to have a seat at the business table that uses data and analytics to represent the customer voice to influence corporate and enterprise strategy. 

She deployed and adopted GenAI to not only reduce repetitive tasks, but to be more agile, innovative, and risk-taking. After 12 months, her team was recognised internally as a representation of the customer voice, one that helps drive key marketing, enterprise, and product innovation decisions.

Foo adopts a ‘human-centric growth’ framework towards leadership of her team. This consists of modules of helping teams build their resilience and grit through self-management, meditation, yoga and finding a ‘mini retreat’ within themselves. 

Foo is a regular mentor to young Gen Z, focussing on female diversity. She has been active in providing advice externally to female aspiring leaders in Asia Pacific. She started a blog recently on LinkedIn initiating a biweekly newsletter that shares her experience and knowledge widely. Currently, she is in the process of publishing her first book that captures all her knowledge, which she hopes will help aspiring young marketers. 

Foo regularly contributes to the marketing industry as an avid speaker in conferences and awards. She is also active with World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) helping them with global marketing capability frameworks.