HP CMO Antonio Lucio On Building The Business Case For Diversity

HP Chief Marketing Officer Antonio Lucio wants to see the tech industry get more aggressive about pursuing diversity and inclusivity goals—and the company is working to lead by example.

"We're going to build a meaningful business case to prove once and for all that increasing representation will indeed translate into meaningful business gains," Lucio told CRN during a recent interview in New York.

[Related:HP CMO Lucio On Reinventing HP's Brand]

HP Inc. has the "most diverse board in tech," as more than 40 percent of its board members are women or people of color, Lucio said.

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Additionally, 60 percent of the people in HP's marketing organization are women, as are 52 percent of the managers and 50 percent of the top 10 global marketing leadership roles, Lucio said. Thirty percent of those top marketing leaders are people of color, he said.

Meanwhile, a year ago, HP issued a challenge to its advertising agencies around diversity goals. The challenge was to increase the percentage of women working on HP's account, increase the percentage of women in senior leadership roles, and increase the percentage of people of color working on its account, according to Lucio.

"Twelve months later, we were able to report back the number of women working globally in our account went from 40 to 60 percent. And importantly, women in leadership roles went in many of the agencies from zero to 50 percent," Lucio said. "We made progress on [the percentage of] people of color in two out of our five agencies, but three of them fell short on the objectives that they see for themselves on people of color." Now that HP has five quarters worth of data to go off of, "we are going to be able to actually build a meaningful, quantitative-based business case for diversity," Lucio said.

The initiative comes as HP is seeing major success in its business, with double-digit sales growth for the past four quarters in its personal systems business, and growth in its printing business for the past three quarters.