A few months after hiring former AOL Inc. executive Bob Lord as its chief digital officer, IBM is welcoming another new member to the management team. The technology giant this week appointed Silicon Valley veteran Michelle Peluso to the newly created position of Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer.

Peluso joins Big Blue from Technology Crossover Ventures, a growth-stage fund that invested $9 million into startups over the past two decades. She previously served as the chief executive of online shopping startup Gilt Groupe Inc. for six years and led Citigroup Inc.’s broad digital marketing operation before that. Peluso said in a 2012 Forbes interview that her role at the bank involved working with a lot of customer data, experience that should carry over well to her new IBM position.

The company’s marketing consulting business, which happens to list Citi among its clients, makes extensive use of analytics in its work. And IBM also sells data-crunching services to help organizations optimize their promotional campaigns independently. Its portfolio includes a mix of vertical-specific offerings and more general-purpose tools like the Watson Developer Cloud. The latter platform is the subject of a new case study from Chevrolet that was released today, which details how the car maker employs Big Blue’s sentiment and natural language processing capabilities to power an internal social media monitoring application.

Many more such customer stories can be expected to emerge under Peluso’s leadership. Once she takes over the reins, Peluso will report to senior vice president of marketing and communications Jon Iwata, who is credited with creating the new CMO position to boost the company’s efforts.

Image via IBM