Seth Godin once said, “Marketing is no longer about the things you do but about the stories you tell.”
How true is this today?
Vedanarayanan Vedantham (Veda), head of marketing at Microsoft, can answer well.
Veda’s biggest learning in marketing is that successful marketers still live by Seth Godin’s quote today. This is how:
Which pages of History do they have reserved?
Before the advent of the digital world, marketing had to be a completely creative process. Then came the arrival of crunchers in marketing. His experience was counting every click. Every impression. Today, top sellers represent a new breed, combining the best of these two disparate worlds. And so, today, marketers must display a unique blend of left-brain and right-brain thinking.
Veda’s career has seen her hold leadership roles across multiple disciplines, from product to digital. But marketing, for him, was a great opportunity initially.
According to him, in today’s technology-frontline marketing roles, the role of a marketing leader involves about 60-70% work on analytics and data, about 20-30% on creative challenges, and around 10-15% in people challenges.
A large part of Veda’s work day involves helping to evangelize marketing with business leaders, many of whom may not have a deep understanding of marketing. There are deep selling skills involved in this. According to him, it’s a skill that marketers need to be good at, and yet one that’s often quite underrated. This ensures that they can get the right buy-in for their ideas and the right budget allocations. What this means in working terms is preparing detailed business cases that can articulate the business value of marketing actions that drive success.
Another key part of Veda’s work mornings includes regular management reviews. These reviews are about the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and marketing efforts. A typical meeting involves specific questions about minute details of a campaign. A marketing leader needs to be comfortable with people questioning him. The questions could be around the return on investment, as in most organizations marketing is a huge outlay of cash and sometimes it is difficult to show tangible results. Questions can come from the Finance team, business teams and management teams. For a marketing leader to face and answer these questions, their emotional quotient muscle must be resilient.
Salespeople also need to develop functional mastery skills, especially in the early stages of their careers. For young marketers, Veda shares some of the growing niches in digital marketing that could lead to rewarding careers. These could range from influencer marketing to digital PR to mobile marketing and B2B SaaS marketing. The other perennial marketing skill in demand today is search engine optimization.
Also, there is a differentiation in business-to-consumer and business-to-business (B2C vs. B2B) marketing. Veda takes a sports metaphor to explain the difference. In B2C, marketing is like a game of T20. There is action, paranoia and boards every day. In B2B, on the other hand, the role that marketing plays is more like a test match. Allow deck fire to continue driving more sales.
With the rapid changes in the world of marketing, another key component of Veda’s time is being a visiting professor at various prestigious institutes. Through these lectures, he helps young students to have a practical and clear view of the way forward in marketing.
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