Our quarterly BEETc Advisory Board convened virtually on 12 October 2023. Esteemed board members from various global industries gathered to discuss recent inspiring marketing campaigns, their insights and tips for sales and marketing integration (referred to as “smarketing”), and their organisations’ innovation plans for 2024.
The meeting saw participation from leaders across diverse sectors, each offering unique perspectives and insights on the MarTech landscape, which enriched the discussion of 3 breakout rooms.
🔎Discussion Highlights:
💡”A recent marketing campaign that inspires you”
During the first discussion, board members were asked to share marketing campaigns that recently inspired them. Rilla Roessel, VP, Growth Marketing from Into Global, and Zsuzsanna Blau, Head of Digital Marketing Campaigns from Nokia, mentioned Apple’s advertisement featuring Octavia Spencer as Mother Nature, which also included Tim Cook. They praised the campaign’s storytelling approach, transforming a boring sustainability report into an emotionally resonating storytelling piece.
The discussion also touched on Barbie’s recent impactful campaigns. Mike Borrelli, Global Functional Lead & Sr. Product Owner – Marketing Technology – Activation Platforms, Henkel, described them as potentially the best-integrated marketing efforts of the year, bringing novelty to nostalgia, spun across multiple generations. Vincent Leung, Global Head of Digital Brand Marketing from Lenzing Group, noted the coincidence of Barbie’s premiere with Oppenheimer, sparking substantial user-generated content due to their comparison.
Devendra Shivhare, Head (Director) of Marketing Technologies, Asia Pacific, from The Coca-Cola Company, highlighted the innovative Thumbs Up campaign (a Coca-Cola brand in India), where consumers could access a hidden camera in a cricket stump by scanning a QR code on the bottle. This strategy, reminiscent of the “Share a Coke” campaign, provided a novel online-offline & multichannel experience.
Zhiliang Li, former Head of CRM from Zalora Group, brought up a psychology-based coffee stamp card campaign, where customers received six stamps initially but needed ten for a free coffee. This tactic enhanced customer engagement by maintaining the same purchase-to-reward ratio of five stamps for one coffee.
Jessie Chong, Marketing Director, SEA, from Trend Micro and Zsuzsanna shared examples of professional businesses leveraging podcasts for content marketing. One is produced by Medius, an accountant company hosting a series called “Account Deceivable”, a crime series of the accounting industry. Another is Salesloft’s comedy series “No Nonsense Sales” hosted by Tom Boston, from a B2B revenue management solution provider’s angel to share the fun stories that all the sales professionals would resonate with. These series, focusing on industry insights and stories, serve investigative, educational, and entertainment purposes.
The conversation also covered campaigns by McDonald’s personalised meal combination, Uber’s market challenges in Hong Kong, and direct competitor callouts in automobile advertisements.
🙌”Best Tips for Mastering the Art of “Smarketing” Alignment”
The second part of the discussion is about optimising “smarketing” — the integration between sales and marketing departments.
Sarzil Sarwar, CIO & Head of Digital Business Solutions from BAT, and Rilla emphasised the need for marketing to communicate in terms that are understandable to sales teams, rather than the marketing languages such as CTR, impression, emotion, connection or awareness. The sales team cares about business outcomes, so the figures should be to actionable insights, such as student enrollments for Rilla.
Zhiliang provided seven key pointers for effective smarketing:
- Shared goals: Establishing real-time, data-informed objectives encouraging collaboration over blame during shortfalls.
- Culture: Ensuring leadership alignment, fostering a collective forward-thinking mindset.
- Collaborative workflow & structures: Regular decision-making meetings to balance supply and demand dynamics.
- Data Sensibility: Avoiding knee-jerk reactions to fluctuating metrics, recognising the noise within data.
- Aligned values & awareness: Balancing long-term brand building with short-term, trackable campaigns.
- Organisational involvement: Promoting collective problem-solving, reducing territorial disputes.
- Small experiments: Initiating low-risk trials to build momentum and demonstrate potential before wider implementation.
Oleg Kravets, Global Head of Data & Analytics, The Travel Company, mentioned their “Money Maker Squad” meetings, where global marketing and sales teams analyse current trends, campaign performances, and future plans.
Federico Brandi, Chief Marketing Officer from Roojai, stressed the importance of incorporating customer feedback known to sales teams into marketing strategies. For having a C-Suite leader looking over both sales & marketing departments, Federico said,
“I don’t think, from my experience in insurance, it’s a good idea to have them under the same umbrella. It’s very hard to find a C-level person who is super proficient both in sales and marketing. There is always a skew on one of the two aspects, but they need to be close. Very close as teams, and they are not silos.”
Jessie talked about cultivating empathy between departments, particularly in B2B settings, advocating for participation in each other’s roles to foster understanding.
“This causes misalignment most of the time, but my best tip was to empathise. As marketing teams, sometimes it doesn’t take us a very long time to get to understand the sales life. As long as you see in the sales meeting with the customer, just being there observing what kind of life they are facing, or you stand in a booth of our event booth and whatnot to talk to the customer and whatnot, then you can start understanding what other things that the salespeople will go through. And for the sales team, they can also learn how to wear the marketing hit and think about how to attract people to come to the activities.”
She also discussed the importance of a unified framework, especially in demand generation.
“Because marketing they need to create demands in the market, they need to educate the market and then so that the sales can help to capture the demands. But it is not a linear process. It is like how sales and marketing collaborate to create the money in the market and then how marketing supporting sales to capture the demand in the market and then eventually convert the opportunities to the sales, convert the pipeline accelerations.”
Zsuzsanna proposed a shift in mindset, encouraging viewing marketing not as a cost centre but as an investment. As very often marketing is the cost centre and sales is the revenue generator. But we should shift from a “cost per lead” kind of measurement to a view of “investment per opportunity”. So you can foster a more collaborative relationship with sales teams. This approach reframes interactions and aligns with broader organisational objectives.
🏃♂️”Your Top Innovation Goal for 2024″
The last topic of discussion during the advisory board meeting is innovation goals for 2024, with Generative AI emerging as the predominant theme across all breakout sessions.
Nikki Taylor, Marketing Growth Strategy Director, AMEA from UPS, Federico, Zsuzsanna, and Devendra discussed the burgeoning applications of Generative AI, highlighting the enhancements seen in tools like ChatGPT 4, Canva, Perplexity, and 123RF. Federico noted that the expanded database and improved capabilities of ChatGPT 4 presented a significant upgrade over its predecessor. Nikki elaborated on how Canva’s integration of Generative AI substantially aids designers, emphasising Canva’s ongoing investment in these features. Perplexity offers a unique function similar to ChatGPT, generating textual content enriched with reference points and links for in-depth information retrieval, essentially acting as a content-creating search tool. Meanwhile, 123RF combines stock imagery with AI generation, allowing users to customise creations based on selected images.
Devendra outlined their 2024 strategy, focusing on harnessing Generative AI within the marketing ecosystem based on experiments and case studies conducted in 2023. Their utilisation of Generative AI for content creation, audience segmentation, and direct consumer communication has not only cut operational costs but also opened new revenue channels. The critical goal for 2024 is the expansive implementation and integration of this technology throughout their operations.
In addition to exploring Generative AI, Oleg discussed their organisational approach to managing the diverse array of AI tools employed by different departments. By establishing an AI governance committee, they aim to standardise policies and ensure data compliance, thereby solidifying their data and analytics strategies. This foundational work is pivotal for future processes and AI-based projects.
Magda Kotek, Chief Marketing Officer – Asia Pacific & Global Distribution Enablement COE from Invesco Asia Pacific, spoke about their significant backend system overhaul scheduled for 2024, emphasising the need to demonstrate the tangible benefits and ROI of this transformation. This extensive change is expected to automate and streamline web content creation, aligning goals across their multiple market regions and standardising their marketing technology stacks.
Rilla and Vincent touched on the automation of conversational marketing tools, integration of CRM systems, data amalgamation, and the deployment of predictive AI.
Conversely, Eric Thain, Director, Customer & Brand from HK Express, championed a back-to-basics approach to innovation, viewing it through a non-technological lens. For him, innovation pertains to enhancing purpose-driven marketing and social impact, particularly concerning sustainability. He posed a critical question: “How can we broaden our social responsibility footprint, especially in the highly challenging airline sector?”
Shawn Roy, Consumer Insights Lead – SEAT (South East Asia & Taiwan) from Haleon, steered the conversation toward accessibility, encapsulating their innovation ethos as striving for “better everyday health with humanity.” The primary goal is to guarantee product accessibility, welcoming innovation that furthers this commitment.
Along with the discussion of the three questions, we gathered the company marketing campaigns and employer branding content from the board members:
In the chat, we also did a quick poll on “Has your total general marketing budget been cut at all for 2024?”
The result is Yes: 9; No: 3.
Wrapping up, BEETc’s Advisory Board’s latest assembly enlightened the multifaceted strategies driving modern marketing innovations. From harnessing Generative AI’s potential to revisiting fundamental principles of purpose-driven initiatives, leaders are charting diverse courses for 2024. The discussions underscored the imperative of ‘smarketing’ alignment, empathy between departments, and a recalibrated perspective on marketing investments. Whether through technologically advanced campaigns or fostering accessibility and sustainability, these pioneers echo a unified sentiment: innovation transcends technological prowess, rooting itself deeply in enhancing human experience, social responsibility, and the relentless pursuit of engaging and ethical business practices.
This Virtual Advisory Board Meeting was a great chance for us at BEETc to hear from our amazing members.
If you find our board members’ thoughts inspiring and want to discuss more with them about it, please feel free to find each other’s LinkedIn profiles through the shared attendance list, or browse BEETc’s Advisory Board page!
Thank you again,
Team BEETc
