Latest / ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence / Best of 2023 | The Super CMO Show

Transcript

Best of 2023 | The Super CMO Show · ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence

• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Hello everyone, welcome to a very special year and episode of the ContraMind Super CMO podcast.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: The ContraMind Super CMO podcast was launched in Jan 2023 this year, and we have had a phenomenal lineup of guests who shared their thoughts on how the world of marketing is changing and transforming.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_00: In this episode, we have tried to capture key highlights, thoughts, and ideas that our esteemed guests have shared with us during the course of this year.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: We had Mark D.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Swan, founder Institute of Real Growth, who talked to me about humanized growth for brands and the Da Vinci CMR model.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: Professor Tanvi Gupta had a conversation with me on semiotics and the importance of semiotics in marketing.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: In my chat with Professor Venki Shankar, we spoke about marketing accountability and how accountability is going to be a key metric for marketers in the future.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: In my conversation with Professor Peter Feder, the legendary professor from Wharton School, he spoke about customer-based audit, customer lifetime value, customer valuation, brand valuation, and how the importance of math in marketing will become more and more important.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: I spoke to David Fraden, who spoke to me about product management and design and the importance of frameworks in building great products.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: I had a conversation with Amit Chivari, Global Demand Center head of TCS, who spoke to me about the importance of CMOs looking at business metrics if they were to get a seat on the table with the CEOs.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Sukumar Muttaya spoke to me about the imperative for technology marketers and how the need for technology marketers will become more and more important as the days go by.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Finally, I had a fantastic chat with Srikant Ramachandran, CEO of Moving Walls, who talked to me about the digital out-of-home platform where the idea of getting data, content, and metrics would change the face of media in the future.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: To listen to all these episodes, you can log on to www.contramines.com or Apple or Spotify Podcast and listen to these episodes.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Do share your feedback and thoughts and share your comments with us.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: I wish you a very, very happy 2024 and I look forward to interacting with you in the future.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_06: You need to earn your place at the table first before you can do anything that starts to feel like influencing the decision-making process.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_06: If you're not at the table, you can't influence.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_06: So, what does that take?
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_06: And it really goes beyond marketing.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_06: It is a Da Vinci growth leader.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_06: What we see is that this is a leader that brings everything together that Da Vinci brought.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_06: Now, everyone I think knows about Da Vinci that he was an artist and a scientist.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_06: That's what 99% of people will tell you made him special.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_06: And so he was whole-brained because he brought together not only the creativity to break through and go to places where no one else had gone before, which of course is the seat of the innovation, of new market developments.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_06: At the same time, he was a scientist, a mathematician, he was commercial.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_06: He literally could do the math, which so many marketers are not able to bring together.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_06: But that third aspect, left brain, right brain, was empathy, was humanism, was heart.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_06: That's how companies used to be.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_06: When Unilever set up in the north of England during the Industrial Revolution, it was worse there than some of the most terrible places in Africa, in India, in China, where you know there was no health care.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_06: I'm talking obviously decades ago, but in some places in the world this is still true.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_06: And so what they did was they built a company because when you started the company, you built a factory, you were gonna be there for 75 years.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_06: Those bricks they stand, they last.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_06: You're drinking the water that your employees drink.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_06: You go to the same church, you meet the people, you take care of them.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_06: And so there were schools, there were health facilities, there were play and children's care cities, there were sports fields.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_06: GE after the war was advertising how much it paid people and how it shared the wealth before you know Jack Wells took over and uh took it in a very different direction.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_06: This is how companies used to be part of society.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_06: So all we're predicating is to go back to that, and the leader that understands that, of course, has to be creative and has to be commercial, but also has to be empathetic, and that's what we call the Da Vinci quality.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_04: Marketing is a cost center, and I firmly believe marketing is not a cost center because marketing decides in terms and the way things are moving.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_04: I'll I'll just uh for 30 seconds I'll digress in terms of why do I say so.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_04: See, life of consumer, life of customer, and life of marketers, these three have been hugely impacted in the last two years of COVID.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_04: What you used to do, what we used to think, and what we used to act before was very, very different to what we do today.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_04: People use a work called BC, which is before Christ.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_04: No, it is not before Christ, before COVID.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_04: The first and most of the you have to be an agile marketer, and that's the first learning that that COVID and last year.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_04: You can't be making a plan for two years, and then you know that this two-year plan is just a theoretical exercise and it will not be implemented.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_04: You have to be always on the toes, and you should have that flexibility to move the way the consumer consumer and the macroeconomic situation move.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_04: Interdependently, that that is very important today.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_04: You just can't have a silo working within marketing or outside marketing within the organization that that's most important.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_04: Last but not the least, which is actually gives you a right matrix or right conversation to drive it within the leadership of the management, is accountability.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_04: Is marketing keeping the hand to the heart can take that particular accountability saying, Hey, yes, this is the objective, I am ready to take this particular accountability of what I need to deliver.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_04: Please don't caveat marketing only in terms of this is the financial ROI and please deliver that.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_04: Let marketing present their own particular matrix that you want to and measure the matrix, get in which is relevant for marketing.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_04: Three T's, which is trust, transparency, and technology.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_04: The trust within the organization, within the marketing team that we have to collaborately, interdependently deliver, transparency with your particular customer because customer is 500 steps ahead that you actually think.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_04: But because what most of the marketers do is to fail to understand and accept that customer is much more smart, customers do much more things, and the most important to connect these particular things is technology.
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_04: Marketing will only get a seat when you actually stand up and say, This is what I am accountable for, and please measure me, this is what for which I am accountable, rather just one particular size which actually is trying to measure everything on the entire uh table.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_04: Marketing should raise the hand first and say, Hey, please measure me on these point parameters.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_04: I am ready to get measured.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_04: If this is the objective, I'm ready to contribute, and that is what I really want to measure in the entire uh proposition that you're actually trying to do, and that will actually show an impact on business, and that will actually show an impact on brand if you measure the right measurement that you need to bring for.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_03: So when it comes to semiotics, so what I shared so far was more social semiotics.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_03: There's another substream of semiotics called visual semiotics where you look at specific things like color, shape, font, layout.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_03: So all the visual design features of anything is dismantled and looked at the effects of each design are looked at, what it means.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, I'm aware that a lot of qualitative uh research happens in that space where they do a walkthrough where the user is using it and then they kind of discuss and understand the entire experience.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_03: For example, colour psychology.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_03: So colour generally we say red and blue, but actually colour has three properties, right?
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_03: Hue, saturation, lightness.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_03: Like my thesis was about what empty space means the cultures in a design.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_03: So cluttered versus spaced out design, high versus low saturation colour.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_03: So these are more as in it's a more mechanical way of looking at uh things, but visual semiotics is does that, like you break it into specific uh design features, not just visual, it also includes sound symbolism.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_09: Uh some folks might be familiar with the old TV series Mad Men.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_09: Uh when we when it was all about the product, it was all about the message.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_09: Uh there was very we didn't have the electron microscope of the customer.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_09: And so marketing was all about uh branding and imagery, and really that was it was great.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_09: That's what really made marketing a powerful force.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_09: But unfortunately, uh to a large extent, we're still using the same kinds of practices as we were using back then.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_09: It's just, you know, old habits die hard.
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_09: Uh, and it's been hard for a lot of the data stuff to kind of find its way into marketing.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_09: So number one is tradition, and I guess related to that, number two would be organizational structure, that there's kind of nobody in the organization is going to take responsibility for that electron microscope of the customer.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_09: The marketing people might, but even for them, it's often going to take a backseat to branding and customer experience and and and all that sort of stuff.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_09: So the idea of customers being assets just doesn't really show up anywhere.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_09: To the extent the conversation comes up at all, it's dismissed as some kind of intangible asset, and and you can't really measure it or manage it.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_09: So we would never put customer information uh on, let's say, our uh on our on our 10 Q's and other auditable statements.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_09: So I think that that's a big uh issue right there.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_09: So a variety of different reasons uh why it's been hard to get the customer data to break through.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_09: And that's the mission that I'm on, is to try to convince people that internally it can help us drive and call attention to more effective decisions.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_09: And externally, it's a better way to gauge what this company is doing, um, what its future looks like, and what it's actually worth, customer-based corporate valuation.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: Just to give you a little bit of backstory, the company I'm working for is Anciera.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we are actually a hundred-year-old company.
• 11:22
  SPEAKER_02: You know, it started in 1919.
• 11:25
  SPEAKER_02: Um primarily, you know, when the company was started, it was all about, you know, the advertisements were placed in the newspapers.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_02: And then later on, they improvised on that and said, hey, you know, I'm gonna go to the competition and say, if an automotive company is placing an ad, I'm going to the competition and say, hey, your competition is actually placing this ad.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_02: What are you doing about it?
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_02: So then it started improvising its mass communication, right?
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_02: So it started with that, and then they started talking about no, I don't think this one size really fits all, right?
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: So we need to figure out you know what is really applicable to a specific set of audience.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_02: It started with database marketing, so let's collect all this, you know, information about people who are interested in my product, or you know, then you know, people who called, people who uh went to the store and bought some things.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_02: Where we are today, I mean, just to make the long story short, here from mass communication to the communication of one, right?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_02: So a segment of one.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_02: So every individual has to be communicated to exactly the needs of you know what they are looking for at the right time, right?
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_02: So if you look at uh you know a TikTok ad today, you know, TikTok will show a particular product or you know, address or whatever it is, you know, in the in the in that short video, but at the same time there is a a phone icon, so there's a call-in number, and then there is a you know email icon, so you can immediately hey I like this dress, so you can immediately call and place an order for that, right?
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_02: So that's how it has become so personalized to the core, right?
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_02: So that's uh you know the the trend we are seeing is it's just technology is just proliferating and supporting uh merities of thinking uh in terms of you know personalizing to the core.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_05: I walked past a bank the other day and they have two digital screens, one located uh facing outside the bank using the uh glass door that they have, and the other one was inside the bank, and both of them were running the same content.
• 13:39
  SPEAKER_05: So I just stood by and I counted the number of content pieces running, and it was about 16 pieces of content.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_05: So I called the CMO who happened, you know, whom I happened to know, and I said, Listen, you run 16 pieces of content on what I would call as a walk past audience and a sit-down audience.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_05: You're running the same promo in every branch.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_05: What if you brought one small location awareness which said the coffee outlet is in the third floor of this building?
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_05: Right?
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_05: Now suddenly you're changing the game in terms of the experiential content, which is instinctively what they do on a website.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_05: If you hit the website from Goa, they would give you a slightly different piece of content, whereas if you hit it from Delhi, they would give you a different piece of content, but they've not brought that thinking into their own media.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_05: So I think that is first party data, owned media, and eventually then you'll start looking at it as an offer.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: Marriott wanted to be uh in in back in early 2000s, uh in the internet was really expanding.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_01: They were not yet online, and uh companies like Travelosity, um, Expedia were already there, right?
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: They were booking travel and so on.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: So they were going to um Marriott and saying, hey, so many travelers are coming to our site and they're booking your hotels through us, so you need to pay us uh uh the commission that you pay to a travel agent, right?
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden, you know, this if you're the CEO of uh uh Marriott, you're shocked and says, Hey, uh, why should I pay you, right?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_01: Because I don't even have an agreement with you, you're not my distributor, you're not my travel agency, and so on.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: And initial fear, the the CEO of Marriott was fearing that once people go online, they can actually switch uh in a jiffy because you know it just needs a click to go from Marriott to Hilton or Hyatt and so on.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: Once they find a lower price, so it'll become a flea market, right?
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: People will start going back, and then their satisfaction will be lowered and they will not be loyal anymore, and so on.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: So we were also apprehensive we might get some findings that are not very pleasant for the uh companies, right?
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_01: But to our surprise, what we found was people who actually started to use online to choose at that time mostly desktop and laptop, now increasingly mobile, they tended to become they're more satisfied of the experience if if their booking experience was you know frictionless and uh flawless in terms of no errors and so on.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then post-satisfaction, you know, they have to stay at the hotel, the service matters there.
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_01: And then they are more loyal, consequently.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_01: And we were scratching our heads and saying, how is it possible, right?
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: Here's a CEO who believes that you know it could be devastating for the price sensitivity loyalty.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: And we also found that they're less price sensitive.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_01: And if the experience is frictionless and flawless, they tend to like it.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: And then it becomes a sticky experience, right?
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: Now I can repeat this.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I can you know do a reorder and so on.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: And at the same time, online uh allowed hotels and uh to really showcase the property, right?
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_01: Before that, you know, you could call an 800 number of Hilton, Hyatt, um, and Marriott and just you know go on on the brand reputation alone.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: You want to know how the property looks and so on.
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_01: Now you can showcase that Marriott could come up with 3D uh views of that, which we are very familiar with the used to now, right?
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_01: We also find some segments are want to be primarily online, primarily offline, some of them balanced.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and and so we have to uh engage with them differently.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: If you're a service provider or a retailer, uh we have to understand their needs better and try to uh satisfy them and delight them in these different channels, and that's really the uh lesson for um marketers.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_07: So I think you touched upon something very interesting, which is the notion of experience.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_07: Uh so as a product manager, how should you be thinking about product experience or what encapsulates product experience?
• 17:59
  SPEAKER_08: Well, it starts with your out-of-box experience, uh, turning the thing on, being able to do something useful with it quickly, as opposed to uh I keep hate to keep beating on Microsoft, but I enjoy it.
• 18:14
  SPEAKER_08: Um turning on, you know, um a Microsoft Office uh product, and it says, uh by the way, you're on a deadline, and you're gonna get fired if you don't get that spreadsheet to your boss in 30 minutes.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_08: Microsoft out of its sheer um um I don't know what you call it, uh hatred for the customer requires you to update the software before you can do any real work.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_08: Rather than saying, hey, would you like to do it now or do it later?
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_08: Uh you notice Apple does that when you get an operating system update.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_08: It asks you, do you want to do it now or do you want to do it tonight when you're hopefully you're sleeping?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_08: Um so that lack of consideration of what the uh uh customer wants to do.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_08: Uh I'll give you another example.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_08: Uh back in 2018, I went to Singapore uh to give a speech at a product management uh festival, and then Cisco, who is my number one client worldwide, asked me to come to Bangalore and train about 20, 25 product managers.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_08: So I needed uh to get to Bangalore from um uh Singapore.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_08: Well that sounds pretty simple, but there's a lot of decisions that have to be made.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_08: Uh, what where what mode of transportation do I want to use from the Singapore hotel to the airport?
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_08: Because in Singapore you can take a taxi, you can take an Uber, you can take a uh shuttle, you can take the trade.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_08: Um I figured all that out, got to the airport, walked into the terminal.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_08: If you've ever been to the Singapore airport, it's slightly larger than Manhattan, and uh you have no idea where to go.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_08: And you're looking at the signs, and they got arrows pointing all over the place.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_08: Uh reminded me of Heathrow of about 10 years ago.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_08: My phone has an app on it called TripInt, and it knew at what time I needed to get to the airport and what flight I needed to get on and what airline.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_08: My phone also has GPS.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_08: My phone knew where I was at and knows from the maps uh inside the airport of which counter to go to.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_08: Why couldn't my phone wake up and just have a little arrow that says go over here?
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_08: Uh and I'll take you, you know, five minutes to walk there or whatever it may be.
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_08: So I mentioned that when I uh gave a talk at Samsung.
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_08: So the V VP of product management says, Wouldn't someone feel kind of weird uh if their phone woke up and all of a sudden sudden giving them directions?
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_08: I said, No, not if the phone asks permission first, which is a notion that uh Samsung and uh uh uh Microsoft for years don't know.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_08: If you ask permission, it's perfectly okay uh for Siri to tell you where to go.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_08: Uh sometimes some products I get, I wonder if the uh senior executive staff ever bothered to try to use the product uh or any of the uh if they bothered to focus at all on uh user experience.
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_08: And again, those companies that do tend to thrive, uh thrive.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_08: Those companies that don't uh tend to go out of business.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening to this episode.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_00: For selected links and detailed show notes, visit www.contramines.com slash blog.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Follow Contramines on social media and let us know who you would like to see next on the podcast.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_00: If you're listening to Contramines on Apple Podcasts, do share your comments and give us a rating.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: We are keen to know what you're thinking.
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_00: Contramines is also on YouTube.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: If you are listening to the podcast on YouTube, hit the subscribe button and stay up to date on all our releases.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening and stay safe.