Follow the leaders
What qualities do marketers need to reach the top and have the ear of the CEO? Research among some of the UK’s most senior marketers identifies the traits that separate the best from the rest and which secure a key role in shaping business strategy.
Great marketing leaders can make consumers love and buy more of their brands, influence their chief executives and ensure businesses focus ruthlessly on the customer. But what qualities make a top marketer and how do they achieve these goals?
Leadership and training consultancy Brand Learning and AstraZeneca have gone in search of the magic formula for marketing leadership, asking a range of marketers at the top of their game what it means to be a chief marketer and how they make their roles central to their companies.
Foremost, it is essential that people holding senior marketing roles are seen internally as strategic thinkers. Brand Learning founder and managing director Andy Bird says: “You can develop brilliant communication and generate demand in a one-dimensional way. But to lift it up so that you are helping to shape and drive what a company is doing, then you have to bring the entire organisation with you.”
For Bird, leadership is a combination of art and science. “It’s not just to do with vision and relationships. It’s also about a hard-nosed commitment to practical delivery, a focus on the commercial and being resilient under pressure,” he warns.
It is their focus on the consumer that enables marketers to set the agenda of the business and engage other teams, he argues. “On what basis does a marketing leader have the right to influence and drive the agenda of any business? Why would anyone in research and development or sales give the marketer the licence to do that?” By talking to other departments about the customer, rather than the marketing, answers Bird.
Tim Kaner, founder of Kancha Consulting and former director of marketing strategy office at Sony Europe, agrees, saying: “The really outstanding marketers are those who have an intuitive understanding of what customers want. They’re also able, through their influencing, leadership and coaching skills, to bring that vision to others.”
Insight into consumers is what gives marketers authority, adds Bird. “Marketers that can identify and bring to life what the business needs to do for its consumers will have greater authority and influence.”
And rather than thinking about “marketing leadership” as a concept, senior brand guardians must talk about the strategic agenda set by the consumer in order to be influential. Research that helps to build a more insightful understanding of a target market is what will help a marketer become a leader, not time spent in meetings or producing spreadsheets.
Getting the insight right is particularly important for the pharmaceuticals sector. It costs $800m to $1bn (£528m to £660m) to get a new product to market, but once the patent expires, sales can decline by 90% overnight, claims AstraZeneca director of marketing strategy, global marketing Tim Bailey. “To counteract this, you have to keep reinventing your portfolio every few years,” he says.
Bird agrees that it is marketers’ responsibility to work out what consumers want and then shape the company’s offering on that basis, rather than waste time in activities that aim to create demand for products and services that already exist.
In the case of AstraZeneca, Bailey says this is achieved by learning from marketing leaders outside the pharmaceuticals industry. Instead of thinking about what drugs could be developed next, it now looks at how it can best meet the needs of its customers, he says. “What differentiates world-class companies is a genuine culture of insightfulness. Our change of strategy is about bringing the customer into the organisation on a scale far beyond that which we’ve previously done and taking really powerful brand ideas from that,” he says.
Part of this is developing single-minded propositions for its medicines, which include oncology, neuroscience and cardiovascular drugs. “Unilever’s Helen Lewis told us that marketers want to work on a powerful brand idea and then they are much more likely to execute it in a way that is consistent. We hadn’t worked with that clarity of branding before. It was an entirely new concept that we took from the consumer goods world,” Bailey says.
While great marketers have to have technical skill, such as being able to find market opportunities, they also have a certain style in how they work. “It’s not just about what you are doing, it’s also about who you are being,” says Bird. “Leaders inspire with a vision of the future, they have courage, conviction and insight about what is possible,” he says.
Bird says that marketing leaders also need to ensure their own values and sense of purpose match the aims of the business.
“There has to be a link between what a marketing leader believes in and what the company is trying to achieve. That is when leaders are at their best, when they are trying to inspire and move the organisation to a place where it can do something they believe in,” he says.
Leaders draw their strength from a deep-seated will or purpose, says Bird. However, Nick Fell, group marketing director at alcohol company SAB Miller, warns that sometimes egos can get in the way of achieving the company’s goals. “Given a choice between a brand that is global but is executed in 15 different ways in 15 different markets and growing at 20% in all of them, and one that is executed the same way everywhere and is standing still, you’d have to be a dummy not to go for the first case,” he says.
“But it is the natural traction of global marketers to go for the commonality everywhere so they can say: ‘I did that’. There’s vanity in all managers – maybe in marketing people more than most – and that’s one of their downfalls.”
Great marketers need to be able to leave their egos behind and create genuine value for consumers as well as for the business, and to connect measurement of consumer attitudes and behaviour with measurement of business performance, says Bird.
“It’s quite easy to create value for consumers in the short term – you can just cut prices or improve product quality – but that might undermine the commercial viability of the business. Equally, you can do the opposite and create value for the business, but then you’ll lose customers as they will get a better deal elsewhere. So finding ways to create value for consumers in ways that will also generate commercial value for the company is what it’s all about,” he explains.
Having a firm grasp on the figures is another way to gain the attention of the chief executive. It is vital that marketers balance their intuitive side with a focus on the numbers, the margins, and the delivery of results.
Bird says: “If a marketer can excite a CEO with a vision of where growth will come from and the commercial opportunity associated with it, then he or she will build influence and connection with the senior members of the company.”
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