A day in the life of a marketing leader

Seth Godin once said, “Marketing is no longer about the stuff you make but about the stories you tell.”

How true is that today?

Vedanarayanan Vedantham (Veda), Marketing Leader at Microsoft, may answer it well.

Veda’s biggest learning in Marketing is that successful marketers even today do live up to Seth Godin’s quote.

Here’s how:

What pages of History have in store?
Before the advent of the digital world, Marketing was supposed to be a completely creative process. Then came the arrival of the number crunchers in Marketing. Their expertise involved counting every click. Every impression. Today, the best marketers represent a new breed, one that combines the best of both these disparate worlds. And hence today, marketers need to display a unique combination of left and right brain thinking.

Veda’s career journey has seen him in leadership roles in multiple disciplines from product to digital. But, Marketing, for him, was a sheer chance initially.

According to him, in today’s technology-first marketing roles, the role of a Marketing Leader involves about 60-70% work on analysis and data, about 20-30% on creative challenges and about 10-15% on people challenges.

A large part of Veda's working day involves helping evangelize marketing with business leaders, many of whom may not have an in-depth understanding of Marketing. There’s deep selling skills involved in this. According to him, it is a skill that Marketers need to be good at and yet a skill which is often quite under-rated. This ensures they can get the right buy-in for their ideas and the right budget allocations. What that means in terms of work is to prepare detailed business cases that can articulate the business value for marketing actions driving success.

Another key chunk of Veda’s workday mornings involves regular management reviews. These reviews deal with the efficacy of marketing campaigns and marketing efforts. A typical meeting involves specific questions on minute details of a campaign. A marketing leader needs to be comfortable with people questioning him/her/them. The questions could be around the return on investment given that in most organizations marketing is a large cash outlay and it is sometimes difficult to show tangible results. The questions can come from the Finance team, the business teams and the management teams. For a Marketing Leader, facing and answering such questions, their emotional quotient muscle needs to be resilient.

Marketers also need to build functional domain skills, specially at the early stages of their careers. For young marketers, Veda shares some of the growing niches in digital marketing that could make for rewarding careers. These could range from Influencer marketing to Digital Public Relations to Mobile Marketing and B2B SaaS Marketing. The other evergreen skill in Marketing that is in demand today is search engine optimization.

Moreover, there is a differentiation in marketing for business to consumer vs. business to business (B2C vs. B2B). Veda takes a sports metaphor to explain the difference. In B2C, Marketing is like a T20 Game. There’s action, paranoia and dashboards everyday. In B2B, on the other hand, the role that Marketing plays is more like a test match. It enables the cover fire to keep driving more sales.

With the rapid changes in the world of Marketing, another key component of Veda’s time involves being a visiting professor at various prestigious institutes. Through these lectures, he helps young students to get a practical and clear view of the road ahead in Marketing.