Satish Rajan, Group Chief Marketing Officer at Buzzworks, writes on invitation and exclusively for our special series BRIEF24.
Learnings and achievements from 2023; Inspiration for 2024
In Marketing, digital took off during COVID and set a new baseline, that played out in 2023. People have become more aware of the impact of technology on mental health, while still carefully leveraging technology for specific use cases.
This means that spray and pray marketing is not working, and high-budget marketing like ATL and Big format events have very limited success. Marketers have to think deeper, analyse a lot of data, while keeping the human at the center of their planning, to create nuanced and targeted campaigns that work, especially in the B2B segment.
Yet, while people are shunning too much social media and limiting doom-scrolling, platforms like LinkedIn have become more sticky and valuable to both the audience and the marketers.
Companies that took the slow route to providing true connections and experiences, even through COVID-19, are reaping the benefits now, while companies who bet too big in the digital boom lasting forever are back to square one.
My year-end analysis of 2023: One key concern is the new generation struggling with too much input, stimulus, and information, without the experience or the feelings quite to understand and navigate adult life. Parents need to be extra careful and conscious as they prepare their kids for life, and productivity, and companies need to humanize expectations from young professionals.
Success stories from 2023: While the post-COVID world is different from the time before, it is mostly a change internal to people. Maybe it was the wake-up call we all needed to connect more in person. This has led to a lot of new startups trying to connect people and services, beyond only data-based products.
Even though, in staffing and recruitment, finding the right person with the right skill at the right time remains a moving target, the means of hiring and retaining candidates are changing.
The young workforce wants continuous learning and a balanced workload. The plenty of opportunities have put the onus on the organization to listen and engage with their workforce to reduce attrition and keep replacement, training, and opportunity lost costs.
Learnings and realizations from 2023: I will speak about insights and discoveries from my journey in marketing over the past 20 years. In marketing, nothing stays the same for too long, and nothing works forever. What I did at the start of my career, like events, is not the best use of the marketing budget anymore.
A good marketer needs to constantly evolve, and keep learning and experimenting. Speak when others are quiet, and be subliminal when others are shouting to attract customers. Understanding human behaviour has hence been a cornerstone of my professional success and growth.
2023 highlights and takeaways: Working from home permanently doesn’t work. Return-to-office is better but Hybrid with a trust-based and outcome-oriented culture seems to be working the best in these years.
Personally, I have slowed down, maybe due to the COVID disruption or might be just age. I like to do deep work over quantum and try to spend more time with my family. My boundaries between work and home have also firmed up more because working non-stop is not for humans.
Automation and AI are good things in this regard and I am watching curiously what develops from these to free us from our industrial age binds.
Looking at 2024: Staffing and Recruitment are only going to become more competitive, at least till the pool of skilled workforce is expanded with vocational training and apprenticeship programs.
The younger workforce wants to learn and organizations cannot expect ready-to-run resources. It will be important for companies to invest in coaching and grooming a talent pipeline, and take the help of specialized partners to be able to stay competitive in their core competence.
Some advice: Be open to learning and experimenting. The world is changing fast, we can keep pace as long as we pace ourselves. To be a good marketer, we should be open to looking around us at humans, as much as, if not more than, the data that we analyse on screens.
The connection between man and his behavior is being rediscovered through technology, and as marketers, we need to leverage this new found appreciation of connections to create more authentic and engaging content and assets.
After all, there are no B2B, B2C or even B2B2C business models. These are just artificial categories around businesses that are effectively just plain simple H2H or Human-to-human conversations.
My personal favorites from 2023
A book I liked in 2023: Rich Dad, Poor Dad is a book I give a lot of credit to for my thinking and attitude. It is not a book about just money, though that is a key part of it. The key thing I learned from this simply written book was to think differently and thoroughly.
Then as Snowball, the biography of Warren Buffet, says, buy land when there is blood on the streets, we can learn to regulate our emotions and make better decisions from a logical point of view. This way, Rich Dad, Poor Dad pushed me to not take anything at face value, to trust but verify, to look at a problem from all angles, and to keep trying till something works.
Sometimes the simplest things work while we are looking for an amazing one. Staying grounded and knowing the difference between income and wealth, not just in money, but also in education, work, family, and life in general, is very important to be truly free.
My 2023 hobby-career connection: I love playing video games on a PC and for that, I assemble my desktops, which has given me a creative and technical bend of mind, especially for problem-solving through curiosity and tenacity.
I also love long road trips that have helped me develop a sense of organisation and structure to be more efficient. If I had 10 hours to cut a tree, I would try to spend 9 in sharpening the axe, and truly believe that most challenges can be overcome by planning and responsiveness.