Inspiring change: Connecting brands to people through innovation, personalization and information

A few months ago, I was fortunate enough to take part in a conference that included a fantastic presentation by the Chief Marketing Officer of the Coca-Cola Company for North America. While she was addressing an assembled group of Microsoft CMOs from around the world, it hit me: this was how my own journey began.

I thought back to the late 1980s: as a high school student from a small town in southwestern Ontario, I joined my class trip to Toronto, where we were awed by sights and sounds of the ‘big city’. The trip included a behind the scenes tour of the not-yet-officially-opened SkyDome, and then to the offices of one of the largest advertising agencies in Canada.  

Innovation must be at the forefront of how you’re reaching and connecting with your audience.

We were young kids learning about the world of big-time marketing. At the SkyDome, they showed us the marvels of the world’s first fully-retractable roofed multi-purpose stadium – an incredible feat of engineering at the time. Then the executives at the ad agency showed us the ins and outs of how they promoted one of the most iconic brands on their client roster: Coca-Cola.

The SkyDome was certainly impressive – this was the heyday of Blue Jays-mania – but I could have spent all day at the ad agency. I was engrossed by the thinking and the creative work that was all ultimately focused on a single goal: inspiring people to think differently about the brand. It wasn’t about a carbonated soft drink. It was about joy.

And really, as marketers, isn’t that the essence of what we do? Our mission is to inspire people to think differently about our brands – whatever they may be – and to change consumer behavior as a result?

I have been Microsoft Canada’s Chief Marketing Officer since September of 2011, but I have been with the company since the beginning my professional career – a rarity in this field.

I started as a co-op student when I was studying at the University of Waterloo, and was fortunate enough to have been selected for a role on Microsoft’s Windows 95 launch team. I watched, in amazement, as a team of incredibly creative people – who seemed to be constantly told that what they wanted to do was not possible – pursue their goals relentlessly, and ultimately succeeded in achieving the seemingly impossible: the unprecedented move of draping the CN Tower with banners proclaiming the launch of our groundbreaking operating system.

I was later part of the team that launched Hotmail, Messenger (remember that sound!) and MSN in Canada. These launches were a major milestone for us as we embraced the power of the internet during the height of the dot-com boom. And as part of the team that brought these products to life in Canada, I could see that this was a defining moment, not only us as a company but for the tech industry at large.

Today, as CMO, I am experiencing that feeling all over again. Microsoft is continuing its evolution – some might call it a revolution – from a software company, into a devices and services company. It is a defining moment for us.

For me, as chief marketer, it’s not only an exhilarating time but a somewhat challenging one as well. Microsoft is going through a truly phenomenal transformation. And yet, as we chart a new course, I remain as committed as ever to what I call the three P’s of marketing – core principles, upon which I rely to guide my team along the way:

• Pioneering: Innovation must be at the forefront of how you’re reaching and connecting with your audience. In order to breakthrough, you have to meet your customers where they live, work and play, in fresh and unique ways with timely and relevant advertising. And today there are more ways to do this than ever before. At Microsoft we enable this by providing advertisers with the opportunity to engage with their customers on platforms they trust – such as MSN, Xbox, Skype, and Bing. There are countless innovative marketing executions that can be done through these services, which in many cases, go across three screens. Marketing innovation at its best.

• Personalizing: The customer must always be at the heart of everything you do. It’s very easy for marketers to get caught up in the wonders of their company’s products or services – but at the end of the day it’s about customer-centricity.  It is critical to understand your customer’s unique needs and how your products and/or services align to those needs. And it is critical to engage with your customers in a way that demonstrates this understanding.  Tools like Microsoft Dynamics CRM allow you to do just that.  Through powerful behavioural and marketing analytics, you can gain insights that allow you to better connect with your customers with the right message, at the right time.

• Performing:  Marketing needs to drive results. Knowing what works allows you increase the return on investment (ROI) from your campaigns. It gives you the power to make better informed decisions and drive increased efficiency and effectiveness in your marketing.  MarketingPilot, our campaign management solution, gives you the power to automate, execute, and monitor campaigns across all channels - including traditional, online and social media. Campaign budgets, costs, performance and ROI can be tracked accurately, and email marketing and lead generation campaigns can be executed with ease. So you can monitor the performance of your investments.

Sometimes the best marketing approaches start off as the craziest ones. That’s why I’m very pleased that we have just launched the Microsoft Canada Marketing Innovation Fund, an in-house program created to encourage the best in off-the-grid thinking within our marketing team. It’s a relatively small pot of money, but it’s there to support those wonderfully crazy ideas that might not have received funding otherwise – “never been tried before, don’t know if it’s even going to work, just needs a few bucks to get it going” – which could turn out to be the next big marketing breakthrough.

I’ll admit, I thought some of those late 80s Coca-Cola creative concepts were pretty ‘out-there’ too – but they sparked in me a passion for the marketing discipline that has driven me throughout my entire career. And I owe those small-town high school teachers who decided to bus a load of high school kids into the big city a huge, huge thank you.

The customer must always be at the heart of everything you do.

image courtesy of resources.hydrotechusa.com