Marketers will continue to be voice of the customer in an organisation: Ravi Santhanam

The role of marketers and CMOs is evolving, and the pandemic has brought about several changes in the traditional role of marketing. Delivering the opening keynote address at CMO’s Charcha, Adgully’s premier event for marketing leaders, Ravi Santhanam, CMO, Head - Corporate Communications, Head - Liability Products & Managed Programs, HDFC Bank, turned the spotlight on ‘Revenue Marketing’.

Santhanam commenced his address by speaking about the traditional role of the marketer and added that in simpler English, revenue marketing could be called the new sales. He said, “Marketers have been brand custodians and one of the important roles has been bringing resilience in terms of building brands.”

Even as the marketer’s traditional role evolves, the marketer will continue to be the voice of the customer in the organisation. “Depending on which organisation you work for, this voice of the customer becomes extremely centric to make sure that we as marketers bring an unbridled version of the truth from the consumer’s side and put it on the table for us to all make a correct decision in favour of the customer,” Santhanam said.

He further said, “We are also supposed to do a lot of work to create awareness and consideration, as well as create a pull for the product – that has been the traditional marketer’s role.”

And how did this role get measured? “Most of the people had some brand metrics to start with,” he said, adding that some people measured share of voice, share of expenditure in terms of their spends, some people started looking at top box consideration, what is the awareness for the brand and all these things people measured and most of the organisational colleagues knew what we did. “But very few people exactly knew how we influence the final business outcome,” he added.

Speaking about the accelerated transition to digital, Santhanam pointed out that digital adoption had started happing quite a few years before we were struck by the global pandemic. “With the advent of digital, one thing which increased is, what I call, measurability of the impact that we deliver. The digital medium created a lot of transparency so that people came to know what we exactly delivered, and for people like us, we clearly started looking at what is the segmentation that we can do. Can I reach these customers in a better manner? How did the reach increase over a period of time, knowing fully well the consumer context? Have I increased my relevance in this communication? All these things started becoming more and more visible and our work started to get much more recognised in terms of what we did.”

According to Santhanam, “For any service industry like banking or any of the new age industries that are tech-enabled, we not only have the ability today to segment and also go ahead and reach them with the right communication, you can actually complete the sale digitally. And now that you can complete the sale digitally, a new animal is born that are you ready to make sure that you are going to focus on revenue generation for the organisation. So, the new ask, in my view is – are you reaching the customer in a relevant manner? Are you helping them – in the case of HDFC Bank, for example – in making the right financial decisions? And if you do both these two well, what is the result in revenue that can be directly attributable to what we have done, and that is where it has become that marketing is the new “Revenue Sales” and it becomes extremely measurable.

These are edited excerpts from the panel discussion. For the complete conversation watch below: