Our new blog series, #WhatMarketersDo, gives you a glimpse into the lives of marketers and provides you with useful tips on how to excel in the role. Thus, you get the latest trends and best practices firsthand from marketers in different industries.
This series has been conceived by marketers for marketers and its primary objective is to encourage sharing in the marketing community.
We’re really thankful to all the marketers who took the time to share valuable insights with us. If you’d like to contribute or know of any marketers who’d be kind enough to share their insights, please contact us at TeamSG@clickacademyasia.com.
Now, without any further delay, let’s move on to today’s post where we have interviewed Sumeet Rohatgi from Elsevier, Singapore.
1. Please tell us about your current role at Elsevier & a short summary of your career leading to this role.
Currently, I lead marketing for Elsevier Research Solutions in APAC covering major markets of Australia & New Zealand, China, Japan, Korea, South Asia, South East Asia, and Taiwan. We serve governments in providing Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) information and analytics through web-based solutions like ScienceDirect, Scopus, SciVal & Reaxys.
I started my career at Elsevier in sales and business development. After 8 years in various sales roles, I transitioned in 2008 to the APAC Regional Marketing role with the responsibility to engage the corporate segment where the target audience comprised major corporations ranging from Pharma, Chemicals, O&G, and Engineering.
2. What are the key trends in marketing that you see emerging in the next 6 months?
If customer-centricity is the north star for an organization, then ‘agility’ is like our coordinates for navigation. In the VUCA world, no insight, no data, and no research is the gold standard to follow. Every day there is a new revelation and new learning and the only way to manage it is through the nimbleness of our teams through the principles of Agile.
What will go hand in hand with an agile mindset will be the focus on the customer through ‘Customer 360’. It will be imperative for every brand to consolidate a single customer view. This single view of the customer will be our compass to navigate the VUCA world along with the agile principle of doing short sprints, learning, iterating, and then scaling up.
3. What do you think are the top 3 factors that are critical for the success of Digital Transformation?
Digital transformation is more about mindset and not just about technology. Technology is an enabler once we are ready to take action. I believe digital transformation is a transition of embracing a growth mindset, a people-first approach, and digital literacy.
A growth mindset is a persistent effort in the face of obstacles, maintaining bias for action despite ambiguity, and willingness to fail and learn from it. This is a key requirement to win in the VUCA world. By people-first, I mean ‘empathy’. We have got to be close to our customers and teams if we are moving them to higher ground. Digital literacy will be essential for our customers and teams to ensure they are willing to embrace a growth mindset and sense of empathy towards each other.
4. What advice will you give to people taking on a similar role?
My advice will be to develop learning agility and leadership skills. Learning agility makes marketers more effective in the VUCA world and leadership skills will be essential to inspire and influence colleagues and customers as businesses adapt to rapid changes.
5. Why do you think Digital Transformation sometimes fails?
Digital Transformation is not a panacea for everything that is not working well, but it is the most efficient way of fixing many of our challenges in companies. DX or Digital Transformation fails when we put too much expectation from one such switch. We forget it is a journey, not a destination. No company can ever say that they are digitally transformed for eternity. There will always be a new set of challenges that will require new digital transformation solutions.
Thus, I would recommend that digital transformation projects should have a realistic scope, plus stakeholders' expectations should be managed from the start. The gains from the digital transformation projects will be evident over some time but not instantaneously.
Thank you Sumeet for taking out time from your busy schedule to share these wonderful insights with our audience. These will be immensely helpful for budding marketers.
Wrapping Up
That is all that we have for you today. Keep a lookout for our next blog as we continue to share what marketers do. We aim to cover marketers from different countries to get global coverage on what marketers do. Feel free to reach out to us if you have any marketing inputs to share with our audience or if you know someone who’d enjoy doing that.
We’ll soon be back with insights from another marketer. Till then, stay tuned!