Frustrated by a tone-deaf marketing head, I stormed out.
The CFO intervened, valuing my professionalism. We met with a new, diverse team & crafted a successful campaign reaching millions, exceeding ROI and boosting brand sentiment.
The clash stemmed from the marketing head’s insistence on an all-male team for a women’s product campaign focused solely on sales with insensitive humor. My expertise in this area warned of a massive PR disaster.
What had led to the heated discussions:
Their marketing head was rigid to have his team of 14 “Yes Men” and not a single woman. The product they were targeting were for women & the campaign revolved around sensitive issues related to women. I kept requesting for few women on their team since after several rounds of discussions, I realised they were clueless of how insensitive their strategies were & their thought of using cheap humor with big budgets would have been a massive PR disaster and extremely inappropriate as a marketing or ad campaign especially in Europe, or for any country for that matter.
An hour after I left that meeting, I got a call from the CFO of their company who asked me what went wrong? He said, “Ananth, I have known you for four years now. I want to hear your side of the story because I have known you to be extremely professional, too nice and polite in fact at times and very logical and rational especially when it comes to business decision making. I have tremendous respect for your sacrifices and journey as an entrepreneur.”
I spoke to him for more than an hour, and he asked me to return to their office the next day.
I entered and I had an entirely new set of people sitting in the conference room. The CFO had gone out of his way since his focus was his vision for a digital transformation in his new division for their new product launch for an entirely new demographics in Europe which was one of our key strengths.
After about two hours of discussions with his new team, we finalised, launched the platform for the new marketing strategy and few weeks ago, they shared the results from the campaign with me:
1) 4.45 Million unique users reached
2) 1.04 Million Unique users engaged with their brand across their target audience
3) 1,56,892 unique users physically visited their retail stores across their targeted locations through the omnichannel marketing initiatives. (Their target ROI given to us for this was 75,000 to 90,000 footfalls)
4) Customer acquisition cost had reduced by 19%
5) Their sales from organic marketing and organic social media activities had gone up by 34%
6) Their customer feedback, reviews, ratings, positive brand mentions and sentiment analysis scores had gone up by an average of 126% across their locations targeted
7) They mentioned that the digital marketing campaigns delivered an ROI of 189%
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Ananthanarayanan V 