The era of Big M Marketing | HT Brand Leadership Series

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The era of Big M Marketing

  • Rajesh Kumar Jindal
  • April 01, 2019

This is the era of hypergrowth brands—the market today is teeming with great opportunities. It also has its own set of challenges. There has been a fundamental shift in the way B2B brand-building communication is driven and how products are adopted by consumers. And, this has implications both for businesses and marketing techniques.

B2B products are getting democratized and demand is increasingly driven by users instead of traditional C-suite buyers alone. Top-down marketing is no longer adequate—understanding and building a bottoms-up marketing engine is critical to reaping rewards. We call this ‘Big M Marketing’—where marketers have to be fast, be at the forefront, and be very hands-on.

The complexity of building a full top-down engine and long chains of access, where marketers have to build an interface with sales, pre-sales, and other teams to interact with customers, comes with the risk of making one too slow and lose the first-mover advantage and even relevance.

Downstream users of technology have a strong role in mooting ideas and championing adoption of disruptive solutions. Also, as more and more products move to subscription-based service models, the voice of users and their experiences will play an important role in shaping the renewability decision year on year.

A brand’s presence extends across social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Quora. We can see many examples where meet-ups, community forums, and user reviews have sparked interest and led to maverick experiments—experiments that became the fulcrum of commercial licensing and wide-scale adoption by client organizations.

A tech-savvy millennial is a marketer’s best friend today. Every employee has a role to play in evangelizing a company’s offerings in their networks. And that’s how this movement grows organically and authentically, eventually resonating all the way to the boardroom.

It is for this reason that organisations are shifting focus to collaborative and participative marketing strategies, thereby turning users, customers, and partners to brand advocates. Digital and a more real-time, consumer centric-approach to business gives marketers agility, scalability, and route to the buyer’s wallet.

At the same time, the need for top-down marketing cannot be underplayed. It is critical to build thought leadership with influencers and persuade C-level decision makers to raise technology decisions at the board level. As Trout & Ries say in their book Bottom-up Marketing, tactics are “competitive mental angles” and strategies “coherent marketing directions”. We believe that leveraging new technologies is a critical board-level agenda today—leaders have to understand and prioritize how new technologies can help them transform their businesses and provide them an edge over their competitors.

With an ‘automation-first’ approach catching on, coupled with the enthusiastic voices of a growing number of users, influencers, and community advocates, UiPath’s CEO and Co-founder Daniel Dines’ vision for automation—A robot for every person—seems not too far in the future.

Rajesh Kumar
B2B Marketing Leader | Startup Mentor | Board Advisor

Rajesh is currently Vice President & Head of Marketing (India Region) for UiPath, where he is responsible for establishing brand leadership and driving field marketing. His career as a marketing leader mirrors the growth and evolution of the technology sector in India and the Asia Pacific. For nearly three decades, he has led marketing, sales, operations & strategy for enterprise, SMB, consumer and channel ecosystems. His last assignment was as the Head of Audience & Experiential Marketing for SAP in the Asia, Pacific and Japan region.

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