Reflections on what it means to be a marketer in the world today

It’s been a week since Discovery Limited?received the Marketing Organisation of the Year Award at the 2022?Marketing Achievement Awards and I’m still absorbing what a momentous night it was for us. The #DiscoveryBank team received the Kantar Excellence in Brand Positioning Award for “The Future of Banking. Now.” campaign, #DiscoveryInsure won the?Telkom Excellence in Resourceful Marketing Award for supporting local restaurants during the pandemic with the Restaurant ReDiscovery campaign, and I received the Marketer of the Year Award.

My personal award was a humbling and valued acknowledgement of 22 years of working across phenomenal brands – among them Coca-Cola, ExxonMobil, Vodacom, Vodafone, Standard Bank and FNB. When I look back on these years, it’s clear that marketing has evolved exponentially since I started out as a young marketer. I was fortunate throughout my career to be mentored and inspired by great leaders, among them Amanda Manchia, Godfrey Motsa, Marcel Willems, Sharon Keith, Enzo Scarcella, Michael Portz, Cindy Nedobity, Jan Holzberg, Marco Gagiano, Jacqui Carnelley, Sarah-Anne Orphanides, Faye Mfikwe, Raj Makanjee and many others.

That said, I am grateful to have been given the platform and opportunity to amplify Discovery’s core purpose of making people healthier and enhancing and protecting their lives. For this, I must thank Adrian Gore, Hylton Kallner, the wider Discovery leadership team, and each and every colleague at Discovery for trusting me and my team with this most valuable of brands. We value the freedom you’ve given us to explore our science and vocation – to make magic happen. I continue to learn and be inspired by you every day.

The occasion has also reminded me to pause and reflect on what it means to be a marketer in the world today:

1.? Find your purpose and make it count. Today, brands have a far greater impact on the world than ever before. Brands can make change happen. Brands must be responsible and responsive. Importantly, brands should have purpose. Deliver on your purpose and everything else will follow.

Empathy and authentic concern for those in our care is a model for good marketing. We simply have no choice but to focus on what is real, right, and of greatest need for the people we serve. This goes for both our professional and personal experiences. ?

2.? Surround yourself with the best. Working with a diverse team with complementary skills liberates creativity and excellence. I’m privileged to have worked with some of the brightest minds globally – modern marketers and business leaders who are leveraging data, analytical insights, creativity, boldness and brilliance to achieve outstanding results. ?

3. Customer. Customer. Customer. This is a core value that we hold at Discovery and while this adage has always been true, the Chief Marketing Officer’s role in ensuring the customer is at the heart of everything we do has evolved. Beyond understanding the customer and having an in-depth appreciation of their needs, the CMO of today needs to ensure that everything that the company does is intuitive for the customer – from the purchasing experience to the use of a product, the servicing thereof and even the ease at which the customer can stop doing business with us. It is this customer-centricity that builds brand affinity, respect and love, so that even when you get it wrong – and you will – your customer will be much more forgiving.

4. Beware of the incumbency risk. There is a real risk when a business grows to the extent that it “owns the market”. Complacency and largesse can creep in and it is easy for people to lose their hunger and ambition. I’ve learned that the only way to overcome the incumbency risk is to continually disrupt your own business in pursuit of being the best and setting the standard for others to aspire to, creating new markets, new categories and new businesses through a strong cadence of innovation.

5.? Stay with the problem longer. It’s easy to jump into solution-mode whenever we are presented with a challenge. There is virtue in staying with the problem longer to implicitly understand what you are solving for and the best way to do it. In my experience, this simple pause has delivered us from mediocrity to achieving brilliance.

I am grateful for the accolade from an industry that I love, and I would like to thank the Marketing Association of South Africa for promoting world-class standards in the marketing profession. Going forward, my goal is to inspire more marketers to realise how powerful your role is, and how you can truly be a force for good. I am committing to elevating the industry in the 12 months ahead of the next MAAs and I will share the initiatives we have in mind as the year progresses.?