Going forward,
there is going to be a greater emphasis
on using human capital as a
branding mechanism
This week, we get Up-Close with last year’s Digital Masters Awards runner-up for Excellence in Marketing, Adeola Ogunwole – Senior Director, Marketing & Communications at Europe’s leading digital freight forwarder, sennder.
What is your career highlight to date? How has this influenced you as a leader?
This is always the toughest question and always the most unfair - I always want to view my career in the future; that the next best opportunity is always going to be the thing that I am building to next year and beyond. I think, however, that one of the highlights retrospectively for my career has been building teams repeatedly from scratch. I think back to my role in London as VP of Marketing for an education institution, I joined an organisation that had candidly said: ‘we have never had marketing before, it has always been a sales-led business, so you are really going to have to build this from scratch’. And when you are required to do that you are scrounging as much as you can to put the function together and to swiftly show commercial value. I then encountered a similar situation at sennder; coming into the organisation there was a little bit of corporate communications, but they had never really done marketing before. So, over the past 18 months, the focus has been ‘how do I build up the structure for what marketing can be?’. For me, team building is always going to be the hallmark of my career: ‘How can I put other people in the positions required to help this overall organisation to grow?’ And then always looking to the future to see where we can take it to the next level.
“we have never had marketing before, it has always been a sales-led business, so you are really going to have to build this from scratch.”
How do you think the role of a marketing leader has changed during your career?
In this question I will probably be a bit controversial. When I grew up in marketing, I came up through FMCG and marketing in those types of organisations owns everything - you owned P&L, you owned branding, you owned go to market. I might be showing my age a bit here but if you remember the 4P’s - sometimes extended to the 6Ps - that was everything and you owned every commercial lever.
And if I take a look at where marketing is today, especially with the rise of technology, I believe there is a bit of a dichotomy that is taking place. Where marketing used to be holistic, now you think of marketing leaders within two main skillsets. You either have the brand leader that is very strong from a branding standpoint with a highly creative mindset, or you have the performance leader – focused on analytics, driving towards the bottom line. Sometimes you see organisations combining the two but what you really see people now saying is: ‘what aspect do you see them being strongest at and how can you help support them with the other aspects?’ and that to me is sort of an
anathema in terms of what marketing used to be because holistically the focus was on building a business rather than saying ‘I know tactically one skillset moreso than another’. It was really thinking about ‘how do I actually grow a business from top line and bottom line?’. So, I see this as being the biggest shift of what marketing has evolved to over this period of time.
And then because of this shift, I think you see organisations struggling because when they are actually trying to hire their marketing leaders, they are just thinking of that dichotomy – ‘are you brand or are you performance?’. Rather than saying: ‘can marketing actually be a function to actively support holistic business growth?’. From my perspective, if you think about marketing more holistically then you can see how a role can be more encompassing, rather than ‘I need someone who is really strong at SEO/paid acquisition’ or, ‘I need somebody to help deliver this brand campaign for me’.
What really cool trends have you see in your function in the last twelve months (new channels/ways of shopping; tools; measurements, etc)?
It would be remiss of me if I did not mention generative AI. If you go anywhere now, everyone is talking about ChatGPT, what is happening with DALL-E, Stable Diffusion etc. All of that happening in the background is really disrupting the bottom end of creative so you sense both this fear and excitement happening where people are saying: ‘Now that we have AI capabilities from this very rudimentary standpoint I do not need to hire someone specifically dedicated towards content creation, I now can use ChatGPT for that’. Similarly, in terms of what we used for creating websites and campaigns, could a lot of this now be outsourced from an AI perspective? I think it is really fascinating. It is going to be highly disruptive to all marketers (and beyond). I actually think it is really exciting and it is going to be beneficial because that bottom end of the spectrum was never ‘fun’ work per se from a creative standpoint; it was not strategic, but rather something that just had to get done. If you are actually then able to have technology do this work, think about what you could then repurpose in terms of strategic or creative ideation towards other aspects of marketing. I definitely think generative AI is going to be the most impactful thing over the next 12-18 months from a marketing standpoint.
What does the future of marketing look like in 2025 and beyond?
I think this one is also tricky. If I go back to my last answer of where I believe marketing currently is, I think you are going to continue to see the blurred lines of what marketing can be. Especially in tech companies where I believe marketing is being considerably impacted by sales and product, and the end result is that its own differentiation will subside a bit. For example, I think you will see a lot more of the marketing function being added to aspects of sales, i.e., when you think of demand generation. That close alignment means marketing might even be seen or categorised as sales. Additionally, the role marketing plays in product growth (i.e. the role marketing plays in understanding your customer persona and driving product adoption), I could foresee elements of marketing being siphoned off and also sitting within product.
So I think marketing leaders are going to have to start thinking even more strategically, to say ‘Where do we want to take this? Where do we see ourselves in this new landscape?’. To me, and maybe this is almost an old-fashioned notion, when we think about it, brand is that big area where I think people still do not fully grasp it, and I do not think that is an area where you are going to say ‘we need to do these high-level brand campaigns’. Rather, I think actually going the opposite direction is most logical, especially working in a B2B landscape where brand is actually your people. More than anything it is less about billboards and making a big splash; it is the day-to-day customer interactions with your team who are your brand ambassadors and champions – they are the ones who I see building a B2B brand. We still do a lot of our sales through relationships, yet I do not see many people saying: ‘our people are our biggest branding channel I have – our actual employees – so how do I make sure that is the focus?’ rather than the latest technology, rather than trying to do another campaign. From my perspective, when you are really trying to impact the bottom line (especially in a B2B business), ensure that the direct link between your product, your company and the sales person who is delivering the client message is your key focal point.
2025
The War-Time CMO – How has the current economic and market context impacted your strategy?
I am sure you are going to hear this from everyone, but yes, budgets are certainly slimmer than they used to be, and most of the focus is on the bottom line. You are going to see that everything is going to be really tied towards the bottom line (immediate performance rather than top of the funnel engagement). So I think for most war-time CMOs, it is this kind of traditional ‘going back to basics’ approach that will win and your focus is going to be on ‘focus’ itself. You are just going to have fewer programmes that you are going to be able to offer; potentially even fewer channels of engagement, and you are going to have to really ask yourself where you are going to put your energy and your time; what you are going to put your resources behind, so you can really say ‘this is going to be impactful to the business’. I would even say from a B2B specific standpoint, there is going to be a greater emphasis on using human capital as a branding mechanism rather than other channels - i.e., how do you get your employee base to help be a lever and a channel of engagement rather than external paid channel spend. Again, having to justify every single euro that you are spending, you want to make sure you can use all your organic resources.
“it is the day-to-day customer interactions with your team who are your brand ambassadors and champions – they are the ones who I see building a B2B brand.”
What would be your advice for CMOs leading through economic challenges for the first time?
I would give this advice to any future CMO, but also even when you are first coming into the marketing role at a junior level: Always tie what you are doing into direct commercial impact to the business, and this is going to be even more critical in this next 12-18 month period. Everything you do is going to be scrutinised into ‘how did that directly impact revenue or operations, or what were you trying to do holistically as an organisation?’. It is not going to be the same where you can say: ‘In three months we will see the output of this activity’. Instead, you are going to have to be able to say ‘we are making quick and direct impact because of this’, so making sure every action is tied towards the bottom line is going to be even more critical for every CMO.
At what stage do you believe a business needs to switch from acquisition-focused activity to heavier investment in brand?
I do not know if this necessarily applies to ‘stage’ of an organisation, instead I would say it applies to what ‘type’ of organisation and in what industry it operates as I believe this has a greater influence on this decision. For instance, if I was going to start a D2C brand, from day one having an equal acquisition and branding focus is paramount. There is no way you are going to be able to create a product that is not going to get eaten by Amazon unless you are creating a strong brand, as well as focussing on acquisition. And then if I switch that lens to a B2B business, we are almost never going to be at that same level of branding focus that you would see with an eCommerce, marketplace, or direct to consumer focus. You may have some branding elements but it is going to be much more of a focus on sales enablement. So, from my perspective, I think it is less of a focus on ‘stage’ and more on the actual company ‘type’ that determines where you are going to have to put your resources, and where that fine line lies.
How do you strike the right balance between acquisition activity and brand-building on an ongoing basis?
I try to then tie that into the actual metric in and of itself. Often you say to yourself ‘here are some brand metrics (i.e. awareness, consideration, NPS), and here are the performance indicators (i.e. CAC, LTV etc)’. For me, I try to strike the balance in the middle. I ask myself ‘what is your blended CAC and what does that look like holistically across all of your programmes?’ At the end of the day – and you typically see this so I will not be the first one to say this – usually your CAC can improve if you are driving a brand campaign. If you holistically pull away brand and rely solely on acquisition and what those costs look like, those tend to rise. Yet once you have a blended approach to top of funnel awareness tied to bottom of funnel activity, you see your blended CAC go down. So, for me, trying to strike the right balance, I actually put a blended approach into the metric directly to then look at it and question ‘is this actually going to help us as a business?’ and think about it more holistically, rather than trying to pull away branding versus acquisition.
“I think it is less of a focus on ‘stage’ and more on the actual company ‘type’ that determines where you are going to have to put your resources, and where that fine line lies.”
Do you believe both can be measured in similar ways?
Yes absolutely, by blending them together holistically versus maintaining the mindset of keeping them separate. However, I have always seen that the best acquisition campaigns actually had really great branding behind them. At the end of the day you cannot just put anything into an ad. You will get a lot of clicks, but you will not get a lot of conversion, so, you do still need to have a value proposition and differentiation that you are able to communicate or else your acquisition efforts really are not going to be strong. For me, therefore, it still has an overlap. I think overall measuring acquisition and branding combined is a more powerful way of thinking about it versus always trying to keep them separate.
How do you keep up to date on the latest marketing practices, tools, tech, channels? And what do you look at to keep up to date as a marketing leader or just as a leader full stop?
Again, I probably have a bit of a controversial view on this – I almost never invest a lot of my time into marketing specific information flows. I still get some of that obviously through LinkedIn (I follow certain people and there are threads you can see day-to-day), but I focus less of my attention on ‘how can I stay up to date with the latest tools and trends?’.
Instead, I think more holistically and big picture. For me, it is personally about trying to understand where society is going. Where are different markets going? I believe that is going to have much more of an impact on a business day-to-day rather than what the latest tool we can use for engagement or analysis is. Those ‘how’ questions are all helpful, but at that level I rely on my team to be on the day-to-day of knowing the latest technologies.
I of course will always have my hands in there a little bit, but I prefer to think of the ‘what’ and see the macroeconomic picture: what are the trends? What is this recession going to look like? Do we think it is going to be long or short? What are the areas where people are going to be most impacted? In my opinion, these questions are actually going to impact what I do from a value proposition standpoint. So for me, I tend to listen and read podcasts and newsletters that focus more on holistic topics so that I can form my own view of trends and market dynamics. This can include news sources that speak of finance, rather than marketing. So, things like the podcast 20VC, that is a fun one to see and get interviews from other VCs that are out there or other operators in the space. Bloomberg has a whole bunch of interesting podcasts from a finance and from a business perspective that I tend to follow. There is also a whole host of newsletters that I look at: Morning Brew for example. They even have Marketing Brew for when I need to get into the detail behind that. I am also a Substack reader, so I have a lot of niche newsletters relating to finance and business that I look at, whether it is The Generalist or The Diff. Those are the kind of things that I really get excited about to help me understand the holistic context of what is happening and evolving in business that then you can translate into the role of marketing.
