My Best Marketing Tips #15: GSK South East Asia & Taiwan / Ashish Porwal / Head of Insights & Analytics
Sometimes a “brand doctor” trying to find out why investment isn’t bringing in ROI, sometimes a “strategy guy” and sometimes an analyst supporting pricing decisions, Ashish Porwal wears many hats in his role at GSK. He looks after a multitude of brands from Voltarol to Sensodyne, across a very diverse market, and he relies on a good understanding of data to do so.
Ashish thinks of marketing data analytics as “peeling an onion” – delving deeper into every data set to understand its origins. Ultimately, a lot of data remains the same, but platforms change, so it’s important to dig beneath the surface of shiny new ideas and concepts and ask the right questions.
What would be your best marketing tip?
One of my first bosses told me: “More often than not, people have the right intentions… If somebody is in conflict with your idea, make a genuine effort to appreciate and understand their constraints and motivations.”
This always leads to closer collaboration and better results for everyone in the business.
How have you put this marketing tip to good use?
I have so many examples of this! Working in marketing analytics, I was once evaluating the ROI for some marketing investments, which appeared low. Every time I reported this to the relevant team, they wouldn’t trust it and think my data was wrong. In my mind, I knew the data was right but there was a clear conflict. Were they not accepting it out of principle?
In fact, it turned out that the department was not against my concept of ROI but trying to safeguard their own budgets. So, instead of talking about cutting down investments, I started looking at re-directing some of them, for example from TV ads to digital. This is a very different conversation that taught me to understand the reasons for low ROI and speak to the team, asking questions.
You need to always discuss these data insights as a team. You can’t achieve everything on your own, there are teams for a reason.
What marketing tips does the industry need most right now?
We need to start seeing through the glare of the shiny new object. Just because some data or some machine learning output shows something with authority, it doesn’t mean it’s right. Marketers should delve deeper and look “beyond the packaging.”
For example, imagine the ROI question above told from the perspective of a machine learning model showing that investments are incorrectly made. You can accept it because it’s from a new and fancy model, or you can delve deeper and ask the relevant questions to see if the model is taking all the data into account. Does it know that we’re working with an emerging brand, for example? Or that the investment in TV ads is justified because the competition is leading in that area and, without a presence, we’d be left behind completely?
These are the onions you have to peel to delve deeper and get to the right answer.
What is the marketing tip you give most often?
For newcomers into marketing, I’d say this industry is very simple and very complex at the same time. The simple part is that it’s made up of many very specific tasks you can become very good at. The complex side lies in using all these tasks, and the variety of them that allows you to reach customers differently.
So, when you’re starting out, don’t just focus on getting very good at the one task and master it over 5-10 years. Instead, explore all the tasks you can do and be open to new assignments so you can cover the complexity of marketing in your first years. Then, in the next 20-30 years, you can decide to focus in on one skill or one activity.
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