Marketers, here’s how to talk to your CEOs

While recent years have seen more marketers ascending to the role of CEO, the occurrence still remains fairly rare.

Great Eastern’s group chief executive officer Chris Wei is one of the rare few. Previously the executive vice-president and group chief marketing officer of American International Assurance (AIA), Wei is credited with overseeing the latter’s massive rebranding move across Asia Pacific. He was also the head of bancassurance and direct marketing for AIA.

Since he came on board Great Eastern in 2010, the company has also taken a big swerve in the direction of digital and content marketing, as well as seeing its corporate reputation rise in several studies.

Sitting down to interview him, I ask about his transition from a marketer to CEO.

“I’m probably fortunate that I am a bit of a hybrid,” says Wei, talking about his technical, financial and risk-management background as well as describing how the transition turned out to be a “non-issue”.

What it gave him was a well-rounded background in these disciplines.

“The ability to segment customer bases, demographics and such – you require a technical background to do that. It acted like a bridge to help me to do things like define certain customer segments that are actually actionable and then what you can do about it in terms of strategic marketing.”

But it’s clear Wei’s marketing background comes to the fore easily.

“I probably give our marketing people a harder time,” laughs Wei, when I ask how his background, particularly in marketing, affects his leadership strategy now.

“But it’s more on the discipline of managing the marketing function. In terms of leadership I’ve always been a fan of being fact-based. Assumptions are dangerous and you’re really taking a risk if you don’t validate.”

What makes a good CMO?

Wei obviously has a strong opinion on CMO issues. He outlines why most have difficulty getting their case across to CEOs.

“If you’re a marketer that’s always fighting for the budget to do marketing, but you cannot demonstrate a clear case on the investment for marketing and the return for business, then that is an increasingly challenging conversation.”

He says conflict occurs because advertising can be difficult to measure in terms of the return on investment for business.

“So a good CMO in my opinion isn’t just someone with a great creative skill set. He also has the organisation to ensure programmes are launched on time and that campaigns are managed with discipline. It cannot be a bottomless pit where marketing dollars are thrown in and you assume that things are working.

“Great CMOs are actually quite disciplined, quite technical as well.”

As for creatives, most of those should be outsourced. “To me, it doesn’t matter how great I think a creative concept is. It needs to be validated with consumer research. It’s very arrogant to assume that our individual opinions will reflect popular acceptance.”

Pragmatism over instinct

Wei goes on to elaborate on his pragmatic, “fact-based” approach, talking about how the company places a huge priority on its research, even doing much of it in-house – from new product development to advertising campaigns and product positioning.

“We are a big believer in customer research, we have our own imagination studio, and we don’t outsource the research on a qualitative basis. We will use firms to bring in the right demographic of people we want to talk to – from there we take it over.

“We design our own questionnaires. We have behavioural anthropologists on staff, change-management people on staff. That’s fundamental to understanding the customer.”

And this is why the company took a hard swerve into digital and content strategy, putting 50% of its marketing budget into it. While the move is hardly unexpected in a digital age, it stands out at a time where most APAC marketers place less than 25% of their marketing dollars online, according to research by the CMO Council as of 2012.

“It was where we were seeing the most results in tailored, engaging content. The simple realisation is that in a newspaper there are so many ads, no one looks at them. And even if they do, they never go, ‘I must buy that product now’. Insurance is just not one of those products,” Wei says.

He adds TV is a big investment, and unproven in terms of pulling in business results for the company.

“In terms of prioritising ad spend, we couldn’t map the benefit directly to spending millions in TV advertising.” In fact, digital is only set to become more essential to the company.

Wei points out the trends are obvious, with more people going on mobile and becoming more comfortable with virtual communication.

He says going forward, financial advisory may even take place on mediums such as Skype, reducing time spent travelling for the company’s advisors. The company will also spend time building its digital infrastructure, such as structuring the website better and catering for more video content.

Product wise, the next thing to expect is more tailored insurance products for consumers. For example, based on customer feedback, Great Eastern added a feature giving 24 months of payments upfront on their retirement. (The general attitude of people when they retire is – “when I retire, I need a celebration”, Wei says.)

“We want to make it as personal to them as individuals as possible.”

According to Wei, the results over the past two and a half years from this strategy have borne fruit.

It topped the Corporate Reputation Survey by Reputation Management Associates in 2012 and top insurer in the health and life insurance categories in the Customer Satisfaction Index Singapore 2012, done by the Institute of Service Excellence and Singapore Management University, among others. Wei adds the company’s sales figures this year also saw growth that outperformed the industry.