Fortune 100’s ‘hired gun’ set to awaken the Sri Lankan marketing community

By Cassandra Mascarenhas

Q: Why should Sri Lankan companies and marketing professionals attend your seminar?

A: I think the main reason is because of the track record we’ve had. If you get down to it, it either works or it doesn’t. We’ve had an extraordinary run for almost 10 years where pretty much everything we’ve done, which was either put into biometric research or put into the marketplace, has been very successful. We do very well in biometric research.

Q: Could you explain why it’s being called the ‘Pull’ forum?

A: ‘Pull’ is the title of the book that I wrote and the title functionally turned out to be a really good one because people wanted to know what it was about, whether it was to do with push or pull and how the whole thing fit.

The truth of the matter is that ‘pull’ actually refers to a sort of innate ability and it is almost like a force that exists within consumers that causes them to take things that we launch into the marketplace, whether it be a good or service, retail business or whatever it is.

They have the tendency to take it and pull it back into the future, to make things comfortable. When things are comfortable, when sales messages become comfortable as opposed to being remarkable, what occurs is that sales drop off. People lose their interest in things that they pull into mediocrity.

Q: You are called the ‘hired gun’ of Fortune 100 companies – what brought that about?

A: I didn’t coin that phrase, one of my clients did a couple of years ago when he was doing an interview and he referred to me as a hired gun. I didn’t like that to begin with, I didn’t see myself as being violent but that is really not what he meant.

I think what he really meant was that when he gets into trouble, I was someone he could rely on to aggressively get him out of trouble or to handle a set of circumstances, whatever they happened to be. Usually that’s when I get the call – when things go wrong so as it turns out, I do like the aggressive nature of it, so I don’t fight it too much.

Q: In Sri Lanka, a lot of people talk about the medium and long term but what immediate benefits will professionals get out of your forum to increase their business?

A: My life is actually spent in the immediate term, not even in the midterm and I think that it is a result of the fact that if I get the call, if it’s a product that is already out of the marketplace, it’s in trouble and you need to react very quickly. What do you now, what do you do tomorrow?

There are essentially 23 different marketing moves that one can make that I’ve identified over a period of time and the way I’ve set this particular forum up is that I’m using two of them that are very short term. In my view, I don’t think there will be anyone who attends this who will leave without the ability to make a permanent and positive change in their business the next day.

Q: A topic that has been coming up these days is marketers and their importance in businesses. So far their role has been downplayed somewhat – why would you say marketers are important to a company?

A: My experience with marketers is kind of interesting. In small or medium sized companies for the most part, marketing in general is missing. What I mean by that is that if you’re a kid, you graduate from high school and you’re fortunate enough to graduate from university and you decide you want to get a degree in marketing, you get your degree in marketing – where do you go?

You don’t go down the street to someone who owns four retail pharmacies. You go into the corporate world and that’s where all the marketing intelligence seems to go into and so as a result of that, frankly marketing for the most part in smaller and medium sized companies is not done very well.

What I’ve been attempting to do for the last couple of years is to take what I’ve learned working for the big brands and repurpose it for small and medium sized companies. The first thing I learned was that there is absolutely no difference in marketing some major brand globally and that of marketing something really small. The fundamental nature of marketing is true, irrespective, in my estimation, of cultures, gender, regions of the world or even the size of the company. It’s all pretty much the same – what works, works.

Q: Could you tell me about ‘Connectics,’ the breakthrough marketing technology that you invented.

A: Connectics is a process I invented because I have a tremendous fear of failure. When you create something and give it to the client, the first thing they will do is take it into research and I would never sleep the night before because I’d be worried about what the research results were going to be.

So what I did was invent a process called Connectics and two things are important about the process. One is that we deconstruct the sales message and we break it down into a lot of different components – sort of like splitting an atom and looking at how the parts work together. What we are really doing is splitting the marketing message and identifying how the parts work together.

We get 24 target consumers in the room and we expose the parts in a very special way to them and let them reassemble them. What that has caused over a period of time is two things: we ultimately end up with a very powerful sales message and I’ve also learned a tremendous amount by watching the interaction of all these parts, just like scientists would watch when they split an atom, how all those parts relate to each other.

I’ve done the exact same thing with the sales message and as a result of that, have a tremendous advantage over my competition.

Q: How do you keep innovating? You’ve worked with so many huge brands and it’s all been successful – what motivates you?

A: I’m motivated really by two things. One is that I’m lucky enough to be associated with the launch of something in the marketplace or the restaging of something in the marketplace that we’re going to change and that occurs every five weeks.

The second thing that motivates me is that I decided two years ago, while I do enjoy working for the big brands, what was missing for me was sort of the innocence of working with people who would have even more appreciation for my abilities to help make them successful. Those are small and medium sized companies and they could never actually afford me, particularly the process that we talked about, Connectics, which is a very expensive process.  The truth of the matter is that you don’t have to do Connectics, we can work with a smaller company and we can make it work without the whole Connectics process, so for me that’s a big motivator. The appreciation is so different because they have so much at stake. When your job is at stake, that’s one thing. You work for a large corporation and your job is at stake and I appreciate the fact that it occurs there but when your whole livelihood, your whole business is at stake, that’s really quite rewarding.