'Take message to target audience':

Marketeers should be business managers

Anuradha KODAGODA

"As I believe Marketeers are a different set of animals who need to have special characteristics in their own life, such as outgoing personality, be able to multitask and work with diverse personalities as well as diverse problems under highly stressful conditions," said Manager - Marketing and Corporate Communication Virtusa, Fathima Farzana Jaleel Khan.

"Having been in the field of marketing for fourteen years, I am a go-getter and very action oriented. I love doing more than one thing at a time. My past experience has been in the FMCG industry and now in the service sector. In both sectors I thrive in driving success and being part of it than being the observer. I get bored fast and in Marketing there is never a dull moment. Therefore, marketing has become the passion of my life," she said.

Q. Being a front-liner in the company, what are the challenges you face in the field of marketing?

A. Today the level of competition among any industry is extremely high. Therefore, the main challenge for a marketeer is the limited space in the consumer's mind. Everybody is fighting to grab his market share within this limited space. Therefore, the constant challenge I'm facing is how to reach the target audience with the best product, which fulfills customers' needs at lower cost. We need to cut through the clutter and take our message to our target audience at the right time and also the right way, so that we have their share of mind.

This is a great challenge today with the many media stations; such as Cable TV channels, radio channels, print media and other non conventional forms of reaching out to customers. We are grappling with our limited resources to reach our customers, who in turn have very little time to spare.

Q. What's the impact of the current economic crisis on your company?

A. We provide IT consultancy services to assist our clients with their continually changing IT environment. We help them analyze business and technology problems by identifying and designing platform based solutions.

Some problems have occurred due to the current economic crisis not only in the IT industry but also in many other industries. Our goal is to help them consistently improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their applications by utilizing reusable software platforms. Hence we are facing a challenge right now in driving our business. To overcome these problems and sustain in the business we have re-launched our services and also moved in to new markets.

As a result we have diversified our business into Dubai recently. With all these innovations we are trying to minimize the threat we are having due to the economic recession and are confident that we are capable of overcoming these challenges.

Q. In many companies we often see that Marketeers are not represented in the boardroom. What is your view?

A. I think that era has now changed. Today Marketeers are getting a seat at the table. In many organizations the marketing department plays a huge role when compared to the finance department. An example is that world recognized brands such as Coco-Cola - the entire success relied on the brand image which was created by their ground-breaking marketing strategies. On the other hand the Marketeer should be more conscious about his job role and should win the confidence of other members of the boardroom as well.

Most of the time we see Marketeers are only keen about the sales volumes or sales budgets. But the marketeer should also have the responsibility about the cost factor of the company. Therefore, the Marketeer should also be a business manager and not only a sales person.

Q. What are the advertising strategies that you adopt in the company?

A. Most of our clients are in the USA and UK. We just opened our doors for business in Sri Lanka as well. Our business model is more B to B and hence it's more one to one marketing. We offer customized technical services to our clients and are not into the mass retail business. We mostly meet our clients in a one to one basis and it helps us to maintain a very close relationship with them. Our website is one of our primary sources of advertising.

Apart from that we also take part in trade fairs and also as our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) we offer internships of students who have passed out of the SLIT (Sri Lanka Information Technology) and we are working very closely with these students in universities. We sponsored to build computer laboratories in schools in rural areas.

Q. What are the challenges you face when it comes to global branding?

A. We are a US NASDAQ quoted company. We have diversified our business in the USA, UK, India, Dubai and Sri Lanka. Currently we don't have any challenges for global branding since unlike other multi-national companies we have not expanded our business in many countries.

We are coordinating our business under a central coordination unit which ensures consistency. The biggest problem I see in global branding is that at times when we introduce the same product to the local market it becomes irrelevant. But we are into the service industry and we don't have this type of issues.

Q. What do you think about local Marketeers?

A. Today we find that marketing has a heavy focus as a profession which has gained a lot of recognition. It's heartening to see that our local Marketeers are exposed to overseas training and insights to sharpen their skills. However, we do still have the misconception that Marketeers are involved in only sales and advertising. My opinion is that Marketeers should be business managers where they should be able to manage a business that has the holistic picture about the company.

Q. What inspired you to select marketing as your career?

A. As I believe Marketeers are a different set of animals who need to have special characteristics in their own life, such as outgoing personality, be able to multi-task and work with diverse personalities as well as diverse problems under highly stressful conditions. Having been in the field of marketing for fourteen years, I am a go-getter and very action oriented. I love doing more than one thing at a time.

My past experience has been in the FMCG industry and now in the service sector. In both sectors I thrive in driving success and being part of it than being the observer. I get bored fast and in Marketing there is never a dull moment. Therefore, marketing has became the passion of my life.

Q. Are there any difficulties in being a female Marketeer?

A. Well, I think it depends totally on the person's attitude. My personality is such that I am able to work in any environment. I have not been marginalized or experienced any difficulty due to the fact that I am a female.

It is the way in which you deal with situations; people and problems that can affect you more than being female. I have worked in a team where 99 per cent were males and still managed to deliver on stretched targets by working together with them as one team.