A survey of Canadian media consumption by Microsoft concluded that the average attention span has fallen to eight seconds, down from 12 in the year 2000.
MEDIA 7: Could you please tell us a little bit about your role at Fujitsu Americas and your overall professional journey?
ANAMIKA GUPTA: While heading Customer Marketing for Fujitsu Americas, Inc., my focus is helping our customers move forward to a sustainable world by connecting people, technology and ideas, in close partnership with my sales and leadership team. Right after college, I entered the services industry. For the past decade and a half, I have been involved in marketing for the services industry, focusing on accelerating profitable revenue generation, enhancing digital reputation, and deepening client relationships. I started my career in a fairly male-dominated environment with not many strong female role models. But I had a few very strong men leaders who not only guided but also carried the torch for me in my journey of becoming a proficient and ‘fearless’ woman business leader. In my journey working with and managing a multi-cultural team at a few very large global cross-functional matrixed organizations, I realized I also have a natural passion for developing trusted, value-based relationships. I have an innate curiosity of understanding the challenge first and then getting to the solution. I believe that trusted relationships are built on the consistent delivery of added value, from interactions with customers, partners, and colleagues right through to friends and family. To deliver this value in every interaction, you need to be curious, empathetic, and innovative. It’s these traits, and a network of great mentors, that have helped me progress through my career.
I am also a creative thinker; I aim to blend the art of storytelling with the science of marketing automation. By using my experience across brand building, demand generation via field/industry marketing and account-based marketing, influencer marketing, partner marketing, and customer marketing across three continents, I strive to combine the perspective of the 30,000-feet visionary with the on-the-ground executor. While I’m most proud of building significant, sustainable, award-winning marketing programs and developing strong marketing professionals with an entrepreneurial growth mindset, I also am proud of the multiple learnings I have had in my journey so far. Applying these learnings from my experience and several new ways of thinking in my career, I’ve helped organizations create trust-based long-term client relationships while influencing a number of multimillion-dollar deals with complex, large-scale IT and consulting services. I also really enjoy sharing my learnings and experiences as a speaker at B2B Marketing conferences and seminars.
M7: Your global flagship event #FujitsuActivateNow was held on October 12th and 13th, Can you tell us little bit about that?
AG: On October 12th and 13th, we held Fujitsu ActivateNow 2021, Fujitsu’s global flagship event. With 37,000+ views in just the first two days, what I am most excited about is that many of our customers around the world took the time to participate. I am also excited about the launch of Fujitsu Uvance, our new business brand launch, in order to promote businesses that are rooted in a vision of what society ought to be; addressing the issues that society faces, in order to achieve our purpose. The session kicked off with our CEO’s message around our visions for the future and empowering one another with our various strengths while working to create a sustainable society, “Empowering People for a Sustainable Future,”
This year we invited a few distinguished speakers to join us including President Toomas Ilves, President of Estonia from 2006-2016, and Kathy Matsui, former Vice-Chair of Goldman Sachs Japan. Mr Ilves spoke about the need for a digital society for people’s happiness and safety, and about issues faced in digitalizing nations and society. He also spoke about the importance of digital technology, including ensuring data security and integrity in various ways, particularly with respect to national ID data. Ms Matsui, former Vice-Chair of Goldman Sachs Japan and, as of May of this year, the founder of Japan’s first ESG-focused venture capital fund, talked about value for society while also improving corporate value, and about ESG and diversity in discussion with Fujitsu CEO Tokita-San. We have the sessions available online for on-demand access – click here.
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Today consumers don’t just expect but demand the content to be extremely relevant, crisp, and served up via the channel they prefer to consume the information from and at the right time.
M7: Congratulations on your well-deserved Dallas Business Journal 2020 Woman in business award. What skills have enabled you to become a marketing industry leader?
AG: Thank you. I would say a few. I constantly strive for learning, de-learning and re-learning. The first and most important for me is, listening to my clients. I partner with my sales team to listen and step into our client’s shoes to learn about their pain points and challenges better. It helps us become wise partners. Taking the team to the next step, identifying how we can deliver extreme value by carefully crafting a relevant solution (of services/products), looking into diversification, which will help the client not only just survive but thrive in this dynamic ever-changing market. I also lean towards our partner ecosystem as we can’t do it all on our own - if we want to present a holistic and future-proof business solution/services/product to our clients. This leads us to the next most important step in the diversification of services - getting our client’s attention. A survey of Canadian media consumption by Microsoft concluded that the average attention span has fallen to eight seconds, down from 12 in the year 2000. We now have a shorter attention span than goldfish, the study found.
With the attention span of less than a goldfish, 8 seconds, it is important for my team and me to identify the right channel, the right timing and the right audience to get the message out and position uniquely. Engage them in a value-based conversation while building a trust-based long-term partnership. This process of diversification into our client ecosystem has worked quite successfully for my team and me. Despite the rapid pace of change and the unprecedented challenges of recent months, my belief has strengthened further confirming, it is essential to stay relevant to our customers to nurture long-term value-based relationships. The key to this, is helping them harness new sources of customer data, and using these to drive insight and thought leadership. While emerging technologies like AI are becoming more prevalent, opening up exciting new sources of customer data, it’s not all about the technology itself – it’s more about helping customers understand how technology can improve the lives of their employees, partners and customers. And I encourage my team to think from this perspective. It’s what we call being human-centric, and it ensures we don’t get too fixated on the technology. I like to ensure my team operates on strong, agile principles, empowered through the right processes and frameworks to create a ‘one-team mentality that’s firmly focused on delivering great results.
M7: With more than 10 years of experience as a marketer, what is the paradigm shift you see in content marketing practices today?
AG: In the digital era today, with the shift in consumer attitude towards content consumption, there has been a huge shift in what, how, and when of content marketing. Today consumers don’t just expect but demand the content to be extremely relevant, crisp, and served up via channel they prefer to consume the information from at the right time. It is the marketer’s job to meet consumers wherever they are in the customer lifecycle journey to get their attention. The goal of content marketing hasn’t changed – it’s still the same- reach the target audience and increase brand awareness, sales, engagement, and loyalty. The process hasn’t changed either- it’s the same- planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing.
What has changed significantly is:
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target audience expectation- be extremely personalized and real-time engagement
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leveraging data – to create insight-based content pieces
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content format for being extremely relevant and crisp- from infographic to podcasts, to videos, to memes, to blogs/social media/apps
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content distribution channels- multiple digital platforms from social media to blogs to websites and more
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measurement and reporting- real-time measurement and optimization for higher engagement
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use of technology in creating top-notch content at scale- with use of AI/ML
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Be brave in chasing your dreams.
M7: Every marketer is chasing the golden combo of Personalization and Privacy. How do you strike a balance between both?
AG: In my personal view personalization and privacy have a symbiotic relationship. Customers today expect every brand to create a personalized experience exclusive to them, and they are ready to share their identity data. As long as the brand is able to use this info in a context by combining their identity data with behavioral data to create a seamless customer experience providing tangible and intangible value. With a good understanding of privacy principles, we leverage available data in reaching out to our customers with personalized and highly customized outreach campaigns, sometimes at scale using the right tech mix.
M7: How do you see artificial intelligence impacting the ABM landscape in the near future?
AG: AI plays a critical role in scaling ABM, and businesses should start evaluating their current and future state now, gain leadership commitment, and secure budget approvals. As part of that exercise, it’s also important to identify gaps and areas for which capabilities can be built in-house, or a partnership needs to be forged with leading vendors that can help realize. In my view, AI will help ABM scale effectively in a true sense. Building and delivering a truly personalized insightful experience for 8-10 accounts is feasible. But as you grow that number to 50 or 100, it’s hard to build relevant messages and campaigns without more in-depth knowledge of the account. No human can cost-effectively do that much research. And that's where AI-supported ABM can deliver the 1:1 experience at scale by converting data into insights and action. Different companies are at different maturity level in their journey to leverage AI.
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M7: Being an advocate for women in business and technology, what is your advice for young women considering a career in high tech?
AG: I would ask the upcoming women leaders to be bold and show courage in delivering their best to society—no matter what seat they occupy today—from project leader to boardroom advisor. At the core, be you! Always! You, and only you, know who you are and what you are worth. Nobody else! When you are being yourself, you have the power and confidence to create change, whatever the challenges. Be brave in chasing your dreams. There will be obstacles, and you will make mistakes. Make sure to learn from them, and keep moving forward towards your goal. Create and deliver value in the things you do. That’s the key to building trust-based long-term relationships, providing a strong platform for your personal growth.