Marketing Strategy Background – The disruptions caused by COVID-19 have magnified the formidable task of driving strategy. I recently asked Dell CMO Allison Dew how she tackles the challenges of developing a marketing strategy.
Allison Dew: The pandemic has brought many changes. But what remains constant is our business strategy and our commitment to our team members, our customers, partners and community. Those who continue to guide every decision we make.
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That being said, what we are constantly changing is the content, focus and tone of our marketing efforts. For example, we’ve launched several small business initiatives that focus on celebrating small business success. It was not the right time to do it.
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As a provider of critical technology, we see our customers, from home consumers to small business owners to large enterprises, face new challenges almost everywhere. night We know we have solutions to help them run their business and learn from home/work from home needs.
Then, we turn to our creativity to quickly respond with solutions to meet the needs. We host virtual forums with clients from around the world to provide guidance and advice, and come up with creative ways to conduct virtual client briefings.
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The tone of all these marketing activities is important. It is important that although we want to show that we are here to help, we do not want to appear as if we are trying to profit from the crisis. We spend a lot of time making sure the tone of our message is appropriate and sensitive to what our customers are dealing with and that makes all the difference. You may have seen some of the famous communication spoofs; we don’t want to be a jumble of “these troubled times” messages.
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Also, communication has always been an important part of my job and it’s never been as important now. A significant portion of my time early on was spent talking to our most important audience: our employees.
We completely changed the way we interact with our team members from a cadence, style and platform perspective. Today, 90% of our global workforce continues to work from home. Effective communications have become a very important part of our strategy to ensure our team members have the information, tools and support they need to stay active and productive.
Talbot: Your brands include VMware, Dell, Dell EMC, Pivotal, RSA, Secureworks and Virtustream. Which of these presents the most interesting marketing challenges?
Rugiada: In the last four years, we have changed the perception of Dell by marketing ourselves as Dell Technologies, which includes all the brands you mentioned. We have observed through our internal data that people see us very differently than they did three or four years ago.
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For example, we build many VMware solutions and work hard to present ourselves together as a family.
That said, VMware also has partnerships with others in the industry. There are times when they have to enter the market without us. This is something we are constantly working on.
In addition, we are one of a very small number of technology brands that must be relevant to a wider audience, from consumers to the largest enterprises. We’re very focused on getting that consistency and relevance to that all-important audience.
Talbot: As your team considered the opportunities presented by different marketing capabilities and platforms, what caught your fancy and what fell flat?
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Dew: I’ve always believed that marketing is at the intersection of data and creativity. When you get the right data, creativity, and business acumen, that’s where the magic of marketing begins.
I spent a lot of time finding ways to bring data in-house while building our own proprietary models so we could be faster, more targeted, and more effective.
I think there’s still a lot of work to be done in marketing technology on how these things work together. Many solutions can solve a problem. We’ve had to spend the last two years solving the complexity of our martech stack. I don’t see any vendors stepping up to address this issue at all. That’s where the opportunity is.
Rugiada: I think what we see as marketers and leaders is that this is a career-defining moment. People are watching to see how brands respond to their customers, employees, partners and communities. What we are going through is not sweet – it is hard! But how to combat cynicism with realistic optimism is the leadership challenge of a lifetime.