I am fortunate to catch up with Atul Vohra, VP of marketing at Dell Services in a rare gap in his busy and international schedule. Just 10 days prior to our meeting, the globe-trotting marketer was a guest speaker at a Dell Services event in Austria, before flying back home to Dallas and then jetting in to London. Later in the day, he tells me, he’s off to Liverpool – not quite as glamorous as other destinations but he’s still excited about seeing the home of The Beatles.
Born and educated in New Dehli, Vohra says he knew from an early age that he wanted to work in marketing, and while he was privy to an exceptional education in India, it was the country’s “insular attitude” at that time that eventually led to him to seeking out an international career. To date, this has involved him working in nearly 70 different countries.
In his current role at one of the most globally recognised brands in the world, Vohra uses both his considerable experiences in multinational marketing and a deep-seated broadmindedness to help drive Dell Services into the future. This is particularly evident through his work in the organisation’s latest campaign ‘Wide open’ – its first major marketing initiative since it acquired Perot Systems last year. Vohra explains that “in a large and fragmented IT services market, Dell Services has both scale and headroom to grow”, offering applications, business processes, consulting, infrastructure and support.
Ultimately, ‘Wide open’ aims to accelerate this growth by telling the world, most of whom will already be familiar with Dell as a hardware brand, that “Dell Services is open for business.” Not only this, but Vohra says it’s a “refreshing new approach to business – more collaborative and more customer focused.”
Open for business
Vohra elaborates on how the ‘Wide open’ campaign is more collaborative by explaining that it draws largely on digital media channels (more than 50 per cent of Dell Service’s spend is in digital), and specifically much social media activity, to deliver its ‘Open for business’ message. He also reveals that marketing activity began with Dell Services’ own employees 60 days prior to the official launch to help build internal momentum and brand ambassadorship. This involved inhouse competitions and an invitation to discover ‘your services flavour’ (a kind of geeky avatar) on Dell Services’ Facebook page – something Vohra describes as “pretty cool” and resulted in the organisation’s Facebook fan base rising by 48 per cent.
Vohra’s global awareness is never far from the conversation. When asked about the ‘Wide open’ campaign’s different channel preferences around the world, he points out that the marketing mix varies from territory to territory, “As you move towards Asia,” he divulges “there’s more reliance on interpersonal relationships and events.” That said, Vohra points out that “Feelings of the heart, gut and mind are all the same, all over the world” – and that this is especially true with regards to business products, when at the end of the day customers are, after all, human.
A modern day gypsy
Today, Vohra welcomes the opportunity for travel and sees it as central to shaping the kind of marketer he has become, “I’m a modern day gypsy” he proclaims, suggesting that his interest in travel probably stemmed from his father who served as an officer in the British army. Indeed, travel isn’t the only thing to have rubbed off from his father, as Vohra draws military parallels with one of his first marketing roles at former toiletries company Chesebrough-Ponds, “It was like running my own command of 100 people or so,” he says, acknowledging that this “very early age leadership responsibility” (he was 23) meant that he learned “pretty fast”, allowing him to rise quickly through the marketing ranks.
From packaged goods, to senior B2C marketing roles in financial services that have included American Express and Citibank, it’s evident that Vohra has an unyielding thirst for grabbing hold of opportunities and seeing the potential in the global market place. Past roles have included marketing head for south Asia at American Express, head of marketing for Citibank in Greece, and helping to set up the first Citibank in Hungary.
Vohra seems to have relished this experience, in particular, as the Hungary project involved “an absolute blank sheet of paper”, building new marketing teams from scratch, and lots of “neat marketing things along the way”, including arranging for the President of Hungary to open the branch.
Wise words
Despite his B2C grooming, it is these global experiences that seem to have made Vohra particularly insightful into the way the world ticks. He’s only been in the B2B marketing game for 10 years, and yet unlike some marketers who fail to really understand the difference between the B2C and B2B arenas, Vohra hits the nail on the head when he states, “In B2C, you’re obviously listening to the customer, you’re sensitive and you do research, but frankly most B2C marketers have never had to ‘carry the bag’ and face the customer, and make calls that are never returned.”
He continues, “While all of marketing can be measured by customer interaction, there is a level of interaction and intimacy that is unique to B2B.” In fact, Vohra admits that in today’s market place, understanding the idea of unique B2B customer relationships is a bigger challenge for Dell Services than the fragile economy, which is essentially what the ‘Wide open’ campaign aims to achieve.
Aside from more talk of his envious travel itinerary after the bright lights of Liverpool, Vohra’s parting comments are indicative of his marketing ethos, “What drives me is that the world is truly wide open. Ideas don’t belong to any one geography or class of people, the best marketers are open to the whole world.”
