Andy Markowitz, general manager Performance Marketing Labs at General Electric (GE), reveals how marketers should be approaching digital and how he keeps up with the latest trends
What is GE’s Performance Marketing Labs?
Performance Marketing Labs is the answer to a couple of things – we wanted to put digital to the side for a second and really start talking about marketing, because that’s what this is. We didn’t want to give people a reason to pigeonhole what we were doing.
We also wanted to revaluated our value proposition as we are a large corporate. And we wanted to offer new value to the business.
We really want to think about the organisational development too and work with other people and skills.
Performance Marketing Labs is our answer to those two things. We’re all about the commercial component of marketing; we are not necessary about the top-line storytelling.
What’s your biggest challenge?
One of the challenges is keeping up with technology. Second is – especially coming from the digital side of things – putting digital to the side. This is just the way marketing is right now, we’re having to reframe that it’s not digital, it’s marketing. But what digital does, it gives you avenues to answer specific questions: I need revenue now this quarter, I need to build better relationships with my customers and understand what their behaviours are, I need to understand what I can do at a tradeshow that is different than I’ve ever done before. So if you can just get to your organisation’s issues and implement solutions and opposed to: ‘What’s your Facebook strategy? or ‘What’s your LinkedIn strategy?’ – that’s the way to frame it.
How do you keep up with the latest tech and marketing trends?
The funny thing is – my colleagues look at me very strangely when I do this – I pick up the phone. If it rings I actually pick up the phone and nowadays most people never pick up the phone.
We also come to conferences like the Marketo’s Marketing Nation Summit and I’ll spend a day on the trade floor because there are so many people I don’t know, and even ones that I do know have changed so much.
Your responsibility as a marketing leader is to go out and find solutions that work. That’s very much a GE philosophy. Finding people to work with I think is really important. You’ve got to pick up the phone, you’ve got to get external, you’ve got to find people that can advise you.
What advice would you give to young marketers making their way up the career ladder?
Understand that everything is driven by the customer. About 10 years ago I heard Rishad Tobaccowala speak at a summit and he said: ‘Nothing has changed, marketing is just the right message to the right person at the right time. All digital has done is thrown marketing on its ear.’
So marketing – in terms of how you can use technology – is still the same. You really have to understand what the need is. Find the problem and then identify the solution that can solve that problem. So, the biggest thing I find today is that more people are focusing on the tech rather than the need – I think that’s something people can do a better job focusing on, especially on the emerging talent side.
What’s the best professional advice you’ve ever been given?
One of the worst days of my professional career was when my boss at my dot.com start-up said: “Perception is reality.” Meaning what people see you as is really important. At that point of time, I had not been living up to the best of my potential and that was a wake-up call for me to start performing in a way that was important. For me that was not about being political, but about doing the job and being open to things you might not necessarily have been open too and doing things in a way that you might not be used to doing them.
