Neil Dowling of Rightpoint On The Top 5 New Marketing Trends Leaders Need To Know

The brand and demand dichotomy. There has often been this type of ‘two camps’ in marketing — which I’ve never subscribed to. There’s the ‘brand people’ that do big activations and only care about awareness and then the ‘field marketing people’ that work with sales and just drive demand. Marketers need to understand that their brand has to drive demand and that brand itself can be the most effective asset.

Marketing trends are always changing, and it's so important to stay relevant. What are the latest trends? How does one stay abreast of the new trends? Is it good to be an early adopter or is it best to see which trends withstand the test of time? To address these questions, in this interview series, we are talking to experienced CMOs who can share their “Top 5 New Marketing Trends That Leaders Need To Know About.” As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Neil Dowling.

Neil Dowling is the Chief Marketing Officer and Global Alliances lead for Rightpoint, a global experience leader and Genpact company. With 20 years of experience in marketing for technology and professional services companies, previously working for businesses including Genpact, Cognizant and Fujitsu, Neil leads a team of marketers across the entire function from brand strategy to supporting company revenue targets to create sustainable growth.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

While I originally wanted to play football, I was also always interested in business. I took Economics at university and studied Marketing within that. After university I took some time off to travel through Australia and Thailand and when I got back I needed a job and remembered Marketing had a lot of interesting pieces to it. It was the main thing that stuck out to me from university because I liked the notion of promoting and influencing – making something of an idea.

I got accepted into a graduate scheme at Fujitsu and I was really lucky in terms of that particular program. The marketing director wanted people to experience the whole life cycle of marketing, so we rotated into different roles and learned the majority of the different areas within the marketing ecosystem. Looking back, that early experience was really important for me because I got to understand marketing in depth and the different jobs within it.

It has been said that our mistakes can sometimes be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest marketing mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I'm not sure if it's a mistake but I remember at my first job, we ran a large campaign where we led with the statement that we were the ‘second largest IT company in the world,’ we were playing up the fact that no one knew us and our audience would be pleasantly surprised by that fact. In reality, I remember the main thing that it led to was clients asking us ‘who is the first?’ The objective of the campaign was not realized.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

There have been multiple people, including some of the folks from my first role that I'm still in touch with now. Even though some of them are retired, they still have a lot of guidance to share.

In terms of seeking mentors and role models, I was always interested in how people treated other people. I've always been really interested in team dynamics and leadership from playing football. A couple of people I've worked with were really good both with me individually and with teams – I always wanted to see what they were doing because they were brilliant at managing groups under pressure.

Then there were mentors who were brilliant with marketing in a technical sense. They stood out in terms of the way they thought, because they always seemed to be able to connect the dots and see the bigger picture. And then there was a third group of people who provided examples of what not to mimic, like micromanagement, failing to develop a sense of team or not growing younger talent.

Are you able to identify a “tipping point” in your career when you started to see success? Did you start doing anything different? Are there takeaways or lessons that others can learn from that?

There is one tipping point that came from a personal setback – when I broke my knee playing football and couldn’t walk for a long time. This is when I realized I had plateaued at work as the injury gave me the time to question what I was doing. I knew I needed to change something up and I was lucky enough to take a six-month sabbatical from my job and headed off to backpack through South and Central America.

During that time, I realized that professionally I was not progressing the way I thought I should be, and perhaps, I had lost a bit of confidence while trying to mimic what others in my workplace were doing instead of being fully myself.

When I came back, I decided to be myself and see where that took me. I got a new job and realized all of the foundational things I had learned already put me in a strong position – plus I carried with me the confidence that comes from traveling, meeting so many people, exploring different places, and having new experiences. As I began to lean more into being myself, I started to feel I was in a much better place. I think that authenticity is what allowed me to build on my strengths.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Two things make Rightpoint stand out, in my mind: the people and the work. We have some incredibly bright people, and I think some of the projects that we're collectively working on will demonstrate that even more to the market. I’m proud of the diversity of our work across customer, employee, and product experience–what we call the Total Experience.

In regard to Total Experience, we're doing things that are very advanced and progressive. Not a lot of companies think about the customer experience, the employee experience, the different experiences of products in ways that connect all the elements. That’s a space where Rightpoint is very well positioned and has what we call the “right to win.”

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Leading companies are already thinking about how to leverage Generative AI in the experience dimension of their organization. We're helping some large organizations with strategy and Generative AI implementation to create a Total Experience for their brands, employees, and customers. For example, we’re working with an enterprise client on how to think about and implement a Total Experience approach across their entire IT infrastructure, inclusive of Generative AI.

Fantastic. Let’s now shift to the main part of our interview about Marketing Trends. As a CMO, you’re at the forefront of the marketing space and leading diverse teams. What resources or tools do you use to you stay abreast of the ever-changing landscape?

I do a lot of reading of pieces by certain publishers and individuals whose opinions I value. Things are always changing, so you have to be very curious and humble in what you think you know! We also work with a lot of analysts internally and we're always asking them for information on market trends and projections.

There’s also a lot of peer-to-peer learning and information sharing at events like the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity in June. At events like that, you get three or four days to immerse yourself in conversations with leaders in advertising, technology, and creativity.

In your experience, is it possible to forecast upcoming trends? How does this process work? Please share a story.

The marketing functions in most organizations vary a little bit by segment, but a lot of them follow a fairly typical path based on the current economic environment or the trends. For example, in economic down times marketing investments can be more limited meaning you can forecast the types of programs marketing functions might prioritize during a downturn. With marketers asked to tighten belts, their program mix will have to demonstrate a tight line to revenue growth.

Then there are technology mega moments like Generative AI, where you can have a best guess, but you don't fully know how that will evolve. You just do your best in terms of leading your team in how to think about it and create an environment where experimentation is encouraged. You just start somewhere, like working on pilot programs. At the same time, you have to be very clear on your position and plan no matter what you've got resource-wise. You need to continue to reinforce the fundamentals of your plan (which often get overlooked in the swirl), be it competitive positioning, the mix of your programs, the mix of your spend, or how you resource and structure your team in order to drive growth for your organization.

In marketing, would you say it’s better to be an early adopter of trends or wait to see if they stick before allocating resources? What are the pros and cons?

There's real strength in getting into the market, trying stuff, and learning fast. That doesn’t mean you should go all in on the next big trend, but a 75/25 approach can keep your organization on the front foot. Your job as a leader is to understand the market and boil it down to a few clear strategies for your company and your team and get after them aggressively. With Generative AI for example, the cost of entry isn't that high and it's a definite case of starting quickly and working out the best roadmap for it in parallel.

What are some of the past trends that you embraced? What results did you see?

I’m a fan of challenger or ‘underdog’ type marketing, and when I first came into Genpact (Rightpoint’s parent company) there was an opportunity to prove the case for it–against a backdrop of people with very different perceptions of marketing.

I was keen to be very challenging, disruptive, and direct, to go straight to the sales team to show what marketing can do in a very direct sense – like help them differentiate to win deals, versus building up a plan that was a slow roll over two years. It can help get you the trust and permission early to build out the bigger operating model of marketing.

I’ve actually never worked in an organization with huge marketing budgets, and I think that has allowed our teams to develop into real smart thinkers and operators. You have to make things work hard, you have to prioritize ruthlessly and come up with fresh approaches. I like having to be sharper, faster, and different from competitors–and think I've got a good track record with building out teams of people that can drive disproportionate results (vs budget levels).

Can you share a time when a strategy didn’t deliver the results you expected and what you learned from the experience?

I'm a big believer in focused efforts – betting big on a few things, doing those fewer things better, and going after those goals hard with the team. But I've done things in the past that were more maybe more textbook and spread efforts out, that I now think should have activated quicker or should have been bolder.

Here is the main question of our interview. We’d love for you to share your expert insight. What are the top five marketing trends leaders should know about in 2023? Can you please share a story or example for each?

1 . GenAI. I don’t think anyone knows exactly where it will take us, but it’s here to stay. Teams will need to adopt it. I think teams are still getting their heads around it but in 2024 we’ll see much more application than exploration and that will create a whole new cycle of trends and areas to adapt to. We’ll see more adoption, experimentation, and scaling. Organizations that have good data and clear journeys or processes and use cases will be able to go the furthest, fastest.

I expect the creative concepting and content part of the marketing process to be common first use cases and timelines will be truncated in a big way. A lot of teams and brands just need ‘good-enough’ creative and content to get into the market and they'll get this in a fraction of the time and cost. Personalization is the other obvious one where brands and marketers will look for competitive advantage to build brand trust and loyalty from the experience with their organizations. Humans will still be in the loop, and I hope the time freed up by GenAI will help us identify opportunities for differentiation based on more time spent on true insights. Obvious point but along this journey, change management will be key for the larger scale applications and marketing functions will need help to organize the right path for themselves.

2 . It’s time for organizations to sort out their technology – which also means sorting ROI and attribution. This relates to GenAI and the platforms it will integrate with but, there will also be additional technology consolidation across the marketing value chain. I think we’ll see the CIO come into more conversations about streamlining and optimizing marketing technology. Most marketing functions have a disparate MarTech set up in reality, and with economic headwinds attribution pressure will ramp up.

Along with the need for better attribution, I think there’s a market opportunity for a technology player to come in and sort this out once and for all, establishing a more common and fair understanding of the return on investment for marketing and experience led functions.

3 . What we call Total Experience do believe will emerge as a key differentiator. There are not that many areas where you can drive differentiation. GenAI will level the playing field somewhat, so one battleground for differentiation is going to have to be the experience you're driving with your brand and organization. Every brand wants a unified end-to-end experience but it's tricky. It requires a cohesive employee experience that intersects and engages seamlessly with the customer and product experience. Brands going through M&A will also have to navigate cultural adjustments that make creating a Total Experience even more complex and more important. Marketing won’t be able to create these experiences alone, so we’ll see marketing leaders working more with IT, HR, and other departments to map, plan, and implement unified experiences.

4 . Progress over perfection. Marketers need to develop and act on bold ideas, and they need to move fast. That means experimenting with tech like GenAI and other technologies rather than hanging back. It also means that marketers need to build ongoing agility into their plans so they can adapt as the results of their experiments come in. Marketers may need to do more with less, and they should consider pursuing fewer ideas but really doing more with those ideas. The world of the 3-year plan has gone. The teams with a mindset to move quickly and boldly based on the right level of insight will outperform.

5 . The brand and demand dichotomy. There has often been this type of ‘two camps’ in marketing – which I’ve never subscribed to. There’s the ‘brand people’ that do big activations and only care about awareness and then the ‘field marketing people’ that work with sales and just drive demand. Marketers need to understand that their brand has to drive demand and that brand itself can be the most effective asset. Now, marketers need to run brand campaigns in a way that gets your brand out with the right reach and scale while also using it as a tool for direct and different client conversations. This can be challenging because of the way people think of and talk about brands. The language we use in marketing functions matters – particularly when talking to the CFO and building a relationship that helps highlight the role of the brand in driving profitable growth.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I think there's something big about people being okay with less. Doing fewer things better – and having more bandwidth to be kind to each other.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

I post on LinkedIn, readers are welcome to follow me there

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.