In his CM Spotlight, Marc André Roy, CM, CX Financial Services Transformation & Québec Lead at Accenture Song, emphasizes the importance of understanding business fundamentals and continuous learning for marketers. He stresses embracing change and purpose-driven marketing, highlights the power of diversity, and advises that marketers must balance speed with excellence in today’s fast-paced environment.

Making a Dent

Everyone should understand business fundamentals and the business they’re working for. Marketers must understand the company and how it’s structured, makes money and is financially leveraged. Furthermore, they must learn to simplify the marketing language when speaking to executives to gain adoption for their ideas. Marketers must adapt to a diverse set of audiences, sales and channel teams, executives and board members on what it means to be more digital and agile.

In addition, I encourage the next generation of marketers to develop more long-term thinking on driving results; building a brand takes time, being relevant takes time and requires sustained effort, results, learning, and agility to make a dent in the market.

Data-Driven Approach

My undergraduate degree is in quantitative methods, with another major in marketing. I also possess an MBA and a graduate diploma from Harvard University. I’ve always taken an outcome-based, data-driven marketing approach, which has allowed me to drive business growth. I also surround myself with incredible creators to deliver. My father was in marketing, so I was playing with numbers at a young age. I saw the opportunity to enter the field through direct marketing and transition to performance marketing, then the acquisition of a new business.

Connect & Change

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, so it’s vital to understand company culture. When I worked in New York at American Express headquarters, I led the strategic planning team of Merchant Services, responsible for 55 percent of the revenue. That’s where I developed the capability and the passion to work in a diverse environment; I was working in another country in another function with a different leader with different values.

It is also where I learned to thrive by focusing on people and their motivations, the fibre of corporate culture. I also led two transformations for Export Development Canada (EDC). The first allowed EDC to serve four times more customers and create wealth for Canada. I attribute at least 50 percent of that success to my ability to intimately understand and evolve the corporation’s culture through a different leadership style and role-modelling the new behaviours and ways of working.

Stay on Top

Regardless of the type of program, marketing tries to bridge the gap between corporate expectations and the crazy lives their customers are living. The pandemic has entirely changed our environment and what consumers expect. Marketers must be comfortable with speed and imperfection and execute flawlessly. They need to accept that they won’t know everything. In addition, marketers must reinvent creative processes and how we co-exist with AI. The last challenge is keeping current with regulations; legislation may not be a top priority for the legal department, so marketing must always stay on top of the rules and regulations.

Reinventing myself

I spend time with my CMO peers and the business community to understand how they see reinvention. In addition, I spend an enormous amount of time reading about the profession’s impact through newsletters and podcasts, and I lecture at my alma mater to stay current. I return to school often; in the past five years, I’ve completed an agile leader (CAL 2) certification and a graduate diploma at the Harvard School of Business in business model disruption. These credentials, which complement my marketing and digital expertise, allow me to lead large-scale cross-lines of business transformations.

Diversify Your Experience

My advice for marketers is to consider laterals. Laterals give you a better view of what’s at the top and how to collaborate with colleagues. Laterals outside of marketing will allow you to experience other departments. A lateral view of the business will also give you a better sense of what’s on the CEO’s mind. If you’re interested in coding, learn to code. If you’re part of CX, learn UX. I’ve led delivery teams and enterprise architecture teams, but understanding different aspects or departments of a business is what will truly make you a stronger executive, change agent and, hence, marketer.

Current & Relevant

Marketing is a science that unites creativity and data; it’s about leveraging creativity and ensuring it impacts the right targeted (data) audiences. The Chartered Marketer (CM) designation allows qualified professionals to execute consistently marketing activities, measure progress, and predict outcomes. The CM program and designation provide a foundation of credibility to marketers. It ensures that they stay current, that they continue developing themselves, and that the practice stays relevant in the business community.

Purpose Marketing

The main change I’ve noticed over the past 20 years is the speed at which we get feedback from targeted audiences. You must weed out the noise, understand the trends, and recognize the intent. It’s the traditional method of measuring and consolidating numbers into data, data to insights and insights to action, but at very high speeds. Another change I have noticed is the power of diversity and how it is shaping our communities of tomorrow. In addition, the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) has become an imperative. It is a fantastic platform to question one’s brand and how it rallies around purpose.

Defining Moment

In New York, I managed multiple markets for American Express, Mexico, and considerable portions of the U.S., South and Latin America. I worked in payments in a closed-loop data network, developing marketing capabilities to connect people with their passions. I deployed Apple Pay™ in Canada and integrated social media platforms into our offer ecosystems, reinventing marketing for cardmembers and merchants, which was very innovative in 2012 and allowed me to receive numerous external awards.

 

 

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