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Veda Iyer, Global Chief Marketing Officer and Head, Hyperscalers and Strategic Partnerships, Mphasis talks about women's work in her segment in the IT sector.
How can women assume more responsible positions in the IT sector?
A company’s culture has a strong impact on employees thriving in the technology sector. At Mphasis, we believe that a more inclusive work culture boosts women’s advancement. Our multi-pronged effort pervades systemic and individual levels in the areas of recruitment, retention and advancement of an innovative workforce, and is key to ensuring that women assume more responsible positions.
Our TalentNext programme provides strong and purposeful options for our employees to reskill themselves and earn rewards.
Almost all IT companies are taking steps to create better gender ratios. Goldman Sachs is working towards making 40 percent of their Executive Vice Presidents women. Intel too, is aiming to double the number of women in senior roles by 2030. Mphasis currently has a 35-65 % of women leadership.
The ‘Mphasis Future of Work’ model provides a viable solution to address the challenges that women employees face at work. Our ‘back-to-work' policies for women who have taken a break, is once such initiative. Through an ecosystem of programs such as SheSharp, Integrated Circuit etc., we provide women with targeted workplace support in terms of mentors, sponsors and employee resource networks. This levels the playing field for women and encourages them to aspire for leadership roles in larger numbers.
Has the revenue growth been challenging in the last 2 years?
Covid-19 has been a crisis of huge proportions that humankind has not experienced before. However, even during these overwhelming and unprecedented times, we continued to deliver excellent customer experience by being more obsessed about our client’s needs. We achieved this by leveraging technology to ensure minimal disruption and maximum business continuity for our clients. Our sales and delivery teams worked together as one in our well-established two-in-a-box model to enhance customer engagement, deliver hyper-personalized service, and provide solutions to help enterprises manage their sourcing strategy and the dynamics of onsite-offshore spends.
We have also seen an accelerated adoption of technology by our clients to unlock new ways of cost savings and resilience. Through tech-enabled operating models, virtual and flexible work-from-home policies, newer GTM and sales models, and increased digital interactions, we have managed to overcome headwinds on revenue growth.
What are the marketing challenges in today's times? How do you resolve these challenges?
Undeniably, the world today has been turned on its head. Organisations have adopted various types of intelligent hybrid work models, and almost everything can be made to happen virtually. In such circumstances, the first challenge as a marketer is to get our message effectively across to the right audience, at the right time, and through the right channels. Especially, in a world where consumers are being flooded with information from multiple channels, loss in translation can quickly turn to loss of customer loyalty. This is our biggest challenge, and the marketer must intelligently capture and hold the buyer’s attention.
As in every other function, talent holds the key in marketing too. We need to strike the right balance of talent for traditional and millennial marketing. Thankfully, today’s workforce is well in tune with the current trends in the digital marketing space. Plus, we have more women joining the workforce, and they bring fresh perspectives on understanding what buyers want and how to get the right message across to them.
Another challenge we see lies in extracting ROI in the current virtual environment. ROI is calculated through brand recall, lead generation and deal closures. Given that everything is virtual today, and with privacy policies hindering individual tracking, it is often difficult to pinpoint what actually contributes to the ROI. By cross-leveraging data from different channels, we can attribute the right impact Persona-based marketing and enhanced experiences from different marketing channels act as influencers to enable us derive impactful results.
What kind of marketing and branding needs arise for a well-known brand?
Every brand needs to have a healthy mix of account-based marketing, customer experience and engagement and interactive marketing and personalisation - without losing sight of the ROI from each.
The brand needs to be positioned appropriately to the relevant target audience. This can be achieved by experience marketing that leverages short-form content at the place and time when they are likely to be consumed. At Mphasis, we regularly create on-demand options such as webinars, podcasts, etc., and make them an integral part of our sales and marketing plans.
We also consistently work towards maintaining and increasing market and wallet share through layered digital marketing campaigns. Our brand campaign is continuous and supported by thought leadership from our leadership teams and SMEs, who share key trends and perspectives. . Through several and parallel micro- and vertical campaigns in support of RFPs, we stay ahead of market trends and focus on offerings that anticipate client needs.
Organisations also need to avoid negative branding. Focusing on the brand’s positives – it’s values and strengths - will improve brand recall. This is especially important in creating an engaging and positive environment for employees, be it the new hires or existing employees. Continuously acknowledging their value and contributions will build a happy work atmosphere of belonging.
Well-known brands must also increase valuations in the case of mergers and acquisitions. For example, our ‘Engineering is in our DNA’ brand campaign at Mphasis is aligned to our design-led, architecture-driven strategy. This has enhanced our market positioning during the recent acquisition of Blink UX, a design, research and consulting firm.