OPINION: CMO World Tour interview with Phillip Manzi, Nokia's global director of marketing operations

Phillip Manzi believes that digital will make marketing more old-fashioned. Communications, argues Nokia’s director of global marketing operations, will be based on word of mouth strategies in the same way as the retailers of the 18^th century had to build their reputation.

“In the 18^th century, if you were a butcher and you sold dodgy meat one customer would tell the other and pretty soon you wouldn’t be in business any more,” he says. “The internet has given people the tools to start the conversations about the brand, to be able to communicate what they think and the internet is very good at amplifying those messages.”

But, he warns, brands have to be careful of switching too much, too soon: traditional media still has a role. “If you look at Pepsi, they went – this is the case of too much focus on digital and not understanding their business – very digital and moved away from all of the traditional media. I think, looking at them, they probably suffered for that,” he says.

Manzi sees himself as digital evangelist at Nokia but his love of the latest technology clearly goes way back.

“When I was at Microsoft [Manzi was UK Marketing Manager at MSN from 2003-2006], I built one of the first media centres, which drove my wife mad because every time you turned on the TV you had to reboot the PC and it would often crash,” he says.

It won’t be a surprise that Manzi’s regular mobile is a Nokia, although he is always trying out the competition’s offerings. An N8 user he praises the handset’s HD video camera, which enables him to film his son playing rugby and then watch it back in cinema quality on the TV.

He’s an avid user of social networks, posting pictures from his travels on Facebook, sourcing reviews of hotels from family and friends and using the platform to communicate to the rugby team he coaches.

“Rather than sending out 20 emails to different parents around the county, I just use this tool and they all log on,” he says. “That’s really actually quite simplified my life as a coach.”

Corporately, Nokia is trying to take advantage of the functionality of Facebook and is currently experimenting with a sales page in the UK within Facebook.

“If it can be positioned as a natural and easy frictionless way to conclude your search and your recommendation for a product, then I think that could work very well,” he says.

Frédéric Colas: Do you set a target of a percentage of marketing budgets to be a spent on digital?

Phillip Manzi: We [say] X per cent  should be invested in digital to kick-start the process. But local marketing teams get digital, it’s not a mystery to them. They want to invest in online. So now it's more [about] observing where the spend is and, if you see a market that's not investing anything, well you have a conversation about that. But it's now more guidance and best practice that encourages that spend [increases].

FC: What level of spend are you specifying? Is it 20 per cent  or 50 per cent ?

PM: It varies. If you look at China, it's approaching nearer the 40 per cent  [mark]. If you look at somewhere like Vietnam, it will be in the low teens. It really does depend on the digital maturity of the market, and also the digital competency of the [local] marketing team.

FC: What are you doing to boost digital competency?

PM: Everyone's very focused on digital competency training from the CEO all the way down to the personal assistants. They all have to become digitally aware. We've looked at not creating digital silos, so digital is part of [everyone] on the marketing team's responsibility.

FC: What tools do you have centrally to encourage local market teams to take action?

PM: Because local teams are empowered, you can't direct them or say you will not do this, you'll do that. You can give them the strategy and the guidance to follow. You can follow that up with investment, so you can encourage and direct where they should maybe invest the money.

So you encourage investment online, which has been a strong message that we've been sending out. You reward and share best practice of digital. All [these] things create the environment where digital marketing can succeed.

FC: What cultural changes are required to encourage changes in marketing approach?

PM: I think a culture of allowing people to take risks is [one of the fundamental things]. To be innovative, especially if you're a leader that hasn’t come from [the digital] area, and taking risks maybe in an area that you don’t really understand [creates] a double uncertainty for you. So you have to be pretty brave and courageous.

FC: In many companies it seems that marketers get caught in the middle. The boss wants them to do more digital but they also demand business results. How do you deal with this challenge?

PM: You have to persuade and prove that the digital strategy will work. You have to provide the evidence to support that, and you have to get them engaged. You don’t swallow an elephant all at once. So you're sharing best practices; why don’t you focus on that bit first and see the results from there, and then you bring them into the journey slowly with trial.

The beauty of it is you can build them up. You're not going to change someone overnight, you're not going to get them to totally risk everything on what they would see as a new strategy or a new way of engaging consumers. But you can transition them slowly. That's a leadership function of the CMO to do that.

FC: What would you like to learn from your fellow members of the World Federation of Advertisers?

PM: A lot of people feel: “I've got to do a really powerful impactful viral ad to grab people's attention”. That's not the case, your content's got to be really relevant and engaging to the target audience first before people will even think about sharing it.

So [what I’d like to ask is] how can you be innovative in that and how can you link that back to your brand?

FC: How do you do that internally at Nokia?

PM: We reward and encourage innovation. [It’s having] the right training, the right structure, the right support and the right investment model. At the end of the day it's about innovation, it's leadership, it's allowing people to be innovative and creative.

The internet is a great place to try things out, so [allowing] people to fail is a way; you know, if that didn’t work let's think about how we could do something that can work.

The internet is often a very [intuitive] process, because you have the real-time element so you can change and adapt as you go along. So it's providing the right framework, the environment and the culture that allows this to happen.

FC: Where do you see the results of that approach in Nokia’s marketing?

PM: I'd use an example from China. The marketing team looked at how they were going to launch the N8. Normally you would say we are going to have a launch press conference, we are going to have all the journalists invited and there is a very, almost-standardised way of generating that pre-awareness of the launch.

They rejected this approach and did a social media launch using all of the social media [tools], integrating all their teams. They worked together on a holistic plan, put the message out there, engaged our fan base in all these social media sites, got them to contribute ideas about the launch and share the messages, spread the word. They built a series of activities online in these social media sites right up to the launch date.

China [then] launched the product online at a press conference and then we had a number of characters from China come in and contribute to that and it was a day-long event. And it was the best launch we had had.

FC: Have you developed any global deals with digital media giants?

PM: Our experience is that you need to do both [global and local] and probably more on the local side. To be successful you need to build up [your] local partnerships and relationships with local developers local content providers.

We will build global partnerships. CNN is a good example and we have a global deal with them but it's executed very locally. So we say this is the deal, this is the framework and you execute it in your market within that framework. We'll do a very few global ones but encourage lots of local ones.

Look at China, look at the key players in social media and digital media out here, there are very few global brands.

Now there's a whole host of reasons for that, but one of the key reasons from China's perspective is that Chinese understand and value a local provider that knows Chinese culture and understands Chinese insights and [that makes them] feel comfortable.

So they see, say Renren as an example, they see that as a far superior product than Facebook because of those things. So as a global company you have to respect those and partner with them, and that's why it's a local partnering strategy primarily.