Animated is not usually the first word that springs to mind when one imagines a business-to-business telecoms executive. But Nortel’s recently appointed chief marketing officer for Asia-Pacific, Rick Seeto, is just that.
He is an instantly likeable, energetic, fast-talking Australian whose enthusiasm adds colour to the otherwise monochrome image of telecoms equipment.
Seeto’s unstuffy character adds weight to his pledge to update and improve his company’s approach to marketing. A keen surfer and Nortel veteran - his career with the Canadian company in Asia spans 20 years - he says simply of his new role: “I’m trying to reshape our marketing strategy and practices.”
Nortel, he argues, has a rich technological heritage, and its marketing has traditionally been based around this. “Two or three years ago, we were very much a technological company rather than a marketing company. It’s a slightly un-sexy background. Now we want to develop integrated marketing.”
That will require a change of internal culture. “When it comes to money, we tend to put it in separate buckets - PR, advertising, direct marketing,” he explains. “But having money in separate buckets forces the owners of these buckets to make individual tactics. We aim to approach things with a single budget and owner.”
Although a campaign’s components are inevitably executed by different groups, he says the most essential element of successful marketing communications is a consistent message through a “unified communications theme”.
And far from presenting Nortel as a straightforward hardware provider for all seasons, the message Seeto is striving to convey is that the company has the credentials and capability to simplify the issue of hyper-connectivity and the business problems that arise from it. “Rather than addressing everything and ending up with peanut butter, our focus is on the issue of hyper-connectivity. We’re trying to tie Nortel to the trend and build long-term association with it on the basis that we have the ability to solve the problems of hyper-connectivity for business. The key to the new campaigns is connectivity and business made simple.”
While the global message is the same, Seeto acknowledges that a certain amount of adaptation is necessary depending on the target audience. One of the major hurdles in Asia is that different markets are at different levels of maturity when it comes to marketing.
“In India, for example, the challenge is finding good database services. In more mature markets, people say ‘print is dead’, but in India it’s alive and kicking. Part of having a presence in Asia is about understanding that and restructuring campaigns accordingly.”
Freely admitting that he is still in the process of forming an opinion as how best to work with the company’s agency partners, which include McCann Erickson as agency-of- record, Seeto appears to take a refreshingly experimental approach both in determining the target segment and developing the campaign.
While the company is unwavering in its proposition as a business-to-business supplier, Seeto points to a recent effort to “do things differently”. This involved the creation of an electronic direct mail campaign to achieve greater awareness and arouse curiosity among the online IT population. He says it resulted in a slew of new customers.
Another campaign, built around energy efficiency, resulted in the creation of an energy calculator that allowed potential customers to compare the energy consumption of Nortel products with those of competitors, such as Cisco.
“We’ve learned to tweak consistently,” he says, noting that just a few years ago, all Nortel’s marketing was purely events-driven.
Last year’s ‘Tornado’ integrated campaign, which incorporated digital media to target the Singapore market, was a new approach that was later adapted for Mumbai. Listing China and India as Nortel’s focal points for the future, he concedes that “large events are not always sustainable”.
He adds: “Now we flood the metropolitan area with messaging. We’re reaching out to customers we’ve never had contact with before. Our focus is to develop as broad a reach as possible and convince people that they’re taking long-term technology with a company that will be around for the long term.”
Rick Seeto’s CV
2007 CMO, Nortel
2004 VP enterprise networks, Nortel
2000 Data product marketing, Nortel
1998 CIO, Nortel