 We have Mr. Thomas Barca, author and former partner of McKinsey. He has consulted and marketed for over 20 years in 14 industries in 45 countries. His clients include many of the world's most prominent companies including over two dozen of the Fortune 500. I'm sure all of you are excited as am I. So let's welcome with a virtual applause, a very warm welcome to you Thomas Barca. Thank you for being here spending this time. We appreciate it and looking forward to your session. Thank you very much, much appreciated, good afternoon to all of you. It's a big pleasure to meet you and I hope you can see and hear us. Now let's see, you're still up for another session, has been a long day in front of the screen so let me see if I can add something that's probably a little bit different today because I want to talk about why mobile marketers must be brave. And I'm indeed, I'm Thomas Barca, I'm coming to you today from Germany, Cologne. So we are a little bit ahead in terms of the time for us. It's just noon, as you can see by the green light in the background. And I'm a former marketer, former McKinsey partner and I write books about leadership in marketing. And I focus on something I want to talk about today as well, which is how you as marketers can have more influence, more impact, but also simply more success. Now, some of you might now say, is he out of his mind? Has he read the news lately? Don't know about you, but we heard just recently about marketing budget cuts. You know, quite some companies are, you know, with COVID, you know, keeping the money together and not spending on marketing. We have in the marketing industry right now, we have quite a number of layoffs. Luckily, mobile is a little bit better off, but, you know, we see that. And if, you know, honestly, many of us, right, we're walking around every single day with a mask on, right? How cool is that? And why would that be a time when we should talk about how you could have more success, a better career and so on? Some people think that's probably a contradiction. And I don't believe that is true. I actually believe this very special time that we're all living in is easily marketing's moment. And I believe if you play it right, this could be your moment. But before I talk about this and about any of the ideas I want to share with you, I want to talk about the PlayStation. What many of you may not know is that the PlayStation is, of course, not only a very successful product, not only a product that many people buy, a product that has saved Sony many times from going bankrupt. But what many people don't know is that Sony had almost missed that market. That when gaming became a thing, Sony management was actually against gaming. There were a lot of people who didn't like the idea of on this was very tricky. And it's a bit like in mobile, right? This was a new industry. This was a new idea. And a lot of people were not sure if Sony should actually engage in that year, except one guy and his name is Ken Kutaragi. And Ken in an almost 10 year long battle, convinced the Sony management, the skeptical Sony management to get into gaming and to make gaming and the PlayStation the success it is today. And in the same way, the success of many things you have been talking about in this conference, many things you've been talking about today in the panel that I also just joined in earlier, isn't so much about how good your ideas are, isn't so much about how good your tools are and how good your technology is. Success for many of you, will be much more about whether you are able to make change happen. Whether you are able to convince people to take your idea and actually make it really happen. Whether you are able to not just develop ideas, but actually make ideas happen. That is the career of today's session. And that's why I believe right now could very easily be your moment. Very easily be a moment. But let me tell you why making this your moment could be difficult. Now, when you look at this baby face and this stunning view, this is how a lot of people in marketing look like when you ask them, do you understand all the current digital technology? A lot of people when they look and immerse that, I'm not sure, right? They're unclear. And it could easily be that the skills that are developing so fast, you know, the new technologies, the things we just talked about 5G and all these wonderful things, they're awesome. But seriously, it's very hard to learn them all. It's very hard to catch up. And a lot of people in marketing are currently facing a little bit of a skills gap because there are just too many skills. Even if you're really, really good, you cannot learn all these skills. It's impossible. So the skills gap is what is it actually? It's a confidence killer. It's not helpful. So it's something you are often up against in marketing. But that's not half of it. In marketing, in mobile marketing, you're always facing a trust gap. Just think about it. How much of the things we've been talking about at this conference, you know, the 5G, 5G, rollout, the new technologies like becoming autonomous, driving, all these wonderful things, how many of those things are about the future? Well, most are. And when you work on a project that is to do with the future and you tell someone, hey, I know the future, they think, no, you don't. You just estimate it. And that's why in marketing, in mobile, everything you will be talking about will always sound a little bit less reliable than some hard facts from other people because it is. The truth is, your work is always or mostly about the future. And people who work on the future, they do things that are sometimes hard to trust. So as a marketer in mobile, you will always be facing that big trust gap. But here, there's another gap you're facing. We already had the skills gap. Now we have the trust gap. There's one more. That's a power gap. Now, just imagine the organization you're working for had the best possible customer experience like this wonderful experience that everybody loves, your product, your brand, or if you're a consultant, everybody loves the work you're doing, or if you have a technology firm, you know, everybody loves things that you're offering. How many people will have to get involved on your end to make this happen? Or probably many. And how many of those people directly report to you? Well, that's typically very few. So the challenge you will have as a mobile marketer is always that power gap. So skills gap, trust gap, power gap. It's not just about you, it's normal. That's what we have in our industry. But the thing is, we don't talk about it because when you're starting out in mobile marketing or in any marketing or in mobile, whatever you do, you're moving to a big city, you're joining a great firm and you're getting really busy and you're working on amazing projects and your parents have absolutely no clue what it really is you're doing. In this world, success becomes a must and you think yourself, wow, one day I will have this great project, this great idea. And then I will be very influential. And I can all of a sudden pull the strings. And specifically when you work in India and I worked in India a lot, some people also think when I'm older, when I'm older, then I will have all that influence. Well, let me tell you this, it is not true because when you think to yourself that you just need to work harder and harder and harder and get older to become more influential, it's not how it works. In marketing, it's the other way around, you have to learn to become influential so all your hard work pays off. And many times when I work with people in India, I got this message that people say, yeah, but I'm too young. You know, I'm too young, nobody will listen to me. Well, I'll tell you what, when you think about some of the most successful entrepreneurs that I've met in India, you are sometimes extremely young people and they're shaping an industry. So if you think age is the thing, I think it's just an excuse. It's not about your age, it's about how talented you become to become influential and you can. Now let me prove this to you. Today I wanna show you two big pieces of research. The first is the research about what matters for success in marketing, but I'm gonna show you in just a moment another big piece on how your bravery matters and that's a fascinating contrast, but let's make sure everybody can catch up. Maybe you have seen what I show now, but it's always good to recap because what does matter for business success of mobile marketers in reality? Is it the industry? Is it whether you work in B2C or B2B, if you work for one of the big mobile operators in Airtel or you work for a technology firm or if you work for a consultancy, it's not. And you see there's a very small bubble coming on this chart right now, actually on this side, I need to do it this way, under 1%, it's not important, it's not that critical. How about gender? That's a big question, right? What good news is, in marketing, gender for success does not play a masterful. And in fact, I looked at this data for a lot of countries, it's a large global study and it was the same in India than it was in China and it was in the US and it was in Europe. So gender per se is not a success driver for you in marketing. Personality and technical skills, two fascinating ones. First off, personality, it's actually surprisingly small. It's under 5%. So the bad news is, you cannot blame your parents for your success, it's not about your genes. Success in mobile marketing can be learned. And technical skills, about 15%. The truth is, in mobile marketing, having the marketing skills is the entry ticket to your game, but to succeed, what you need is more. So what is it that makes you successful? Well, finally, someone, we can blame the company. That is true, if you work in a place that is not great, if your boss is not very nice or difficult or not very smart, what doesn't really let you thrive, doesn't really help you with your big ideas, that can be very difficult. But far and away, the largest factor for success of mobile market is our change leadership skills. The best people that we had in our global research study, literally hundreds and thousands of people, they were good at doing marketing, but what they were really good at is making the ideas they had actually happen. That's the game you're in. So that's the trick, or in other words, you could say, great mobile marketers are great change leaders. That's the headline. Now, today what I wanna do in a couple of minutes we have, I wanna give you just three tips. And they're way more, and I'm gonna show you also where you can learn way more things, but I wanna quickly show you three tips, and I wanna talk about bravery and why it's so important. So what are some of the tips? Well, the first tip is if you want any influence as a marketer, tackle big issues. Make sure the projects you're working on, the issues you're tackling, the things that you worry about are big and big specifically in the mind of your stakeholders. This is a prepaid card, which of course many of you have seen, there's a still 4G, I know we're talking 5G now, but you know what, when the whole industry started, it wasn't long ago, there was no prepaid. You know how it worked when it all started out? People had to make a contract, they made phone calls, and they got a bill at the end of the month. And you know why it was like this? Because that's how the fixed line telephone worked, right? You make calls, you get a bill at the end of the month. So the mobile operators did just copy the old system. And one guy changed the entire game. And his name is Dee Dutta. And Dee Dutta as a young marketer for a mobile company called One to One, which is now a T-Mobile, he was angry about this because he said, you know, lots of my friends can't get phones because they don't have the credit rating. So he wanted to change the system. And Dee convinced the management of One to One of Two Things. First, that prepaid phones, so paying before you make the call, right? Buying some credit and then making calls is a customer need. People want this, they love it. But Pays You Go or prepaid is also a company need. It's gonna make us money. It's gonna be profitable. We can technically do it, which was a real big question at the beginning. You know, and finance agrees, it could be really cool. So then he worked in what we call the value creation zone. That's the zone where you as a mobile market to have power. So I want you to think about your current projects and I want you to think about how much are they covering customer needs, but also company needs. And does your company understand that? And if both are true, then you're working in a value creation zone. And sometimes that's hard. Sometimes your projects aren't in there and sometimes your company doesn't get it or the customers don't get it. But that's your job then to make sure people understand because only when they understand is there a value creation zone and that's when you can have success. I have two more tips for you. Two off about 20 to 30 tips that are important for change. I'll just give you a little bit of a flavor. Walk the halls, you know. If you wanna make change happen, if you wanna convince your boss, if you wanna convince your colleagues, you know, you can't do this by email. It's a bit of a contact sport, which, you know, right now contact is a bit of a tricky thing to do, but it's still important. You know, you almost have to like be around people and try and figure out what actually happens. The good news is with the current restrictions or we can't meet physically, it is actually much easier to get people on 10 minute Zoom or Teams or Epic's call than it was before to meet them in their office because people are quite used to having these short conversations. So you can actually go around and see this. This is Ed Smith and Ed Smith is one of the most successful chief marketing officers in the world and he achieved the unthinkable. In Australia, he was able to install a paywall in front of a magazine called The Australian. Now, as you can imagine, when you have journalists who love their work and you come in as a market and say, let's build a paywall. A lot of journalists get very nervous because they want their things to be read. So Ed did a typical change leadership saying, very smart, he basically did something we call listen, decide, communicate. He went out to people and said, look, this is what we need to do, but I'm here to listen to your concerns. And he did listen. He listened to what people said. He didn't promise anything. He didn't say, yes, I agree. No, he just said, I'll take notes, you know? Then they went back with all the comments, made a decision, decided to paywall, very different from the paywall they had in mind. But then he did something that's very important. He met people again and said, hey, you know, this is what you told me. Here's what we've done. Here's what we could take on board. Here's what we could. The power of going back to people and communicating the change is unbelievable. He did not make everybody happy, but he earned the most precious thing you can earn as a change leader. And that was respect. So how could you walk the halls in a virtual time? You can. Think about how easy it will be for you to get some of the stakeholders into a 10-minute virtual meeting. It is actually easier than it was last year. So try that. Walk the halls with your ideas, get feedback. Don't promise anything. And when you decide, go back to people and explain it. Okay, I got one more for you. This hit the head and the heart. You cannot prove anything to people if they're not listening. But he could tell them a story, a story that gets on their heart, that captures their mind and their souls. And these stories are very powerful. This is Jim Fahley, former CMO of Ford. Ford once was bankrupt. He was a CMO. Guess how much marketing they did? Very little. People said, we have to keep the money. And he said, look, guys, I'm not gonna tell you about marketing here. What I'm gonna tell you, however, is that my parents bought a Ford because for them, the Ford oval, the blue oval was a symbol of pride. We have to bring the pride back to people if they want to buy a car. Ed Smith, I talked earlier about, he didn't say, let's do a paywall. He said, I'm here to help save quality journalism. That's powerful, isn't it? You gotta have a story for what you are talking to. So what is the story of hope that you will tell to people when you are going around with your big ideas and wanna make change happen? Now, I realize this was reasonably fast, a couple of ideas. I give you a few more tips, but I can't, for time reasons, go into a lot of detail. But if you wanna really learn how to be influential, you gotta learn these skills like understanding the value creations on how you build it. You're making a business case that works in the C-suite, quite important, not in marketing, but in C-suite. Storytelling, navigating a matrix organization. It's so common today. We have matrix organizations where so many people are in charge. How do you do this? Mobilizing colleagues, what's the idea? How do you become a role model that people love and wanna follow? How do you start movements inside a company? And so on. So there are a lot of things. And I wanna very briefly, if you are interested in learning these things, I'm gonna give you one piece of tip on my end. You don't have to do that, but just as a sort. Siltzaller. Siltzaller is former chief marketing officer of the global spirits firm Diageo, one of the biggest businesses and spirit in the world. And Siltzaller is one of the icons of marketing. Together, for example, we're currently running, starting February 15th, a class for people who want to learn change. It's a virtual class, of course. And we're gonna talk about how you lead upwards, how you mobilize your bosses, how you lead sideways, how you mobilize your colleagues, how you lead teams in marketing. So your team is actually pushing forward. And how is the whole you lead yourself? How do you become that person that is actually having the energy in the drive to make change happen? And we're doing this, not just as a video format or something in that sense that you've seen, but also we're gonna have a real, this is a real discussion platform. Imagine you're entering a group of peers who are debating day in and day out and exchanging their change leader tips. So if that's interesting, we're starting in February, let me know. It's the marketing leadershipmasterclass.com or write us a message if you're interested. We're very happy to have you on board. Now, I promised you to talk about why your bravery is important. And that's the last point I wanna make before we wrap up and then move to questions. Your bravery is very important. In fact, I wanted to know last year, does bravery matter? Everybody talks about it. So together with the marketing society, we did the largest ever study on bravery in marketing. And here's what we learned. By the way, just shows you how big the study is. And here's what we learned. Among the manufacturers, skills, expertise, the company and others. Remember, yeah, there's a similar logic that we had before. The brave leadership behaviors explain over 50% of people's success. So bravery is really important, but it's not that simple. It's not that simple because let me think, let's think about this. What does bravery actually mean? There's more of bravery. You stand up for your beliefs. There's psychological braveries. That means you have the strength to face these big issues. But also there's speed. You're brave enough to go really fast rather than wait. All of these are very important. But you know, here's what we found. And that's fascinating. The brave people, the people who are really, really, really brave all the time, they were not more successful than anybody else. In fact, they were slightly less successful. But you know, who was really unsuccessful, who was really behind, the people who were never brave, the people who were never, never, ever brave, those are the people that were in real trouble. And it makes a lot of sense. If you work in a company, you cannot be brave every single day because you know what, they'll fire you. So you have to pick your battles. You have to be very clear about the thing that you want to be brave about. Pick your battles and then go out and brave. In other words, for success in marketing, caution is risky, but you have to pick your battles. You have to pick the thing that you really care about. And if you're still very afraid, if you're still afraid to be brave, let me end with one big idea. This is a Sydney funnel web spider. It's a very dangerous spider. In fact, it could kill a person within hours. It's very dangerous. And people in Australia know it. Now, what happened? Just imagine a picture it is. You walk into a room and just two meters away from you on the wall sits that big Sydney funnel web spider. What do you do? Do you get closer and have a look or just go back and run for safety? Picture the same situation. Now you see under the spider is a sleeping baby. And the spider keeps crawling down. What do you do now? Go there and fetch the baby or do you run? Most people that I've met, attack the baby. Bravery is purpose minus fear. If you want to be brave, yes, you can try to be less fearful. Maybe you are successful, but you know what? You know what's much easier is to have a real purpose to be brave, like the baby. Something to fight for. So if you want to be brave, that's my advice as a marketer in mobile. Think about what you really want to fight for. And once you know, and once you know what it is, and once you're really clear, be brave. So that's it for me. I hope that was useful, gave you some ideas. And I'd love to hear if there are any questions at this point. Otherwise what we can do is, I think we have a Q and A lined up.