Vinod Kumar runs Vodafone Business and Iris Meijer is its chief marketing officer. Kumar’s account of the function is structural rather than promotional. Marketing sits at two junctions: one between external views and internal perceptions, the other between the product organization and the channels that take products to market.
The job at those junctions is not to police the traffic but to move it. Kumar wants the position leveraged for commercial outcomes aligned with company strategy, and says the role is to aid the speed at which the traffic flows rather than to witness it.
Key findings
- Kumar’s standard for brand communication is congruence: it should be congruent with the strategy of the business and amplify it. The failure mode he names is getting carried away with the brand without understanding why you are amplifying it.
- The test he applies to his own chief marketing officer is placement rather than output. He asks whether marketing is in all the relevant business flows and in the right internal and external conversations, which in a company with multiple lines of business is not a given.
- None of that can be arranged by process. Nothing at Vodafone is completely scripted, and no three clicks of a button produce a beautiful report, so the job falls to keeping an ear on the ground and scanning the horizon externally.
- His model of marketing support is multi-modal rather than single mode or even bi-modal. Marketing an incubating business or a newly launched concept is a different job from supporting an established multi-billion euro revenue stream, and the talent bench has to shift with the product life cycle.
- Meijer narrows the question when it is put to her. Marketing does not represent all stakeholders equally; it represents the customer, who is one stakeholder among several, and its role is to represent that customer internally.
We had no data, except we had all of it
Meijer takes the drama out of the subject. Marketers talk about data constantly, she says, as though the data and the technology were driving them, when the correction is to take control and decide what matters. Her team told her on arrival three years earlier that Vodafone Business had no data. In fact it had a great deal, first party and third party, but fragmented and disparate.
The remedy was consolidation plus new primary research: more than 10,000 small businesses surveyed across Vodafone’s markets to establish what they needed. The propositions built on that were keyed to customer needs rather than to the existing product set, which is the harder direction for a product organization to face. Her proof that it landed is not a metric but a customer saying they now believed Vodafone understood them.
The magic wand answer
Asked what he would change with a magic wand, Kumar points at his own side rather than at marketing. Customer insight has come a long way. What is missing is a team that understands Vodafone’s technology and products equally well. Bring insight to the technology’s capability and you can present it in a way that delivers real value. He calls that non-trivial, given the size of the product shelf.
His answer has no silver bullet in it. The operating model changed in the product organization and in Meijer’s team, which now puts more emphasis on segment-specific proposition creation. A culture platform called Spirit pushes customer centricity, getting things done together, and experimenting and learning fast. Talent is the urgent part, closed by reskilling, upskilling and skills brought in from outside, with no five-year runway.
Change the addressable market, not the customer count
Pressed on the industry pull toward acquiring the next customer, Meijer puts the base first. Serve existing customers the best way you can, she says, and the right to acquire new ones follows. Kumar reframes it further: the bigger opportunity is changing the addressable market rather than acquiring more customers, or as he puts it, redrawing the perimeter of Vodafone’s relevance.
The arithmetic behind it is the whole argument. Telco land services grow at one percent in what he calls a generous world, while the adjacent areas inside the perimeter Vodafone has drawn grow at eight. What he asks marketing to do about that is preparatory rather than promotional: seed the ground so the company can operate in fertile territory when it arrives.
He also credits Meijer and her team with acting as the company’s conscience keepers, holding it to the customer need and putting technology second. Vodafone is an engineering company full of engineers, himself included, and its instinct is to run at the technology first and the product after it. Expansion, he says, is now driven by customer need rather than by having a hammer and going to look for nails.
The free service, and why it was not charity
The example both of them return to is V-Hub, a free digital advisory service built when the pandemic hit Vodafone’s smallest customers hardest. It covered digital marketing, security and a range of other areas, delivered through phone and chat support alongside educational and training courses. Meijer frames it as a response to something the research had already established, that many smaller businesses were not yet digitally savvy.
Pressed on how something with no immediate return gets approved, Kumar declines the credit. He may have triggered the solution and championed it, but it came from listening to customers and to a human plea for help from small firms. His first justification is unsentimental: if those businesses did not survive there would be nobody left to sell to, and no P&L either.
The second justification is strategic. Responding to the plea gave Vodafone a way into the concentric circles outside telco products and services where it had not previously played, and made the brand recognized for something it cared about. He is not naive about how it pays: those firms have to choose between providers eventually, and he expects them to choose Vodafone.
Underneath both halves is a claim about time rather than generosity. A for-profit business does not have to sacrifice the interest of stakeholders, Kumar argues, and the prerequisite is defining the horizon over which you expect the economic benefit. Playing at the most strategic horizon is how the decision gets made, and the price is patience and authenticity rather than money.
What happens when you cannot afford it
Kumar does not pretend every commitment survives the budget. A target for how quickly the company decarbonizes can carry a cost of several hundreds of millions. The question is how much of it Vodafone can absorb, and where it tightens its belt for the rest. Sometimes it is too much and gets deferred. The standard he holds instead is directional: honest that they are going toward the target and making steady progress.
The failure he names is setting an ambitious target and assuming people have forgotten about it, which he calls a hollow statement that will show. The countermeasure is operational rather than rhetorical: break the purpose agenda down into quarterly, weekly, functional and person-level goals, the way the company breaks down anything else it takes on.
Where the money is not there, other resources still are, and finding them is the leadership obligation rather than an excuse. Thought leadership, advocacy, partnership with customers and giving people’s time all count, so it does not always mean taking the checkbook out. Where money is redirected, his condition is that it goes to real contribution rather than external talk, and that the contribution speaks for itself rather than the headlines.
The test that it is real
Asked whether the company has become good at building the business case for purposeful work, Meijer refuses the premise. They do not think purpose, she says, they feel and live it, and nobody consciously writes a business case for a purpose-driven initiative. The fuel is internal: her evidence is how strongly Vodafone’s own staff responded to the new brand positioning.
Kumar’s test is behavioral. In eighteen months at Vodafone he has watched people weave purpose into meetings that have nothing to do with it, unprompted, while preparing for a customer meeting or in another session. That tells him it is grassroots, not something he walked in and asked for. The stronger signal is being called out himself on whether a decision fits the purpose agenda, because the challenge means it is live in the business.
Where their own purposes sit
Kumar is executive sponsor for the race and ethnicity strand of Vodafone’s inclusion work, one of three pillars alongside digital society and planet. He ties it to his own working life: it is the reason he has had a global career and lived and worked all over the world. His case has two parts, a social justice element and the logic that cognitive diversity strengthens any outcome.
Meijer’s addition is the categories usually left out. Diversity talk reaches for gender first, then ethnicity and race, but disability belongs in it too, and she credits the team member who pushed that into Vodafone’s advertising. Showing it internally is not enough; the same thoughts have to be expressed externally, because you have to be true to yourself.
Stakeholders started asking about each other
What the pandemic changed, in Kumar’s account, is not the ranking of stakeholders but the linkage between them. Shareholders now ask him how Vodafone is working with policymakers and how it has helped governments through the period. Consumers ask what the company has done for small businesses, because they want the neighborhood baker to keep trading and the local hairdresser to survive with an online capability.
He marks the condition that might not hold: some of the new attentiveness comes from not being in a high pressure situation, though he believes it will stay. Meijer passes on the correction a taxi driver gave her, that this is not the new normal, it is simply the normal. She adds that a year of resilience talk has left everyone exhausted, and that people should cut themselves some slack.
Two months, not two years
Asked what she wants to develop as a leader now that this is the normal, Meijer picks pace. In big organizations, developing something new and thinking outside the box takes months, slowed by process. V-Hub went from need to launch in a couple of months, which she reads as proof that Vodafone can be agile when it wants to be and can find the positive in adversity.
What she wants from that is a habit rather than an exception: seeing the art of the possible and acting in an agile, flexible way. The loop she describes is short. Try this, see whether it worked, try something else, instead of developing for months and months and then launching.
Scope and limitations
This is a chief executive and a chief marketing officer describing their own company, recorded in 2021, and the growth rates, research volumes and program outcomes are their own statements rather than reported results. Both flag that the work described is early: Kumar on his own impact after eighteen months, Meijer on propositions still in test with customers.
Source
This page summarises HGS #27: Vinod Kumar & Iris Meijer (Vodafone Business) about the CEO & CMO collaboration, by Frank van den Driest, 2022-02-16.