How Infosys’ CMO is Making B2B Marketing an Emotional Affair

It doesn't matter whether you are a B2B marketer or a B2C marketer. At the end of the day, marketing's job is to create an emotional bridge between an organization and its consumer. And that's as important in B2B as it is in B2C.

Thank you, Jenny. Great to be here.

Well, my name is Sumit Virmani. I'm the chief marketing officer at Infosys. As you introduced already, I have been in the space of marketing for close to three decades. Two of those three decades have been with Infosys. I love to call myself an accidental marketer because growing up I never thought marketing would be a career path that I would actually embark on. A happy accident actually led me into this journey and here I am three decades later quite enjoying the path that was chosen for me while it continues.

Well, I guess there's only one answer to the two questions you raised and that really is the happy accident. I did my undergrad in finance with a clear pathway aspiration laid out to make a career in finance. I joined a management course with the intent to specialize in finance. At that point, the first year used to be the common year where you study the foundation. In our day it used to be one year of common foundational understanding of business and the second year used to be the specialization year. I went through my common year with the full intent of getting into my finance pathway, which I had trained for several years in the past. I was quite excited about it. I've always been the numbers guy and used to enjoy that journey. But here I was being taught brand management by an incredible marketing professor who possibly introduced the idea of marketing and brand building in such amazing ways that I realized there's more to business than numbers. It's the whole idea of making these emotional connections between organizations. It's the whole idea of understanding the science of building brands. I was so excited and enamored by that course that by the time it was point to make a decision on finance or marketing, I did take that leap and choose to specialize year two in marketing. And three decades later, I'm sitting right in front of you pretending to be an expert in a space that I did study foundationally for.

Well, Jenny, first of all, I think you made a great point. I've often taken a moment to reflect on how much the foundation in finance actually helped me navigate this career in marketing. I would like to believe that it had a tremendously critical role to play. I share a fantastic relationship with my CFO, with my CEO, and with the board. I would like to believe that one of the reasons we've been able to do that is because from early on, the way we think about marketing is from a perspective of what business cares about. Business in the C-suite and the boardroom only cares about growth and profitability. Marketing or any other function that exists in the organization should not lose sight of that because that's all that matters when you're a public company responding to shareholders quarter on quarter. Having said that, as a marketer you actually have to wear two hats. You have to wear the hat of the short-term business objectives that business is chasing and the long-term business aspirations that the C-suite and the board is chasing. When you're playing the role of a marketer, you're actually playing a role to accelerate growth in the short term and lay the foundation of growth and market share gains in the long term. You can't do that without having the right balance in what I call brand marketing versus performance marketing. The debate that is possibly timeless with marketers. By virtue of the role that I play, by virtue of the global brand that we are and the marketing organizations I get to sit with and build with other marketers, you're right, the conversations for several years now have been around the importance of the balance of art versus science, the balance of brand versus performance. Most successful marketers have at some point or another found the right balance between the two because the one or the other is a sure-shot recipe for marketing and business disaster.

No, it absolutely is. The foundational understanding of just marketing as a discipline may not be adequate to navigate the business demands of what the function needs to translate into. In the absence of that, there's a risk that marketing will end up becoming a glorified promotion function, a glorified events function, or a glorified communication function. For marketing to truly become a strategic function, that balance has to be addressed. Having said that, I would say there's another important skill that has become quite integral to every successful marketer over the last few years, and that is a skill in tech. Once again, I'm quite blessed to actually be marketing for an organization where you are a technology company, so tech comes quite naturally. Technology has brought that foundational difference that existed in marketing possibly two or three or four decades ago where attribution was a huge challenge. Showing correlation between investments and outcomes, between marketing plays and business impact, becomes very difficult. But in the last two decades, and more so in the last decade, the evolution of very strong attribution models, very strong tech platforms, and the digital emergence of digital as a channel has all ensured that there is very little which is gray and not attributable in marketing. If you have really made the effort to invest in the right platform, the right technology, and you have an attribution engine feeding your short-term and long-term goals, there is absolutely no reason why marketing cannot play alongside any other function in the C-suite in terms of driving business impact.

So Jenny, Infosys is close to 44 years old. It was founded in 1981 by a group of seven founders that started with a dream and a seed capital of $250. That itself is an ambition laid out of sheer boldness of being. Today we are a little over $19 billion in revenues, present across 56 countries, over 300,000 employees, and serve markets and industries with IT services. We are one of the largest IT services companies in the world and we also happen to be the fastest growing IT services brand in the world.

It's my third job in life and over two decades of that has been spent at Infosys.

I haven't been CMO all this while, but I have been CMO well beyond that stat already for sure. It's been quite a platform. It's a fantastic platform that presents the right foundation of bold ambition, deep-rooted sense of purpose and values, which I believe is quite unique and possibly one of the reasons why the organization has been so successful over the last four decades.

When you look at the world of technology, it is incredibly dynamic. Unlike most other industries, the success or failure of tech companies depends on how well they're navigating every turn of technology. If you were to just look at the multiple cycles we have seen over the last two decades, this industry itself has evolved from an era of pure play outsourcing to an era of digital-driven innovation, to an era of cloud driving the next chain disruption, and finally to an era of AI. There have been multiple significant turns of tech that we have seen over the last two or three decades. The only companies who have successfully navigated every turn are the ones who continue to be successful and continue to gain market share. We happen to be one of those. We're quite delighted that we've been able to successfully navigate these transitions. One of the reasons why we've been able to do that is because the foundational principles that we were created on, the whole aspiration of an insecure startup, that feeling has been deeply rooted across a large organization. We don't take our success casually. We would like to believe that we have a great responsibility as a company that is actually running the technology backbone of some of the largest organizations around the world. We have a deep responsibility of ensuring that we are able to very successfully transition our clients as new tech disrupts their business. That's the business we are in. Whether you are a financial services company or a retailer or a manufacturing player or a bank, you need tech transitions to reimagine your customer experience. You need tech transitions to successfully run your ops. That's when they rely on us. We got to make sure we stay on the cutting edge of it to stay relevant for our clients.

Well, I'll give you one data point and one metaphor to respond to your question. 95% of our business is repeat business. That essentially means that when we work with clients, we work with them for decades on end. That's only possible because there's deep institutionalized trust and institutional knowledge. Therefore the responsibility is immense on us to make sure that we stay deeply connected to the client's business while bringing them the best of tech that we have expertise in. In terms of the role that we play, I like to say we are the navigators. If you're in the business of crossing oceans on this incredibly wonderful ship, you need a navigator by the side of the captain to make this journey as smooth and as successful as possible. That's the role we see ourselves playing. It's even manifested in our promise. Infosys's promise is all about navigating your next. Everybody's next might be unique. It'll be different for a financial services firm versus a consumer products firm. But when it comes to adapting our tech to your specific requirements, that's the expertise we bring and that's the role of the navigator we aspire to play with every client that we partner with.

I would like to believe that I have two primary roles, or rather three primary roles. First, you have to invest in building the trust of the business, which is the C-suite and the board. You got to understand what they are looking for, what are the constant challenges they are navigating, what are the constant opportunities. You got to feed them as a marketer because you have that one foot in the market. The role that you're playing as a strategy partner, that's where I see an important focus for myself. The second is the role that I play in actually creating an incredibly strong team that is able to run with the large bold aspiration that we've laid out for ourselves. Finally, the role that I actually play in the market in terms of quantity that possibly ends up becoming the larger chunk of the three because marketing after all is the voice of the market into the organization. We have structured programs through the year where we have platforms to interact with our clients. I make it a point that a fair amount of my quarter is spent in the market to get a sense of what our clients are dealing with, what the industry influencers are thinking about, so that we can bring all that learning from the market into the boardroom to shape the strategy, be the growth catalyst, and protect and promote the reputation of the brand of the organization.

I think my two responses will converge, but I will take a lead with Sumit's point of view and if you want me to double down on something from an organizational level, I'm happy to do that as well. I've said this before, I deeply believe that AI is not an incremental shift for the business. It's a disruptive one. It's not an incremental shift for marketing as a function. It's a disruptive one. Possibly once a decade or once in two decades we come across disruptions that fundamentally reshape the foundations of functions. I would like to believe that AI is one of those. The reason I say that is because typically, and I'm saying it both as someone who's grown up in the world of tech and as a deep user of tech in the marketing function, if you were to go back a decade or so, ever since marketing tech has become an integral tool for every successful marketer, you normally come across point solutions that solve a specific problem. We had CRM, then that came into being, and we had small campaign management solutions. We had performance marketing playbooks. We always had point solutions that have been making marketing's job easier. In fact, a lot of debate has been around whether there are far too many tools that marketers should be navigating. I know you and I have both explored that debate often. But AI is not a piecemeal tech. AI is a disruptive technology. If I were to look at marketing as a function, the earlier debate a year and a half or two years ago was that AI is all about driving efficiency, AI is all about automation. It's going to take away the low value tasks and you can do marketing at one-third or one-fourth, depending on what research you look at, at that level of productivity. Absolutely, AI is definitely a tool that is driving more productivity. But having experimented over the last two years now, I would like to believe that this is one technology that is going to really transform the entire lifecycle from efficiency to experience to effectiveness. It'll actually vertically transform every single subfunction of marketing because it has the potential to do that. It's intelligence that's contextualized. It's intelligence that is rapidly evolving. If you just look at the last two years, we talked about AI for automation, then we had generative AI come into being, now we're talking about agentic AI. Who knows, by the time we finish this podcast, there might be a new version of AI that we might be grappling with. That's the pace at which this tech is evolving. But what I have been truly excited by is not the automation potential, possibly not even the effectiveness potential. What has truly excited me is how this tech is making things possible that weren't possible in the age before AI. I'll give you an example. It's a marketer's dream to potentially have millions of consumers co-create their campaigns with them. We love to have our campaigns become this fanboy craze about our campaigns. People can participate in it, they can actually contribute to it. Well, it's possible now. We have done that a couple of times already. We are deeply invested in the sport of tennis and Rafael Nadal happened to be a brand ambassador. Last year when he was retiring, we actually created a platform to pay tribute to the legend of Rafael Nadal and to celebrate his life. We introduced some pre-approved imagery of Rafa and we opened it to the billion fans of the sport around the world. We said, 'Get into the platform. Choose one of your favorite styles and imagery. Enter a little prompt which possibly lets you imagine Rafa in your living room or Rafa on top of Mount Everest or in the swimming pool, whatever suits your fancy.' We had thousands and thousands of fans actually using the platform and publishing it on social media, truly joining in the celebration. Could you imagine something like this even remotely possible before the age of AI came into being? To me, that's the potential and that's what has to be seen. How does it truly amplify a marketer's imagination? It's a true tech that has the potential to amplify humanity.

No, no. Having said that, Jenny, I'm glad you still asked the question because it's an important one to navigate. People like us are living and breathing technology day in and day out. Many of my fellow marketers are looking at this tech from a distance and would like to think about how to really handle the enormity of what's coming their way. The question you raised is very important. The potential of technology is there, but it cuts both ways. If you don't embrace it responsibly, it has a potential to hurt your brand in ways you can't even imagine. We've seen stories around that where AI chat has gone on to speak things that are not what the brand propagates, but it has happened on the brand handles and the brand has seen a lot of backlash. Therefore, wearing the Infosys hat, not necessarily the marketer's hat, we were one of the first companies in the world to set up what we call the Infosys Responsible AI Office. Any tech that we embrace at Infosys, including everything that we embrace within marketing, actually has to go through the checks and balances of the Responsible AI Office before it's approved to be deployed externally. The example I gave you about the Rafa Forever campaign, there were a series of checks and balances put in place so that people who want to take liberties with the brand don't embarrass the brand. If you put an inappropriate prompt in the Rafa Forever campaign, it would not generate an inappropriate output. It was ensuring that it is blocking the right set of prompts, checking for the imagery, validating it for appropriateness before publishing on a public platform. Responsible embrace of this tech is crucial and critical. You can't just randomly go out there, pick up a publicly available large language model, generate imagery, and publish it on your brand platform. You cannot do that because you may be infringing on copyrights, you may be infringing on multiple other dimensions which may not be in sync with your brand language, your brand standards. So work with AI, leverage AI for sure, but work in partnership with the right organization that can help you embrace AI responsibly.

Well, in some sense it's related to the larger question that I answered for Infosys earlier. That's the same question our customers are asking themselves, especially if I look at this global environment that's dynamic, supply chains that are being tested every quarter, consumer sentiment that is getting impacted by the economic reality. When you work with some of the largest organizations across industries, your focus ends up becoming how can you actually help them navigate disruption. One of the ways we work with them across both spectrums is to use tech to drive deep efficiencies in their business so that in an environment like this they can leverage technology to drive more productivity and efficiency. At the same time, we are helping them embrace the potential of new technologies to serve their customers better, to create experiences, to drive targeted growth, to focus on doing their marketing in a more effective way, helping them embrace AI overall in a way more responsibly. Clearly, our focus is as businesses navigate this turn of economic turn, are they well equipped to leverage the potential of existing digital technologies and the potential of evolving AI? That's really what we focus on.

Oh, yes, absolutely. Across the board.

I'll give you two names. We may already have them on the show, but if not, both are worth evaluating. I am biased because I look at it from a perspective of who's leveraging tech while making the impact both in the market and the boardrooms. I would like to believe that both these individuals are doing that quite remarkably. One is Asmita Dubey of L'Oréal, a good friend. She's the Chief Marketing and Digital Officer at L'Oréal. I think Asmita is doing incredible work in using tech to reimagine products, to reimagine experiences. She sits on top of a portfolio of brands. She would be able to give you a couple of incredible examples on how the world of consumer is evolving in the world of tech. In fact, she was a guest for one of my marketing all-hands meetings earlier this quarter because I thought my colleagues could get inspired by the work she's doing. That would be an exciting one to go for.

A second I would say is Raja Rajamannar, but on the B2B side. He's someone I actually share a deep-rooted belief with that it doesn't matter whether you are a B2B marketer or a B2C marketer. At the end of the day, marketing's job is to create an emotional bridge between an organization and its consumer. That's as important in B2B as it is in B2C. I think Raja has done an incredible job of that through his sensory marketing playbook, through beautifully shaping the Priceless campaign that he inherited but has given it a completely new flip. That would be another one that is worthy of talking to again if you haven't talked to him for a while.

Thank you, Jenny. Thanks again for having me and appreciate being part of the wonderful Vanguard community.