My Journey toward Marketing
Everything started with one question
I remember very well what intrigued me the most during my first working experience, an internship at a publisher in Paris. It was not the high care the publisher gave to the content and the printing, but his big attention for the promotion of the books: by writing the most attractive back cover, contacting journalists, convincing bookstores to show prominently the books... Year after year, I am still very obsessed with this question: HOW to make people aware of your product and, even better, to make them buy and use it? Surprisingly Marketing didn’t naturally appear for me as the area for the answers, and this was perfect.
Literature and Marketing: unexpected productive friends
At that time I was studying literature. It was all about: how was the attention attracted and kept? How was the storytelling leading efficiently toward a goal? How was the style original? How was the reader collaborating to the story? In my early career, these questions definitively influenced how I approached, not readers or customers, but projects and products as well as potential business partners.
Indeed one of my first missions was to find foreign publishers willing to buy rights of translation. And my intuitive Marketing mindset worked out: by renewing our Marketing approach, we doubled the income of the ‘foreign rights’ department in 3 years.
Because structured knowledge doesn’t hurt
The fun is in the doing
From 2011 I decided to focus on Marketing at 100% by joining IONOS, a European leader in Web hosting, as Online Marketing manager for France, and then the UK and Polen. My daily and exciting playground areas were: SEA, SEO and Affiliates Marketing. After several years of practice, I deeply wanted to understand where the products I was selling were coming from, how they were conceived.
That’s when I moved to a Commercial Product Manager role. During these 3 intense years, I developed and optimized the Go-to-Market strategies in 8 markets for the E-Mail & Office products (Norton, Office / Microsoft 365…), what increased noticeably the performance of the existing customers sales. I also monitored the P & L of the E-Mail & Office portfolio for the British brand, Fasthosts, and launched successfully Office 365 with a dedicated local Marketing strategy.
Applying Marketing at online channels and at a product portfolio allowed me to develop a comprehensive understanding of the business on a limited perimeter. In 2018 I felt that in order to influence more deeply the Marketing of the company I needed to have a much broader approach. At the same time, the Marketing division was deeply restructured. So I took my chance and joined the newly created Marketing Communication team, before becoming Expert Global Marketing in 2020. Beside conceptualizing and orchestrating campaigns execution in several markets, I increased the Brand awareness in the European footprint by directly coordinating a prestigious advertising agency for the launch of 2 very big-budget TV brand campaigns in 4 key European markets: Germany, UK, Spain, France.
Today I specialize on what I enjoy the most: global Marketing strategies, including their implementation in several markets to optimize the Marketing-Market-Fit. In one word: the “How”.
I love intuitions but mixed with intentions, they are even more powerful. That’s why I soon started Marketing studies through an MBA in parallel of my job in order to properly set up my Marketing basis and doing so, leverage my creativity and my analysis skills into a meaningful direction, but which one? I was light years away to know that this would bring me to a fully new industry: IT. Indeed I first used my recent new structured knowledge in Marketing when I moved to Germany and was working for SAP as Pre-Sales manager. There I transformed 8% of my calls into leads and was one of the best results of the team after 4 months.
Basically since then I never stopped learning about Marketing, not matter if by participating to trainings about Brand Management or Conversational Marketing or by writing about Marketing, especially for the Internet Industry association in Germany, ECO. Motivated in doing a deep-dive in a topic I studied some years ago, I even did a PhD. The topic? “Storytelling in advertising”. Dots joined.