My work philosophy

That meant turning that awareness website into something that could support a real decision, with a booking journey built into it.

A brief is a starting point, not a set of instructions to follow blindly. Sometimes the requested solution is perfectly reasonable, sometimes it’s an expensive way of solving the wrong problem.

At MSD, one of the challenges was improving the journey from HPV awareness to vaccination. The answer wasn’t simply to run more campaigns or send more traffic to an already existing awareness website. We needed to connect the dots between understanding the risks, considering vaccination and actually booking an appointment and simplify this journey for HCCs as much as possible. That meant turning that awareness website into something that could support a real decision, with a booking journey built into it. At the end of the project HCC users who entered the page, were able to book their vaccination appointment in 3 clicks, simple as that. The work contributed to a 5% year-on-year increase in private-market vaccine sales.

I’ve learned to spend time understanding what happens before and after the thing I’m being asked to improve, otherwise, it’s easy to make one part of a process look better while changing very little for the business.

One of the most expensive sentences in business is probably: “That’s how we’ve always done it.”

I saw this in a Dubai clinic that initially believed it needed only an external agency and a women-heavy target group to handle its marketing. Turns out the underlying need was much bigger, since most of their appointments were low ticket appointments, mostly dermal or wrinkle fillings, however the clinic is also specializing in high ticket treatments, like orthognathic surgery, rhinoplasty or augmentation mammoplasty. Rather than adding a couple of hands to an existing setup, I helped build an eight-person department covering performance marketing, social media, project management and the other capabilities needed to support the business. Beside this I also got the carte blanche to revise every process from a user clicking on an ad until the final consultation before the big day.

Over two years, the appointment mix shifted from 87% low-ticket and 13% high-ticket appointments to 62% and 38%, respectively.

That didn’t happen because we made the marketing department bigger or refined some campaign targeting for the sake of it. It happened because we questioned what the business needed, then built the structure around that. Sometimes the right answer is to improve what’s already there, sometimes it’s to admit that the existing setup was never going to get you where you wanted to go.

If you don’t understand how the business works, you can easily become very good at improving things that don’t matter enough.

Marketing doesn’t exist in a separate universe, neither does digital transformation, operations or any other function. If you don’t understand how the business works, you can easily become very good at improving things that don’t matter enough. At Amplifon, I learned that selling hearing aids wasn’t simply a matter of generating leads, most people don’t wake up wanting to buy a hearing aid. They notice a problem, often put off doing anything about it and need a reason to take the first step.

That understanding shaped initiatives such as a dedicated native landing page for a nationwide hearing screening campaign. Instead of asking people to buy something they weren’t ready to buy, we gave them a straightforward way to register for a hearing check. No fancy websites with content structure or flashy functionality, just a one pager and a form. The proposition matched what the 60+ yrs old audience actually needed at that point.

It’s a relatively simple example, but it changed how I look at commercial problems: understand the customer’s situation, understand the business behind it and only then decide what marketing or technology should do.

Every additional step should have a reason to exist, every tool should solve a problem, every meeting should move something forward.

I’ve seen plenty of projects become unnecessarily complicated because adding more features, channels, steps or presentations feels like progress. Let me tell you, it isn’t always.

The nationwide hearing screening page was aimed at an audience that included plenty of people over 60. It didn’t need to impress other marketers or win a design award, yikes I even puke from those. It needed to explain the initiative and make registration easy. That was the only job.

I have a similar instinct when looking at processes and organisational structures. Every additional step should have a reason to exist, every tool should solve a problem, every meeting should move something forward. If a simpler solution gets the job done, I don’t see a reason to make it more complicated just to make it look sophisticated on a fancy deck.

A strategy that depends on resources nobody has, capabilities nobody possesses or decisions nobody is authorised to make isn’t a strategy yet, I actually call that a wish list.

It’s easy to come up with a convincing strategy in a presentation. I was sitting through many of these. It’s considerably harder to make it work when budgets are limited, teams are stretched, priorities compete and people have their own ideas about what should happen next.

I’ve worked in multinational environments with several layers of stakeholders and approval processes, as well as smaller businesses where the same person might be responsible for making the decision and carrying it out. Neither environment is automatically better, don’t get me wrong, they simply require different approaches.

I try to be realistic about what an organisation can actually deliver. A strategy that depends on resources nobody has, capabilities nobody possesses or decisions nobody is authorised to make isn’t a strategy yet, I actually call that a wish list. I’d rather have a smaller plan that gets implemented than an ambitious one that looks impressive and quietly disappears after the presentation.

You can’t build trust through a calendar full of status meetings and in my humble opinion autonomy doesn’t mean the absence of accountability.

I don’t believe good leadership means having an answer to everything or being involved in every decision. If people need permission for every small move, something is wrong with the way the team is set up. When building the Emirates clinic’s marketing department in Dubai, I wanted people to take responsibility for their areas rather than simply wait for instructions. The people working across performance marketing, social media and project management had different strengths, ways of thinking and ideas about how to approach their work. My job was to give them direction, make sure the pieces fitted together and create enough room for them to own the outcome.

I’ve also led people I never physically met and that taught me to listen properly, pay attention to what isn’t being said and avoid assuming that silence means everything is fine. You can’t build trust through a calendar full of status meetings and in my humble opinion autonomy doesn’t mean the absence of accountability. It means agreeing on what needs to happen, giving people room to work out how to get there, and being honest about the results.

Sometimes the numbers tell you what’s working, but you still have to decide whether it’s worth doing.

I like measurable results, they help separate what actually happened from what people would like to believe happened, but at the same time numbers don’t make decisions for you, and a good-looking dashboard doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing the right thing. Sometimes I crack a joke that data-driven initiatives are for people with lack of empathy.

During an HPV awareness campaign, advertisements featuring genital warts were performing particularly well. From a purely performance-driven perspective, there was a strong argument for putting more budget behind them and the agency pushed this agenda very hard, but as we know, genital warts are already a symptom of an existing HPV infection. Our objective was to raise awareness and encourage prevention, including vaccination. In my mother tongue there is this phrase, putting on a coat after getting soaked from the rain (Eső után köpönyeg) which describes this perfectly.

So we stopped using those ads. It wasn’t the easiest decision to justify if you looked only at the immediate campaign metrics, but the campaign had a purpose beyond generating cheap engagement or clicks. Sometimes the numbers tell you what’s working, but you still have to decide whether it’s worth doing.

I don’t think a job title should become a boundary around what you’re allowed to understand or contribute.

My career hasn’t followed one particularly tidy path. I’ve moved from marketing into digital leadership, then into omnichannel operations and broader business transformation. Each move meant learning a different part of the business, working with different people and getting comfortable with things I hadn’t done before. I don’t think a job title should become a boundary around what you’re allowed to understand or contribute. A marketing person should care about operations, an operations person should understand the customer, a leader should be interested in the work itself, not just the reporting around it.

I’ve had to learn a lot of things along the way, often without having someone show me exactly how. That’s part of the appeal, I enjoy getting into unfamiliar territory, asking questions and figuring out how the pieces fit together. At the same time I’m not interested in pretending to be an expert in everything, I’d rather understand enough to ask better questions, recognise what I don’t know and bring in people who know more than I do.