CMO Chats with Deon Pillay, Head of Marketing for Legal & General Investment Management

Can you tell us a little bit about your journey and what sparked your interest in marketing?

It’s a really interesting story. I was approached by the then Head of Marketing, our now Global Director of Marketing, to come in and help transform the marketing business. So what we’re looking to do is create a marketing operations function within Legal and General Investment Management. My passion for technology and transformation is what really led me to this opportunity because I really thought that with marketing shifting away from being traditionally a ‘colouring in’ department, as people call it, more into something that is more strategic in the way it approaches marketing, it’s also a very commercial business. For us, it was really important to drive scale, and I saw this as a great opportunity to come in and really make a difference with the marketing community at large.

Thank you so much. Now, what does your company do?

Legal and General Investment Management is an asset manager. We are one of the largest asset managers here in the UK, and we are part of the Legal and General group. We try to invest in solutions broadly across a full spectrum of products; that’s, asset classes range from index-tracking funds all the way to active portfolios and liability-based risk mitigation solutions. And, also, through our private markets platform, we together form what we call the asset management business for Legal and General.

As the head of marketing, technology enablement and governance in your company, what is currently your main marketing focus?

It’s about driving scalability and ensuring efficiency through technology-enabled solutions. That’s my biggest focus. It’s about maximising our budget and how we use that budget to really drive scalability globally. What I mean by that is bringing in more automation of the processes, removing the mundane admin burden from the team, and allowing the creators to be really creative in how we sort of plan our marketing strategy for the year and execute that through the technology that we bring in.

Thank you. Can you tell me about a particularly innovative or successful marketing campaign your team has recently executed?

That’s a great question. There’s so much great creative stuff that the team is constantly producing. There’s several pieces that I can think of, the one being our brand activation campaign with Louis Pugh, who is the UN patron of the oceans. There was a great piece of work that was done to showcase how the great work that Lewis Pugh is doing aligns with our brand about sustainability. We think about, globally, what’s happening with the climate challenges that we currently face and how they’re impacting us generally as human beings, but also how biodiversity is also being impacted by them. It was great to see how we were able to bring his messaging to life throughout our brand and also utilise his skill sets to educate and advocate for change and sustainability.

But more importantly, recently, we’ve been doing lots of automated stuff through a team called Ciro. It’s a new technology that we’re using, and I call it the death of PowerPoint or the death of the PDF, more realistically. What we want to do is create interactive, immersive experiences for our clients. The way we go about doing that is by building what traditionally will be the presentation; you cannot build an immersive experience for your client. The key campaign that we’ve done with that one was about each year’s launch, and the other one that was really impactful is our Unfiltered campaign. The Unfiltered campaign is a campaign where we’re talking about multi-asset funds, and it’s an opportunity for you to take a break, have a cup of coffee, and chat with our team about what multi-asset actually means. So, they get to explain and educate people about that. With that campaign, we had a magazine wrapper where we gave away a free coffee sachet for sustainable coffee. So, everything was about sustainability, but also talking about how you can maximise your investment returns by investing in sort of, obviously, multi-asset type strategies. Again, obviously, the statement is that this is not the sort of application to go and buy the product. It’s more generally talking about advertising and how we utilise that to strengthen brand campaigns, but also activating through coffee and conversation and bringing that to life for our investors as well.

I love the importance of education, but also kind of almost storytelling and the intimacy of that relationship in one on one. That’s great, I love that idea. Thank you. And what are your biggest marketing challenges at the moment?

The biggest challenge we’ve seen in the industry, really, is data, right? There are two sides to this data problem. One is the quality of the data. Managing to capture the great quality of data, then giving you these insights to really drive the client experience, because it’s all about client experience and relationship building. We need to make sure that the data we’re using is used in a responsible way to activate these campaigns and to create these personalised, custom journeys for our clients, but equally, how we target and market them—nobody wants to be spammed with tons of stuff, so it’s really important to get that right.

Equally, when you gather so much data, what do you do with all that data? So that’s the other side of the problem, and it’s making sure that you have the right systems in place. To one, clean, maintain, and secure that data, and then take the insights from that and utilise them in a responsible way to then create your marketing campaigns and how you target. But equally, being a good data steward. Also, make your clients aware of how to use the data and then be able to delete that data if required by the client as well.

Thank you. Yeah, that data is something that we keep hearing over and over, and we also can relate. Obviously, because of the nature of what we do, we manage very large sets of data, so we can definitely relate to that challenge. How does your company stay ahead of its competitors in terms of marketing?

Should I be sharing that with you? I’m kidding. What’s really great is innovation, and with technology changing so rapidly, it’s bringing in new technology. It’s thinking outside the box. And you probably hear this a lot, but what does it actually mean to think outside the box? It’s not sticking to the mainstream channels like we think about marketing. It’s mail is still very popular. Sending out emails all the time is very popular. But I go back to Ciro for that immersive experience. That’s one way of doing it right. Another way is video, using AI and video and really scaling how we produce video, but again, giving us clients that really immersive experience through embedding video into some of these pieces that we’re doing so it’s not only a static piece of content going out. It’s really engaging, and it’s interactive.

Also, by taking away lots of the admin buttons from the teams, you’re learning to be much more creative. Buying the right tools is important, but equally important is getting the right martech stack, as I call it. I created what I call a marketing 360; in essence, what I want to do is have one system where everything happens. From the time you brief the marketing team to the time you create the asset to the time you execute that asset and put it in a central repository, You’re keeping the marketing team working in one system. Nobody must be working on multiple systems, right? It’s pointless. When you can get your team all working in one collaborative space, you can sort of generate much more creativity. You are also reducing the amount of effort you put in because there are duplicate campaigns potentially happening across different channels. You have to leverage those assets and spread those assets across multiple channels as well. It’s really important to think about not only the innovative ways of going out to market but also how you can help support your teams to become more efficient and to be able to scale globally as well.

Thank you. Now, in your opinion, what does the future of marketing look like?

Interesting. Marketing has already changed a lot, and I joked about it at the very beginning when I said, “Oh, the colouring in department,” because that’s how marketing was seen traditionally. Marketing has completely changed. Marketing is now about sales enablement, right? We are a core partner and a core pillar of business, and we’ve got to think about how we can actually help support the business in delivering its capital.

Ultimately, it’s about ensuring that you’re commercial, and that’s where you see marketing playing sort of a core strength in bringing that brand activation at one level, but equally being able to support the sales team by enabling the sales team through great assets, great presentations, all of the core channel activities, advertising, and all the other stuff that we do as a marketing function to really bring our clients, to create those leads, those effective leads, or those warm leads, so that the business can have better conversations with clients, build stronger relationships, and therefore generate more revenue for the business overall.

If you could describe the role of the CMO in one word, what would that word be and why?

I’m going to go back to the word enablement because, again, it’s so important that the traditional CMO is over, right? There’s no longer a traditional CMO as such. I think it’s very digitally focused in the future, as we’ve seen already. It’s already happened, and if you’re not on that journey already, then you are behind the curve. What’s also really important is having that mindset of enabling your team to do really well, and that’s through the upskilling and cross-skilling of teams, but equally, being able to think commercially around how marketing is playing its role in that sort of sales enablement journey as well, because revenue is really important, and CMOs now have to be part of that commercial discussion. We’ve got to think more commercially. We can’t just be creating brand activation and thinking about all these fluffy advertisements that we traditionally created in the past. Right now, it’s really, knowing what is the business driver and understanding the strategy of the business, how marketing plays a core role in activating that and bringing to life the vision of the business version, but also commercially. What’s the CFO asking for, and how is marketing helping deliver those numbers? So that’s really sort of a joined-up approach around brand proposition and brand value, but also commercially. What are we trying to achieve as well? Enabling all of the different parts of the business to really come alive and work together collaboratively to deliver that is the role that I see coming more for the CMO in the future, in terms of enabling both marketing teams and the sales team as well, including a key commercial contributor to the overall picture for the business.

Thank you. What piece of career advice would you like to share with other marketing leaders?

The most important thing here is having a growth mindset. As things continuously evolve, you’ve also got to continue to develop yourself while also helping your people develop. That’s one of the gifts that I’ve been given—to always sort of learn and continue on learning. When there are opportunities that have been given to you by your business, you take them and embrace them.

Technology is changing all the time, and we can talk about AI. AI is a big player in this market right now, right? And if people are not up-skilled to use the tools effectively, to learn how to write prompts effectively, and to understand how the technology landscape is changing, then unfortunately, lots of people will be left without jobs, right? It’s our responsibility to work in senior marketing roles to really demonstrate a growth mindset, influence the people around us, and develop their skills. The shadow of a leader does fall far, and therefore we are accountable to help develop our people.

I always approach my leadership with servant leadership, which means being able to support your team as a servant to them while equally helping them to perform to their best, and that’s by empowering them to do more and to stretch them in different ways. Also, commercial acumen is really important for a leader right now. I always talk about why a commercial network is so important. Being able to understand the needs of the business, the wants of the business, and the commercial drivers of the business, and how you play a key role in that, is extremely important.

The last part is about networking and building strong networks, both internally and externally. And leveraging those networks both to give back and, equally, to look for help and support when you need it, because you learn so much more from your peers inside and outside the industry. The more you stretch yourself to see what’s happening in other spaces, the better opportunities you can find to bring back to your business in terms of technology and different creative elements that you see in the industry as well.