CMO Chats with Vsevolod Samsonov, CMO Global Markets at Flowwow

We continue our knowledge-sharing mission through a series of interviews with marketing leaders from all over the world and are thrilled to have Vsevolod with us today. Vsevolod, who are you, and can you tell us a bit about your journey and what sparked your interest in marketing?

Hello everyone, and welcome to CMO chats. I’m the CMO of global markets at Flowwow. We are a gifting marketplace and are already working in over 40 countries, such as the UK, UAE, Spain, Poland, and others. I am responsible for all marketing activities throughout these countries. My work typically involves planning, strategy, budgeting, and so on. I manage global marketing at this company.

What does your company do?

We are a gifting marketplace. If you need a gift for someone or want to order something like cake or flowers, mainly flowers, but also gift boxes and anything you can give as a gift to someone you love or for any occasion. As I said, we are already working in over 40 countries, so we are a worldwide business. We have an easy, comparatively scalable business model.

As the CMO at Flowwow, what is currently your main marketing focus?

I would say right now, I’m trying to enhance our analytical capabilities by building better dashboards, mainly focusing on conversion performance and media mix modelling. Media mix modelling is always in focus in our case, as is our strategy for our main groups of sellers and clients. We always balance between B2B and B2C strategies. For customers, it’s very important to personalise ads and the experience as much as possible. For sellers, it’s about empowering local sellers in every country where we work. For clients, we also use occasion-based marketing, adapting it for local traditions. For example, local holidays like Eid in the UAE or Mother’s Day all over the world. At the same time, for sellers, we need to help them deliver our unified brand voice and unified marketing strategy to our end clients. Our unified brand voice and marketing strategy are something that are, of course, always in focus.

Moving to the next question, can you tell me about a particularly innovative or successful marketing campaign your team has recently executed?

That’s a great question, and a bit tough because they are all like children. An interesting fact is that performance campaigns gain you revenue, especially when you have so much organic leverage like our team, like our company. We need to do everything from the start in marketing in every new market. Overall, campaigns that are remembered most, even by me, are branding and branding-oriented. We promote every local holiday in the countries that are our main focus. For example, on Valentine’s Day, we did a campaign that was very romantic and emotional SMM content. For example, we had a campaign where a woman was in a dress made of roses. It was very exciting. These are things that people remember; these are the stories that we like to tell and remember ourselves. As a result, we have good revenue times. We have good growth.

That’s very interesting to hear. It’s always very different when your campaign truly resonates with the audience and with the people, and it really sticks. We talked about successful campaigns; now we want to talk about challenges. I want to learn more about your biggest marketing challenges, or those you are currently dealing with at the moment.

Our main challenge as a worldwide company is always about being culturally relevant to all people all over the world. Countries are different, and the ways we use marketing in them are a bit different. We need to always be consistent on the one hand, but on the flip side, we need to be focused on traditions and traditional holidays and how people act during these holidays and on usual days. For example, we can talk about the UAE and Spain. In Spain, people tend to have a more traditional, conservative approach to buying gifts, and the marketing reflects this because it’s mostly contextual advertising on websites; it’s not an app-first country at all. In the UAE, it’s a completely different, dynamic market. It’s digital-oriented, so people make fast decisions, and they tend to love big gestures in gifting. For example, for Valentine’s Day, we have a lot of orders with 1,001 roses. It happens a lot in the UAE. For us, it’s very important to manage people’s expectations, not only concerning traditions but also by building overall trust in gifting in every country. People tend to value visual honesty and clear descriptions, and they like it when the photo looks like the real thing. In marketing, we use this because we found out that our campaigns, when we show the product itself—for example, a feed from Facebook ads or Google Shopping—sometimes work better than some 3D or AI-generated content, simply because it’s the real thing, and people love it. That’s managing expectations.

I absolutely agree. It’s also very interesting to see the nuances per culture. You really see the differentiation. What may work for the UAE, for example, as you mentioned, may not work exactly as compared to Spain or other regions across the world. There’s a very interesting approach. That brings us to the next question: How does your company stay ahead of its competitors in terms of marketing?

That’s a good one. In our company, our main advantage over competitors is the ability to fast-test every hypothesis. Because we are not so structural or organisational in our approach, we can test fast. We can try everything we see in marketing or invent ourselves. As I’ve already said, we have an easy, scalable model. If we see from the start that a market is not working for us, we can change and go to another country because it’s only an app that we need. What helps even more is our brand performance approach to business, not just marketing. The main thing here is uniting brand and performance marketing in a way that works more effectively because we always focus on sustainable, long-term growth. Performance campaigns can give you spikes in revenue sometimes, especially with occasion-based pricing or something similar. But branding and a brand performance approach are more about building long-term relationships with your client, and it works better. In the end, all these investments and efforts play an enormous role.

That also brings us to the next question: What do you believe is the biggest opportunity for CMOs today that might not have been available in the past?

That’s interesting. Answering this question, it’s important to note that it very much depends on what you mean by “in the past.” If we are talking about nowadays versus 50 or 60 years ago, of course, we have more data and more digital approaches. We have a lot of easy decision-making tools and instruments for advertising. But if we compare it, for example, with five years ago, there was a lot of data back then, and maybe even more accessible, because in our new world, with cookieless environments and iOS 14+, I actually feel that we are returning to the ’60s. It’s like a retro effect. Sometimes it feels like, for example, five years ago, you could narrow your audience to an exact group and launch a campaign on Facebook. But now, it’s also broadened by Meta, for example, and all your campaigns should be. That’s why I talked about brand performance in the previous question, because the audience is now broader. You need to have good advertising; you need to have excellent quality and beautiful advertising, like filming. Even if we are talking about UGC, for example, they tend to be a more real approach, but more creative and sometimes even cinematic. A lot of experimental things are going on. Sometimes I even feel like we are in this Mad Men show, like in the ’60s. It literally feels like that because we have our goals, and we are trying to achieve them, and we cannot always believe the data. We need to trust the data we have, but we need to build it from the start.

That’s also something we’ve been seeing with the rise of AI, especially nowadays. This isn’t something that was available 60 years ago. I completely agree with us turning back to the Mad Men type of mentality. I also love that show, by the way. Absolutely agree. Okay, so the next question is, I guess, more coming from your opinion: What does the future of marketing look like?

I am not a good forecaster, and many people are not good forecasters, especially when we’re talking about this constantly changing world, particularly in digital marketing. But what I want to say is that at Flowwow, we always focus more on what’s not changing because trends come and go. But empathy is forever. Empathy, love, happiness from gifting—it will always have more strength and effectiveness, even for future advertising. Of course, we will use a lot of these new things, and we already do, like AI-generated content and AI-driven personalisation. I am also a big believer in the explosion of social commerce right now because I’ve had a career mostly in e-commerce, so I know how it works. I really think it’s still a bit of an underrated channel, especially if we are talking about social sales. Now, I think it’s perhaps even more important to have the right keywords on your social page to be more effective organically, not just through paid channels. Then there’s also the rise of AI assistance. Recently, ChatGPT launched ad placements within ChatGPT, so let’s see where that’s going. It’s exciting.

It is really exciting. I also want to quote what you said earlier: “Trends come and go, but empathy is forever.” This is something we also resonate with a lot in the event sphere; it will truly be forever in terms of what will happen in the industry. That brings us to the next question. In your opinion, what is the role of a CMO in one word, and why?

Coordinator. You need to unite branding, analytics, product, and performance, and then incline it all to one approach called marketing strategy, and actually, marketing. You need to coordinate this.

Absolutely. That’s very accurate in terms of what the role of a marketing leader is nowadays. With that, what’s a piece of traditional leadership advice that you believe doesn’t really apply to modern CMOs?

What comes to mind instantly is “more people equals more results.” Because of this AI assistant world, that no longer holds true. I have a very small team of performance colleagues, but our performance is far larger than the team. We have a lot of reach and a lot of campaigns. It works because many things can be automated these days. It’s more about how people work, not how many people. Things like emotional intelligence and the psychology of talking with your colleagues, teammates, and your team are more important nowadays, even because we talk not only with each other but with AI systems. It’s more important to look at your team not only as professionals and resources but as people, as human beings, with thoughts and feelings. One-on-ones are very important. You should be a mentor; you should be an emotionally balanced mentor. This leads to sustainable performance with your marketing strategy.

At the end of the day, we’re all just humans. Amazing. That brings us to the last question: What career advice would you like to share with other marketing leaders?

If we’re talking career advice, let’s give three main pieces of advice.

First and foremost, do hard things. Literally, this says everything because life starts when your comfort zone ends. You need to work in discomfort. To explain it better, just type “do hard things” on YouTube. This video works for many people; it definitely explains why you need to do such things. It’s not just about career; it’s about everything in life. You grow only when you do hard things.

The second one is contrarian to the first. In our age, making hard decisions, sometimes nervous ones, and doing it very fast and rapidly, constantly, it’s very important to be doubtful. Question every data, test more times than you can, and validate all your data before acting. Literally, especially with all the data limitations we have right now, the most important thing is to be helpful. Really, with every decision, don’t believe the data as it is.

The third one, I’m not good at it either, but please protect your work-life balance. Great ideas sometimes come not from working life, but outside of the laptop. Be close to your loved ones. Always try to make your loved ones happy. Order them gifts, not necessarily from Flowwow. But actually, we have a promo code for this podcast, specifically if you’re listening right now: “CMO30,” and you can get 30% off all orders. But again, just be close to your loved ones.