Even before coronavirus, the World Economic Forum was increasingly irrelevant and seen as a byword for the narcissism of an elite. The creed of globalisation is under challenge.

It was only ever meant to be a bridge to tide employers over a short-term loss of trade. And however much we might hope not, a wave of redundancies seems inevitable.

RUTH SUNDERLAND COLUMN: If ministers let Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic crash into the ground, we will all be the poorer for it.

RUTH SUNDERLAND: Bank of England governor Andrew Bailey has injected a very welcome dose of hope into an atmosphere of almost unrelenting despair since replacing Mark Carney.

Charlie Sheen is auctioning off Babe Ruth's 1927 World Series ring and the letter of sale that brought the great slugger from Boston to New York for at least $1million through Lelands.

Charlie Sheen auctioned off the 1927 World Series ring and Ruth's sale from the Red Sox to the New York Yankees at Lelands.com Invitational Auction on Friday

ITV's Believe Me is said to feature fresh testimony about the alleged attack in Ayia Napa last July including compelling statements from the young woman's friends.

Alexandra Hall Hall, the embassy's 'Brexit counsellor', ended her 33-year foreign service career this week, saying she was not willing to 'peddle half-truths on behalf of a government I do not trust'.

Angie Kent has hit back at trolls who pointed out an apparent 'Photoshop fail' in her promotional image for Dancing with the Stars.

Father-of-four Rob Lawrie, from Guiseley, West Yorkshire, stowed Bru Ahmadi in his van after bonding with the child while volunteering in 'The Jungle' refugee and migrant camp in 2015.

If the new Chancellor Rishi Sunak wants to appeal to Tory voters in the shires and the new converts in the Red Wall seats of the North, he should use his first Budget to end the war of attrition on savers.

Ginsburg, 87, underwent 'non-surgical treatment for acute cholecystitis, a gallbladder condition' on Tuesday afternoon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, the Supreme Court said in a statement.

ROBERT HARDMAN: Here are two nations of comparable size. Both have a long and proud history of medical excellence and both are home to international pharmaceutical giants.

DEREK LAWRENSON - WORLD OF GOLF: Perhaps no American golfer in the past 35 years has had the ability to rub Europeans up the wrong way quite like Paul Azinger.

DAN HODGES: When the coronavirus crisis began, Boris Johnson wanted to follow the science. But thanks to the paranoia of the Chinese government, there was little science to follow.

'Trump seems hell-bent on pursuing a very self-destructive course when it comes to handling the biggest test of his presidency, and it could see him get kicked out of the White House.'

A wave of people in the old Labour heartlands of the North have taken a huge psychological and emotional step by voting Tory for the first time in their lives. They have not done it lightly.

This year is shaping up to be a white-knuckle ride for the supermarkets. Tesco, Sainsbury's and Morrisons will reveal this week how their trading went over Christmas. It's not likely to be happy reading.

If you are older than about 30, you have probably never heard of Klarna. But for millennials, it is one of those firms, such as Google and Hoover, that is so widely used it has become a verb.

The recent stock market falls have been the worst since the financial crisis and, just as then, we are in new and sobering territory.

The Suparna privately chartered flight touched down at Sydney Airport on April 8 with 70 tonnes of personal protective equipment from Wuhan, the reported epicentre of the COVID-19 outbreak.

George Osborne hoisted an 'Open for Business' sign over Britain with a multi-billion pound package to help firms fight back against the slump at home and the troubles in the eurozone.

George Osborne did not address problems such as low levels of investment, lack of access to finance, and high energy costs.

The big omissions from a Budget or an Autumn Statement are always revealing. It used to be help for savers. This week the missing element was the squeezed middle. Not households, but firms.

Research by The Mail on Sunday found that Airparks Drop and Go at Birmingham is a 14-minute drive from the airport, with buses only coming every 25 minutes.

WORLD OF RUGBY: When the RFU released their annual report, the document contained an opening page which stated: 'Our purpose: to encourage rugby, and its values.' 

James Corden took to Instagram to share a collage of photos with his sisters Andrea and Ruth on Tuesday.

This Morning fans were left concerned when they noticed hosts Ruth Langsford and Eamonn Holmes were missing from the shows Christmas party.

Lucian Freud's nude portraits continue to command giddy sums even after his death, with Benefits Supervisor Resting achieving a world record in 2015 when it sold for more than £35 million.

The hit show gives a behind-the-scenes look at Jordan's final season with the Chicago Bulls in 1997-98.

What should be the yardstick of performance for our leaders in the Lok Sabha? Should they be held accountable for issues of governance in their local constituencies, or their legislative record in parliament? Kishore Mandyam explains his stance.

The unstated policy of murdering unwanted elements is wrong at every possible level, and it leads to a crisis of legitimacy of the state, while claiming to be a patriotic act, writes Rajesh Kasturirangan.

Still Voices, Tamal Sen's diploma film from the Satyajit Ray Institute looks at freedom of expression in the world's largest democracy, showing how it is suppressed in the name of the larger good, writes Shoma Chatterji.

Venu Govindu reviews Globalization and its Discontents, by Joseph Stiglitz, the winner of the 2001 Nobel prize for economics.

The Whistleblowers Protection Bill moves closer to becoming law, as the Standing Committee on the draft law submits its latest report to Parliament. Kaushiki Sanyal reports.

Dilip D'Souza on how unglamorous measures have begun to pay off for the Saora people in Orissa.

Circumstances surrounding the death of alleged terrorist Khalid Mujahid in UP underline how sloppy investigations and a bias for emotion instead of facts have dented the credibility of the fight against terror. Puja Awasthi fears that such half truths will only feed the evil of terrorism further.

Bala starring Ayushmann Khurrana, Bhumi Pednekar and Yami Gautam, certainly gets your attention but does not manage to sweep you off your feet.

The Allu Arjun film, also starring Tabu and Pooja Hegde, promises to be a full-on family entertainer. Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo will be releasing on January 12.

Shylock is a bi-lingual drama laced with whatever a diehard Mammukka fan could expect him of. The film hit the theatres in Tamil Nadu as Kuberan.

Varuthini Ekadashi is the third Ekadashi in a Hindu year. Every year, the festival is observed on the Krishna Paksha's Ekadashi in the month of Baisakh. This Ekadashi is dedicated to the Vaman incarnation of Lord Vishnu. Therefore, the festival holds

Marketers are in the business of attracting attention. All of our tactics, our strategies, our goals boil down to: Did we get someone’s attention and inspire them to take action?

The key to modern marketing is that we have to earn that attention. There will always be someone on who is louder, funnier, more talented, or just less shameless than your brand is willing to be. The only way to truly capture and sustain someone’s focus is to earn the right to their time. 

How do you earn attention? By providing remarkable experiences. By showing you care about your audience, you know who they are, and that your brand is here to help and to entertain them. 

For our latest Break Free video, we talked to a marketer who is helping marketers offer more memorable experiences. Sruthi Kumar is the Senior Marketing Manager at Sendoso, a platform that coordinates direct mail and gifting campaigns for personalization at scale.

Sruthi and I sat down to talk about experiential marketing in all its forms: Event marketing, direct mail, content and beyond. We also dig deeper into the philosophy of marketing. Should marketers specialize in a certain aspect of marketing, or should we be taking a more holistic approach? Can left-brained content folks and right-brained strategy folks get along… and really, is it that simple of a divide? Sruthi has some inspiring thoughts on all of the above.

Oh, and along the way, Sruthi shares how she built a marketing department from the ground up, taking Sendoso from a small start-up to competing with the big brands.

 [bctt tweet="I think what we’re really trying to do is bridge that online and offline experience. @sruthikkumar" username="toprank"]

Highlights:

1:00: Direct mail plus digital marketing for unforgettable experiences

5:45: Marketing to delight your audience

7:40: Building a marketing department from the ground up

11:05: Tactics for earning attention at marketing events

18:15: Marketing requires creative and analytical thinking 

Josh:

So tell me a little bit about Sendoso. What is it? What do you do?

Sruthi:

We're a sending platform, so we really help our customers reach their customers and prospects in a meaningful way by sending company swag, direct mail, sweets and treats, handwritten notes, the whole nine yards, in order to make really human connections with their prospects and customers.

Josh: 

Do you feel like this going back to a more simpler form of marketing compared to digital marketing? Do you feel like that’s more effective as our world gets more digital?

Sruthi:

So I actually think they go hand in hand. What we're trying to do is really bridge that online and offline experience. So not to say that digital marketing does not work. I'm a marketer. I run our field marketing team, we use digital heavily, but it's just about bringing all the channels together to create that seamless experience for the end user, and that person that you want to book a meeting with or have a signed contract with or whatever else you need from them.

[bctt tweet="It’s about bringing all the channels together to create that seamless experience for the end user, that person who you want to book a meeting with or have a signed contract with. @sruthikkumar" username="toprank"]

We are moving to an ABM approach when we are doing our events, because sometimes you get to large audiences and it's hard to really get in contact with anyone. The beautiful thing about our product is that anyone can use it in any vertical. It's direct mail: If you're selling, you can use it. If you're trying to reach an audience, you can use it. 

We do the double funnel approach at Sendoso. We do have demand gen tactics while we also have ABM tactics as well. 

I had an interview that was my first internship as a marketer. The CMO asked me, ‘Are you analytical? Or are you creative?’ And I was like, ‘I don't know, I feel like I'm a little bit of both.’ 

And she said, ‘You can't be both.’ And I just want to call her now, because you have to be both. I may not be the most analytical person on my team. But I get to work with this marketing ops manager. We built our team together, and she's very analytical. I get to learn from her and understand how would my MOPS person do this. And that's the cool stuff that you get to take with you. 

As a marketer, you should be well rounded — you're a content marketer, but you could put a demand gen campaign together.

Josh:

 We just love this binary of left brain versus right brain. But then you get this idea that oh, well, the creative types are just sitting up there in their beanbag chairs with the lava lamps going, ‘Oh, wouldn't it be cool if we did this?’ And then on the other hand is a bunch of robots who are crunching numbers. For some people, those things are going to overlap into a circle and some are somewhere on the continuum, but you can’t be just one or the other. 

[bctt tweet="People ask, 'Are you analytical or are you creative?' But you have to be both... As a marketer, you should be well rounded: You're a #contentmarketer, but you could put a demand gen campaign together. You're not just writing. @sruthikkumar" username="toprank"]

Sruthi:

With all those marketing activities that we're supposed to do, some people are just doing the check-boxes. That's totally fine, but I think you should bring your personality into it. I think so many of us are so scared. Like having our corporate voice, but I think our personal voice should be in there too. 

I think the only reason why Sendoso did stand out in the early days is because we got to incorporate so many of our early founders’ and members’ own personalities into the brand. And even the way we pitch our product today is by the voices of our sales team and our marketing team, our co-founders and c-suite. So I think it's just about being okay with being yourself and incorporating that into your whole corporate brand.

[bctt tweet="I think the reason Sendoso did stand out in the early days is we got to incorporate so many of our early founders’ own personalities. It's about being okay with being yourself and incorporating that into your corporate brand. @sruthikkumar" username="toprank"]

Stay tuned to the TopRank Marketing Blog and subscribe to our YouTube channel and podcast for more Break Free B2B interviews. Here are a few to whet your appetite:

• Break Free B2B Marketing: Gary Gerber on Scaling ABM without Losing Focus
• Break Free B2B Series: Hal Werner on the Intersection of Marketing Creativity and Analytics
• Break Free B2B Series: Adi Bachar-Reske on Taking the Lead in the Evolution of B2B Content Marketing

The post Break Free B2B Marketing: Sruthi Kumar on Creating Memorable Experiences appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

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New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2019.

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Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2020.

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2019.

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2019.

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2019.

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