The Sit Down: Rajesh Subramaniam

ANA

Since the advent of the internet, our audience composition has fundamentally shifted. Traditionally in the U.S., our audience was 25 million to 30 million small, medium and large businesses. With e-commerce growing so much and the role that we play there, it’s different. FedEx has a huge aspect on all those people receiving all those shipments. That’s an audience of 200 million to 300 million people — an explosion from where we were. We’ve had to evolve our messaging and communicate more broadly.

There is no such thing as free shipping. Someone’s paying that bill. But the expectation from consumers now is they take the movement of goods for granted. … The mix of the digital and the physical [transport] is what makes e-commerce magic. How we make that invisible part visible to consumers is our challenge.

More often now, CMOs are being asked to write the growth stories of their organizations. Of course, communicating your message and building your brand is still an important part of everything, but the bigger opportunity is how we work with the CEO and others in senior management to make the right growth choices. It’s a much broader set of responsibilities and I see more CMOs doing it every day.

We have to showcase our value. Once millennials understand the story of FedEx, the original VC story and our story of innovation and technology, it’s amazing how they latch onto it.

We measure everything, which you would expect from a company based on tracking things from here to there. So making sure there is an ROI to these [sponsorships] is vital. … Digital media is ultimately more accountable, of course, but other things are tougher to measure precisely also. Our sales people tell me all the time that the FedEx brand is what initially gets them in the door time after time, so how do you quantify continuing to support our brand, even if it already has very high recall? As far as how a sponsorship fits, there has to be a good connection and it has to fit at a deeper level than just transactional. Of course, it has to be about meeting a business objective as well.

As far as sponsorships, for us, it really gets down to media mix and allocation between those and other media. Our sports sponsorships are really working well, but we have a great opportunity to expand those globally. So, we’re deeper into golf, tennis, soccer. Along with the brand benefits we get there, they all provide great opportunities to bring customers into these events and build those relationships.

Media and creative are just elements of branding. Our actual service is the other big area. If you do that right, it almost doesn’t matter if they see your media. Our truck, our plane and our people are paramount. More recently [within the past six months] our customer experience organization is reporting in to me, because those are just as key and critical to our brand, if not more so.

Your corporate culture has to drive all of your other activities. If it doesn’t, you aren’t authentic at all. The good news for us is that we’ve always had a phenomenal culture and it sets us apart. If you want to set a culture after the fact, it can be done, but it requires considerable commitment from the CEO on down. That can be done, but it’s a very tough challenge.

We’re looking at esports, but we’ve not pulled the trigger on anything yet. We’re looking at the overwhelming majority of decision-makers on our business being millennials soon. [Esports] is probably more of a Gen Z thing and we are just beginning to think through and understand Gen Z.

I started as a chemical engineer. You’re going to see more engineers as CMOs and CEOs, as it’s become more about developing and using an analytical framework for the basis of all sorts of judgments and decisions. Those are foundational skills and they are growing more and more important as marketing has been changing. My role as CMO is different, and it’s also changing across industries. In my role, I have marketing, of course, but also under my direction is innovation, digital transformation, retail channels, revenue sciences/analytics and customer experience, along with other business, including FedEx Office — that’s 53,000 people. So that engineering/analytical background serves well there.