Forbes: Cognizant’s Executive Vice President of Strategy Says Marketing is About Constantly Listening and Paying Attention to Clients

“The person at the center of communicating and demonstrating Cognizant’s value proposition is CMO, Malcolm Frank,” writes Bruce Rogers, Chief Insights Officer at Forbes.

“The idea that the exponential growth in computing power, performance and bandwidth is transforming every aspect of every business is a given,” Rogers writes. “How companies manage those transformational forces to gain competitive advantage by better understanding and serving the needs of their customers is not. No wonder consulting and managed services devoted to helping companies along this journey is a big and fast-growing business. Cognizant is one such consulting company that has itself experienced explosive growth as a result of its digital transformation service offerings.”

Rogers adds, “Rare among marketing leaders, Frank is a consulting practitioner with P&L responsibilities to go along with his strategy and marketing responsibilities. Not surprisingly given his profile, he has also not followed the usual path to the CMO ranks.”

“I came from a different path in marketing,” says Malcolm Frank. “When I played college football one of our coaches said, ‘Your value to the team is how close you are to the ball at the whistle.’ I often think of marketing in that way; your value is how close are you to a customer.

“I studied economics in college and then I was a commodities trader right after school. But when I was about 24, I took this role at a start-up in Boston that was on MIT’s campus, Cambridge Technology Group. It was executive education for IT leaders of Fortune 500 companies on how to rethink technology and the role of technology in their companies.

“To be that close to clients on an ongoing basis, deeply informed my view of marketing. It’s about constantly listening and paying attention. In doing that, patterns start to emerge and it becomes clear what clients want, what role you can play, and how you need to position your product or service against that. That’s where it started for me. I think it was a good foundation at least for our industry.

“We’re fortunate because in our industry, technology is reshaping everything, so people want to engage in that conversation, but I think that metaphorically you’ve got to walk the path. You’ve got to continue on the journey and that journey is about having a conversation with the market. One thing I recognized a long time ago is that the market is always right. Marketers can get in trouble when they think they’ve got a monopoly on truth, or they’ve got one scenario in their head, as opposed to how the market really thinks and really behaves.

“It was always in the corner of my mind and at the risk of sounding melodramatic, I wanted to participate in building the future. I think that’s what led me to what’s going on in IT. There’s this sense of building the future and participating in that, and I’ve always found that to be a very exciting element of our business.”

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