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Rukmini Priyadarshini

At 33, this head of global marketing at iGate Global Solutions, is savvy, sure where she wants to go and how to get there. Her plans for iGate are imaginative at least and trendsetting at best.

SHE believes a company must walk the talk for its brand to survive, she banks on humour to get her message across and believes the Indian IT service offering must emphasise their core competence. Traveller, furniture hunter, hardheaded marketer, Jessie Paul, at 33, is comfortable in these and many other roles. A former Infosys global brand manager and global head of marketing at iGate Global Solutions, Jessie is hoping to help build an organisation having at least three separate cultures — a startling idea when most enterprises prefer a one-size fits all culture; and the devil take the different.

Since no success story, according to the canons of sensationalism, can be either successful, or true, without suitably humble beginnings, Jessie's schooling in little Nazareth — a small town near Kanyakumari — must fit the bill. "Education was all Nazareth's people had — you either studied and got out or you rotted," says Jessie on what drove most of the town's inhabitants. An engineering degree in computers and a job in marketing and as trainee in Tata Elxsi followed. Jessie says listening to the smooth talk of the ad agency people decided her in favour of working in an ad agency — to understand marketing and, just as importantly, agency jargon!

So much of an organisation's success depended on how it was projected that Jessie determined to study marketing — an MBA at IIM-Kolkata was followed by a job at O&M Bangalore — "where I spent my time handling three of Unilever's tea brands". Jessie says she realised how important branding was to an organisation "I visited practically every tea shop in Ellora, Aurangabad and Kanchipuram and realised tea-wallahs actually believed a particular brand of tea would ensure their success," she says. Notwithstanding the uniformly sickly sweet brown concoction that is sold at tea-shops across India, Jessie feels customer perception can make or break a brand.

That learning was important to her work at Infosys — be it in marketing the company in Europe or entering partnerships that would enhance its image and is crucial to the work she hopes to do at iGate Global - establish it a business service provider in a BPO-driven market.

A move to O&M Chennai led Jessie to work on RPG's launch of cellular services "where I could use my favourite form of communication - humour", she says. Even the Quintant website uses cartoons and humour — a preference she shares with the iGate Global's CEO, Phaneesh Murthy. Several business development projects later, the move to the client side happened, and Jessie chose to work with Infosys, a brand identity that Jessie would change to reflect its core strengths as a `damn good IT service provider'.

As employee No 4 in Infosys' fledgling marketing department, Jessie now feels the confusion and ownership of the work she did then — on the first corporate brochure and the first corporate film, for instance — will serve her well in her current role at iGate Global. "Mr Nandan Nilekani and Mr Narayana Murthy were co-writing that brochure and then we reworked the simple website for the company. There was no context for the IT services out of India and no resources we could call upon for our marketing efforts," recalls Jessie. She says she spent half the night hammering Infosys' booth in place at a trade show in Brussels — until the organisers decided to lend a hand.

Marketing Infosys' IT services in Europe taught her the importance of squeezing value out of each event and opportunity, as well as the need to emphasise the core strengths of the company, says Jessie. "Infosys did cutting-edge work, but nobody seemed to know that — neither potential customers nor potential employees. So the shift to core branding was aimed at both of them," she says.

As a business service provisioning company, Quintant, recently acquired by iGate Global relies on Jessie to sell the concept, manage the brand and the worldwide marketing team.

"At iGate Global, we are trying to put in place an organisation that excels at innovation, customer service and in operations," says Jessie. So often an organisation that is competent in one area falls down on the other, simply because the type of people and process needed by each type of competency is different. To foster innovation, you need to encourage creativity, even if it does not result in winning ideas all the time. Incentives and processes will have to be suitable for that. Such processes will not suit an organisation focussed on operational excellence, which is something Indian IT service providers have excelled at. In an operation-focussed environment, there is little deviation from standards and norms and rewards are based on delivery, not on experimentation. A customer-oriented organisation needs to hire different types of people and put in lace systems and processes that suit the customer.

Jessie says the management team at iGate Global plans to put in place the three very different cultures in the same organisation — simply because its business needs it. "We could have teams focussed on product innovation and customer contact while the bulk of our people will be focussed on operational excellence. The analytics team at iGate Global needs freedom and space to create and innovate. For instance, incentives for the analytics team could be linked to innovative implementations for customers," she says. But the bulk of our revenues will continue to be from operational excellence, she said. The challenge is to create an organisation that can offer all the three yet retain focus and integrity, she says.

Harking back to her favourite theme — fun — Jessie says that it is not enough to make a company a fun place to work in. Unlike call centres, BSPs require people to remain motivated for longer and have very low employee turnover says Jessie. That means we will have to make the work at iGate Global itself fun as opposed to the call centre concept of a fun place to work, she says. How have they done that? She's not telling — not yet anyway.

Picture by G.R.N. Somashekar

priya@thehindu.co.in

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