Mohit Arora is the Global Digital Marketing Lead for Mars’ Petcare Nutrition arm. A mechanical engineer with a penchant for the arts and philosophy, he made a few career changes before landing in CPG marketing. He shared with us how running a strong, smart process requires an engineering brain, but also how his other passions influence his approach to digital marketing.

Mohit’s Shiny New Object is winning in ambiguity in the context of modern marketing. Good marketing leaders need to combine discipline with long and short-term outcome analysis to face the ongoing changes in marketing and the fact that technology now offers us almost too many options.

Technology is making choice difficult

In data driven modern marketing, senior leaders often don’t know what to choose among a huge variety of options, according to Mohit. Whether using Meta for Facebook ads or focusing on influencer marketing, the key is to always refer back to the original objectives and use mental discipline to single out the best solutions for your brand.

Use a question compass to identify the best strategies for your plan

Instead of constantly trying new things without a good strategy, Mohit proposes that marketers ask questions that lead them to single out the best one. He calls this a question compass – a few questions already planned in, before a pitching meeting, which will allow him to see whether his objectives can be met by what is being proposed. He also asks himself whether the initiative will add incremental value and he uses the “Versus rule” – “will this add value versus what I’m currently doing anyway?”

Innovation needs to be split between protecting the core and disrupting the future

Each of these two areas of focus needs to have its own time frame of planning, its own experts and its own budgets in every organisation. The team looking at core growth has a short time span of 1-2 years, whereas the disruptors look to what will be relevant in 3 years and beyond. This helps leaders make choices among too many available options, too – some marketing solutions will solve problems appearing in the immediate future, while others solve for the long term.

The host of the Shiny New Object podcast is Tom Ollerton, founder of Automated Creative.