I need your help to play the Founder-led strategy to fast-track growth

TO: CEO

FROM: Azleen Abdul Rahim, CMO

SUBJECT: I need your help to play the Founder-led strategy to fast-track growth

Adam,

Per our management meeting early this week, I need to talk to you about the above. FYI, our Ops BOBI is a work-in-progress now.

In the meeting, I shared my thoughts about how our brand is quietly bringing us down. Yes, we’ve been around for more than 45 years in the country. Our brand is highly recognisable. Yet, the numbers I’m seeing in the weekly marketing reports are telling me the opposite. The brand we’ve built is becoming a liability now. The reason could be this. People are seeing us as “standard” (read: traditional and boring). This is not good.

People nowadays want to be associated with "upgrades”, not “standard”.

I need your help to emulate Tony Fernandes and Kamaruddin Meranun of AirAsia, and how they played founder-led marketing years back. It's like personal branding, but with a little twist. They sold stories. They sold behind the scenes of what’s happening in the organisation. They sold a movement. And these were translated into seats sold. Their visibility made AirAsia feel human and unstoppable at that time. We can use the same playbook, too.

As the CEO and founder, you are the only one who can bring us to the next level, especially among your circles and beyond. This may sound like it's nothing, but this strategy matters. You see, when we hit the market with outbound and inbound strategies, people will check you out as well. Through you, this simple validation will strengthen our conversion push in a big way, better than through the 45-year-old brand.

Adam, just do this intensely for the next 24 months. The goal is to aggressively grow your connections and followers, pulling your first-degree connections into a tighter inner circle and converting second-degree connections into loyal advocates. Behind your founder-led strategy, the marketing team will run our publishing push to win our marketing game.

You don’t have to do anything. Just do your normal routines, go to meetings and events as usual. Our marketing team will handle the content part end-to-end. Three key objectives you want to achieve urgently. One, you need to be easily found across social media, search engines, and AI queries. Two, you need to be clearly associated with the company. And three, we need to spark conversations out there through you.

Let me briefly share how we’re going to play this founder-led marketing. First, I will assign one person from the marketing team to shadow you. Be it in the office, or outside for meetings and events, this guy will help to snap images, shoot footage and take notes of each activity. These materials will then be stored in our shared folder in Google Drive. There will be one person in the office, who will then grab those and properly write the details.

Each content will be created dedicatedly for social media captions, news, opinion-based articles and others, while they will be complemented either by the images or videos edited. On social media, postings will be done under your name-account, and under the company’s, too (with a different vibes of course). For search engines and AI queries, the content will be developed to suit each indexability type, where we will publish it on our official website and other external publishing platforms. We’ll ensure we are tagging the right brands and individuals to weave you into the conversation. The key is to post naturally. We will avoid overdoing it. As always, each milestone will be closely monitored via our KPI Dashboard.

When you are visible, algorithms in social media, search engines and AI Assistants will index you, the company and the entire ecosystems of what we do, et al, linking everything with clarity. In less than four months, we will start seeing the initial traction. People will find us easier, even though they just browse through their social media, they ask Google about something not related to our brand, or even converse with their favourite AI Assistant naturally.

Let me know if I can secure your time for only 30 minutes this Tuesday at 3 pm. I’ll share more when we meet.

Azleen.

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