Expert Talks with Mariagrazia Flaibani: How Marketing Becomes a Strategic Lever in B2B

Who a Fractional CMO is and what they do in B2B

Daniele: Good morning everyone, my name is Daniele Delle Case and this is Expert Talks, the Things5 podcast about technology and smart products with industry experts. Today we have Mariagrazia Flaibani with us, who led the digital transformation and e-commerce at Illycaffè and Electrolux Professional, and who is now a fractional CMO with her firm MGF Digital Business Consulting. Hi Mariagrazia, welcome. How are you?

Mariagrazia: Hi Daniele, thanks for the welcome, I'm really glad to be here. All good, thank you.

Daniele: It's a pleasure to have someone with your experience on our podcast. I'm sure what you share today will be a great help to our listeners. Would you like to start with your roots and your career path?

Mariagrazia: Gladly. I was invited here to talk about marketing, but my path actually didn't start in marketing, and maybe that's exactly what made it interesting. I started out in classic sales offices, and from there I joined Illycaffè as head of B2B sales customer service, managing relationships with customers in the HoReCa world - hotels, restaurants, cafés - and with distributors, through a sales network focused on Italy.

That was my start, and then I stayed there for 17 years. During that time I was lucky enough to work on a lot of other things, to grow, creating company functions from scratch, like the direct-to-consumer channel, from customer care to e-commerce to all the digital communication aimed at the end consumer. Eventually I also took on omnichannel management, because we had opened company-owned stores, so there was also this blend of retail and e-commerce.

After 17 years I felt the need for a change. I stepped out of that comfort zone and joined Electrolux Professional, an even bigger company than Illy. We were part of the Swedish group at the time, so a true multinational. There I was able to work on B2B marketing applied to the metalworking world and to the ecosystem of sales companies, dealers and distributors in more than 90 countries. I broadened my experience both on the marketing side and on CRM, but designed for B2B.

Then Covid came along. It stirred things up in a lot of situations, including in my own head, where I felt a strong desire for change. I had already been considering going out on my own for a few months, but that's when I made the decision. The goal was to put everything I had learned at the service of companies; it was the natural evolution of my career.

Daniele: When I introduced you, I mentioned that you see yourself as a fractional CMO. Can you tell us what this role is and how it works with the companies you collaborate with?

Mariagrazia: It's a big word, like all English terms, but the concept is simple. It's a marketing director who, instead of working for a single company, splits their time across several. Depending on the goals of the companies I work with, I put on whatever hat is needed to help them reach them.

Business digital transformation: automating processes to eliminate repetitive work

Daniele: There's a common thread in your story, which is digital technology. Would you tell us how digital has shaped your career and what the key moments were when you realized digital could be a strong business lever?

Mariagrazia: Right from the start, from when I began working in sales service, I found two inner drivers that move me: curiosity and boredom.

Curiosity is the desire to learn, to go further, to explore new things. Boredom is the fact that I hate repetitive tasks that take up a lot of time, and seeing my team spend a lot of time on these activities when technology could do them. So I was always trying to figure out how to automate a process, what a given piece of software could deliver.

This started maybe three months after I was first hired and I still carry it with me today. I always ask myself: is it possible that there isn't a different or better way to do things well, or to do them in less time?

My passion for digital doesn't come from technology itself, but from the desire to simplify things and leave room for the more interesting activities, for everyone.

How to do marketing in the B2B manufacturing and industrial sector

Daniele: I saw that you went from Illy to Electrolux and then started working on your own. What changed the most in moving from B2C to B2B, and then in becoming a consultant? How did it change the way you work?

Mariagrazia: The biggest shift was precisely between Illy and Electrolux Professional. They're two completely different companies.

Illy was very focused on the consumer experience; even when it worked through HoReCa (which has remained the company's core business), the ultimate point of view was always that of the consumer, so the brand and the experience were at the center of everything and of the strategic business levers.

When I moved into manufacturing, I entered a world that thought in a more industrial way. There was excellence on the factory side, but with a completely different approach to marketing, often very traditional. Marketing was seen as a support function, mainly for trade shows. The distributors themselves are very traditional, they still love brochures, paper. I didn't expect that. On the other hand, though, I saw things that Illy didn't have — configurators, technology tools that help you sell better and bring customers closer to the products. In this world there's certainly a strong focus on the product, on research and development.

But I believe the relationship with the customer doesn't begin when the product is designed; it has to continue until the product has been used and decommissioned. The final phase is at least as important as the pre-launch one.

How to structure goals between the Marketing and Sales departments

Daniele: What would you advise a manufacturer of catering equipment to build a marketing strategy that accompanies the consumer from before/from the purchase all the way to the end of the product's life?

Mariagrazia: I'd advise them to orchestrate this journey well, which in my experience doesn't mean writing it on a nice slide, but defining the strategy, the processes, how they're put into practice, who puts them into practice, when and with what resources.

It sounds obvious, but often the intention is there and it stays on paper. Partly because there's the issue of departments working in silos: you set out to orchestrate a complete cycle, but there's no function that owns it from start to finish. If goals aren't cross-functional but stay departmental, it's hard for things to happen.

Daniele: How should the cross-functional roles that keep everyone aligned on common goals be structured?

Mariagrazia: The first thing would be to build shared goals across multiple functions. A simple example: if I, marketing, am only responsible for leads, and sales is only responsible for revenue or the margin generated, we have different goals. I bring you tons of leads that don't convert; as marketing I've hit my goal, but you haven't hit yours. In my view, depending on the company, goals should be structured so they're shared across multiple functions. And these functions have to work together.

There's also the issue of communication: departments often don't talk to each other. And then there's the problem of meetings: either they don't happen, or they happen but nothing gets decided. When I work with companies, I don't leave a meeting without first clarifying whether that meeting is informational or decision-making, and without leaving with meeting notes and a table of who does what and when.

Daniele: I'm aligned with what you're saying. The pre-meeting is important. You need to define clear goals to come out with and, where relevant, also share the documents to work from. That would be ideal; it's not always possible because meetings turn into brainstorming sessions, but it would be valuable. Earlier, though, you told me that the final lever for change, that is, becoming your own boss, was tied to a moment of global crisis that triggered your desire to change. If you had to give advice to someone who's in a situation of personal discomfort because they're not at ease with what they do or they want to change something, what advice would you give them?

Mariagrazia: My advice is very personal: I believe the first thing to do is to listen to yourself, so look inside yourself and understand what you really want. It's not the same for everyone; it varies from person to person. Personally, I had already developed that desire a few months before Covid. Then during the pandemic we realized that certain priorities change, that there was no need to catch a plane at 5 a.m. to attend that two-hour meeting you had to do in person. You realize that the world kept going remotely for a year, that priorities have changed too, and it gets you thinking.

What I wanted was to step into a dimension where I could directly see the impact of my work. I like building, experimenting, being close to people and their problems. I started in customer care and then developed the direct channel, so I like being close to companies, understanding their problems and trying to solve them. That's what still drives me today. What I say is: listen to yourself and understand yourself better.

Daniele: It's a recurring theme when we talk to entrepreneurs or people who have gone out on their own: meeting customers' needs. And that becomes the driver behind their choices, and I feel like I heard the same words again in your story.

Mariagrazia: I can tell you that in my current situation as a consultant, I've also done pro bono projects. There are situations, for example with the guide who showed me around during a trip to Bhutan, where I wanted to do something for him. Something that would have been impossible if I were an employee.

Customer listening methods and qualitative market analysis

Daniele: What strategy did you use in the past to understand and interpret consumer needs?

Mariagrazia: One above all: listening. When I built customer care at Illycaffè, because we needed a front office that understood the needs of the end consumer before starting to approach them with sales as well, what I did about 15 years ago was bring in-house the toll-free number that handled all the products on supermarket shelves. To get a firsthand sense of what consumers were saying, what their requests were, what they wanted.

Over time, this never left me. I kept working with customer care and I'd sit with the customer care people, listen to live calls, have the team tell me their impressions. I had the reports and the data, of course, but data are numbers that need to be interpreted.

Then, when budgets allowed, there was market research, focus groups, direct surveys of e-commerce customers with a small e-commerce incentive, interviews in retail stores. In my opinion, listening and not losing touch with the market, the sales agents, the people who talk to customers every day is essential. Qualitative interviews are as valuable as quantitative data.

Daniele: At our company we too are very careful to talk with users and try to understand their needs; you can't always act right away, but understanding the needs lets you meet that need, which becomes a reason to stay on as a customer. What you've told me is exactly the way to avoid the disconnect between marketing and the market, which I still see in some companies. In your approach, on the other hand, there seems to be a strong connection with the market.

Mariagrazia: That's exactly it, because when I think about marketing I don't start from what I need to say, how I communicate it, because I'd risk drifting away. I've always tried to avoid that. First I try to talk to customer care, to sales, and to understand.

Daniele: Based on your experience, how do you get a manufacturing company to see marketing as a strategic function, not a support function, isolated and marginal, but a strategic function that lets you open channels, grow revenue and build awareness around your products and your brand?

Mariagrazia: First of all, it's marketing itself that has to prove it deserves a seat at certain tables. If marketing is used to being "traditional," change is unlikely to come. Marketing has to be the engine of change, by changing first. I'm speaking both as a former employee and from my experience as a consultant, where I've worked with other manufacturing companies. It's a real struggle, so it starts from marketing and from the other departments.

Priorities are seen differently, resources are seen as increasingly scattered in terms of budget allocation, so it's not easy to make this change; but in my opinion, the fact is that the market is evolving, technology is advancing, AI is everywhere, and some competitors are already more innovative. Data on these competitors can help management understand that the time has come to move, otherwise you risk extinction.

How do you do it? You have to become aware that even though we have distributors between us and the market, because manufacturing companies have few direct customers (e.g. chains) and then have relationships with a great many distributors who distribute the product, one of the solutions is to have a direct relationship with the end customer in order to be more aware of their problems, that customer's satisfaction, their wishes, to inform them more promptly, and to start owning the data, because it's data that makes you competitive on the products you're trying to innovate (e.g. predictive maintenance, consumables, which are a high source of margin and can tie you to your end customer through a subscription - I'm talking about the B2B customer). If marketing is able to make these arguments and bring them to the table, it might be listened to.

Why Data Governance matters before choosing business KPIs

Daniele: You're talking about data. What metrics should be measured to make decisions, and in relation to the types of analysis you imagine being carried out in a manufacturing company?

Mariagrazia: It depends on the goals and on what you want to improve. What I can tell you is that first you have to fix the data.

In my experience, manufacturing companies often go through a cycle of layering with other companies (they get acquired, they enter joint ventures), and this means there are business units within the same company that use different systems with different logics for handling data. The first problem is standardizing and cleaning the data. Often there's no data owner, and data isn't considered important because until yesterday it was practically never used. I'm talking about situations where customer care has its own data and systems, sales has its own, marketing has its own, each branch has its own, and none of it talks to each other. So even before thinking about KPIs, in my view, you need to do data governance work.

How to build a B2C e-commerce channel from inside a manufacturing company

Daniele: You told me earlier that you chose to become an entrepreneur in the latest part of your career, but actually I saw that during your time at Illy you already had an intrapreneurial approach (you acted as an entrepreneur inside the company): you created the e-commerce channel from scratch, and it became a business unit. How do you build a path that's different from traditional sales, highly specialized, and that becomes a company within the company without getting crushed by internal habits and customs?

Mariagrazia: At that company, after our first attempts at selling directly to the end customer, we immediately understood that we weren't structured to do it.

We started with a major enterprise platform. The e-commerce began to put up its first numbers. At the time we had launched in Italy and 5 European countries, but then when Christmas came there was panic: the platform went down every hour because it couldn't handle the traffic. On the logistics side it was a problem because we were stealing products from each other across divisions, between e-commerce, large-scale retail and HoReCa, and when the product wasn't available you had to wait. When we delivered, sometimes it was the wrong product.

We understood fairly quickly that the platform was the main problem, and that a major replatforming was needed. We could only manage the service issues. When the company saw that we were delivering results, we gained the trust to move forward.

From there I started separating everything I could. First we separated the services, then logistics, internally with dedicated staff and separate warehouses, then fully outsourced when volumes grew. The same for payments, carriers: practically a company within the company.

Daniele: How do you teach a company that besides physical products it can also sell services, and create new revenue streams through e-commerce?

Mariagrazia: Today it's much easier, because there's this established trend toward servitization. People no longer buy just the product, but what's behind it and above all the services.

Back in our day I was lucky to work at Illy, a company that had already thought about this. When I think of services at a company like ours, subscription services meant the recurring coffee subscription. Illy was based in Trieste, yes, but it had always been open to innovation. Illy's fortune came through the pressurization of coffee, which goes back to the great-grandfather, who had in mind that coffee from Trieste all over the world. Illy already worked very well with its US subsidiary, where the subscription idea was already developed. But to give credit where it's due, with HoReCa customers we had already activated a coffee reorder subscription based on their consumption, even before e-commerce. Just to show you how a company already thirty years ago was starting to think about how to innovate and how to always stay one step ahead.

Daniele: It's very close to the servitization mindset; in this case the product, or in the case of a machine, I could servitize a machine that I don't sell as a one-off product, but as a service in which I guarantee the entire life cycle of the product, which ties back to the right approach to marketing.

Mariagrazia: Yes, that's something we did regularly at Illy with our HoReCa customers, such as baristas and restaurant owners.

E-commerce platforms: advantages, challenges and the Make or Buy decision

Daniele: What are the main advantages for a manufacturer in creating an e-commerce strategy, and what challenges have you encountered, besides the ones you've already listed?

Mariagrazia: I'd say skills, the fact of having to acquire skills that are different from the traditional world, and then the fact of having to manage another sales channel that should potentially integrate with other distribution channels that already exist.

Daniele: And what advantages do you see in integrating these channels compared to the others?

Mariagrazia: The economic benefit is obvious because you cut out the intermediaries and go directly to the end customer, but given what I told you earlier, I think the biggest advantage is the relationship with whoever comes into contact with your product, and so the relationship that helps you grow, both in terms of reputation and in terms of knowing who your customer is, how they use your product, what they would like, so it leads you to think about the future.

Daniele: Earlier you told me that you started with what was basically an off-the-shelf platform, so you bought a platform from a vendor and then decided to change strategy. How do you see the make or buy dilemma after this experience? In other words, does it make sense to buy from outside or does it make more sense to create a tailor-made product built around your own needs?

Mariagrazia: If we're talking about an e-commerce platform, I'd go with buy every time, maybe with small customizations. I'd avoid developing a custom solution in-house because it stays fixed for quite a long time and it's very rigid, whereas buy solutions let you evolve as the market evolves, with new features that give you more and more possibilities. So I'd definitely go with buy, as we eventually did too, successfully.

Daniele: And how did you choose the products to sell on e-commerce? Did you have products specifically for that channel or were they the same products?

Mariagrazia: We also had ad hoc products, but never exclusives. Every company needs its own sales strategy across channels. In our case, we had a specific product that would never go, and in fact still hasn't gone, into large-scale retail, but only into selective channels. For us, the selective channels were some of the stores of our HoReCa customers and e-commerce. I'm talking in particular about a system made up of a coffee machine plus capsule, a closed system. This drove the e-commerce launch for the Italian market, but that wasn't the case in other markets where the product mix might be different. While in Italy you can find the little can of coffee at the supermarket, in Asia you can't, and so with e-commerce in Asia I sold tons of whole bean and ground coffee, more than closed-system machines. That's why I'm telling you it's important to study your product portfolio, see where I want to go, how I want to get there and which consumer I should target; there's no one-size-fits-all solution.

Omnichannel strategy: integrating physical retail and digital channels

Daniele: And what about the omnichannel approach, how did you go about it?

Mariagrazia: Are we talking about physical retail plus e-commerce?

We always approached it by thinking about our customer, because in the end the customer is one and the same. If I go to the brand's store, I expect to have a similar experience in the e-commerce world as well. So it was mainly about synchronizing communication moments and promotions between the two channels and recognizing the consumer. If I have a loyalty program, it has to work both online and offline.

Then, of course, I can have channel-specific logic: for example, if I create a cold drink recipe for the summer, I'll only do it for retail and not on e-commerce, but maybe through digital I'll let my customers know that they'll find this new recipe or this type of event at those stores. The point is to create a plan that takes into account all the communication channels and what I call touchpoints, which are the ones that interact with the end customer. Keep in mind that for me the product itself is also a touchpoint, because the packaging, for example, communicates something to me. I always try to keep everything under control and aligned.

Daniele: Would you give us an example of the touchpoints you had in your flow? I'm really fascinated by this.

Mariagrazia: Sure, but to me this is all obvious to describe. The website is a touchpoint, the owned social media are touchpoints, the product itself and its packaging. If I think of Illy, I think of the iconic little can: that's a touchpoint. The stores are touchpoints, our cafés, the resellers are touchpoints, and how the baristas communicate is a touchpoint. There we even had selected venues called "Artisti del Gusto" – I think they still exist today – and those have uniforms made in a certain way. Everything that interacts with and reaches the end consumer is potentially a touchpoint. The phone itself is a point where the brand comes into contact with the end customer and vice versa.

Daniele: And how did you measure the effectiveness of the various touchpoints?

Mariagrazia: It depends. On the web you have all the classic e-commerce metrics; on social you have engagement and you measure that; on the retail side we ran periodic satisfaction surveys. On the product side we ran focus groups, we listened and we did customer care analyses, so all the collected requests or complaints related to the products. You have no idea how many people call and ask: "Why, when I opened the can, did it vent for a second and a half instead of 5 seconds? Was it good or not?" Literally anything and everything.

Daniele: Still, that's valuable information too, even if it maybe doesn't have an immediate impact on the product, because it helps you understand how the consumer thinks.

Mariagrazia: To give you an idea of how a quality-driven company thinks – now I'm advertising my old company, but it deserves it on this front – all the calls or reports about the product that came in through various channels (WhatsApp, email) were checked by batch number and expiration date. They went to the quality department, which did a specific check on that batch and replied to practically everyone.

Daniele: That's a very serious and consistent approach.

Mariagrazia: In return you got information that was later also used for innovation and product improvements.

Daniele: Of course. And if you had to talk about the biggest successes and the biggest failures in your career related to e-commerce, what would you tell us?

Mariagrazia: The successes are easy: the revenue spoke for me, so it was definitely a big sales success, first at the European level and then globally too, and not only through our direct channel but also by moving into marketplaces, especially in Asia. On the technology side, this success was possible precisely because we replaced the enterprise platform and moved to a cloud platform; that's why I say buy every time, because it allowed us to do e-commerce, which wasn't possible before. Today I find it hard to imagine someone wanting to build a serious platform by buying a rigid enterprise solution; it seems unlikely to me.

Daniele: I'm sure there are still companies like that. Maybe we could debate whether it's actually a smart choice or not, but I'm sure there are still a few crazy ones out there.

Mariagrazia: Look, I'm so shocked that when I go into companies, one of the main things I do as part of the assessment is look at the technology, and I usually always manage to stop two or three projects they have underway or want to launch, because I already know they're going to get themselves into a sea of trouble. In the end, for me as a professional this is a big plus: having seen what I've seen, I can bring together the digital side, the communication side and the technology side. Having such a 360-degree skill set is rare, and it's what makes me happy, because I see that I manage to keep my clients from hurting themselves as much as they otherwise would. A wrong technology choice then turns into a bloodbath that's hard to fix.

Artificial Intelligence and e-commerce: the risks of automation without human oversight

Daniele: Yes, I agree with you that having skills like yours, which let you immediately understand whether a project makes sense or not, is of great value to the companies you work with. And what about AI, what's your point of view?

Mariagrazia: The failure was missing, I have to tell you about it! On the subject of failure and the problems I see now, there's the risk of trusting the platforms and what they give you on the service side a bit too much. For example, nowadays almost all platforms include a lot of AI, and this means that maybe you don't have much expertise and you rely completely on the platform's technology and on AI. This could become problematic because in the end you forget everything that's behind it: that is, good old SEO, which yesterday got you onto search engines and now gets you onto AI as well; you don't know how to do merchandising, and so on.

This means you end up with conversion rates that, instead of being at 2%, are at 0.6% or 0.5%, and you, the e-commerce manager, don't even know why, because until yesterday you maybe had a different job and you lack the basics to be able to run the channel. I also see this in communication, and this is where I get into the world of AI. Someone might say: "OK, AI does it for me," but that's not quite how it is. If right now you don't have the critical thinking to understand whether a piece of work is done well or not done properly, you risk not getting results or even making them worse.

Conversational AI agents and sales assistants in the B2B market

Daniele: We talk about this a lot at our company too. We've certainly automated some processes and simplified others using AI, but the approach always has to be critical because otherwise, if you delegate and you're not aware of what the tool is doing, you're delegating your strategic choices to something you don't have under control, and that's a problem. So the tool is fine for automating and speeding things up, but there always has to be a human contribution, what's called human-in-the-loop, something that lets you stay in control of what you're doing. I'm very much aligned with what you said.

And, staying in this world, we're at a time when AI agents are popping up everywhere. What's your view on AI agents, and do you think they can be a sales channel for physical products or services?

Mariagrazia: I think an AI agent can definitely already sell products for you today, but in an assisted way, as if it were a sales assistant. Right now I see it, for example, answering questions 24/7 very autonomously, being able to recommend products in a personalized way, retrieving information from company databases or the CRM, preparing quotes, guiding the customer to checkout, helping them if they run into problems along the purchase journey, and recovering abandoned carts on e-commerce; or, going beyond that, booking appointments and doing demos. I also believe it can create orders, so do somewhat more advanced things like applying discounts or reordering recurring products. In my view it can do all of these things. What I perhaps still see as a human prerogative at the moment is getting into complex negotiations, because I see that when you start going back and forth with questions and answers, it still struggles to interact with a human being. Likewise, I also think of the difficulty of handling rather delicate complaints or rather difficult personalities; I see that as harder for AI. Making strategic business decisions also seems a bit complicated to me at the moment. So yes and no, but as a sales assistant I think we're absolutely there. What do you think?

Daniele: We ourselves are investing to integrate into our agentic platform the ability to sell, for example, consumables and spare parts based on triggers generated by the data. We think this can be valuable for the user, who at that point no longer has to wait for something to break before placing an order and risk ending up with the machine down, but it can become a kind of proactive selling that satisfies both sides of the transaction: the end user, because with less effort they have something that's always up to date and in order, and the manufacturer, because they don't miss opportunities. We believe in it quite a bit, but I agree with you that in high-level strategy experience counts for a lot, and that an AI, even if it has all the data available, today might have less fine-grained insight into the nuances of negotiations or strategies. On the other hand, I see many practical use cases and automation in sales processes; those I do see coming.

Mariagrazia: I agree with you, and it brings to mind a further reflection on readiness, companies' preparedness. I've found myself in some situations where the technology was there and ready, but the company wasn't ready to adopt it, and this is an important aspect that unfortunately I'm seeing now with AI too. Obviously there's a bit of a race toward AI adoption, but here too, if you have problems, AI doesn't magically erase them. If you don't solve them first, quite the opposite, it amplifies them, it makes your problems even bigger.

That brings me back to the topic of data, which was one of my pain points. If the data is disorganized and you don't have the processes ready, AI risks creating even more confusion for you because you haven't fixed the foundations.

Daniele: Yes, I wanted to connect to your reasoning, but you did it yourself: data cleanliness and quality are essential for an AI agent to work well too, and so that's definitely a step that comes before any project. Absolutely.

How to keep up with continuous change in MarTech and cut out background noise

Daniele: I'd like to head toward the end of our conversation and reflect on the lessons you've learned over time. We know that today digital moves at a staggering speed and AI is pushing us more and more toward process automation. What would you advise one of our listeners to manage the anxiety of always having to learn new skills quickly and keep constantly up to date on technologies that are evolving at the speed of light?

Mariagrazia: I smile because the first thing that comes to mind is this: manage the anxiety without anxiety. Because today it's simply impossible to keep up with everything. Every day a new tool is born. We're bombarded by ads telling us "try this, try that, this will let you do this and that," new platforms, new features. There's really an overload of everything, and if we try to chase it all, in my view we only risk wasting energy and getting nothing done.

So I go back to my old fundamentals: let yourself be guided by your priorities and your goals. You don't need 500 priorities, but one, two, three, no more. Once you've clarified that, you try to understand which tools can help you achieve them. You'll find dozens, you'll pick a few, one or two, you'll test them and see if they're satisfactory for you. That's what I'd do, because otherwise you really risk being overloaded.

Daniele: Yes, I agree. Among other things, in my opinion you've brought up a key point, which is about eliminating background noise. In the end we're bombarded, and right now especially every company is bombarded with AI-based solutions and processes, and I think instead you need a lot of clarity in defining what's signal and what's noise, focusing on the two or three things that actually bring value to your work. The rest should simply be cut; there's no need to consider it now; maybe it'll be considered when it becomes a priority. At this stage it becomes essential to keep the air around you clean. And how do you use AI?

Mariagrazia: Look, I use it a lot as a sparring partner, I use it to do market research, for example, but also to bounce ideas off directly. But then what I do is also discuss with the team. I do rough work with AI to try to speed up gathering the information I need. I use it to scour the web and pull out market trends, research or competitor analyses. Once I've gathered all the information I need, I analyze it critically, and I assure you I always find things I need to fix or revise. That's sort of what we were saying earlier, right? Because we know that, even though it has improved, for many things it works by deduction, and so you always need to check and have knowledge of what you're asking and looking at. After that, we manage the output within the team, enriching it, and from there we basically pull out the clean project and go on to develop it. Then I also do lots of other more operational activities, for example editorial calendars or content refinement. I also use it, speaking of the web, to do UX/UI analysis; so yes, for quite a few things.

Daniele: OK. I don't know if you've ever heard of this, but lately I'm seeing more and more platforms emerging that simulate populations of potential buyer personas and use them to anticipate users' needs. What's your position on these technologies? Do you think these technologies can really reduce the need to talk to the end customer?

Mariagrazia: In my opinion, these technologies can help you speed up the work, but I'd always validate these outputs with real people.

Daniele: That's a very interesting point. We're wrapping up, and I'll ask you the question we ask pretty much everyone, which we think is essential, and which is about you: we'd love to know what today's Mariagrazia would advise the Mariagrazia of 10-15 years ago. What three pieces of advice would she give her?

Mariagrazia: The first thing is tied to the beginning of the interview, so what I'd tell my younger self is: "You're on the right track, keep nurturing your curiosity." In my opinion this was one of my drivers, and it still is now.

The second thing is about knowing how to wait, and I'd tell her she needs to be patient. I'm a Sagittarius, I'm always on the move, and I'd tell her not to be in too much of a hurry to get there. Some of life's experiences, from what I've lived through, also come from professional moments that may be "lows," or from less linear paths, or from changes that seem difficult at first but then open doors.

And consequently the third is: "Trust yourself." I'm very hard on myself. Earlier we were talking about anxiety, and why did I say "the anxiety of not having anxiety"? Because I'm someone who always tends to want to know everything, to want to know all the answers, and so on; but sometimes you just have to try, take the first step and learn along the way too, with a bit more serenity. I only acquired this after many, many years.

Daniele: Well, first of all, you've given some truly deep and beautiful advice, thank you for sharing it with our listeners, whom I say goodbye to, and goodbye to you too, Mariagrazia. It was a pleasure to have you as our guest today and a pleasure to hear about your experiences. I really think listeners will have a few more tools to tackle their challenges and maybe, why not, even get in touch with you for support in their work.

To all our listeners, thank you for listening. We'll talk at the next episode of Expert Talks. Remember to like and follow our channel. Thank you so much.

Mariagrazia: Thank you Daniele, it was a great conversation and I say goodbye to all the listeners. Thanks to you, bye!