Nishan Lahood on Revealing the Humans Behind the Numbers

| Mar 25, 2022 | Michael Benigno

By Jessica Jordaan, MS ’22

Nishan Lahood, associate brand lead at Sanofi Consumer Healthcare

Nishan Lahood, associate brand lead at Sanofi Consumer Healthcare, joined the Gabelli School Marketing Area’s Industry Speaker Series, discussing a case study where he was tasked with growing the awareness of one of the IBM business units’ solutions. During the webinar, Lahood, formerly a digital media strategy supervisor at EightBar (Ogilvy), elaborated on the goal to increase the number of onsite actions taken by website visitors by 50% through a comparative analysis performed at semi-annual intervals.

During an extensive research process, Lahood focused on important questions, including, “What are we asking users to do when they click through to the website?” and, “What actually happens when users visit the website?” His research revealed that many users who went on the website landed back on the homepage after the third or fourth click. This indicated that “people [were not] finding the information they were looking for.” This highlighted the value of ensuring that users can clearly find the next steps to find more valuable content.

Lahood compared an online ad experience to shopping in a mall. Each onsite user has a location or starting point (the mall). An advertisement acts as an interruption (other stores in the mall) which subsequently leads that customer to the advertising companies intended destination (desired store in the mall). Web users are not willing to interrupt their browsing experience for more than three to five seconds, which leaves the advertiser with an extremely short timeframe to engage with the user. He emphasized the importance of boldly establishing the value you can provide a user to justify their time because their interruption is crucial. This also makes for a better customer experience journey.

Lahood presented the volume and effectiveness of actions measured before and after his recommendations were implemented (the first half of 2018 vs. second half of 2018). His recommendation to optimize the onsite user journey doubled the on-sight actions and increase effectiveness by 22%, resulting in a satisfied client.

After presenting his case study to the audience, Lahood spoke about his career journey between data analytics and brand management. He mentioned that the two careers go hand-in-hand, as it’s beneficial to understand the basics of one in order to thrive in the other. His natural curiosity and communication skills were among the factors that led to him pivot within the marketing field from analytics (translating data and numbers) to brand marketing (how to build awareness). The combination of being able to develop implementable insights and the ability to develop relevant recommendations and actions has led to Lahood’s immense success in the industry.