“Companies got ahead of the demand; there weren’t any clients on the Internet yet”

19/12/2019

Joana Sánchez, a 1986 UAB graduate in Economics, had a hand in marketing from early in her career with high-level positions at Grup Planeta. An expert in direct marketing, she witnessed the Internet’s entry into the market, and after many years of experience she founded íncipy to advise companies on digital transformation and employee centricity. Finally, she created Inesdi, a business school specialising in digital innovation.

Let’s take a look at her career, which runs parallel to the history of how marketing has evolved in our country.

You earned your degree in Economics from the UAB in 1986. Why did you choose this field?
By sheer chance. My entire life I had wanted to be doctor, and I actually pre-enrolled in Medicine at the UAB, but at the last minute I had a kind of personal crisis and wasn’t sure that’s what I wanted. I had finished secondary school in Philosophy with honours and thought that might be an option, but ultimately someone told me about Economics, which was a good match with my mixed profile of numbers and sociology.

So, what was the experience like?
At that time, I didn’t know any economists, I had no point of reference, I began just by chance and it turned out to be the discovery of my lifetime. My first year was pretty hard because theoretical economics was a bit difficult for me, but after the second year it became more practical and I liked it. I did my entire degree thinking about the field of finance, plus I’ve always had a gender battle and I was eager to be in a men’s world. When I was studying for my degree, I took classes in the afternoons because I was working in the mornings, and there were only three or four women in the entire class.

Your first professional job was at Grup Planeta. How did you get your start there?
In the third year of my degree, I had the chance to do a summer internship, and I worked balancing the accounts of banks. The internship ended and they immediately called me to replace my colleague. Ultimately, they offered me a replacement contract in the Management Control Department, and I started my career at Planeta. We began working on spreadsheets right when they were being taught in the Faculty, so I helped my colleagues understand them. We’re talking about the IT back in those days. In the end, they put me in charge of finances at Grup Planeta while I was still doing the fifth year of my degree, and I accepted and then had to work all day, so I reached an agreement with my professors and my classmates and they gave me the notes every Friday in exchange for me showing them how to use spreadsheets.

At what point did you get into marketing?
I got a job offer to be the financial director of Hospital Dos de Maig, and at that time Planeta counter-offered with a job where I would go into a field known as direct marketing, even though I had no idea what that meant. There was an agreement between Planeta and Time Life Books, an American group, to develop the sale of book collections by post by subscriptions with a novel technique called direct marketing. I accepted the job, and Time Life trained me in data, data prediction, analytics, etc. for one month before I started.

What was this marketing like?
It wasn’t global but segmented marketing, and you made prediction curves, which is ultimately the origin of digital marketing. I entered the world of marketing and I liked it because I love data; I was able to interpret those data and make subscription projections. It’s a very analytical kind of marketing using measurements. So I made it my profession there, I earned a Master’s, I got international training in direct marketing, I was in Switzerland and the USA and I went to conferences and training in that field, and ultimately they appointed me director of Direct Marketing at Grup Planeta and I began my career as an executive with more responsibility.

And you were still quite young.
Yes, and then suddenly I found myself working at Accenture, developing the entire tech system to support marketing, developing technology and setting up and creating the team. We kept growing and I became a manager at the age of 24. The team was growing, and we were beginning to sell by television and there were some really interesting collections.

What exactly did you do?
We were working on this concept of collections of publications; it was a really great period of learning and knowledge in the world of marketing and technology. On the other hand, among the executives, I was the only female director in the group and one of the few with a university degree. We innovated and created collections such as the ones with books by Karlos Arguiñano and Jacques Cousteau. We invented many different channels, not only television; we reached agreements with banks and sold encyclopaedias via banks, and even with Gas Natural; and we made deliveries and publication sales via banks like BBVA, Banco Santander, la Caixa, etc.

What happened with the advent of the Internet?
At the start of the Internet, in 1998, a head-hunter appeared and proposed that I join Deutsche Bank as the Director of Partners and Innovation. Suddenly I found myself on the executive committee of a bank as a board member and a leader in charge of developing new business channels to sell financial products and develop the bank’s CRM. I began with that unit reaching agreements with insurance companies to sell credit cards. And then suddenly, along came the Internet.

What were the first few years of the Internet like?
At that time, companies were ahead of the demand; we probably dove in too deeply, and there weren’t yet any clients on the Internet. Finally the bank had to shelve that project, but we did begin to work on Internet-based services; we had implemented the segmented bank and created an entirely new model of personalised marketing by segments, which was fairly innovative at the time. Six years after this huge investment of resources, the Internet bubble burst; at that time, not only was I in charge of Marketing and New Channels but also Communication, and I was the deputy director of the bank. And at some point, at an event I found myself face-to-face with the president of the Grupo Planeta, José Manuel Lara, which was a very special moment for me. He told me that many Internet companies had closed, but that his vision was that they had gotten ahead of themselves, and that the Internet was going to become a really big thing. He wanted to be prepared because there was a company in the USA, Amazon, that he had his eye on. He made me an offer and I went back to Grupo Planeta in 2001, but this time as the CEO of the e-commerce division and direct marketing, as it was called at the time.

So, what was your new time at Grupo Planeta like?
I had left the world of publishing years ago, and the Internet bubble had burst, but Spain and Catalonia were growing, all investment was going to the real estate sector and it was all growth and expansion. I conducted a study and concluded that the concept of collecting could be applied not only to publications but also other things, and so we implemented a division applying this notion of collecting to Manila shawls, watches, jewellery based on historical figures… products that consumers bought. We drew inspiration from wealthy homes that put their items up for auction. We turned the concept of collecting, which had been done at newsstands with small collections, into an entire division. At the same time, the group had focused on home book purchasing via e-commerce, and we did a fairly important Internet-based leisure and culture project.

What were your sales channels?
In the early years they were more television and telephone, and gradually as the Internet market grew the category of books and leisure and culture was the first to sell on the Internet, and we began to create the first Internet-based e-commerce models in the country. It was a division with more than 100 people; we acquired companies like muchoviaje.com, we spread internationally into Latin America and we grew considerably. It was a very interesting period until the crisis came. It was a division that was highly exposed to risk because we had made acquisitions and part of the sales were via credit on TV, which hurt our bottom line. We decided to make a strategic shift: Grupo Planeta had to restructure, and that division had to be trimmed back. I reached an agreement with the group and left as the executive, but I still continue working with them as a consultant, and I even remained president of muchoviaje.com. That’s when I began to create my own companies.

How did you tackle this new stage?
I travelled to the USA; at that time Amazon not only sold books but had also created algorithms and was customer-focused, plus the social media had appeared. I visited Facebook; Twitter had just recently been launched. On that trip to Silicon Valley, I realised that the world was changing, and that direct marketing could easily be done with Facebook and Twitter. And we decided to first create íncipy, which comes from the Latin incipit, meaning ‘beginning’. We founded it exactly 10 years ago. In the first year, we were mainly focused on digital strategy; we told large companies why they had to be on the Internet and why they had to be on the social media. We had major clients that we still work with today, like Naturgy and Affinity.  

At the talk you gave at the 3rd annual gathering of the alumni network of the UAB’s Faculty of Economics and Business (CAFEE), you spoke a lot about the importance of personnel management.
Yes, working with these companies with my partner Mireia Ranera, we realised that if companies wanted to work on a direct relationship with their clients, it wasn’t just a matter of marketing but there also had to be a culture and people. And 8 years ago, we began to work on the issue of employee centricity, in relation to the digital transformation as well. We were the first ones to start telling companies that in this new century they have to change the entire company in order to provide experience, become customer-focused and give customers the best experience through technology. The goal is not solely to create e-commerce models or social networks, but more importantly they have to be customer-focused, and the staff have to change.

In addition to íncipy, you also created Inesdi, a business school specialising in digital innovation.
Yes, we realised that there weren’t enough professionals. With some of the íncipy partners and my colleague in the faculty, Carme Maria Martínez, we created Inesdi with the idea of providing training in the new professions created because of the impact of technology and the digital transformation. The first courses we created were Community Manager and Digital Marketing expert 9 years ago. Since then, we have been trying to identify what these professions are before any other educational institution and to transition professionals towards this field. We opened Inesdi in the middle of the economic crisis; the majority of students were unemployed. We began with brick-and-mortar schools in Madrid and Barcelona, and it was a huge responsibility. Everything was new, we’d be offering class and a new social media would appear and we had to update the content – we hardly had enough time to develop it. In an exponential, disruptive environment, change is the only constant and you have to learn how to learn and keep learning constantly.

What is your hallmark as a school?
We invented our own methodology, we worked with professionals’ experience and students’ real projects. Some of those unemployed students began to create their own companies; in fact, 35% of our students are entrepreneurs or businesspeople today. And the others began to look for work. We’ve trained almost 3,000 students; we have around 400 students per year and they are all employed. We have a job bank, and my partner Sylvia Taudien and I have created a digital headhunting company called Indigital Advantage, because both our clients at the consultancy and other companies were asking us for top-tier professionals, experts in digital marketing and digital strategy.

And in addition to all this, you have contributed to the growth of many projects.
Throughout these years as an entrepreneur, I have promoted many projects with entrepreneurs; I have helped them and invested, such as in Womenalia, the most important network of female professionals, entrepreneurs and freelancers. We even have a small project incubator, Incúbame. I have also promoted my son’s company, Telemaki, and around 10 or 12 other projects either with my capital or by mentoring entrepreneurs, most of them young and many of them women, so they can be successful in their ventures.