Simon Philip Rost transitioned from management consulting to marketing management after completing his MBA. One of the biggest takeaways from consulting was breaking down data and finding insights to make better informed decisions—a skill he applies every day as marketing director for EMEA at GE Healthcare. There he is responsible for the digital health and artificial intelligence portfolio, leveraging data-driven marketing content to create global campaigns.

Shaheen Samavati interviews Simon about his career, and touches on how his experience having worked and studied across Europe, North America and Asia, has helped him in his approach to international marketing.

You can watch the full conversation in the video above or on YouTube, and listen to the podcast on Apple or Spotify.

Rapid-fire recs  

• Favorite App: 
  • getAbstract. “You can get book summaries which help you to identify the next book you want to read or the next podcast. That’s something I use quite extensively”
  • Strava. “On a personal level, sportswise, there’s an app called Strava, which I like to use to track my results and try to improve my performance.”

• Favorite book:
  • If Disney Ran Your Hospital by Fred Lee. “It’s an old book I just started from 2005. It tells you how you can apply customer facing techniques to patients. It speaks about nine and a half things that he would do differently. I wonder what the half thing is, but I’m just at the beginning.”
  • Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol. “For me, it’s the must-read if you are interested in the topic of digital healthcare.”

• Productivity hack: “I tell everybody ‘Don’t interrupt me!’ I’ll switch my mobile phone off to eliminate distractions as well. I try to tackle my biggest problems in the morning. As Mark Twain famously said: ‘If it’s your job to eat a frog, it’s best to do it first thing in the morning.’

• Online courses:
  • LinkedIn Learning. “They’ve got a very wide range of self-paced learning courses which I enjoy.”
  • Coursera “A good resource to go to if you don’t want to invest and search for free courses on digital marketing, online marketing, artificial intelligence.”

“Be bold and try new things. Reach out to the external world, look into other sectors to see what’s working there because it might also work in your world.”

Connect with Simon and Shaheen on LinkedIn.

This post was edited by Jessica Farmer. 

For mor insights into data-driven marketing, check out:

Leveraging social media data to make marketing decisions

Use customer data to address pain points – Jaime Lee, head of content strategy at AdRoll

Master data skills for content marketing

To see the full transcript, click on page number 2 below. 

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