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CMO Insights: Digital Marketing and Customer Centricity

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Before taking the job as SVP, Head of Integrated Marketing at Wells Fargo, Michael Lacorazza was cautioned that it might take a while to get things done at this huge bank.  Much to his delight, he was able to push through a number of new initiatives in his first year that had a profound impact on the business.  Though he credits his strong team for making it all happen, The CMO Club acknowledged his accomplishments in the area of digital marketing with their Programmatic Marketing Award last fall.  Here is my interview with Michael including some timeless insights on the power of customer-centricity:

Drew: Wells Fargo is considered an integrated marketing leader in the banking industry. What is your approach to seamlessly promoting the Wells Fargo brand across multiple channels?
We start with the customer—identifying the needs and insights to define the customer journey.  The customer journey determines the channel strategy, so that we integrate in the right places.  To bring the work to life, our large-scale campaigns are headed by a marketing integration lead, who assembles the physical and virtual teams (both Wells Fargo team members and outside resources) needed to develop and launch the assignments – and is ultimately accountable for the project.

Drew: With the purchase of Wachovia in 2008, Wells Fargo became a nationwide presence. How do you stay close to your customers when you operate in so many markets and have so many different types of customers?  
While we are a coast-to-coast company now, our focus is on serving our customers and our communities at the local level. We have a strong culture of putting the customer first and strive to live it every day. And, that customer-centric culture is guided by our company’s vision to satisfy all our customers’ financial needs and help them succeed financially.

Drew: You operate in a relationship-based business. How do you improve loyalty among your customers?
It’s about living our vision and values and doing what’s right for the customer.  It’s about building lifelong relationships one customer at a time. Our team members are the competitive advantage that enables us to achieve greater loyalty through that relationship building.

Drew: Innovation is a sexy word but not as sexy to a CEO as ROI.  Have you been able to link your innovative marketing activities to the kinds of business metrics favored by CEOs?
Measuring the impact of the marketing investment is critical in a data-driven company like Wells Fargo.  We create scorecards with KPIs for all of our large initiatives and leverage tools like media mix modeling to help us quantify the economic value of our investment and make optimization decisions.  Further, we share the results transparently with business lines and senior management.

Drew: A lot of financial services firms have tiptoed into social.  Do you see social as viable channel for your business and if so, in what capacity?  
Absolutely.  Our customers live digital, mobile and social lives.  We are continuously investing in social infrastructure to enable us to serve our customers and connect with them where they are.

Drew: A CMO has a lot of choices in terms of where they invest their time.  What have been your top priorities in the last couple of years?
My first priority has been to enable Wells Fargo to design and execute fully integrated marketing campaigns that engage the customer and drive measurable business success outcomes.  We’re very proud of that work. We have made a lot of progress and have more opportunities going forward.

Drew: Have there been any big surprises in terms of what’s worked really well and what hasn’t?
I joined Wells Fargo just over a year ago.  While preparing for the assignment, I received a lot of guidance to expect both change and projects to take a long time to matriculate in a matrixed, regulated company.  The magnitude, quality and impact of the work that the team has produced during my rookie season have been very impressive and much faster than anticipated.

Drew: Content marketing is hot topic at the moment.  What’s your perspective on content in terms of its effectiveness?  Are you increasing your investment in this area?
We view all of our communications as content – even our paid advertising.  And, more than ever, there needs to be a value exchange with the customer.   Marketers can no longer “message” at the customer at scaled weight levels.  The customer expects much more and look to us to deliver relevant content on their terms.

Drew: Big data as a big part of the CMO conversation these days.  How are you tackling big data?
It’s top secret, so I could tell you, but…all kidding aside.  What’s fundamentally important for us is to protect our customer’s data and operate in a spirit of transparency.  And we need do this in a tightly regulated industry with substantial uncertainty on where the privacy dialog will lead us. At the end of the day, we want to use data to improve our customer experience and deliver more relevance—that’s our focus.

Drew: Do you agree with that notion that “marketing is everything and everything is marketing” and if so how have you extended the boundaries of your job beyond the normal purview of the CMO?   
Yes, the key marketing leaders in the organization are deeply involved in helping to shape our future customer experience initiatives.  Because we are often so close to the customer and have unique insights to share, marketers can add a lot of value.  In my opinion, it’s not the sole domain of lines of business or product teams.

CMO Insights: Marketing the Lifestyle

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Every once in a while I meet someone whose job sounds like a lot more fun than mine.  After interviewing Chris Brull, Head of Marketing at Kawasaki Motors, I definitely had pangs of jealously.  I mean who wouldn’t want to ride bikes, ATVs and Jet Skis all in the name of customer and product research?  And then there’s the fact that his marketing mission is to reinforce the “wild, unrestrained, amazing fun” that his customers have using Kawasaki products.  Sounds like a winning formula to me and as it turns out, it also resonated with the folks at The CMO Club, who recognized Chris with their Rising Star Award late last year.

As you will see, Brull brings tremendous passion to his job at Kawasaki and is not afraid to take risks.  This sense of adventure made Brull an early proponent of digital, social and mobile, all of which helped build enduring connections with its fan base and drive new fans to Kawasaki dealers.  Read on to learn what Brull means when he refers to marketing Kawasaki not as a brand, but as a “lifestyle.”

Drew: Kawasaki Motors has a famously fanatical customer following. What are the things you are doing to maintain and improve loyalty among your customers?
I think you hit it straight on in terms of the fanatical following. We’re one brand (Kawasaki) and we have 14 different sub-brands, and 84 different models. You have to speak to these targets extremely authentically because these enthusiasts can spot a fake. To connect with them, we really have to know what we’re talking about. There can be no one-size fits all campaigns. You have to be very, very targeted and direct. Not every industry is as hyper connected with their customers as you have to be in power sports. You have to understand how people act, react, and think. We’re becoming real and authentic to the point where we’re almost a family member.

Drew: You said yourself that you have 14 different sub-brands and 84 different models. How do you stay close to your customers when you have so many different segments and so many hyper-focused initiatives?
Our company name is Kawasaki Heavy Industries. We’ve been around since 1870. We build products that are all about bettering people’s lives. Our company actually builds the Shinkansen bullet train. We build the fuselage of the Dreamliner. We build the factories where our products are made. It’s a crazy experience.

This is idea of Kawasaki Strong – the company that builds all of these things is actually the same company that builds these power sport products. If you look at Harley, they just build cruisers. Our engineering comes from something bigger and it’s very compelling for the customer. There’s a new campaign kicking off that will celebrate this engineering prowess.

Drew: Would you call this new campaign a re-launch?
It’s not a re-launch, it’s just re-telling the corporate story. We’re formalizing what the dealers have been doing for the past 15-20 years. There is a lot of story to tell, a lot of sex appeal that separates us from the competition. We call our appeal “intelligent rebel”. We’re not for everyone nor do we want to be. We’re about going further, faster. We’ve always been known for wild high-end performance. No one builds engines like Kawasaki. It’s just this rider feeling that we have created. Almost like you’re one with the product.  This is wild, unrestrained, amazing fun.

Drew: In terms of marketing, have there been any big surprises in terms of what’s really worked well?
We started testing our tools on customers via trial and error. Much of this stuff started to work. We were hooking these guys online long before the online bandwith was widely available. But it worked! We were giving fanatic customers their Kawasaki fix. They wanted to see the next big thing in Kawasaki and we were giving it to them. Our idea was to just give them a little bit. We were taking our content down to bite-sized pieces and giving our customers reasons to buy Kawasaki. The videos were shot in an elegant way that engaged, educated, and excited our customers. Our content strategy was ahead of the curve at that time. And there were skeptics within the company at the time but we were ultimately prophets and the strategy proved itself to be wildly successful.

Drew: As everyone moved online, experiential marketing was somewhat lost. Would you consider going back to experiential to be an innovation?
Personal interaction (especially in our industry) is still so critical. We might have a customer sitting on the website at 2am getting hooked. But at the end of the day, you can’t buy our product online. You still need to get the person to the dealership.

Demo rides are not often offered at dealerships because the dealerships have liability. That’s a strike against us. So, we create opportunities where we can show people the inside of our bikes and compare it to our competitor’s bikes. Tell the customer the Kawasaki story. People are hungry for knowledge. We get them fired up to ride. Now that I’ve told you what features we have inside of the bike, once I’ve showed them to you, then we go ride. I talk through what you’re feeling once we’re riding. It’s very experiential. Then you’re hooked. That’s the Kawasaki experience. We go to where our customers live and create our own experiential events.

Drew: How do you evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing?   
The sale of units is our top goal. But we’re not necessarily holding marketing solely accountable to the sale of the unit. Local sales guys are tasked with the selling. Flat out awareness of the brand is one goal for my team. We are also looking at engagement levels in the digital space and floor traffic into the local dealerships. We also evaluate marks such as the strength of the brand, likelihood to recommend, and likelihood of missing the brand if it were gone. This is all very top line.

Drew: What are a couple things that you’re most proud of as the head of marketing at Kawasaki?
The first thing that comes to mind is our online integration into social and mobile because we were the first to do it in the industry. Another thing that I’m very proud of is the global launch of our products. One of the sexier ones we did was a Times Square launch for Ninja. We had a live broadcast globally and had 1.5 million people show up to the event. No one else in our space had done something on that scale. It was a big risk with a big reward.

One of my biggest accomplishments was actually internal at the company. When I started, trust needed to be built between the factory team and the U.S.-based marketing team. I was able to build an internal coalition within Kawasaki that proved that the U.S. marketing team was able to work with and add value to the home office in Japan. The Times Square experiential launch was the turning point for us. It was the first time that the Kawasaki message was the same globally and the content was the same globally for a product launch. To be able to pull that off and get people to work together and trust each other as part of a global coalition – that was an accomplishment. Now I get to be a team leader of that global coalition.

Drew: Have you been able to use the voice of the customer to affect not just marketing but product development?  
When I started at Kawasaki, marketing didn’t find out about a product until 6 months before launch. There was an inherent distrust. Now through the trust that we’ve built, our company has realized that it’s critical to listen to the voice of our customers. We also realized that product marketing was critical to separate ourselves in the market. We needed to understand the real reasons why certain products weren’t selling. One of the things we realized was that certain products sell better in certain places. For instance, 4 wheel products sell great in the US and not in Japan. How could a customer tell you about advancement? They can’t. But they’re giving clues all the time as long as you’re listening.

Drew: It would be remiss of me not to ask about social media. You have 800,000 fans on Facebook, a fair amount of activity on Twitter. Let’s talk about it from a customer service standpoint. Are you set up to deal with customer issues on social?
We were the first in our industry to have a social presence. So that’s something to be proud of. For me, it wasn’t enough to post a bunch of cool shots of cool bikes. It was really about the voice of our customers. We have our social team set up to respond almost 24/7. It’s critically important that we are sensitive to what’s going on with our customers. These hyper enthusiasts are our “friends”. They expect that Kawasaki the brand respond in real time. Our communities will often police itself and many times they take care of their own before we have to. We’re looking at it as social business more than social media. It’s almost a lead tool. The conversations actually go pretty deep. We’re sharing riding tips, riding locations, history of the brand, dealership locations. Another nice thing is that we’ve never bought a single fan on social. Our 800,000 fans are hard earned.

Drew: You talked about the interest in all of this related content. How far have you gone with product related content to keep customers interested and engaged?
We think that content related to “how the product works” is critical to our audience. Then there’s the “what it is” content. This is the physical product, how it’s supposed to performs, etc. Then you get to the most important piece: why. Why do you ride? Is it the wind in the face? Is it the escape? Leaving friends and family behind? Or is it riding with a big pack? It’s the inspirational part of riding. It’s a very mature market and being able to tap into that with our 26 different targets. When you get into our content, we’re hitting the why, the how, and the what, when we’re trying to excite these people. We tap into the lifestyle. We show people what goes on at Daytona Bike Week. Let me show you what’s going on with our Ninja ZX14 when they’re actually drag racing it. Let me show you what happens in Europe at the Isle of Mann TT. People are hanging on every morsel that comes out of the Kawasaki Corporation. They want to connect. They want to belong. So the product itself is almost a ticket to the Kawasaki party. The all-access content is a hook. This type of marketing is hard to pull off. The deeper we go, the more rewarded we are. After all, I’m selling a lifestyle.

CMO Insights: The Importance of Fresh Marketing

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Faced with big-budget competitors boasting award winning advertising, John DeVincent, CMO of eMoney Advisors, needed to find a fresh way to stand out. For DeVincent, this meant focusing his attention on eMoney Advisors’ rare, personal approach in a business that is increasingly self-served. DeVincent’s marketing tactics revolve around excellent customer service and include openness to changes in marketing trends. At the end of the day, his efforts make eMoney more visible in the financial services industry, introducing trusted advisors to a solution that helps them build and strengthen client relationships.

Note: DeVincent won the CMO Club President’s Circle Award late last year.  According to The CMO Club founder Pete Krainik, this award is based on “a marketing executive’s demonstrated delivery in supporting the DNA of The CMO Club for building relationships with peers in the club, sharing and helping others, and referring other CMOs to join the world’s best CMO conversations.”  

Drew: A CMO has a lot of choices in terms of where they invest their time.  What have been your top priorities in the last couple of years?
My focus has been around product innovation – the messaging and positioning of new products. eMoney Advisor operates within the B2B space and our focus has been on presenting software products to financial advisors who are looking for innovative and all-encompassing wealth planning solutions for their clients. Ultimately we’re looking to position ourselves as advocates for financial advisors in the marketplace.

Drew: Have there been any big surprises in terms of what’s worked really well and what hasn’t?
There haven’t been any huge surprises. We’ve been working on new 90-second video elements that have shown success so far. Online advertising doesn’t work quite as well (though we don’t focus as much of our efforts here). Additionally, we’re beginning to expand our digital presence to offer constant flow of timely and relevant content to our audience. This industry experiences frequent market changes, which calls for us to shift our priorities. Regardless of this unpredictability, we do a fantastic job of creating content to accommodate these changes.

Drew:  You have some noisy competitors like eTrade and Fidelity.  How have you been able to get your message across without being drowned out by talking babies and endless green lines?
eMoney is a smaller firm. We can’t compete with the advertising budgets of our big competitors like eTrade and Fidelity. Instead, we created a campaign to position our user-base as “trusted advisors” and encourage them to leverage our product as a tool to further strengthen the advisor-client relationship. It can be challenging because of eTrade and Fidelity’s award-winning advertising, but when clients need comprehensive financial advice, they look for a trusted advisor, not an automated system. We advocate for the human advisors – the ones who provide a personal touch.

Drew: Marketing seems to be getting increasingly complex in terms of ways to spend and ways to monitor. Has it gotten more complex for you and if so, how are you dealing with that complexity?
As marketers, we wear several hats.  At eMoney, we manage a blog, create video vignettes, maintain a social media presence and employ traditional advertising. Again, how you shift that focus is dictated by the market itself. With that in mind, it is extremely important for us to work collaboratively to align the 12-15 tasks assigned at any given time.  We make sure we communicate among ourselves to develop our campaigns that reach all channels based on what’s currently relevant in the industry.

Drew: Have you been able to link your innovative marketing activities to the kinds of business metrics favored by CEOs?
We have a number of analytics coming back from these 12-15 projects on any given day. What we do is take the key metrics from each campaign initiative and tie it to an ROI for our CEO. Edmond has come to rely on these metrics as a starting point to strategize for future initiatives.

Drew: How do you stay close to your customers when the relationship is primarily online?  
We’ve realigned ourselves to become a regional company. Our sales team attempts to get as many face-to-face meetings with prospective clients as possible. We also have an advisory board that we meet with twice a year. Our retention team monitors whether or not our clients (advisors and their staff) are actually logging in and using the software. If we find out that they are not, we reach out and offer educational resources, software training, etc. Additionally, we provide classroom training sessions. We are really focused on this because, to us, getting in front of customers to facilitate the natural interactions that we have as human beings is imperative to a lasting advisor/client relationship.

Drew: A lot of financial services firms have tip-toed into social.  Do you see social as viable channel for your business and if so, in what capacity?  
The financial services industry has been very slow to adopt social because of the regulation and compliance gray areas associated with it. FINRA has been very slow in defining how social media initiatives should be handled in our industry. There is a fine line between what is considered advice and what isn’t. Recently, we’ve seen more advisors embracing the tool as an arena to show thought leadership, reach existing clients and find prospects.  However, LinkedIn is currently our biggest social platform. We are using it heavily as a recruiting platform. Highly educated, high-income prospective clients are on LinkedIn and that’s who we see our advisors going after.  However, we’ve recently ramped up our efforts around Twitter and Facebook.  By leveraging these channels, we can participate in current industry conversations, connect with thought leaders and show the depth of our own knowledge.

Drew: What are you doing in the content marketing area?
We have a corporate blog and a user-focused knowledge community blog called Ask eMoney. On this blog, we’ve included eMoney-focused content, as well as general industry best practices. The content is incredibly rich to the point that I’ve hired people whose sole responsibility is managing the blog. We’re also increasing efforts to identify people who are knowledgeable in the industry as content contributors. We’ve found that good content is incredibly sticky – people become more interested in your site and, therefore, your product.

Drew: Do you agree with the notion that “marketing is everything and everything is marketing” and if so how have you extended the boundaries of your job beyond the normal purview of the CMO?   
I do agree with the notion that the CMO’s job extends to supporting the entire customer experience. In my mind, during every customer interaction, you either win or lose share. It’s either positive or negative. That includes everything from a phone call and training, to customer support and interacting with sales people; you want to make the process easy for your customers. You want to be the company that people want to do business with. It’s important to stay relevant and stir emotion. Make people feel good. If you face obstacles, you must make sure you overcome them with style and go above and beyond to problem-solve. Being a small company, this has been a relatively easy philosophy to adopt. The customer experience is a big priority for our CEO. We focus heavily on best practices and proper training for our team — embracing that philosophy as a company. You have to consistently go above and beyond to create an excellent customer experience.

Mobile Ads in Social Marketing

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webster headshot 2Many consumers see mobile advertising as nothing more than an annoyance – irritating interruptions that appear as they scroll through their Huffington Post app or disturb their game of Sudoku. Webster Lewin knows we can change that. As the former Director of Mobility at Starcom MediaVest Group, Lewin believes mobile ads are not only useful, but can and should become the primary focus in social marketing planning of the future.

Getting those flashy banners to attract rather than deter consumers will require smarter use of customer data. With more than 15 years in the business to back him up, Lewin can be confident in calling out creativity and relevancy as the two major keys for creating more successful mobile advertising campaigns. He let me in on some of his ideas for improving the way we approach mobile ads:

Drew:  You provided a couple of examples of “great mobile ads we haven’t seen.”  For the purposes of my blog, can you provide a mini-summary of one of the cases and share why you think it was so effective?

I am highlighting two mobile campaigns that I really liked for different reasons (and wish that I had done). The first is one currently running on the iAd network for GIECO called the Money Badger. To me it represents the height of production value of any mobile display unit I’ve seen to date. The team at CDG Interactive used stop motion photography to create something that’s on par with a TV spot.

The other campaign that I really liked appeared on Mashable.com and was for Motorola’s Moto X smartphone. The ad, like Mashable’s website, uses  responsive web design to provide a seamless and compelling experience across a range of devices via a single ad and a single ad tag.

Drew: When you mention mobile advertising to people outside of the industry (i.e. normal people!), they roll their eyes in annoyance.  How do marketers make sure that mobile ads aren’t simply another source of disruption we all try to ignore or avoid altogether?

I think the keys are creativity and relevancy. So, agencies, publishers and brands need to keep pushing for better experiences. Also, as an industry we need to discourage the increasing use of deceptive mobile ads that try to trick users into tapping on them. They only exist because people focus way too much on CTR, and they will poison the well for everyone else.

Drew: Asked differently, what are three key components of a great mobile ad campaign?

Flawless execution from start to finish, targeting the right consumer at the right time in the right way, and offering something of value.

Drew:  It’s been the year of mobile for the last 10 years yet mobile still feels like a bit of an after thought for many brands.  First, why is it so important that marketers put mobile at the center of their planning process today?

Mobile is where the eyeballs are moving to, desktop usage is declining. Consumers are using mobile while they are shopping and while they consume other media, so figuring out how to use mobility in media plans is essential.

Drew:  Mobile at its best seems to be integrated with data (social, local, CRM) which then allows for a very personalized mobile experience. Can you each give me another example of a brand that is doing this well and what it took to get them there?  

I think that Samsung and Walmart, and some of the large CPG brands are really starting to make smart decisions about how to use location and past purchase data in targeting. Retailers are focusing on location data, both real-time and historical, to better target customers and potential customers. I’ve seen that I personally have been targeted by Samsung base on my actual location, around the launch of their Galaxy Gear smartwatch, and I ended up heading over to Times Square that day to check it out. CPG brands are less better positioned to leverage location data as their product are sold in so many places, but they can target using purchase history via Catalina and other data.

Drew:  You provided examples of mobile experiences when a person was indeed using a mobile device on the go. Seems like this is one aspect of mobile. The other aspect of mobile device usage is when we are stationary in the office or at home using a 2nd and 3rd screen. Should marketers look at these situations distinctly and create campaigns specific to that usage scenario? 

A lot of brands are now using various methods to target consumers when they are actually at home, using wifi IP addresses. Also, prime time TV viewers are being actively targeted now on Twitter, and Facebook via sponsored posts. If you are on Twitter during any major TV event, you’re certain to see ads that drive to mobile friendly experiences.

Drew:  You used the expression, “if it doesn’t work on mobile, don’t do it!” yet this is far from the reality.  What are problems that happen when marketers tack on a mobile campaign versus building all programs around it?

When the experience from start to finish isn’t fully planned out and tested on mobile, things inevitably fall apart. I can’t even begin to tell you how many mobile campaigns I see that don’t work the way they should. It’ really unfortunate, because many clients don’t realize that they are just creating a very bad impression of their brand.

Drew:   It seems like we won’t be distinguishing between mobile and stationary media consumption in the near future.  Assuming you agree with that scenario, how will this effect media planning/buying?  Will mobile still be its own thing?

Even when audiences are bought across multiple devices, the experience the consumer has with each of their devices is quite unique. So, I think that responsive ad units are one of the ways that marketers can ensure that they are efficiently reaching everyone, yet still providing an experience that is tailored to each device. Also, when it comes to rich media, there are some things that you can do in mobile that you just can’t on other devices, click-to-call for example.

Drew:  How do you see mobile evolving in the next 2-3 years?  What are the most exciting new or emerging trends leading edge marketers should be experimenting with now or really soon? 

I think targeting data and especially targeting based on location data will be the biggest ways that mobile ads will become more relevant. Also, mobile creative is just now coming into its own. As more digital creatives see mobile as their primary focus, we’ll start to see more really amazing campaigns.