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CSR: Global Food for Thought

Posted on April 25, 2016 by Drew Neisser

With the Empire State Building glowing in the background, I wondered what was on my own horizon that evening. The cocktail party in a chic midtown hotel had just begun, the award-winning CMOs were pouring in and my curiosity was starting to peak. Who were these people? Sure I could read their name badges but what were their stories and more importantly, would I have time to discover them in between the chit chat?

Shortly thereafter I met Paul Hillen, CMO of what turns out to be the largest privately held company in the US, Cargill. As Paul told me about this global agricultural powerhouse, I became more and more intrigued, especially at it relates to their abundant CSR activities. So, of course, I followed up with Paul.

These days, one expects global companies to have a reasonable amount of charitable activities and to show some level of environmental responsibility. What I didn’t expect is that in addition to things like building 75 schools in developing nations, Cargill became so well versed in Responsible Supply Chain Management that they turned this into a service they offered their clients. You’ll find that surprise and others in our comprehensive interview below. Cheers.

Drew: What is your overall approach to corporate social responsibility?

I am a big proponent that whether it’s philanthropic, an investment in a community or a partnership that it is all an extension of your business strategy. It’s just like branding. If branding and marketing are not an extension of the overall business strategy, then they are probably doomed. And so when approach CSR programs, I start by asking what are the things that we can do where we operate that are linked to good business? And the first answer to that has to be a direction extension of your business strategy and how CSR can continue to deliver on the expectations that our board and our shareholders have in terms of the growth of the company.

Drew: As a private company, a lot of folks are unaware of the size and scope of Cargill. Can you talk about that a bit and how it impacts your CSR activities?

We have over 2,000 locations with operations in over 70 countries around the world. And in many of those places, we tend to be one of the top employers, thus our presence in each community is critical. The reason we’ve invested in those communities is so that we can maintain a great workforce, as well as help educate and nurture a future workforce. I was recently in Côte d’Ivoire in Africa and I visited four different village where we had built schools and helped drill wells because those are two of the biggest issues that have there–clean water so that they don’t have dysentery and educating kids so they have something beneficial to do during the day (and not become part of the child labor workforce). We’re going to be opening our 75th school in Vietnam for similar reasons. So for us, corporate social responsibility is about improving people’s lives and doing it in a way that is directly linked to the business.

Drew: Could you talk about a specific CSR program that you feel is really representative of the kind of initiatives that work for Cargill and your constituents?

Sure. It’s built around sustainability and responsible supply chain management, which is one of our core competencies. We’ve created a tool in partnership with PwC [PricewaterhouseCoopers] called the Cargill Responsible Supply Chain Framework. This program is unique in that it helps our customers in three ways:

We work with our customers to help then take costs of their supply chains identifying where they can do things more sustainably and hopefully reduce costs in the process;
We identify areas in which the customer is already doing things in a sustainable manner enabling them to take some credit where credit is in fact due;
We help them take some of the risk out of their supply chain by identifying non-sustainable practices that should be addressed.

All of these things help our customers to build their businesses in a more social responsible way and helps us as this a fee-for-service business. So we turned “responsible supply chains” into not just a nice phrase but also a service that we provide to our customers.

Drew: That’s really interesting in and of itself. How did you know that you had that expertise in the first place? I mean, how did you develop a sustainability practice such that you could actually not only educate your customers but also create a service that you could sell them?

Well, it’s a model actually that we’ve done for years. We are celebrating our 150th anniversary this year, and this has given me an opportunity to really learn a lot more about the heritage of the company, and a lot of our businesses were born this way. We take capabilities that we’re really good at, and then we say, hey, we could turn this into a business because if we’ve got this need, then so do our customers. We’ve been doing supply chains for 150 years. It started when our founder in Iowa opened a grain warehouse because it was all about helping farmers to get their grains to market in a more efficient way. Instead of everybody doing it on their own, W.W. Cargill built it. We understand most supply chains around the world because we have an ocean transportation business, we’re one of the largest users of railcars, we understand the trade flows and the flow of goods, and then we understand it more at the micro level. We understand exactly what the supply chain is. Planting a soybean all the way until it’s bottled and branded by one of our customers as an example. Or in other parts of the world, we bottle our own — we have our own consumer brands. So it really is a core competency of ours, and we are now extending that to our customers.

Drew: One of the big reasons that companies talk about CSR is because it makes employees feel better about working at the company. How do employees get involved in Cargill programs and how important is that to retention?

Yes, employee involvement is very important. First of all we give employees credit for and ask them to track all of their time regarding time, talent and treasure that they contribute to their communities. Our food scientists actually created the highly nutritious recipes for the pre-packed meals that are sent to Africa for Feed My Starving Children. One of the things that we did in conjunction with our 150^th Anniversary was to involve employees in “learning journeys.” Two years ago, we did one on Brazil. In 2015, we did one in Africa and another one in China, where we get all of the different stakeholders who are interested in important issues like hunger and sustainability, and we have them live together for a week.

Drew: Has your past life at P&G had an impact on your approach to CSR?

One of the things that I think might be different with me, relative to other CMOs is that I had P&L responsibility as a business leader for seven of my fifteen years at P&G and many of my 14 years at Cargill. I’ve only been in this current role for about four years and try very hard to avoid using the typical marketing clichés like “doing good is good business.” My background has trained me to think of CSR in the context of other efforts making sure they are directly linked to the business strategy and the P&L.

Drew: What is Cargill’s purpose and how does this impact your CSR activity?

Our aspiration is to be the global leader in nourishing people; that’s our stated corporate purpose. So most of our CSR efforts are built around nourishing people. As an example, we have a very strong partnership with CARE, not only do we donate significant contributions to them but also our employees are heavily involved on a local level.

Drew: How does your brand purpose translate into marketing messages?

It all extends from our purpose to be the global leader in nourishing people while translating into a more specific brand promise – helping you, the stakeholder, be more successful with Cargill than with anyone else. And it’s based on how the stakeholder defines success. Then that leads to our brand expression – Thrive. Our commitment to helping stakeholders thrive (the highest level of success) works on many levels. For example, if you do a public-private partnership with Cargill to develop a village, to develop schools, to drill wells, to do water filtration systems, we believe that you’ll have the best chance of thriving. I chose Thrive because it works with our purpose–if you’re not well nourished, you can’t be successful and because it supports a broad range of initiatives across our many business units and countries of operation.

Drew: How do you measure the effectiveness of this program? As a truly global company, do you have a global brand health tracking in place?

From my P&G experience, I really like to conduct brand health research and when we couldn’t find an existing template, we built our own. In the fall of 2013, right before we launched our new brand promise and brand expression, we fielded the first survey wave in 22 countries among all nine of our stakeholder groups. By the way, this was the first time ever in the history of Cargill that we’ve had a single brand promise and a single brand expression in all 196 countries where we do business. We picked the 22 countries (now 24) because it represents about 80 percent of our business. That was our baseline and now, two years later we’re in the middle of a second wave of tracking to see if we’ve moved the needle, to see if we actually own the brand promise and to what degree against our nine stakeholder groups. We also work with the 66 individual business units to identify their top three or four stakeholders that are critical to building their business help them with their own brand and reputation studies locally.

Drew: What’s on your to do list?

We have to now improve awareness of what we do, and why people would partner with us because in a world where you can’t hide anything, you better have nothing to hide, right? So we have to do a much better job of defining who we are because if we don’t tell our story, somebody else will, and it’s probably not going to be accurate.

Reading v. Viewing: Which is Better?

Posted on April 17, 2016 by Drew Neisser

Let’s do a little test together. Watch the video below which features Trish Mueller, CMO of Home Depot and Pete Krainik, founder of The CMO Club, and make note of the marketing insights you gained. Next, please read my interview below, also with Trish Mueller. Then jot down your key takeaways. You’ll have to trust me that both are well worth your time and in no way are redundant.

Drew: What innovations/programs are you particular proud of?

I am proud of the seamless transition we’ve made into the digital, social and mobile world, and I am most proud of how our team continues to innovate in a “VUCA” world (volatile, unpredictable, chaotic and ambiguous!). I enjoy the fact that here’s no map for where we’re going – we’re operating on the frontier of the new media world & we’re forging new digital roads every day.

Drew: How do you keep innovating in the shifting sands of marketing? Is this a mindset, a culture, a staffing issue?

We have built a dynamic culture of curiosity & courage, and we encourage a fast test & learn mentality across the entire team. It is definitely a team sport, with ideas coming from team members at any level or rank.

Drew: Where do your get your inspiration?

I am a voracious reader & I specifically pay attention to what is happening across retail marketplaces, not just in home improvement. I spend time with peers in other specialties, and I also spend time with our marketing team at every level, to see what is on their minds and to pressure test if we are missing out on opportunities that may not otherwise get in front of me. I work very hard to be approachable, so everyone feels they can share their ideas – you never know where the next innovation may come from & you’ll never hear about it unless you dig in with the team.

Drew: How do you instill creativity across your department / organization?

First, we nurture creativity with existing team members, we reward those who take risks to learn and we actively recruit against specific criteria to fuel the talent pipeline long term. We look to have our staff reflect a perfect balance between subject matter expertise and new, unconventional thinking. When recruiting, we focus on “raw talent”, those who have the right mind set versus matching just to specific expertise in given functions. This approach with staff feeds the group’s curiosity, tests our thinking and fosters a culture of “what if we tried this?” vs. the legacy of “we do it this way.”

Drew: A lot of marketers go so far as to celebrate failures as a reminder of the importance of taking risks to move forward. Have you had any programs that didn’t work out as hoped and if so, how did you make sure the organization not only learned from the misstep but also that the folks responsible didn’t get punished?

We have a very strong communications-based culture that keeps innovation and quality work in front of everyone. I personally recognize our team accomplishments every Friday in a formal communication that goes out to the entire marketing team. I also recognize team members individually with thank you notes, shout outs in our monthly “All Hands” meetings, additionally we award a special quarterly innovation award. We call it the “Big Swing” award, which recognizes a person or a team for taking a swing at exploring new ideas which helped us learn, even if the idea may not have worked out as we originally thought. During the all marketing team presentation, we lean more on what we learned in the recognition vs. whether it failed or succeeded.

Drew: Looking ahead to 2016, what is the single biggest challenge that you’d like to overcome?

I’d prefer not to answer this one – I will either give away a key strategy to potential competitors or expose some weakness, not to mention opening myself up to a zillion cold calls from companies wanting to sell me new technology that supports my goals!

BLOG POST continued: SO, if you complied with my request to watch the video and the read the interview, then first and foremost, I suspect you’ve come away with a super positive portrait of Trish Mueller. And based on other conversations I’ve had with Trish, your perception is dead on. Second, you probably remembered different things from each. I thought the video was particularly good at demonstrating the power of in-store home improvement classes. (By the way, that is wonderful example of “Marketing as Service” in action.) Our interview reveals more of Trish’s management style, how she stays on top of her game and how Home Depot encourages risk taking.

So which is better? The video is beautifully produced and obviously took a lot more time to create than my interview. The video has the advantage of sight, sound and motion. The interview, on the other hand, goes deeper and into areas that wouldn’t have translated as well on video. And that’s the point. Different media communicate differently. Neither is “better” in the absolute, both have their strengths. Like instruments in an orchestra, each can certainly stand alone but the combo is almost always more powerful.

How CMOs Take Marketing to the Next Level

Posted on April 10, 2016 by Drew Neisser

Last week I introduced my new keynote speech, Think Like A CMO as the brazen answer to the question: What’s the secret to success? My rationale starts with the extreme yet somewhat familiar sounding challenges that most CMOs (and the rest of us) face:

Bosses that may have unrealistic or significantly different expectations;
Numerous factors that impact results that are outside of one’s control;
Limited time-frame to achieve successful outcomes.

To overcome these obstacles, I then present successful CMOs as cool CATS (Courageous, Artful, Thoughtful, Scientific), an acronym that offers guidance for just about anyone looking to accomplish anything. Happily, the speech was well received. What also makes me happy is that the interview below with Anthony Christie, CMO at Level 3 Communications, adds more evidence to my growing stockpile. Christie, winner of The CMO Club‘s Officer Award, is indeed one of the cool CATS:

Courageous: Shifted the responsibility for customer experience into the global marketing department;
Artful: Developed CMO-CIO-CTO triumvirate to tackle cross-functional challenges;
Thoughtful: Launched a new branding initiative internally first, an effort that insured employee pride and commitment;
Scientific: Implemented a variety of metrics including brand tracking and sales performance.

And like his successful peers, as you will soon learn, for these CATS, there’s no time for preening.

Drew: Looking back over the last 12-24 months, what initiative under your leadership really worked well?

In Q4 of 2014, Level 3 completed the acquisition of tw telecom. My team was directly involved in leading the integration process from end-to-end. First the product management and development teams that I oversee have led the process of rationalizing our product portfolio and continued work to move to single instances of our products and solutions around the globe. Additionally, our marketing strategy, pricing and communications teams have been responsible for integrating targeting strategies, pricing approaches, voice of the customer activation as well as all internal and external communications related to bringing two companies together as one. A year into the integration process, the company has achieved our major milestones and are meeting stakeholder expectations.

Drew: I watched your recent corporate video and one of the lines that struck me was “you may not have heard of us but many companies have.” How important is it to your long term plans to have broader awareness of Level 3? If it is, how do you go about building this awareness while still driving leads efficiently into your pipeline?

We have a very surgical approach to targeting enterprises in our addressable market. Our business is B to B only and focused on wireline services to enterprise and wholesale unlike some of our competitors who play in the consumer wireless space. So, it’s not necessary for us to have broad awareness in the general marketplace. However, we are focused on simultaneously building awareness and filling our funnel through a mix of thought leadership, events, social media and hyper-targeted efforts that drive inbound activity and qualified outbound activity. And we have evidence through our brand tracker and campaign results that this approach is working.

Drew: Effecting change beyond the marketing department is not easy and is often met with resistance from other departments. How did you make this happen? Looking back, what do you wish you knew a year ago that you learned “the hard way”?

It’s critical to understand the needs across the enterprise and to look at change efforts from your cross-functional stakeholder’s point of view. In our case, we look at the functions of the CMO, CTO and CIO as a three-legged stool that relies upon each other to move the business forward. This relationship has become a deliberate part of our operating model. Separately, we learned the “hard way” that affecting change in improving the customer experience could not happen in a silo within one functional area of the business. We resolved this by moving responsibility for global customer experience out of the business process function and into the global marketing function as we believe that customer experience is intrinsically tied to brand and a comprehensive view of the customer journey.

Drew: Did any of your marketing initiatives involve employee activation? If so, can you describe what you did and how it worked? How did you get employees to care?

When we relaunched our brand, we actually built the foundation through the lens of our employee base first then evaluated it to ensure that it was also compelling for our customers and prospects. We also deliberately launched the brand internally before launching it externally. We built various programs and communications to engage our employees. These included a fun and interactive e-book, use of our employees in our branded materials including videos and posters, and ongoing communications and brand immersion training. These efforts helped to instill a sense of pride and to give them context for how important each and every one of their jobs are to “Own It” and be accountable to their contributions to the company with the end goal of enabling our customers’ business success.

Drew: When advising members of your team on cross-departmental initiatives, what do tell them to do and not do to ensure success?

First and foremost, I advised them to approach these initiatives as though they were the CEO of their business. That inherently assumes cross-functional leadership and engagement. A CEO by definition cannot do the job on their own. It requires understanding and respect for cross-functional expertise. At the same time, the leader of any cross-functional initiative needs to gather stakeholder input and work toward a collaborative solution. And to remember that collaboration does not equal consensus. At some point in the process, the best decision for the business needs to be reached and implemented.

Drew: Looking ahead, what is the single biggest challenge that you’d like to overcome?

The biggest challenge I’d like to overcome to is to accelerate the alignment of my team with our partners in sales and operations to grow our business faster than the broader market and do that on a global scale.

A 150 Year-old Brand Takes a Fresh Look at Storytelling

Posted on April 6, 2016 by Drew Neisser

I have to admit that I went into the conversation about storytelling wondering “what’s the story here?” How could something as old as storytelling be a hot new topic in marketing. Darren Marshall, CMO of Steinway & Sons, was kind enough to set me straight in preparation for our panel Storytelling and Branding: Does Story Trump Data (also featuring Aimee Munsell of IBM and Douwe Bergsma of Georgia Pacific) at The CMO Club Summit. I could add a more robust preamble but that would simply get in the way of the good stories that lie ahead.

Darren Marshall Drew: So Darren, our given our panel title, does story trump data?

I think it’s the balance to be honest with you. I wish I had more data. I am glad I have a good story, but I’d love to have a little bit of both. But you know, with the lack of data, then story is where I am going.

Drew: Steinway has been around a long time. What story are you telling?

What’s interesting about Steinway is that it’s an old company that really has a pretty incredible story because you don’t think about how pianos are made, the artistic expression they bring, or the emotional connection that people have with them. And not only the beauty of what goes in, but the beauty that comes out, as well. And to realize that this level of craftsmanship happens in New York City to this day, much in the same way that it did a 100 or 150 years ago is pretty incredible, particularly in a world where disposability is the norm.

Drew: I have to say that the made in NYC part really struck home for me. Do you see storytelling as something different than you would have done as a marketer 10 years ago?

Not really, I don’t think. At the end of the day, I believe that stories are engaging. Bedtime stories are all about captivating someone’s imagination and taking them someplace else so that you can relax and calm yourself and go to sleep. That’s what any advertising or communication should be about. And whether it’s a presidential speech or whether it’s a story about a brand, there are groups of people who are buying the technical elements of products. But the real value of a brand is telling the story of that brand and where it’s come from and why it’s come from there and how it’s made and who made it. That’s the irrational piece where you can exchange value. When you think about antiques, it’s one thing to say this is an antique revolver, but to say that this was the revolver General Custer used during the Battle of Little Big Horn — that has a story that goes along with it and there’s huge value. Whether it’s true or not is a separate thing. But it takes you to that place that is new and different and imaginative.

Drew: Tell me about your target audience and how this impacts your story.

At the end of the day, we address a very small group of humanity, people who have the buying power to buy one of our instruments and who have the interest in our category. It really is a very thin group of people. So the level of engagement needs to be much deeper than broader. I need to be able to really help them understand what the brand stands for and why it’s three times more expensive than other alternatives that may look the same. The value of what we do is not necessarily seen to the naked eye. And we need to be able to tell the story of what it is, particularly for people who don’t know what Steinway does in quite the way that others do. So as an example, a concert pianist would know exactly what a Steinway does. But you or I look at the Steinway versus its next alternative and they look very similar. You’ve got to be able to bring that to life why it is different for mere mortals like you and I.

Drew: So how does the storytelling enter the picture given your target?

We’re going to be much more about depth than breadth. The media choices that we use are going to be much more focused. I spent, as you may know, a long time at The Coca-Cola Company. And if you’re buying a Coke and you’re making those sorts of decisions very, very frequently, then your level of engagement and your risk of purchase are very, very low. And you’re making those purchases very frequently and you can change your behavior quite quickly. But when you’re buying something else of great expense and lasting value, and you’re doing it once or twice in a lifetime, then there is a lot more research that is done. I’d like to say that it’s an impulse purchase and it is for some people — for a lot of people, but not for everyone.

Drew: I know that you’ve just started marketing again after a long hiatus. Have you looked at new kinds of metrics to get a more complete understanding of the impact of storytelling?

To be honest with you, ours is a very small company. It’s very entrepreneurial; it is not the world that I used to work in at Coke. There’s a lot more subjectivity. Although the process is very similar, in terms of just finding the North Star if you will or the story arc that is essential to your brand, and then bringing it to life across the various different touch points, we don’t have the resources to be able to measure the effectiveness of every message at every touch point. By the same token, it’s a much smaller organization, so we can quite easily determine whether the content is on brand or not.

Drew: So how do you decide whether to tell the story from the brand’s perspective or from that of the customer’s?

For any brand, there needs to be a framework that considers the true essence of that brand, its values, its benefits which I’d call a traditional packaged goods creative brief. It really gets to the essence of the brand, which we have done and as most other people have done as well.

And getting to that story comes not only from a couple of different vantage points, but then also gets to the different stakeholders as well. And each of those, if the brand is true to its set of values and it’s North Star, then that story will be similar but told from three different angles. So in our case, we talk about the craftsmanship of our product, the artistic expression that it empowers, and the beauty it adds to homes and lives.

We talk about those things and values from the artist’s perspective. Showing how that craftsmanship then leads to nuances not just in a physical product object, but in the music that then flows from that product, which is really the end benefit in another way.

We talk about the owner, those who may or may not be players, but those who appreciate what our brand stands for, and that same set of values, but seen from another set of eyes. And there are probably few other perspectives. But all of that content is what brought them to life. It’s the same story, but told through different lenses. It’s almost like the books of the Bible are the same story, but told from different apostles’ perspectives. And so it’s the same sort of idea.

Drew: Okay, I am a believer.

If Marketing is War, I Want Kylberg as My General

Posted on April 3, 2016 by Drew Neisser

It is hard to be a student of history and not be fascinated by leaders. And as some of you may have picked up by now, I spend a lot of my spare time reading books and listening to courses on American History with a special concentration on Ben Franklin and the American Revolution. Starting about a week ago, I took a break from the 18th century and jumped into the mid-19th to try to fill a huge knowledge gap on the Civil War. As told by Professor Gary W. Gallagher, this is a story of leadership and often the lack there of on both sides of an epic confrontation. Ultimately, two leaders rose above the others, Lincoln and his final Commanding General, Ulysses S. Grant.

Now since you probably didn’t come here for a history lesson, let me explain why I’m talking about these two leaders before I introduce you to Rich Kylberg,Vice President of Corporate Marketing and Communications at Arrow Electronics. Well, first Rich and I talk about leadership and the challenges of reinventing and transforming Arrow, a 75 year-old company. Lincoln’s United States was just a decade older (“four score and 7 years”) at the time of his Gettysburg address, when he looked to transform the nation. Second, Rich seems very much a man of action, the very reason Lincoln made Grant his main man in March 1864, a decision that cemented the Northern victory just about a year later. Third and hopefully more to the point, Rich uses warfare as a metaphor in one of his answers paving the way for this grandiose introduction.

Given this history-rich if not historic preface, you may rightfully expect an enlightening interview and indeed you will find one below. Kylberg, for the record, was awarded the Leadership prize from The CMO Club late last year.

Drew: How would you describe your leadership style?

Optimistic, passionate, and entirely “out of the box.” Offering a teenaged German song contest participant 1,000,000 euros to alter her lyrics from a love song to a ballad about the nobility of engineers raised eyebrows.

Drew: Do you have any role models that you’ve admired over the years and if so, what did you pick up from him/her?

Mom, Dad, and Walt Disney: altruism, entrepreneurship, and creativity. I can’t walk through a Disney park without being stunned by the imagination and creativity brought to bear in an effort to create happiness (and, I suppose, cash flow).

Drew: Can you talk about some of the actions you took as a leader in the last couple of years that were particularly challenging?

Working to try to reinvent and transform a very large and already successful industry comes with a great deal of resistance, reluctance, and (when we get it right) reward. Over around 75 years Arrow revenue grew to over $20 billion with very few people knowing about the company; we built a brand message, architecture, and platform that resonates across all of our business units, all around the world.

Drew: How important is your peer to peer network to your on-going success? What are the biggest benefits of having a peer network?

My peer to peer network has been critical to my journey. These friends have flattened my steep learning curves, and kept me from going way off the rails. Participating within the best organizations in my profession (the CMO Club!), our industry (IBM Amplify), and the broader business community (YPO International) is essential to keeping me relevant and connected.

Drew: What’s the best advice you’ve been given to guide personal / career success?

Pick your battles. Win the war. I’ve had dozens of individual initiatives shut down within Arrow, I’ve seen my team grow from 6 to 70 and back down to 30, and yet our main focus on propagation of the united Arrow brand continues and only grows stronger.

Drew: What is the single biggest challenge that you’d like to overcome?

I’d like to expand the scale, scope, and impact of the great work that we do to continue to transform our company and make this world a little better place for us all. Last year to promote our brand we toured a race car that’s driven by a quadriplegic, and we built a computer lab in a shipping container for orphans in Tanzania –I encourage our small team of professionals to dream of what we can do in 2016 and beyond that will make life better for others, while further defining and disseminating the company brand.

[Bloggers Note: For those of you interested in more on Lincoln’s leadership style, I have a spare copy of the timelessly brilliant Lincoln on Leadership at the office OR feel free to borrow my copy of US Grant’s autobiography, a surprisingly fascinating and well-scribed book.]

CMO Insights: The Extraordinary Power of Focus Even with CSR

Posted on March 27, 2016 by Drew Neisser

Whenever I meet entrepreneurs, they often pick my brain for marketing wisdom usually asking one or all of the following questions:

How do we get the biggest bang for our marketing bucks?
What are the most effective marketing channels?
Is social media worth the time and effort?
Does guerrilla marketing still work?
Tell me Obi Wan, what is the secret to marketing success?

Avoiding questions 1-4 until I have a better sense of their overall go-to-market strategy, I jump all over #5. “The secret,” I say, “can be found in one word–focus.” Somewhat rattled by the simplicity of this seemingly obvious counsel, I wait for the notion to sink in and then offer real world stories of how businesses, large and small, have achieved success through laser-like focus on their product/service offering and target audience.

These stories are not always easy to come by which is why I’m so excited to share with you an interview I had with Diane Scott, Global Chief Product & Marketing Officer at Western Union. In her responses, you will discover how a deliberate focus on one charitable activity (Education for Better) has helped Western Union impact more than 1 millions lives around the world and gain 75% employee participation. It’s an impressive approach that not surprisingly garnered Scott and Western Union a Social Responsibility Award from The CMO Club. Prepare to see for yourself the power of focus in action.

Drew: Congratulations on winning the Social Responsibility Award. How do you define Corporate Social Responsibility?

Western Union defines itself as a purpose-driven company. Our business drives social and economic growth by promoting financial inclusion. In 2014, WU moved $185B, more than the GDP of 147 countries. Cross-border remittances provided needed funds for education, housing, health care and more. WU also provides better ways to move money for NGOs, universities and SMEs, which are an economic engine.

At Western Union, we use the term “corporate responsibility,” since responsible companies engage in far more than socially-oriented programs. For us, the term “corporate responsibility” typically refers to a fairly specific focus on responsibility in our core operations – e.g. how we treat our employees and promote diversity, how we focus on governance issues, how we prioritize ethics and compliance in our operations, and more.

Yet I think your question is getting at something broader than responsible operations alone. At Western Union we also seek to coordinate our corporate resources for both business and social impact, and engage our business, consumers and employees in this work. We seek to marshal all our assets – e.g. products and services, cause-related marketing, executive leadership, employee volunteerism, philanthropy and our core operations – for both business and social impact.

For the last three years our focus has been on supporting education through a program we call Education for Better. In fact, Western Union just publicly renewed our company-wide commitment to education through 2020. As a company whose mission is to help create global economic opportunity and growth for individuals, businesses, communities and economies, education is a natural focus for our citizenship efforts.

Drew: Can you provide a short recap of your CSR initiatives in 2015?

Two achievements that stand out are:

The Western Union Foundation surpassed a major milestone, since it’s inception, donating more than US$100 million in support to more than 2,700 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to provide support to thousands of families and individuals in more than 135 countries and territories.
We also marked the three-year milestone with our Education for Better program, and renewed that commitment to help meet global education goals over the next three years. That programs has focused on secondary and vocational education for marginalized populations, including girls/women and migrants/refugees.

Drew: How do you measure the success of these programs? (Please provide specific results if you can.)

Each corporate initiative has its own metrics for success, and of course the Western Union Foundation has its own metrics to measure the success of its philanthropy. Yet generally we’re looking to measure both social and business impact through our social responsibility work.

To give you an example, we’ve measured the following with Education for Better:

Social Impact
- Moved more than $7 billion in principal for education (WUBS), exceeding our original target of $1 billion.
- Provided more than $11.6 million in philanthropic funding to support educational programs in 53 countries, impacting more than 1.1 million students, teachers, and administrators.
- Through the UEFA PASS program, enabled more than one million days of school for disadvantaged students through UNICEF.
- Provided more than 11,000 hours of employee volunteer support to education.

Business Impact
- Our education products saw double-digit revenue growth in 2014.
- Education-related cause promotions help assist our growth initiatives. A Mother’s Day promotion between the U.S. and Mexico, promotions in India and China, and a Ramadan promotion in Germany all contribute to our growth. Consumer engagement online soared over 100%_
- Nearly 75% of Western Union employees have participated in the cause, either through the employee giving campaign or volunteerism, building employee pride and increasing understanding of our cause.
- We engaged 72 WU agents, deepening our business relationships.

Drew: Building a business case for CSR initiatives can be tricky. What were the keys to gaining management support?

The second key insight was that while Our World, Our Family had been effective, it was largely philanthropic and had not benefited from the full resources of the company. The next strategic initiative would be imagined differently to leverage not just our funds and volunteer hours, but the whole of our business, including marketing and products.

Drew: When it comes to sharing your company’s CSR initiatives is there a fine line between letting the world know about it and overplaying the contribution? Where do you sit on this spectrum from letting the good action speak for itself and broadcasting it from the treetops?

I think one of the first questions is whether the work itself is authentic. Is it just writing a check, or does it tie to the company’s values, operations and brand identity? For WU, our community commitment goes back to the 1800’s, and today is stronger than ever. In some ways, I think that gives us “permission” to communicate about corporate responsibility.

Over the years, studies by Cone, Inc., Nielsen, Edelman and others have consistently shown that up to 91% of global consumers are likely to switch brands to one that supports a good cause, given similar price and quality, and 57% would purchase a product of lesser quality or efficacy if it was more socially or environmentally responsible.

That suggests it’s important for consumers understand our responsibility commitment. It’s probably not possible for companies ever do enough to tell consumers not about what they do, but also why they do what they do. That’s particularly true for WU, since I think our commitment to “moving money for better” is a meaningful brand differentiator. That said, it takes a lot to raise awareness – let alone build deep brand association. That’s another reason why we focus on a single cause company-wide. That focus is critical to enabling us to both track and deepen our impact and speak loudly with one voice that can be heard.

Drew: Looking ahead, what is the single biggest challenge that you’d like to overcome?

Like most thinks in life, our biggest challenge is our biggest opportunity from a marketing perspective – for WU, we have more channels than ever before, and more data than ever before…

200 countries, 500k locations, 100k atms, kiosks, mobile apps, online presence, ability to send from and to accounts to mobile wallets or with cash, 130 currencies. A brand and technology platform built to drive simplicity, security and reliability of cross border money movement – for consumers and businesses alike.

Given the brand’s 160+ years young existence, many times people and businesses think they know this brand and really don’t. 2016 is all about continuing to onboard and innovate around more cross border customer use cases for consumers and businesses than ever before – whether to fuel cross border payments for a small business in Bangladesh, a large bank in London, an NGO in Lagos, a University in New York, an ExPat in Dubai or a recent migrant from Nigeria.