Category: Interviews

CMO Insights: No One Dies in Marketing

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Two days after resigning from his position as Chief Marketing Officer, Jeffrey Hayzlett was still saying “we” when referring to Kodak, a habit I suspect will take some time to break. Speaking with understandable pride after four years of remarkable accomplishments, Jeff answered my questions with an authority that at first left me baffled. Then it hit me. This is not your typical marketing maven. Jeff Hayzlett actually puts the Chief in Chief Marketing Officer.

Instead of talking about ad campaigns, we talked about products and value propositions. Instead of talking ideas, we discussed what a marketing chief needs to do to succeed in a rapidly changing media landscape. Its not that Jeff doesn’t care about ideas, its just that he knows those are by products of performing the CMO job as a true leader, a practice that I have broken down into seven bite-sized morsels for your immediate consumption.

1. Align Goals

Making sure your marketing goals align with the goals of the company seems like a fairly basic place to start but it is amazing how many senior marketers forget this important first step. “A lot of CMOs fail because they forget to get conditions of satisfaction,” offered Hayzlett, who spends a lot of time setting the goals and won’t move forward until he knows what will make his customer (in this case, his boss) happy. Jeff acknowledges that “a lot of CMO’s aren’t even in the C-suite,” which can make nailing down the goals quite a bit tougher.

2. Create Tension

Once your marching orders are clear, Jeff believes the next priority of the CMO is “to create tension in order to encourage more innovative activity.” When reviewing the launch of a new video camera, Jeff created tension “by asking questions no one thought to ask before,” even going so far as to publicly ridicule an alphanumeric product name. “That made some of my people cringe,” acknowledged Hayzlett, whose questions led to a public search for a new name that generated millions of free PR impressions, thousands of entries and one winning name—PlaySport.

3. Act Fast

As we jumped from topic to topic, it was clear to me that Jeff is nothing if not a man of action, and his biggest lament, “wasting time on things that didn’t materialize.” In a period of four years, he was able to launch several successful new products in both B2C and B2B segments, all of which were able to achieve 1st, 2nd or 3rd positions in their respective categories. Jeff noted with glee that 60% of Kodak’s revenue now comes from products that didn’t exist when he started there. When talking about the launch of the naming promotion for Play Sport, Jeff sounded more like the head of racing pit crew, having jumped from concept to execution in two weeks flat!

4. Stretch Budget

It is no secret that Jeff is a huge fan of social media noting that, “It’s a great way to launch a new product and gave us an extreme amount of credibility in the video camera category.” Targeting “every blogger and thought leader,” Hayzlett and his team were able to make Play Sport a strong alternative to category leader Flip without spending a dime on traditional media. As he points out in his new book, The Mirror Test, Hayzlett sees social media as an extraordinary way to connect with consumers and stretch a budget under an umbrella notion he celebrates as OPM, or “Other People’s Money.” Given the low costs, even the smallest businesses can see very tangible returns from social media,” offers Hayzlett.

5. Breakdown Silos

Recalling the extraordinary success that Kodak has had in the ink jet category, Jeff zeros in on how Kodak changed the value proposition in the category, offering reasonably priced ink cartridges to go along with a reasonably priced printer. “When the printing of a recipe is more expensive that the actual ingredients, the consumer knows there is a problem,” noted Hayzlett. Because marketing had a “seat at the table” and participated in the product development process, Hayzlett was able ensure that a strong value proposition was baked into the product, offering a point of difference that made marketing a far simpler task. With the silos broken down, Kodak ink jet printers, according to Hayzlett, “achieved #1 share in some countries.”

6. Take Risks

“No one is going to die in marketing,” offered Hayzlett when discussing the justification for taking risks like playing a video featuring a gray-haired spokesman shouting “booyah” about how Kodak was changing. He went on to note that, “if you want to grow, you’re going to have to take risks. It’s not that Hayzlett is out to offend but as he cautions, “sometimes you don’t know ‘til you try it.” He prescribes “doing it in such a way to minimize the backlash,” and if things don’t work as planned, “its okay to say we screwed up.” Jeff recalls with bravado that his group was fined $500 for not filing a promotional contest in time, a calculated risk that ended up saving his team irreplaceable weeks in program development time.

7. Listen Up

After talking for a good bit, Hayzlett circled back to the importance of listening to the consumer and being “completely transparent.” During his tenure at Kodak, he brought “voice of the customer” to the forefront establishing the position of Chief Listening Officer “to bring scale” to all of Kodak’s social media activities. With a CLO in place, Hayzlett ensured that complaints were heard, questions were answered, comments were responded to and even more PR was generated. “When a consumer tweets ‘they are thinking about buying,’ then we listen and point them in the right direction,” added Hayzlett, whose innovative and authoritative approach to the CMO position at Kodak leaves some pretty big shoes to fill.

Final Note: During his tenure at Kodak, Hayzlett established himself as one of the first “celebrity CMOs,”gaining notoriety on Celebrity Apprentice and extending it with a well publicized book tour. With an army-sized following on Twitter, and a well-established presence in every form of media, I have no doubt we’ll be hearing a lot more from Jeff in the near future.

A New Standard for Marketing as Service

Posted on by Drew Neisser

“It’s marketing that isn’t marketing,” said John Bernier, the social media maven at Best Buy whose dev team brought the stunningly effective Twelpforce to market in July of 2009. Since then Twelpforce has responded to near 28,000 customer inquiries via Twitter, enlisted 2600 employees to share their knowledge, and paid for itself many times over via extensive PR coverage, enhanced brand perceptions, and potential savings to the call center.

Setting a new standard for Marketing as Service, Twelpforce is worth studying, both for its lightning quick development process and for the surprise benefits of this highly innovative program. While this article is based on two extensive interviews with Mr. Bernier, one at the New York 140 Characters Conference and the other by phone last week, he is quick to note that this was “clearly a team effort” that went well beyond the marketing department. In fact, it is the cross-disciplined nature of this effort that makes the following 7 insights all the more instructive.

1. Recognize the Need

Most marketers know to look for an unmet needs but few find them, especially in the chaos that was Twitter in 2008. “We saw widespread use of Twitter among employees,” noted Bernier, “and our customers were talking about us on Twitter.” Putting two and two together, the Best Buy development project team created spy.appspot.com to monitor the conversation online and to formulate an engagement plan. This was a critical first step on the road to meeting “a need in a time and place when customers were asking for it,” as Mr. Bernier so aptly put it.

2. Follow the Leader

At about this time, Barry Judge, CMO of BestBuy was emerging as a major voice on Twitter. “Our leadership started to get very visible with customers, and that set the tone for the rest of the department,” noted Bernier. “Barry was the catalyst, giving us the green light to go experiment, so we had the luxury of leadership buy-in,” Bernier gratefully added. All that said, Barry Judge alone couldn’t answer all the customer questions himself, and it quickly became clear that they needed to find a way to tap into the tech expertise across the organization.

3. Build it Fast

Around April 2009, Bernier’s team was told that Twelpforce was a go and would even be featured in a TV spot in July. They essentially had two months to build a system that could monitor customer inquiries on Twitter and allow multiple employees to respond from one account. The risks were huge and “not a day went by that I didn’t think this might not work,” sighed Bernier. Nonetheless, using open source software and “the cloud,” they were ready for a “soft launch” in June by which time 600 eager employees had already volunteered to test the system.

4. Unleash your Employees

Unlike traditional customer support services, employee access to Twelpforce was not restricted to a select group of highly trained agents. In fact, the genius of Twelpforce is that it tapped into an existing talent pool that welcomed the chance to share their knowledge in their spare time! “A geek squad guy might have a break between sessions or it could be a ‘Blue Shirt’ in-store at a slow moment, either way,” noted Bernier, “this talent was ready, willing and able to help out. Because the system was designed to tie each response to an individual employee, each Twelpforce rep could feel a personal sense of pride in their participation.”

5. Expect the Unexpected

After the initial 600 Twelpforce testers, an additional 2000 signed on, and while not all are active, those that are have found some extraordinary side benefits. First, it helped create a new internal network, “broadening their relationship with other employees who shared a common interest,” beamed Bernier. Second, it served as on-going training program as Twelpforce reps researched questions and read the range of answers. Because it became clear that some questions couldn’t be answered in 140 characters, the development project team also went to work on a tool that enabled longer, more sophisticated answers.

6. Support the Big Picture

Though it could have been a big risk to feature Twelpforce before its merits were established, BestBuy took the chance with good reason. Seeking the well wishes of early adopters and tech influencers, you can’t simply talk the talk. You have to walk the walk, demonstrating your passion for technology and leading edge know-how by applying innovations like Twitter, innovations favored by the technorati. Being able to translate this passion into better, faster service as BestBuy did with Twelpforce is an even bigger coup since this is clearly a weak spot for discount-driven competitors like Wal-Mart, who are far less in tune with the latest innovations.

7. Reap the Rewards

While on the surface, Twelpforce could be perceived as a short-term marketing ploy, it is in truth more like a vein of gold that has just barely been tapped. Twelpforce offers “real time pulse measurement” noted Bernier, “so we could use the feed to adjust banner ad copy”, to reflect trending topics like iPad accessories, new game releases or localized out-of-stocks. In order to help Best Buy “Examine the past to predict the future,” Bernier and the dev team are currently creating an even more robust monitoring system, once again in a highly transparent manner and which you can see in its infancy at bbyfeed.com. As Bernier puts it, “The evolution of Twelpforce involves the story of data.”

Final note: Customer satisfaction among users of Twelpforce is actually higher than c-sat ratings of Best Buy among the general population. These higher ratings translate into increased purchase intent as well as the likelihood to spend more per purchase. Not bad for a program that was built in two months under the premise that “If we were going to fail, we wanted to fail fast.”

Don’t Sell Chocolate Broccoli: Serious Games Turn Play into Revenue

Posted on by Drew Neisser

The argument raged until 2am when the guy stormed out. The guy, an MBA student at UNC insisted that “games are for kids and IBM isn’t going to buy it,” while the demure Phaedra Boinodiris, also a first year MBA candidate, stuck to her guns, knowing the case challenge posted by IBM “screamed for a business SIM.”  Just a few hours later, Sandy Carter of IBM was asking Phaedra to build a prototype of her idea, an idea that became Innov8, a highly successful “serious game” that explains business process management to non-technical people and is my new favorite example of Marketing as Service.

In retrospect, it wasn’t really a fair fight. Phaedra was not your typical MBA student with ten years of entrepreneurial experience under her belt, having founded two companies including WomenGamers.com, now a popular portal for female gamers.  Thus, her expertise on the gaming world was substantial and while Sandy Carter’s request would have tripped up most students, Phaedra was up to the challenge.  In my interview with Phaedra at Impact 2010, IBM Software’s annual conference, her experience with IBM over the last two years provides a gripping playbook for innovators, especially “intrapreneurs” seeking to build “start ups” within large companies.

1.     Pursue your Passions

Phaedra got into the gaming business back in 1999 because she was a gamer, her sister was a gamer but not one of the industry publications addressed the category from a female perspective.  Knowing that 35% of women play video and computer games, she leapt into the void by setting up WomenGamers.com. She became an activist for the cause, starting the first scholarship program for women to get degrees in game design and development in the US, helping to share her passion with others.  After two years full-time with IBM, her passion for the power of games remains strong, adding that, “through self-discovery and experience consumers can better understand what you’re selling.”

2.    Find a Champion

When Sandy Carter first approached her at the Case Competition, Phaedra wasn’t sure what to make of her prototype request.  Now she knows that Sandy is the kind of internal champion that every “intrapreneur” dreams about finding.  “What amazed me is that Sandy attends the Case Competition’s herself instead of delegating this to a junior person,” marveled Phaedra.  “That takes real cajones and reflects Sandy’s commitment to find innovative ideas,” added Phaedra.  After the Case Competition, Sandy offered Phaedra an internship that lasted the rest of her time at business school and led the way to the now successful Serious Gaming group at IBM.

3.     Partner with Pros

Given only three months to build a prototype, Phaedra and her team at IBM knew they needed great partners and aligned with Centerline.”  “There are so many bad games out there,” noted Phaedra, “you really have to find a developer with a light touch,” to create an engaging experience.  In fact, Phaedra notes that of the three key ingredients of entrepreneurial success; people, process and ideas, people is by far the most important.  “A great idea without the right people will fail, whereas even an okay idea could succeed with great people,” she added.   Phaedra’s confidence in Centerline was thoroughly justified as they turned the initial idea first into a prototype and later into a simulation game played now played at over 1000 colleges and business schools around the world.

4.     Start with the Low Hanging Fruit

Once Innov8 was produced, it was quickly adopted and lauded by teachers, students and the press.  USC’s Marshall School of Business soon required every student to play Innov8.  Phaedra noted with understandable pride, “One class at a Turkish University uses Innov8 for its final exam!”  Teachers thanked Phaedra because “BPM is not an easy thing to teach.”  “We took something that was highly technical and made it more intuitive,” added Phaedra.  “Students were the low hanging fruit but they also represented future business opportunity,” which would eventually help to get Business Process Management software adopted by more and more companies.

5.     Build from Success

Once Innov8 had gained traction with graduate schools, Phaedra got approval to develop a flash-based online version of the game that could reach and engage a wider audience.  Adding social networking elements like a leader board, the online version soon became a lead machine.  Currently thossands of potential and current customers play Innov8 2.0 Online per month generating thousands of leads, many of which have been converted into sales.  In fact, Innov8 online generates many times more leads for IBM’s BPM software than any other source, creating an ROI that even “VCs would love.” “We took baby steps, building our case internally, showing ROI of each subsequent project, just like we would have to external investors,” offered Ms. Boinodiris.

6.     Don’t Sell Chocolate Broccoli

One of the happy by-products of the online Innov8 game was that it introduced the idea of serious gaming to a broader audience.  Soon IBM’s business partners were asking if they could customize Innov8 for their customers.  And eventually a new group within IBM Global Business Services was set up to do just that!  This speaks to the power of selling by educating as well as the quality of the game itself.  As Phaedra opined, “people can smell chocolate broccoli from a mile away,” so even educational games have to be extremely well crafted.  This insight is a truth for all such marketing as service programs, if the experience isn’t top notch, the customer or prospect simply won’t engage.  On the other hand, if the experience is rich and educational, there is simply no better way to sell.

7.     Revel in the Naysayers

Since her late night argument with a fellow MBA, Phaedra has reveled in the challenge of selling games as a serious business tool and formidable marketing weapon.  Some have resisted the idea, calling games “fluff” and “kids stuff.”  When I asked her about sales force adoption, she noted that there has been some resistance there too. “Sales has their lucky underwear and don’t like to change it,” she winked. Fortunately, her continued emphasis on proving ROI internally has been rewarded with the green lighting of a next gen simulation game called CityOne that will launch Fall 2010.  CityOne is already being lauded by the press, with Gizmodo saying “if SimCity introduced legions of gamers to the world of urban planning, then IBM’s upcoming CityOne game looks to take that education to the next level.”

Final note: I consider myself lucky to have met Phaedra.  As proud as she is of her accomplishments thus far, she remains humble.  She states with realistic clarity that “games won’t displace anything; they will supplement other sales tool, driving people down the purchase funnel.”  My guess—the potential for games as educational sales tools for highly technical products is truly unlimited and Phaedra will remain on the forefront for quite some time.

Guerrilla Marketing Insights

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Business Insider ran a feature today on guerrilla marketing which included a couple of quotes from yours truly.  Here are my notes from my interview with reporter Bianca Male.

What is the best way to define guerrilla marketing? And what is it most definitely not?

Guerrilla marketing is a state of mind not a particular channel. Guerrilla marketing is about making more out of less, combining innovation and elbow grease to cut through. Guerrilla marketing can also be defined by what it isn’t. It isn’t traditional media like TV and print. Today’s guerrilla marketers capitalize on social media with a vengeance; listening, researching, conversing, engaging, supporting and ultimately selling. That said, just using social media channels like Facebook doesn’t make you a guerrilla. Using Facebook in a fresh way like Burger King did with Whopper Sacrafice is guerrilla. It simply isn’t guerrilla if it isn’t newsworthy.

How can a business decide if a guerilla marketing campaign is right for them?

There are a few highly regulated industries like financial services and insurance that make considering guerrilla approaches a risky proposition. That said, just about every other marketer big or small can benefit from guerrilla, its just a question of risk tolerance. Guerrilla marketing typically carries some risk since it requires a brand to step outside its comfort zone and do something they’ve never done before. Guerrilla marketing done right is newsworthy. As I said earlier, It isn’t guerrilla marketing if it isn’t newsworthy. One of the risks of guerrilla marketing is that it simply won’t cut through as planned simply because it wasn’t original or it was just a dumb idea. Another risk is that the guerrilla idea was a mere moment in time and didn’t include sustaining elements. One of my favorites: Renegade launched the HSBC BankCab in 2003 with a search for the “most knowledgeable cabbie in New York” which got tons of PR and concluded with a one-year contract for Johnnie Morello. Seven years later Johnnie is still on the road providing free rides to delighted HSBC customers in a vintage 1982 Checker Cab.

How does a business develop a guerrilla campaign? Any guidelines?

The article I just wrote for my blog on Fast Company provides several relevant guidelines. Generally, its best to start by setting clear objectives followed quickly by doing your homework, really thinking through your category, brand and consumer. Ideally, this process will yield a true insight that can be transformed into a big idea. Then its time to think 360°, imagining all the ways your idea can come to life, online, offline and in-between. It often helps at this point to imagine the story headline you’d like to see, the tweets you’d like to read, the photos you’d like to be taken and YouTube videos that you’d want to view. Talk to some PR professionals you trust to make sure these story ideas might in fact find purchase in your ideal media outlets. Google your idea to make sure it hasn’t been done the same way you’re planning to do it. Guerrilla programs usually start when a client says to us, “we don’t have any money but we’d really like to get some media attention.”

One of my favorites: A few years ago, Panasonic was introducing a new line of alkaline batteries called Oxyride that were far more powerful than Energizer. Since they didn’t have the budget to compete directly, Renegade came up with a truly guerrilla program called “Neuter your Bunny.” This tongue-in-cheek “public service” effort focused on heightening awareness of the benefits of bunny neutering. Turns out it calms the male bunnies down and prevents female bunnies from getting cervical cancer, a disease that otherwise strikes them with remarkably frequency. So Panasonic Oxyride batteries established Neuter Your Bunny day, donating 5 free neuterings and $10,000 to the House Rabbit Society. And despite the fact that PETA gave Panasonic an award for caring, the American press thought this was veiled yet hilarious competitive campaign writing headlines like “Panasonic Wants to Neuter Energizer” in over 30 publications from Time Magazine to Newsday.

Is there anything a business should NEVER do when it comes to guerrilla marketing?

It is generally not a good idea to do something that will cause someone on the team to go to jail. If you have to break the law to get attention then you probably need a different business model. Try not to annoy your target. A street team performer once shoved a donut in my face in order to get me to stop and go into a bank branch—this was not a fun experience for me or productive for the bank who would never ever get my business after that. Try not to think of guerrilla as a moment in time or as a simple street stunt. This will limit your horizons and the potential impact. And never tell the boss that your guerrilla program is going to be a hit before it becomes one. Its always better to under-promise and over-deliver especially with often unpredictable guerrilla endeavors.

CMO Insights: How A Cosmetics Brand Achieved Beautiful Growth in An Ugly Economy.

Posted on by Drew Neisser

When Ted Rubin grabbed the reins as CMO of e.l.f. cosmetics in 2008, he knew he was going to have to be inventive.  “There’s not a lot of margin in a $1.00 cosmetic,” he noted in my interview with him last week.  “I simply didn’t have a budget for paid media,” he added.  Yet despite this limitation, in just under two years Ted was able to help the company significantly increase its sales in one of the worst recessions in history, providing a textbook case for any aspiring guerrilla marketer.

1. Listen Up

Anyone who’s ever met Ted knows he’s a great talker who prides himself in responding to any query from any person as fast as humanly possible. BUT what they might not know is that he’s also a great listener, and he made listening his first priority when he arrived at e.l.f.  What he learned in his first 90 days provided the foundation for his subsequent success.  Scouring the web, Ted found hundreds of fans across multiple channels, many of whom provided invaluable feedback — feedback that he continued to seek as ideas began to percolate.

2. Sniff Out an Insight

Up until recently, e.l.f. cosmetics were sold mainly online, direct to consumers at an unbelievably low price point. Therein lay the challenge.  Even bargain hunters asked, “How could a one dollar cosmetic be any good?”  Ted realized that this rampant skepticism could not be overcome by any company messaging, and in fact would require extensive word of mouth in which one consumer reassured another that e.l.f. is indeed a high quality product.  Fortunately, during Ted’s listening period, he had found hundreds of delightfully chatty fans dispersed all over the web.

3. Hug Your Fans

Though e.l.f. had been early to the blogosphere, in late 2008 they had almost no presence on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube.  So this is where Ted started, zealously responding to any mention of e.l.f. and engaging customers with instructional content that emphasized conversation over sales pitches.  In the process, Ted discovered hundreds of consumer-generated videos that featured e.l.f. products and consolidated these on a branded YouTube channel and created a hub for them on the distinct AskELF.com url.  During the course of 2009, e.l.f. became a social media powerhouse, accumulating in excess of 50,000 Facebook fans, over 50,000 Twitter followers (including Ted’s presence), and an astonishing 2.3 million+ views of user-generated videos!

4. Hold the Right Hands

Lots of brands pay lip service to the influential blogging/micro-blogging community by parsing out chunks of content they hope will be repurposed.  Ted took a far more personal approach, “nurturing each relationship” to the point that many became his close friends.  They also became a sounding board for ideas, one of which became the “Make Up at Home Parties,” a program that delighted the targeted bloggers so much that after 70 such parties, there is a waiting list of 250, and a galaxy of party-related content including text, pictures, Whrrls, and video that has been shared and shared again by thousands upon thousands of e.l.f. fans.

5. Tap into Metrics

As e.l.f.’s social media efforts were starting to take hold, Ted realized that “just building a large base of fans was insufficient.”  He needed to understand who was really engaged and if/how this was affecting sales.  Fortunately, the news was good.  As the fan base grew, so too did traffic to their online commerce site from social media sites, 75% of whom ended up being new visitors.  These new visitors demonstrated their commitment by buying product and signing up for the e.l.f. newsletter.  In fact, the e.l.f. database nearly doubled to 2.3 million by the end of 2009, a metric that was music to the ears of the company’s owners AND prospective marketing partners.

6. Reach for Partners

One of the ways Ted was able to stretch every precious marketing penny was by partnering with a host of brands with shared interests.  Conde Nast’s Allure Magazine provided content and gifts for the House Parties while the SheSpeaks.com network of product testers and bloggers helped find party hosts that would spread the word.  ExploreModeling.com was the perfect partner for a marketing contest called the “New Face of e.l.f” which sought out 4 models of various ages. Viral by design, contestants garnered over 800,000 votes supported by 40,000 pictures that in turn gained 35,000 comments.  With results like these, it is little wonder marketers like Virgin Mobile and Warner’s Bra along with J.C. Penney reached out to e.l.f. for more cross-promotions, most of which cost e.l.f. next to nothing.

7. Kiss and Tell

In the 4th quarter of 2009, e.l.f. was suddenly in 1700+ Target stores with a 4 foot end-cap. For a primarily online brand this was a huge retail expansion. “Target was totally enamored with our social media presence,” noted Ted, who suddenly had a “currency” he could exchange not just with other marketers but also retailers eager to share e.l.f.’s social media cache.  Marveling at how quickly the product sold once in Target, Ted noted, “A good part of what we built in social media enabled that to happen.”  With over 400 blog posts about e.l.f. entering Target, 2000 retweets of the new retail presence and customers snapping photos of product flying off the shelf, Target was so thrilled with the results it helped e.l.f. secure a permanent in-line presence in a significantly larger percentage of stores in early 2010 than originally planned.

Final Note: Early in his career, Ted worked for “America’s Greatest Marketer” Seth Godin, who by then had already co-authored The Guerrilla Marketing Handbook. Clearly Ted learned at the feet of a master, one who instilled the guerrilla credo that inventiveness and elbow grease can make up for a small budget every time.  Ted is taking that same spirit of inventiveness to OpenSky, introducing Relationship Commerce, and something he says “will change the face of e-tailing.” Ted is also a proud member of The CMO Club.

CMO Insights: The Importance of Innovation

Posted on by Drew Neisser

In October 2008, Barbara Goodstein, Chief Marketing Officer of AXA Equitable was only slightly nervous as her company launched an unprecedented customer retention program called MyRetirementShop.com.  Creating a “retirement portal” more focused on “value add” than lead generation, Ms. Goodstein was moving her company into unchartered territory, delivering a “marketing as service” program that became far more successful than even she had anticipated.

Since its inception, MyRetirementShop.com has attracted over ½ million visitors who spend a whopping 11 minutes browsing highly relevant content from top experts like Kiplingers, Service Magic and MyRecipes.com.  Current customers were quick to thank AXA for this resource with not just words of praise but also by buying more AXA products, generating revenue far beyond the program’s cost. The press responded to this innovative marketing approach with over 200 stories that yielded an equivalent of $4.0mm in paid media coverage.

Since the old proverb “success has many fathers but failure is an orphan” also applies to marketing, it is often difficult to get the real story on what it takes for innovations like MyRetirementShop.com to come into being.  In this case, however, after an extensive interview with Ms. Goodstein in which she reviewed the development process, it became very clear that her journey has provided a textbook case on innovation, yielding the following seven critical elements of success.

1. Innovation Starts at the Top

Ms. Goodstein is no stranger to innovation.   Having guided the highly effective 800-Pound Gorilla advertising campaign for AXA into being four years ago, she knows a big idea when she sees one and she knows how to stretch a budget for maximum impact.  But she is also the first to acknowledge that “innovation more than anything starts at the top” and that if her CEO, Kip Condron, didn’t encourage and support innovation, her efforts would never see the light of day.  With senior management saying, “We should try multiple creative options and see what’s going to work,” and encouraging innovation with financial incentives, the virulent skepticism that typically inhibits new idea development is diffused if not silenced.

2. Listen to Your Customers

The impetus for MyRetirementShop.com sprung from an annual study AXA conducts among its customers. According to Ms. Goodstein, “We built MyRetirementShop.com on years of data that revealed the topics that were most relevant to pre-retirees, so we just had to take all of this content and make it accessible.”  Pre-retirees noted their interest in everything from home and family to health and fitness, from travel to finance, from self-improvement to entertainment.  So it came as no surprise to Ms. Goodstein that these topics gained traction with their target.  The only surprise was divergence between the expressed interest in volunteering and concierge services in the research versus the actual behavior on the site.  Ms. Goodstein speculates that disinterest in these areas may be more a reflection of current economic realities than the ultimate value of the content.

3. Make Sure It’s Truly Innovative

Before developing MyRetirementShop.com, Ms. Goodstein and her team did an extensive review of retirement portals and competitor’s websites.  When it was clear there was nothing like it out there, the AXA team then “did our own screening to find the best possible content providers.” According to Ms. Goodstein, “It took over a year to line up all the partners, and an internal SWAT team dedicated to every area of the site” to pull it all together. To insure relevance, they insisted that all the content had national reach and users could even “drill down by zipcode.”  And though much of MyRetirementShop.com content exists on other sites, AXA is the first to aggregate it all in one place, and is the only retirement portal without highly intrusive advertising.

4. Service First, Then Branding

The intention of MyRetirementShop.com from the beginning was to be a service – not an advertisement, a service that would help retain existing customers, and one that would reflect the deep expertise of AXA Equitable and its sincere commitment to help consumers with retirement planning.  “We wanted the site to be value add” noted Ms. Goodstein, “and we didn’t want it to be a commercial for us.” This commitment to service had a strong influence on the design of the site, which has almost no AXA ID other than their 800-pound gorilla who serves as “branding anchor and host.” The now familiar gorilla sits on top of each section and offers a “pithy audio message” that Ms. Goodstein anticipated “would create more of a connection” with site visitors.

5. Service First, Then Sales

Once the site was launched, AXA representatives were provided with a number of tools to share it with existing customers.  Direct mail, email and brochures described the content and invited customers to visit the site.  Then the unexpected happened, this so-called retention program started generating sales. “For $40 worth of DM, our reps generated an incremental $60,000 in sales,” added Ms. Goodstein with glee.  Suddenly the sales team that usually put the kibosh on programs considered “non-revenue generating,” embraced the site, acknowledging its power to increase sales among existing customers and even to attract new ones.  By providing a genuine service to its customers and prospects, AXA found a friendly way to break the ice and renew the conversation about retirement with a now receptive target.

6. Innovation Requires Perseverance

MyRetirementShop.com took over two years from conception to launch, with multiple hiccups along the way.  Getting the technology right was challenging and the site, which was developed by internal IT resources, went through several iterations.  “It took us a while to get it right,” acknowledged Ms. Goodstein and of course, she did not have “universal support initially.”  Importantly, AXA Global and top management voiced their confidence in the project, which Ms. Goodstein gained by outlining a clear vision, defining the content with crisp wireframes and by providing prototypes that fueled expectations.  By demonstrating what it would look like and never wavering from the quest, Ms. Goodstein and her team were able to build consensus from top to bottom, setting the stage for its ultimate success.

7. Don’t Rest on Your Laurels

Despite exceeding expectations on every metric, Ms Goodstein and her team continue to seek ways to improve MyRetirementShop.com.  New original content is in the works that will simultaneous enhance the visitor experience and increase the natural page rankings on the search engines. New content partners that could increase consumer appeal are being evaluated.   “We are also going to change the enroll button so interested visitors can reach us more easily” added Ms. Goodstein who marveled at the unexpected benefits of a true “value add” program, “Because we are willing to work so hard, people want to connect with us.”

Bottom line: Marketing innovation is neither easy nor linear, requiring support from the top, a clear vision from the start, steadfast determination along the way and ultimately a desire to do right by the consumer, a consumer that will thank you many times over with not just words of praise but also their pocketbooks.