Category: Show Notes

Diversity Matters for Marketers – Not Just HR

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Inclusion in the workplace has been on the agendas of companies for quite some time. Rarely, though, do the potential marketing benefits of diversity get addressed when taking on the initiative. After all, a rich assortment of team members provides unique insights into the various demographics your brand may be targeting.

Award-winning entrepreneur Jennifer Brown preaches equality to business professionals, explaining why this social issue must be addressed and outlining the path to change. Jennifer understands that we live in a fast-changing world and many organizations may not be ready to take the bull by the horns. Although inclusion cannot be achieved overnight, she believes companies can take big strides by instilling themselves with the will to change.

Jennifer dishes on diversity in this Renegade Thinkers Unite episode. She tells Drew about some of the ways enlightened companies are working to diversify their employees, citing the importance of inclusion to the younger generations as a major driver for change. You can listen to the episode here.

Here are a few of Jennifer’s inspirational responses from the interview:

 

Drew: Is there research that shows having a diverse workforce actually helps the bottom line?

Jennifer: Yes, there is a ton of research about it. There are studies that quantify, for example, the number of women that a company may have on its board or in its senior executive team correlating to bottom line results, better shareholder returns, better eBid. They get very very technical about it. They’ve actually linked the representation to the way the company shows up in the world and the way that the company succeeds. It’s not just optics, but it’s actually bottom line results that these companies that tend to prioritize diversity and inclusion as a corporate value and as something that they are targeting in terms of hiring. They have linked it to company performance. There’s a lot of studies, and I won’t go into those, but you can actually Google it and there’s more than you could ever know what to do with. Even though that’s been out there though Drew, it’s still hard to make the case for why this is important and to help companies or urge companies to put this on their radar screen and really take it seriously. It’s interesting notwithstanding what we might call the business case over and over again, which I have to communicate and teach about. When I called my book The Will to Change, the big question mark for me is – what does motivate people to change? I think there’s still a lot of resistance to change.

Drew: If you’re part of a marketing department and you’re struggling to add diverse talent to your workforce, what should you do?

Jennifer: It plagues tech. A lot of other industries are struggling to get engineering talent of color, for example, let alone women. So it is a pain point that’s felt across many industries. How you set your founding team really really matters. When you’re an early-stage organization, I would recommend being very dogmatic about who you recruit because the optics and the message of who is particularly in the leadership or the founding team or that original group really matters. It sets the compass a certain direction and makes everything that happens after that easier to attract, especially diverse talent when they see themselves on a company’s masthead and they see that it’s a priority that the company talks about throughout its marketing and its outreach when it comes to recruiting. All of that are elements that people, particularly diverse talent, pay a lot of attention to. So what you say and the decisions you make and whom you hire matters – especially at the beginning.

Drew: What does it mean for a company to take a stand for diversity right now?

Jennifer: Brands are being judged by the stances they take and the conversations they jump into or not. For example, both the ACC and the NBA pulled games out of North Carolina saying we’re going to deprive you of revenue and we’re going to get all the teams behind us and we’re going to really make it hurt because of the transgender bathroom bills that were going on in that state, and there’s some similar ferment that’s going on in Texas. We see corporations banding together and watching what each other do. There’s strength in numbers, so it’s not even like a company has to necessarily stick its neck out alone. There are families of brands that can make these decisions together, and it’s interesting to watch the dominoes. It’s almost like the companies and the CEOs who walked away from the Trump business councils. The news is happening so fast. I watched which companies went first and then which were in the second round. I was noticing that and I was putting myself in the position of the employees of those companies watching their CEOs say, “Not on my watch. I’m not going to be party to something that I think is harmful for our society.” I was imagining how good that felt and how reassuring that felt in particular, not just for diverse talent that works for that employer, but even I’d say the allies – the people who believe in equality and inclusion.

Drew: How are millennials impacting the workplace diversity initiative?

Jennifer: One of their top values is inclusion, regardless of what their own demographic is. This is not just important to people of color or female talent. It’s actually important across the board generationally. I think we’re entering a day and age where what brands do really matters. Is it risky? I have to tell you, I’m not sure the boycotts that have been threatened and the bottom line impact has really been felt. There’s a lot of bluster and a lot of social media activity for a while, but I have to say I don’t think that brands have really paid a negative price in my experience for standing up and being counted when it comes to social issues that impact equality.

Building Your CEO Relationship

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Honesty is at the heart of the CMO-CEO relationship. No matter what your marketing data may show, it won’t mean much to your CEO if the context is unclear. Few CEOs are as brutally honest as Alan Trefler of Pegasystems, who is also the company’s founder and chairman. Alan urges marketers to really understand the metrics they share with the board, and also be able to communicate why those facts are so critical.

This episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite covers some of the most important factors for the CMO and CEO to maintain a healthy relationship. Alan brings decades-long wisdom to the table, as he discusses some of the best—and worst—things CMOs can do for their organizations. You can listen to the episode here, or continue reading below for some selected questions and answers from the interview.

Drew: When you bring in a CMO, what are your expectations of the role that they’re going to play in and how they’re going to be successful?

Alan: I have the pleasure of working with what I think is a terrific CMO, and I also have the ability and routinely do interact with dozens and dozens of CMOs every quarter because our products are actually used in power. What CMOS are often trying to do, I find that CMOs make a number of interesting, perhaps predictable, but actually very serious mistakes when they talk to the CEO…There’s a tremendous challenge in the industry in which CMOs and marketing in general is hungry to prove that they’re having an impact. And there’s a tendency for CMOs to want to really I would say over-rotate on attribution. I’m going to go demonstrate that the sales in this region that this particular big deal for a to be to be company this particular launch for B2C Company was empowered by marketing because that’s how I justify my budget and I make things good for everybody. The trouble is CEOs are very by their nature suspicious of what I would describe as soft estimates. And so when they hear things that sound like grand claims and they look at the data and they say, “Well, that’s really an estimate. This isn’t really a great estimate. This isn’t something that can be provable,” they become very critical. And I think CMOS set themselves up sometimes.

Drew: If you had a group of CMOs sitting here, what’s one bit of advice you would give them in terms of interacting with the CEO and the board?

Alan: The interactions obviously with the board are going to be much more brief and episodic. I would say from a CEO point of view a great CMO is constantly working with the CEO. If you think about it, arguably the brand of our time, Apple, that CEO came to love the concept of branding and marketing and lived it. I think that CMOs will do a great service for the whole company if they really invest the time and effort to these concepts as opposed to just “delivering measurable results.”

Drew: What should marketers do to get next-best action?

Alan: What you need to be able to do is when you touch a customer, either because the customer is coming into your owned property or this customer is one which you’re choosing to make an outreach to or this customer perhaps is in a paid channel and you’re looking to push some form of promotion to them, you need to think of it in terms of: What is the customer seeing? What has the customer done? Is this a customer who’s typed something anxiety-producing on your website, for instance, by searching for “termination fee,” which should definitely raise some red flags. Pulling this information in real-time or near-real time is critical because you really don’t want to inundate the customer with things that they don’t care about. Traditionally targeting starts to feel like abuse to customers. I remember I looked at the TiVo site for a TiVo I bought. For months after I bought it, I was chased around the Internet by TiVo. It was really quite irritating and menacing to go back to that site.

Drew: Are companies wasting a lot of money on chasing acquisition?

Alan: There’s a lot of money that’s being wasted out there. There’s simply no question that by blindly targeting with traditional campaigns, you really have very low hit rates and it can be expensive, particularly when you’re buying digital media. I think that acquisition needs to be thought of in two contexts. One context is: How do I increase what I can sell my existing customer base? That’s sometimes the absolute best way to magnify your portfolio of products that you’re selling because those customers are ones that you already have reasons to contact. They have reasons to come to you. If you can get them to give recommendations to friends, you’ve got something that is a much warmer introduction. If you could reach out to those friends based on their suggestion, they get some sort of benefit from that. Those sorts of approaches, which is leveraging your existing customer base are ones that can be extremely valuable. You have to make sure you don’t offend those customers. It’s so easy to upset a customer by bugging them about things that you’ve bugged them about the seventh time, or going and blindly doing things without being sensitive to aspects of how you work with them and their demographics. Blind acquisition, just reaching out blindly or buying ads, can be effective though only in very limited circumstances. You really need to be able to also target those where they have no hope at all. There’s just so much noise out there.

Renegade Thinkers Unite

Turning Your Blog or Podcast into a Lead Generation Machine

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Creative marketing outlets are ripe for the picking. Seemingly every big company has its own blog, as do countless small and medium businesses. Many organizations are also finding ways to reach thousands upon thousands of consumers through podcasting. Although it’s easier than ever to create content through these mediums, the market for blogs and podcasts has become fiercely competitive. Thus, the path to monetization can be tricky to find.

That’s where marketing expert Dorie Clark comes in. Clark—who is an adjunct professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, a professional speaker, and a bestselling author—preaches patience and perseverance when it comes to content marketing. As she points out, the average podcast only lasts 12 episodes. Similarly, a high number of blogs run dry after a handful of posts. So while the creative marketing field is crowded, it becomes considerably less cluttered once an extensive base of content is established.

On this episode, Clark shares her experiences in the content marketing arena. She discusses insightful dos and don’ts of web media, while also explaining how to know it’s time to reinvent our marketing strategies. You can listen to the episode here.

Here are some sample Q&As from Clark’s interview with Drew Neisser:

 

Drew: How do you create a blog today, particularly if you’re a CMO or an aspiring senior marketer who wants to cut through?

Dorie: A lot of people who may be in the early stages today look back and they say, “If I had started in 2007, then great. It was open terrain then.” But now, it’s gotten filled out. It’s gotten crowded. Let me share two thoughts. The first one statistically comes from the world of podcasting, but it is very relevant to blogs as well. There’s actually a study that I quote in Entrepreneurial You, which was a longitudinal look at podcasts between 2005 and 2015. And what they discovered is yes, it is true there are hundreds of thousands of podcasts, but what they also discovered is the average duration of a podcast…is 12 episodes. When we look out at the field we say, “Oh it’s so crowded! I could never compete!” But the truth is, yes, if you’re at the starting line, there’s huge numbers of aspirants. But if you literally can keep it going past a dozen episodes, the field thins considerably. All of a sudden you’re not competing against 300,000 people; you’re competing against 3,000. In some cases, depending on what field it is, 300. In many ways, it is a persistence game. It is a longevity game.

 

Drew: What is your second thought?

Dorie: The second thing that I’ll just mention briefly is that it’s absolutely true that in the early days of any content creation that you’re doing (podcasts, blogs, whatever it is), you’re not going to have an overnight success. You’re not going to have millions of readers. But it’s really important to think about the interim metrics. And what I mean by that you won’t be successful if the only thing you’re looking for is wide scale. However, a blog can be incredibly successful for you—even if you have a hundred readers or fifty readers—if you write a post and it enables you to close a deal. In the early days, understanding how your content creation factors into your sales process and aligning those very closely saying, “I’m going to write this post” that lays out the answer to ideal clients’ problems, and being able to share that in a targeted fashion with them, often helps expedite the decision-making process when somebody is saying, “Which company should I be going with?”

 

Drew: How do you create direct business value through blogging and podcasting?

Dorie: It’s likely to take a while. I’m not a podcaster, but in terms of my blogging, which I’ve done quite seriously, it took me two to three years of consistent blogging—and by consistent, I mean 10 to 15 times a month—in order to literally get any clear value in terms of inbound, unsolicited inquiries. Now once you cross that threshold, now I get a lot. But it took two to three years before I saw anything at all. That’s the dark period…where people are worried that it’s not happening. It’s not going to happen for them. You have to plow through that in order to get to the other side where the competition is scarce.

 

Drew: You really are a connector of people. How do you recommend others grow their networks?

Dorie: One of the things that I’ve studied over the past number of years, especially with my book, Stand Out, was the question of “How do you become a recognized expert in your field?” And what I came to discover through my research is that fundamentally there are three key pieces that you have to keep your eyes on. One is content creation, which we’ve just been talking about. The other is social proof, meaning what is your perceived level of credibility? What affiliations do you have that give people confidence in you and your ideas? The third is your network. Your network is critical for a whole host of reasons. One is that they’re the people who can speak to you honestly. They can tell you what’s a good idea and what’s not a good idea. Another is that you’re kind of judged by the company that you keep. Your network is part of your brand in some ways. And then also, your network, if done right, they’re the people who often want to be your earliest evangelists.

Tuning into a Flexible Media Approach

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There are few industries as dynamic as the media business – and rightfully so. Changes in both technology and culture necessitate ongoing adaptations for sources to reach their audiences. Over the last decade alone, we’ve seen dramatic changes to the ways people receive news and entertainment through the development of social media, podcasts and interactive audio players. Even for age-old outlets, evolution is a must.

New York Public Radio, which has been around for 93 years, is leading the way in redefining media. Once simply an FM radio station, the company now hosts a wide range of podcast shows that garner over 26 million listeners every month. New York Public Radio’s Vice President and CMO, Peter Weingard, declares they are in the curiosity business. The brand—as historic as it is—regularly reinvents its media approach, while sticking to its core message.

On this episode of the Renegade Thinkers Unite podcast, Peter Weingard talks to host Drew Neisser about what it means to be a historic brand in a world dictated by fluidity. You can listen to the podcast here. Below are some highlights from this week’s episode:

 

Drew: There are a lot of brands connected to New York Public Radio. How did you sort through them and figure out what your priorities were?

Peter: Financially speaking, the big priority is of course the terrestrial broadcast station. We are a member-driven organization. Actually, one of the largest membership organizations in New York City with over 200,000 members and that’s how we pay our bills here. Across our portfolio there are lots of different objectives nestled within all the different brands and some of the brands are quite large and quite important like Radiolab and Freakonomics. Also, it’s very important to think about how we’re unlike a lot of other companies, especially other media companies. We are a mission-driven nonprofit, we are driven by the need to serve our mission and consumers. We’re not looking at Wall Street and worrying about quarterly earnings reports and a lot of the other distractions that other media companies face. I think it allows us to focus on what matters. And as a marketer you always want to be focused almost relentlessly on the consumer. Here, we get to do that because that really is why we’re here.

Drew: What have been one or two things beyond the studio that have really helped you continue to meet the objectives of the organization?

Peter: There are so many wonderful things that are going on here and one that I personally like very much is if you listen to the top of the hour IDs on WNYC, you’re going to hear a very different sound than you might have heard previously at WNYC. And part of that is the evolution of radio and what radio has become in the world of Pandora and the ability to stream the BBC from London. Suddenly, I have a pocketful of radio stations. There’s a lot of rethinking about what that is. Can we be the center of the New York conversation, the conduit by which New Yorkers are able to have shared experiences? Part of that is reflected in these top of the hour IDs, which if you listen to don’t sound very public radio. What you hear is the voices of people in the streets of New York, the sounds of the city behind them, and the accents and voices of real people in a real New York. And I’ve had people in the street react to that.

Drew: What else have you done?

Peter: I’ve had other radio stations tell us, ‘I love what you’ve done,’ because we’ve begun to reframe what it means to be a local radio station and we’re very proud of our newsroom. We have a 70-person newsroom. It’s one of the largest in New York, winners of many awards. And we’re working very hard in creating engagement opportunities around the news so the news doesn’t just go one way anymore. Communication isn’t just from the transmitter to your radio out. What we’re doing is actually trying to involve people in the stories and involve them in the station and in the brand in very significant ways. One thing we’re doing right now in New York is, as any New Yorker will tell you, the subways are a big old mess and mass transit is a big mess and we have an ongoing program project called “#WeTheCommuters.” And we actually had a listener who volunteered to be the #WeTheCommuters ambassador who went to the MTA public hearing, representing the listeners of WNYC, to read aloud to the management of the MTA what was important to our listeners about commuting in New York.

Drew: You ran an ad late last year that garnered a lot of attention – can you talk about that?

Peter: One of the ads that came out right when the Russia thing was happening — I was actually concerned that by the time the ad hit the streets that it would be over, and it turns out to be the gift that keeps on giving. We had one headline that just said, “More Influential than Russia” and had what looked like Putin in the ad and then talked about tuning into Morning Edition for unbiased journalism. People were tweeting that and sending it to each other and Instagraming it and saying, “Wow.” One person said, “This is not your father’s NPR,” and that’s exactly right. We can’t be your father’s NPR. We need to be…a city that’s ahead of the trends. New York is more diverse than the rest of the country. And we need to reflect the city that we call home, and we do. I think everybody else is going to follow us.

Redefining Core Brand Values

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Core values undoubtedly determine the path of a brand. Companies that have a clear vision are likely to be more resistant to adversity than those that don’t. Denise Broady, CMO at WorkForce Software, knows plenty about both core values and adversity. Having fled Vietnam as a child, Denise learned to become resilient by sticking to her roots while growing up in Richmond, Virginia. She learned in her post-graduate job quest that a strong foundation should be the backbone of any company.

When Denise arrived at WorkForce Software, she noticed that the core brand values had not be clearly defined.  Working with the leadership team, she made this her top priority. Needless to say, changing the heart and soul of the established international company was no easy feat. That didn’t stop Denise from helping to redefine WorkForce’s ideology from the inside out.

On this Renegade Thinkers Unite episode, Denise Broady explains how she managed to help construct WorkForce’s values and drive its future success. You can listen to the episode here. (These show notes were prepared by Jay Tellini.)

Here are some sample questions and answers from RTU host Drew Neisser’s interview with Denise:

 

Drew: What do you think is the most renegade thing you’ve done at WorkForce so far?

Denise: Coming in, it was tough to even look at the company and say, “Wow, we don’t even have core values.” So how do you go through the process to define core values? Our core values are everything around put customers first, make it happen, celebrate our success. The CEO at WorkForce asked marketing to really have the initiative. Imagine taking these three principles, going out with a small team, getting 25 people to sign off and endorse it, and then roll it out to the entire company. It’s not a brand new company. When you have to come in and actually change people’s perspective on something so fundamental as core values, it’s not an easy task.

How did you go about getting the folks in the organization to embrace WorkForce’s new core values and make them their own?

Denise: We huddled as a management team. We came up with the concept, but not the actual names of the core values. And then we took the 25 folks across the various business. We ran all the workshops. They flushed out the final three core values. And then when we launched it at the company meeting, we ran the communications around it. There was a video, there was a booklet that was handed to everybody. It was put into every headquarter that we had globally. So the most important thing, as you mentioned, it’s not about the words on the pamphlet; it’s about getting people to embrace it.

Drew: In many companies, the process informs the values. In your case, however, the values inform the process. How do you manage to do that?

Denise: Yeah, actually we didn’t roll out the core values until a year after I was at WorkForce Software, so it was really a second year. And as you mentioned, you’ve got to really feel what the company is about because it needs to be authentic and it needs to be adopted by every single employee. And because we’re globally distributed, we also need to make sure everybody in the UK feels the same, that everybody in Australia feels the same, and also Livonia, Michigan, and then all the remote folks. So it’s really critical. I think that you can do the process piece first, but sometimes if you have a key deliverable like the core values, then laying out some of the additional processes will definitely help later on.

Drew: Right now as you look ahead, what are the things that you think you can do as a CMO that will make the biggest difference for the company?

Denise: I always tell our team it’s not about being integrated to sales; it’s about being integrated to the business. We can change and inspire so many. We can be change agents in so many portions of the business. A great partner I is Leslie Ternaki, who leads our H.R. I remember calling her and said, “Leslie, it’s my first year anniversary here and I just got a clock from us” and I said, “first of all, nobody uses clocks anymore. Can we change our employee gift?” And it seems so minor, but these are areas where when you have a great relationship with different areas in the business, we can come in and make these changes very quickly. And doing things like employee advocacy, we just ran this past quarter through our social channels WorkForce around the world and we gave out these water bottles where people would travel all around the world and they’d take a picture of their water bottles. And it’s been one of the best run advocacy programs for us and I really do truly believe employees–if they love their brand, if they are passionate about where they work–it will amplify on the market and what we do.

Inside the Box Marketing

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Giving customers a little something extra can go a long way. Just ask Jackson Jeyanayagam, CMO of Boxed.com. Founded in 2013, this e-commerce startup doesn’t only deliver packages – they also deliver joy. Customers who order from Boxed can expect heartwarming trinkets like handwritten notes and creativity kits that explain how to turn the delivery box into a castle for the kids. That joy isn’t limited to consumers either. Boxed.com embraces employees in a big way too:

On the Renegade Thinkers Unite podcast, Jackson explains how Boxed.com maintains a radiant brand image. There’s a good chance you’ll smile on more than one occasion during the episode, which you can listen to by clicking on this link. (These show notes were prepared by Jay Tellini.)

Here are some special Q&A selections from the interview:

Drew: Zappos delivers “wow.” Boxed.com delivers joy. Is there a difference?

Jackson: I think so. I think what Zappos did is actually amazing, especially as relates to customer service. They reinvented what customer service should be like in retail -not just e-commerce. I think we look at it as a little bit more, I don’t say fluffy because it’s more than that but it’s a little bit more nuanced so that delivering joy is obviously the product experience first and foremost. [If] the product is shit, marketing is shit. It really doesn’t matter. No matter how great I think I am or how great my agencies are, it won’t matter. But after that, it’s about delivering joy through every experience when you open the box.

Drew: What happens when I open the box?

Jackson: You see a cartoon face of our founder with a quote on it. When you see a handwritten note in a selfie of your box inside of it, when you get that delivery within a day and you didn’t pay for shipping. When you get a creativity kit where you get crayons and markers and instructions on how to make your box into a castle to celebrate Beauty and the Beast so you can do that with your kid. We do that. We offer that for free. It’s those little touches that for us is all about delivering joy, not only from your products that are there and you paid a good price for it, but all those other touch points that is a little bit more nuanced to us specifically.

Drew: What have been some things you’ve focused on to help the brand grow when you got here?

Jackson: Bringing media in-house allowed me to get closer to our acquisition efforts so we could start focusing on finding the high-value customers, and we did in a few ways. We did a pretty big segmentation [study] with the Cantor Group. It’s actually just finalizing right now where we can better understand our current customers and the potential opportunity with new consumers, [which is] something a lot of big brands have done for decades – customer research segmentation.

Drew: Then what happened?

We were lucky enough that we have first-party data. We knew a lot about our customers, but we hadn’t bubbled that up into themes and thematic around who are our four or five ideal customers based on lots of different factors. So we implemented that, and then started applying that to our acquisition efforts so we can be more focused and more specific on who and where we spend money for acquisition. The idea that okay, we’re just dropping a value-driven promo at 15% off on average and just targeting people we think would like Boxed, that’s great. But you don’t really know a lot about them and they’re really probably going to come in on the deal, and then the next time they shop they are looking for whoever has the best promo code.

Drew: What’s the goal?

What we want to do is attract you in with a great promo code. But if we know a little bit more about you, we know what drives you, we can lead with something that’s more important to you around a specific product or value prop versus me or someone else. And that’s where I really want to focus this data to drive better decisions on how we target and acquire new customers.

Drew: What’s the culture like at Boxed?

Jackson: Honestly Drew, this is one of the things that attracted me the most to Boxed. My interview [was] with Chieh Huang, CEO, one of the four founders, and my boss in the warehouse, for four hours. 90% of the conversation was about this values-driven initiative that he has undertaken with the co-founders around what this company stands for. And two examples of that are once he found out that a lot of employees were struggling with personal financial issues like sending their kids to college and weddings, which are maybe the two most expensive life things that happen in your world.

Drew: How did he help them?

Jackson: One thing that Chieh said as an immigrant, came here when he was one, his family really valued education. He had the chance to go to college himself and go to law school. He wanted to take care of that for our employees. He put his own equity, his own piece of the pie, money aside so if you’re an employee at Boxed and your kids are going to college, he’ll pay for tuition for four years.