Category: Show Notes

Why Marketers Need to Think About Cyber Security — Now!

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Although the Equifax hack put cybersecurity on the priority list for over 140 million Americans and scared the heck out of many others including yours truly, it is hardly a new issue for consumers. Major hacks at Yahoo and Target a few years back put many on high alert. So, you might ask, “What is new here and why should cybersecurity be a priority issue for senior marketers?”  Well, as it turns out, all that marketing technology senior marketers recently brought into their companies has created even more exposure for company data and the consumers with whom they do business. Sure enough, the pursuit of big data to optimize sales, marketing and customer experience efforts, has put companies at risk, in a remarkably big way. And of course, a data breach will inevitably become a brand breach as the folks at Equifax can attest. So batten down the hatches and have a listen as Norman Guadagno, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Carbonite, a data security company, shares his thoughts on why this is such a big problem and some of the steps that marketers can take to prevent or at least mitigate the impact of a security breach. (You can listen to this episode just by clicking on this link.)

Guadagno discussion with host Drew Neisser yields a number of recommendations for marketers:

  1. Assume you will be hacked and prepare a crisis plan;
  2. Befriend your CFO, CTO and Security experts within your company;
  3. Recognize that with each new marketing technology that you bring in, you will need to make sure that resources are allocated to secure that technology;
  4. Consider bringing in an outside security expert to identify and address your biggest points of vulnerability;
  5. Continue to make “deposits” in the “goodwill bank” with your customers by offering extraordinary customer service (this goodwill will help you weather a security storm);
  6. If you are hacked, be as transparent as possible about the problem and how you are going about addressing the problem.  That said, make sure that your efforts themselves are tough to hack!

Also, early in the show, Drew mentioned a few resources to check to see if the Equifax hack had an impact on you personally and if so, what to do about:

  • Equifax resource– To see if your data was compromised, Equifax set up this special site at which you enter your last name and the last digits of your SSN.  There are only two answers, Yes or No.

  • If Yes — You don’t necessarily have to enroll in the program Equifax offers BUT you do need take some action steps right away.  Here’s a link to Steve Faktor’s thorough post on what to do which we found to be particularly smart and useful.

Supersizing your Customer Service Techniques

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More and more brands are recognizing that consumers are people and have human needs. When customers raise questions and concerns, businesses should be swift with helpful responses. Dan Gingiss, Senior Director of Global Media for McDonald’s, champions customer service as a major component of the brand experience. Satisfied consumers can be invaluable assets, he believes. Since people are becoming increasingly accustomed to having their brand questions answered via social media, it’s crucial to maintain a strong and efficient platform presence.

As a published author and podcast host, Dan understands the power of communication for engaging audiences. The right approach to starting brand conversations and addressing customer issues depends heavily on the technology and manpower behind it. In some instances, Dan finds, AI provides communication solutions. In others, however, it’s necessary to provide clients with a human representative. (These show notes were prepared by Jay Tellini.)  You can find Dan’s book, Winning at Social Customer Care: How Top Brands Create Engaging Experiences on Social Media on Amazon.

On this episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite, Dan provides expert customer service insights. He also offers podcasting advice, explaining some of the challenges and successes of his show. You can listen to the RTU episode here. These are some sample questions and answers from Dan’s interview with host Drew Neisser:

 

Drew: What is your podcast about?

Dan: The show is called Focus on Customer Service. We interview brands that are doing social customer care really while we don’t talk a ton about marketing, but it is all social media and it’s all focused on the “how do you engage with customers?” piece of it.

Drew: Tell me about an episode or two that made you go, “Oh my God, that was just so great!”

Dan: Two of them surprised me. One of them was probably one of my favorite episodes. Definitely top three out of 51 was a guy named Scott Wise who owns Scotty’s Brewhouse. If you read Jay Baer’s book, Hug Your Haters, he’s also in that book. Scotty’s Brewhouse is about a dozen or more pizza and Brewery kind of places in Indiana, and I think he’s expanded into Florida. When I asked Scotty what business he was in, he told me he was in the customer service business. That surprised me so I pushed him a little bit and I said, “Well what do you mean? Like at your own restaurants, are you telling me that customer service is more important than the food?” “Absolutely!” he says. Like not even a question. “If you have a restaurant that has amazing food and crappy service, you have no customers,” he said. “But if you have a restaurant that has good food–great food–and incredible service, you have loyal customers for life.” He focused his entire brand on this is the place you come for amazing service. He follows through on that on social media. He told some really funny stories about people even tweeting while they were sitting at a table and he answers the tweet basically by calling the manager of the restaurant and saying, “Get over to table 48 and solve this problem!” So he was doing it in real time, which I thought was amazing.

Drew: What was the other episode that surprised you?

Dan: One other example that I really loved was the guys from Spotify. The reason I love this example is that they integrate their product into their responses. If you tweet at Spotify, oftentimes what they’ll do is respond back with a personalized Spotify playlist that when you read the titles of the songs from top to bottom are actually the answer to your question. They’ve built their own proprietary algorithms so they can sort of type in the answer and it spits out the songs. But I thought that was so clever and such a great use of the product and so I started looking. There are some other companies that are doing a nice job of this as well, integrating in their product in some way to sort of show that personality and to frankly differentiate from all the other companies out there.

Drew: When you were at Humana, you focused on generating real-time responses to customer questions. How did that translate into perceptions about Humana among customers?

Dan: Let’s all be honest. The healthcare industry is in a difficult spot in the United States and healthcare companies are not exactly the kinds of brands that people wake up in the morning hoping to engage with during the day. Frankly, I think it’s important to acknowledge that. I acknowledge that when I was a discoverer as well. Nobody wakes up wanting to talk to the credit card company. They do because they have to or because they need to. I think it was important to acknowledge that and then to acknowledge that when people need help and it pertains to their health, it’s a very sensitive personal situation that is emotionally charged. It was really important that we train our agents to understand that and to know that it isn’t really about that we declined a claim. It’s about that somebody has an illness and needs some service from a doctor and their insurance is saying no. That’s an emotional moment right there. A lot of times the reason why a claim was declined because it was the wrong code or it was some stupid thing that you could fix. I think the expectations were low because we were in this industry that people love to hate.

Drew: What happened when people tweeted at Humana?

Dan: When people tweeted at us or posted on Facebook and we responded, I think you could tell it was a pleasant surprise. A lot of times people would tweet you–almost could tell from the text that they didn’t expect us to respond. I do think that was successful in changing perceptions in that way.

Drilling for Brand Loyalty

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Shell Retail is the only major fuel brand that operates in all 50 states. And yet, Head of North American Marketing Dan Little says the company is in the middle of the pack when it comes to brand loyalty. After launching several loyalty-building campaigns that haven’t taken root, the gasoline company is trying to change that.

Earlier this year, Dan and his team launched a rewards program called Instant Gold Status. In this effort to amplify brand love, Shell now offers customers the chance to save 5 cents per gallon at the pump through Instant Gold Status. Since only 10-15% of Shell customers are true brand loyalists, this campaign has the potential to tap into a well of opportunity.

Dan describes the cut-thru strategies his team is developing on the Renegade Thinkers Unite podcast. Click here to listen to the episode. We’ve also prepared some sample questions and answers from the interview in case you don’t have time to listen to the podcast:

 

Drew: There are a lot of fuel brands that are acceptable. How difficult is it to get people to regularly choose Shell?

Dan: So less than 20 percent of the population [is] truly loyal to a single brand, and the rest of the 80 percent have a consideration set. And, of course, the consideration set of brands are different for those different segments that we talked about. But if you are in one of those three that I talked about—if you’re not one of those 20 percent that are loyal to Shell all the time—you might be buying Shell when it’s convenient, and you might be buying another major brand that you think is as good a quality, or perceived that way, when that’s convenient.

Drew: How are you planning to address this issue?

Dan: The role of our loyalty program is to get them to make one more right turn instead of a left turn. Give them one more reason to be a bit stickier to the Shell brand. And we find over five years of having a true loyalty program in the marketplace, we find that absolutely works. Surprise! Loyalty works, and that we see new members coming in–whether they were existing customers or new to Shell customers–and increasing their frequency of purchase at Shell on a monthly basis significantly. Not only that, now getting back to our independent dealers, what we see is it drives not only fuel sales; it drives in-store convenience retail sales for our dealers at their sites which is a big part of the proposition for our dealer network as well.

Drew: So you launched the Instant Gold Status reward program. What were your going-in expectations?

Dan: Well because we don’t operate the retail sites ourselves, it presents at least two different challenges, and one is the economics of loyalty. So you have to get a certain uplift in order to pay for the benefits and the value you’re putting into the loyalty offer. And being a supplier, being the brand and the supplier–but not the operator of the site where a lot of the value and the margin is created–that can be a challenge. So number one, we had to go out and prove to ourselves the uplift that we need to create the value to have an ROI on a program like this exists. That was one thing that we were able to do. And then the second was to break through the awareness and understanding barriers that you have in loyalty programs to get conversion.

Drew: What is your goal with the program?

Dan: And what we are seeking to do is take the conversion rates that we had in the past and triple them. We want to triple the penetration that we have of our loyalty program. And to do that we said we’re going to have to do something we never have done before and that is reach out and involve our wholesalers’ and retailers’ site staff.

Drew: What are some of the key insights from having piloted this and now rolled it out nationally?

Dan: Well for us it was about building broad awareness. It was about converting at the site and getting our site staff involved in it. But stepping back from that, the loyalty program in general–because we’ve been on this this journey for five six years now–it really requires a top down commitment in strategy and philosophy from executive management down. And so without that you’re not going to stay on the journey that it takes to build the membership base to invest in the VI, the technical platform, to bring in the partners. It’s just not going to hold. And I think the second piece is, we’ve learned we’ve had to become even better at partnering, meaning using technology and loyalty partners and agencies, but also reaching out to other brands and finding where we can cross-promote and cross-sell and add value to their engagements with their consumers and bring their consumers into our fold and become Instant Gold members. So I’d say top down commitment and philosophy. It’s a culture here. And I think also skills in partnering. You can’t do this with an internal view.

Moving from Storytelling to Story Living Through VR

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Marketing has undergone drastic changes in the last 100 years. At the start of the twentieth century, advertisers started hooking consumers in new ways, appealing to the psychology of storytelling to sell products. With the recent birth of social media, marketers took this strategy up a notch by further personalizing those messages. Now, we are on the brink of another marketing revolution. Virtual reality, or VR, seeks to fully immerse consumers, figuratively and literally providing 360-degree story experiences. Zoo, which is Google’s creative think tank, initiated a study on VR and is now working on ways to discover its full potential.

Abigail Posner, Head of Strategic Planning for Zoo, boldly claims that storytelling is evolving into story living through VR. A student of anthropology, Abigail sees great promise in VR’s ability to connect people and brands on an essential level. Even though VR is more or less in its infancy stage, it may play a critical in both marketing and culture in the near future.  [Note: Drew saw Abigail speak at this year’s PSFK conference, a must attend event for any renegade thinker!]

On this episode of the Renegade Thinkers Unite podcast, Abigail shares her expert VR insights with host Drew Neisser. She describes some unexpected use cases for the platform and discusses ways in which marketers may soon be able to capitalize on this new technology. You can listen to the episode here. If you don’t have time to listen to the whole thing, check out these sample Q&As from the interview:

Drew: VR has been talked about for years and years and years as the next thing. Are we finally at the point where this is going to become at least semi-mass?

Abigail: I think it’s a combination of a number of things. One is that we have enough experiences under our belt to recognize the value of it, whether it’s gamers playing it, whether it’s porn, whether it’s the fact that doctors are using it. All of a sudden, there’s a range of different worlds that are recognizing its value and it’s hitting mainstream. That’s number one. Number two, as we brought up before, the actual physical headsets themselves are becoming more accessible, whether it’s accessible that we can wear them or accessible price wise. That helps. And then finally the technology itself is evolving. So it’s becoming finer tuned. It’s becoming more accessible so that we can use it on a number of different platforms integrated into our phones and so forth. It’s a combination of a number of different factors. And then I just think generally we are becoming just more comfortable and agile with what it means to create a story in this space.

Drew: Are there any brands that are using this immersive technology right now that you can talk about and that are paving the way for others?

Abigail: Yes, we’ve seen it in a couple of different genres or categories. One is what R/GA recently launched with Guinness, which is an experience that you can experience inside a convenience store, inside a store that sells beer. And so instead of just giving you a message about the beer, you actually get to experience the shapes and the smells and the angles of beer in a way that you never would have thought of before, really giving you the essence of beer. So that’s one example. I mean whoever thought of getting to the essence of beer in that way?

Drew: How are brands going to learn how to use VR?

Abigail: I think it’s going to be about brands recognizing the role they play and how they want the user / consumer / human being to respond to them. Here’s another example that we created. This is like the ultimate PSA. We worked with The National Transportation Highway Safety Board, and they are trying to do something quite important, quite serious. It is not entertaining whatsoever, and that’s about preventing drunk driving. Probably one of the most critical endeavors that we have today, especially among young people. And so instead of creating the same type of story over and over again, which is, “Here’s what you do when you drive drunk, you hurt people or you hurt yourself.” It wasn’t effective. It just wasn’t doing what it needed to do. The results were just not in, that it was positively stopping drunk driving. They said we’re going to create a VR 360 experience where people would themselves experience as sober people, what happens to themselves as they get increasingly drunk.

Drew: How does that work?

Abigail: Where you’re playing bar games for example, and all of a sudden you don’t have the same trajectory you used to, or the sounds that are penetrating your brain are now more muffled and you come across as really funny to your friends. And all of a sudden you realize, which you wouldn’t realize being drunk, how affected you are as someone drunk. And so your cognitive side of your brain goes, “I don’t want to get behind a wheel now because now I can see how affected I am.” So it’s not entertaining as much as it is educational.

Drew: If I’m a brand, and I’m looking at VR right now, what are some of the things that I should be trying to do to capitalize on this burgeoning channel?

Abigail: Recognize that this is not a story-like experience that we’ve ever had before. In other words, it’s not a linear story. It’s not a place where you can message something that has a beginning middle or an end. It is not a space that a marketer can control. Rather, it is a highly sensory highly visceral place, so leverage senses. Recognize that people are going knee-deep in. It’s highly immersive, which is wonderful. It’s highly absorbing, so therefore you cannot be distracted by anything else. But in that experience you have to realize that this is not a place where you can distract them with stories and language. Let them go and experience a world by themselves. There are so many different nooks and crannies for them on Earth, and people want to do that. Let them do that. Give them the opportunity to just kind of see everything from different angles.

To Boldly Go Where No Marketer Has Gone Before

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Many CMOs take their client base for granted. Even though they may put a lot of time and effort into building that base and retaining customers, most marketers are fortunate enough to have an existing network of consumers to work with. When Trip Hunter set out to promote Silicon Valley’s first-ever ComicCon in 2016, he needed to start from square one. Trip’s genius advertising prowess—along with some help from Steve Wozniak—helped the con bring in over 60,000 attendees. Great Scott!

Silicon Valley ComicCon wasn’t Trip’s first crack at delivering a dynamite marketing strategy. He’s been implementing cut-through tactics for nearly 20 years with brands like Renegade, Fusion-io, and Primary Data. A strong believer in the “no risk, no reward” theory of marketing, Hunter is the quintessential renegade thinker!

Trip Hunter discusses some of his boldest marketing ambitions on the Renegade Thinkers Unite podcast with host and former business partner, Drew Neisser. You can listen to the episode here. If you don’t have time to listen to the whole podcast, you can check out these sample questions and answers below:

Drew: There were a lot of comic cons already when you started this two years ago. How did you make sure that Silicon Valley ComicCon was unique?

Trip: Steve Wozniak is one of the partners of both companies that I work at and he wanted to do a ComicCon that was not just about pop culture. He wanted it to include science and technology because in his mind, these two things drive each other. And so I don’t think there are many shows out there that balanced content between technology and pop culture as well as we do.

Drew: What role did social play in the overall marketing program?

Trip: We started with nothing two years ago—we had no social following at all. So it takes a while to build that up and once you kind of hit a certain level, it starts to grow pretty quickly. But one of the reasons that I think it was successful was, we focused on creating ownership. So we weren’t just talking to people, we were engaging them and asking them how they wanted to shape the event. That empowerment allowed them to recommend guests; one person said I want to do a cosplay show for dogs. I don’t think anybody had done a doggy cosplay, and that became a huge component.

Drew: How did it go?

Trip: The press loved that! That came directly from the people that we were listening to. So again I think it’s about listening and then giving people the ability to help shape and create the event.

Drew: What was one risky marketing stunt you pulled off at Primary Data?

Trip: For the launch of Primary Data, we wanted to do something that was also big and about moving just because moving data is what we do, and so we brought Nitro Circus into South Hall, which is a building at the San Jose Convention Center. These guys have these massive ramps that take all day to set up. The first guy goes off the ramp on his motorcycle—this is an enclosed building and the ceiling is 80 feet in the air—and as he goes by one of the giant lights he reaches out and taps the light. I went over and said, “Well, I’m not sure this is going to work.” And he said, “No, no it’s going to be fine. That light was a good three feet from me.” So we changed things around, but the next time he went off it, he did a backflip and it was right next to the ceiling. It didn’t seem to bother anybody, so away we went and Nitro Circus did a big indoor show and people loved that.

Drew: What was the story there?

Trip: Again, it had to do with moving data: showing that moving data is difficult, but also showing that there are very few people that know how to do it. Nitro Circus in this instance was one of those very special groups that knows how to do this and nobody else does. At Primary Data, what we’re trying to do hasn’t really been accomplished yet and so we’ve kind of put ourselves in that vein. Now granted, that’s a pretty thin line. It’s about Nitro Circus—they’re just amazingly cool to watch, and for a launch party, it doesn’t take much more than that.

Drew: What is the toughest lesson you’ve learned when it comes to marketing?

Trip: For me, the toughest lesson has been staying up with the evolution of marketing and I think it’s really easy for us to become complacent in the channels that we’ve tried. Just because it worked before doesn’t mean it will work again. It is one of the things that Silicon Valley ComicCon has taught me especially as I move back to B2B marketing is the importance of social and all of the different channels working together harmoniously.

The Ingredients to KFC’s New VR Recipe

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In terms of marketing technology, virtual reality is one of the newest kids on the block. As Google’s Abigail Posner previously discussed with RTU host Drew Neisser, VR has the potential to become a dominant advertising platform sooner rather than later. Many brands are already figuring out ways to improve consumer experiences through VR.

KFC is one such company. The 70-year-old quick-service chain recently initiated a VR experienced that will help teach new cooks how to prepare fried chicken under the watchful eyes of Colonel Sanders. The game, which is called “The Hard Way: A KFC Virtual Training Escape Room,” isn’t just a publicity stunt. According to KFC’s Director of Advertising George Felix, it aims to help recruit and train quality candidates (These show notes were prepared by Jay Tellini.)

On this episode, key members of KFC’s marketing team explain how the new VR training program is “re-colonelizing” the brand. You can listen by clicking this link.

Here are some excerpts from the interview:

Drew: What is the strategy behind KFC’s VR effort?

George: It’s definitely an interesting endeavor for us. It starts with the fact that we have cooks in every one of our restaurants that are hand preparing the Colonel’s original recipe chicken. That means that we have about nineteen thousand cooks across the country that go through extensive training, we call it Chicken Mastery Certification, in order to make Kentucky Fried Chicken. There’s nothing that’s changing about that. There’s no replacement for getting your hands dirty and making chicken in the restaurant.

Drew: How does Colonel Sanders play into the VR game?

We really saw an opportunity “Colonelizing” the brand. The best person to teach someone to make our original recipe would be Colonel Sanders himself. Through the magic of virtual reality technology, we’ve been able to bring the colonel back in a fun and engaging way that we think can supplement our training and really bring a sense of pride and excitement to the team members. Honestly, when you compare us to other quick-serve restaurants, it’s a point of difference that we have cooks in every kitchen that are hand-preparing meals. We want our team members to feel that pride and excitement.

Drew: How much of the VR strategy is marketing, and how much of this is real training and employee engagement?

George: I think it’s both parts. There’s a definitive purpose we want from a training aspect that really brings attention and pride to this process. Of course, we want to reinforce the fact that we do have nineteen thousand cooks across the country making KFC. By doing things with virtual reality, we’re also hoping that we not only draw in younger customers but also we attract high-potential talent to work in a Kentucky Fried Chicken and this is a brand that they want to be associated with.

Drew: I’m imagining that a lot of your future cooks are millennials. Did that factor into KFC’s thinking in terms of developing a gaming experience?

George: Absolutely. The idea of making this gamified, escape room idea and the colonel not letting you out until you’ve proven that you know his way of making Kentucky Fried Chicken was a big part of that. We know that our team members and our cooks are the lifeblood of the brand. We’re extremely proud of the work they do and we want to make a brand that they’re proud to work for.