Category: Show Notes

The Power of Storytelling

Posted on by

It’s not easy to get a breakthrough marketing strategy off the ground; it’s even more difficult to kick start a new idea in a highly regulated industry. This roadblock didn’t stop Manny Rodriguez, CMO of UCHealth, from developing an eye-opening campaign. Through patient-centric storytelling, he managed to help the university hospital network invigorate its message. This tender approach isn’t just business for Rodriguez. He is a leukemia survivor who underwent many of the types of treatments his team now promotes.

Manny Rodriguez discusses how UCHealth embraced the power of storytelling on the Renegade Thinkers Unite podcast. If you’d like to listen to the episode, click here. If you don’t have time to listen, you can read the notes below for a summarized account of the interview.

Rodruguez’s healthcare marketing philosophy goes against the grain. Hospitals and clinics often showcase their technologies and services in advertisements, much to Rodriguez’s chagrin. “I just believe healthcare marketers in general have lost sight of what matters,” he says. “We’ve gotten away from the fact that what we do is about the patient.” Instead of explaining how great UCHealth’s treatments are, Rodriguez set out to reach patients on a more personal level.

Rodriguez wanted his UCHealth’s advertisements to focus on clients and their experiences. Being a leukemia survivor, he understands the pain patients have to deal with. Rodriguez says, “Most health care brands look at themselves as the hero. We believe that our patients are the heroes.” UCHealth decided to let its heroes tell their stories from their own perspectives. The result was a series of heartfelt video testimonies given by actual UCHealth patients, like this one:

You can’t help but cry during these 90-second flashes of affection. As Rodriguez notes, “You really feel, hear, and sense the heartache and the emotion and the feeling in the story.” Although the scripts are written internally, the patients themselves deliver the lines. Who else could?

One of the biggest challenges Rodriguez has faced is advertising services that have such a negative connotation. “Nobody wants what I have,” Rodriguez says. “Nobody is sitting there going, ‘I can’t wait to have my liver removed or my heart surgery!’” The UCHealth marketing team remedies this problem by delivering what Rodriguez calls a “lifestyle brand.” The CMO continues, “I want to provide you [with] content and resources, and talk to you in a way that prevents you from being broken more than selling you a service when you’re broken.” Warmth is at the heart of the strategy, giving patients hope and comfort in UCHealth’s message.

Enhancing patient experience plays a big part in the brand’s marketing strategy. When someone goes to a hospital, obviously the biggest goal is to leave healthy. For Rodriguez, the peripherals of a hospital visit also matter greatly. Elements like staff friendliness, parking accessibility, and cafeteria food quality make a difference in the patient’s experience. “It’s the softer side of healthcare that I think we’re looking at as an organization—How do you build the softer side?” Rodriguez wonders. UCHealth answers this question by staffing itself with sympathetic employees. While health remains the top priority, patient experience is still important.

It’s been a bumpy ride for Rodriguez, as his own encounter with terminal illness has driven him to help other patients in need. He says, “Being a survivor of ultimately a disease that takes many lives is a motivator for everything I do.” Rodriguez recalls the personal experiences he’s had with medical professionals—some great, and some not so great. Ultimately, those instances have given him the drive to connect with patients through heartfelt passion and understanding. (These show notes were prepared by Jay Tellini.)

Bankruptcy as an Opportunity?

Posted on by

Filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection is not exactly a CMO’s dream situation. In fact, if handled poorly it could be a career-ending nightmare not to mention the potential reputational damage to the company. Fortunately for Avaya, which filed for Chapter 11 in January of 2017, CMO Morag Lucey provided the kind of courageous leadership that leaves one both awed and inspired. Lest you think we are exaggerating, have a listen to this episode and you’ll want to join the Morag Lucey fan club with us.

Click here to listen to Lucey explain how she helped Avaya weather the storm and come out all the stronger. Here are the highlights from this week’s episode:

There was nothing fundamentally wrong with Avaya when it filed for bankruptcy; earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) were high, and the brand maintained a healthy reputation. The culprit for Avaya’s Chapter 11 filing was its $6 billion debt. When the deficit grew too large to handle, the company needed to restructure itself financially.

Lucey, who was in charge of managing internal communications in regards to the bankruptcy filing, aspired to preserve Avaya’s image and address any worries about the brand’s stability. She managed the process by explaining the situation to Avaya’s customers, affiliates, and employees on a regular basis. “We met [with our constituents] daily and talked about the narrative of what was happening to us and why it was happening,” says Lucey. “And on the other side, we also balanced that with all of the positive that was happening.” Lucey made it perfectly clear that Avaya had no intention of going belly up.

On the day Avaya filed Chapter 11, the company was already working on a campaign to show that nothing was wrong with the service it offered. “The key is the stories that we tell,” says Lucey, “and the customers that continue to rely on us to provide that experience that is outstanding…this was just a debt issue. We [could] still execute in terms of serving the market.”

Openness was the key to Lucey’s communication strategy. From holding regular meetings to promoting CEO video communications to distributing employee newsletters, Avaya used a variety of mediums to keep its workers in the loop in regards to the impending changes.

The brand used storytelling to send the message they sought to get across. Avaya wanted to let its employees and customers know that bankruptcy wasn’t the end; it was a new beginning. Lucey explains, “It was very much a story about the future. We had to bring the past to the future, and so we really did write the narrative of where we’ve been and where [we are] going.”

For Lucey, storytelling is more than a means of keeping customers and employees at peace; it’s a mechanism to reach clients emotionally. “[What we do is] not just communications for companies to make big profits,” she says. “It’s really about the connection between people and it’s creating a world in which we can have more time to spend doing the things we want to do, while we seamlessly interact and communicate with all the things that we have to do because it’s mandatory in our life.” Business can be a welcomed, integrated part of life.

Even though Lucey was able to safeguard Avaya’s image in the face of bankruptcy and keep it going strong, she understands that her brand has to keep evolving to remain vigorous. She believes change is always imminent in marketing, and every CMO needs to be a “catalyst for change” to stay ahead of the curve. Lucey says, “Today, if you don’t look at transforming your marketing organization and really focusing on how the technology delivers to the customers in a way so they want to consume it, you’re going to be left behind.” Success today doesn’t necessarily equate to success tomorrow. Be ready when the call for innovation beckons. (These show notes were prepared by Jay Tellini.)

How a Global Brand Integrated Its Marketing Strategy

Posted on by

With great power comes great responsibility. When Lexmark acquired Kofax—an automation software company—in 2015, the now-global business was burdened with the task of streamlining its marketing functions. Kofax CMO Grant Johnson was tabbed for the job. It was Johnson’s duty to institute a centralized marketing plan that the company’s worldwide sectors could follow.

Grant Johnson talks about his formula for creating a unified, global marketing strategy in part two of his interview on the Renegade Thinkers Unite podcast (You can listen to the episode here.) Host Drew Neisser, accompanied by Inc. magazine author Bill Carmody, ask Johnson about his trials and triumphs. If you missed part one of this episode, you can listen to it here.

Here are some sample questions and answers from the podcast:

Drew: What’s your proudest accomplishment as a marketer at Kofax?

Grant: Bringing everyone together into a single, global marketing organization working with a common purpose to deliver a truly integrated marketing plan in 2017. I’ve been at Kofax for three and a half years and I started the process of uniting a very diverse and distributed organization in October, 2016 and then aligning all marketing functions, including channel, product and industry marketing, digital marketing and social media, demand generation, corporate marketing and communications to this new integrated approach.

Drew: What were the key steps in bringing that program to fruition?

Grant: To understand how this program was brought to fruition, I need to first provide a perspective on the organizational structure I inherited before this program idea came to mind. Lexmark purchased Kofax for about $1 Billion in May 2015. They had an existing enterprise software group comprised of Perceptive Software, purchased in 2010 and ReadSoft, purchased late in 2014, as the two primary brands. A few months after the CEO of Kofax was made President of Lexmark Enterprise Software, I was asked to take on the entire global software marketing organization.

The first step was to meet the various leaders and teams and review global marketing programs to understand what I had, what was similar or different, and what gaps existed.   Kofax is based in Irvine, CA, Perceptive is based in Lenexa, near Kansas City and ReadSoft was headquartered in Sweden, and each company had somewhat divergent approaches to marketing, along with some natural cultural differences you would expect.

We already had a division-wide integration process underway to unify systems, processes and procedures under a consistent approach, so I just added a new work stream entitled “marketing best practices.” This became a great way to gather the people, review the work processes, systems and programs and inventory what we had across the three initially disparate groups.

Drew: What were some of the biggest hurdles to overcome?

Grant: Because people were used to doing things in different ways, they had to learn as well as “unlearn” certain habits or practices. A key step to getting this new process going was actually creating a blueprint for how integrated marketing would work at Kofax. We consulted with a few outside firms like Sirius Decisions to ensure we could leverage insights from how others are doing integrated marketing successfully. In putting together the various functional components of the plan, I came up with the idea to put our entire 2017 plan on a page. There were a few reasons to do this. One was to break down the functional silos, say in channel, field and product marketing, so everyone could see how their part was connected to a holistic approach. I had observed what I call “random acts of marketing,” not necessarily intentional, but nevertheless, discrete and disjointed in their impact in the market. This integrated approach improved our collaboration and cohesion – so integrated marketing became the glue for the organization.

We’ve all know the phrase “getting everyone on the same page.” In this case, that fact that every group could see how they were contributing to and impacting the integrated plan helped literally get them on the same page they could refer to, communicate and understand.

Drew: What is great work and how do you know it’s great work?

 Grant: It connects, it responds, it resonates. People shout about it in the halls, they forward it to each other, customers comment on it. It’s so easy to do something that just works. You have to be willing to take some risks. I have to have the ability to say yes or no. What’s it’s like is taking a beautiful distinctive object and every person who touches it sands it down and what you get is something that nobody can object to and nobody likes.

Last Thoughts

When getting many moving parts to work together, simplicity is the way to go. Complications—whether they’re between branches or within your own office—can hurt your business. Coordinating your efforts, however, will give your organization a greater chance to thrive.

How Kofax Clicks with Its Digital Community

Posted on by

If one phrase could be used to describe the philosophy of marketing in 2017, it would be “customers come first.” Gone are the days of product pushing as a surefire advertising strategy. Consumers want to find solutions to the problems they encounter. Marketers have to address those needs from first contact to have a shot at a sale. And really, that’s how it should be—marketing brands as answers and showing that there are people behind the brand who care about the consumer.

Kofax CMO Grant Johnson is leading the way in putting the customer first. His team speaks its clients’ language, delivering an authentic persona at every buying stage.

Below, you can listen to part one of Grant Johnson’s interview with Renegade Thinkers Unite host Drew Neisser, and Bill Carmody, entrepreneur and Inc. magazine author.

If you don’t have time to listen to the whole podcast, check out these sample questions and answers from this episode:

Drew: What is one non-traditional technique that you have used with success? Why do you think it worked so well? 

Grant: I think we are a bit nontraditional here at Kofax in that we follow an “aim-ready-fire approach” vs. the traditional “ready-aim-fire.”   Over 3 years ago I determined that we had to get to best-in-class in our digital marketing capabilities, but I didn’t have a completely baked plan on how to get there. I hired a very strong leader and we crafted the vision and started the journey together. Since then, we’ve doubled in size from just over $300 million to more than $600 million in revenues, and as we’ve integrated several companies, we’ve taken the best aspects and brought together the best people from each to become much better across the board in digital marketing. We also do a lot experimenting and iterating, and not everything works, so when we strike a rich vein, like some of our PPC or retargeting efforts, we pour gas on those fires and smother the less successful endeavors as fast as possible.

 

Bill: Once you’ve mapped out that journey and you really thought through the content strategies, how are you measuring the effectiveness of the content in each of those individual prototypes?

Grant: One of the ways that is a good proxy, is through social media. We have very active social media. We do something called go social. We encourage any field-facing staff to try to engage and share content. We have this great tool called push-button content. I just published my second blog on a 4-part serious about a step-wise approach to digital transformation. As people share that, they say “I’ve got this problem, can someone contact me?” It’s not a perfect science, there’s always art, but it helps.

 

Drew: It’s hard to get our marketing messages to stand out…what is one thing you do to make sure your marketing cuts through?

Grant: We take great pains to avoid the one-size-fits-all approach or what I call random acts of marketing. Instead, we work toward truly integrated marketing campaigns that encompass print, digital, social, etc. Part of cutting through effectively is a relentless focus on delivering consistent messaging across every touch point and element of a given campaign. Like many companies, our customer base cuts across a range of verticals – from Banking and Financial Services and Insurance to Healthcare, Government and BPOs. For some of these verticals, like banking, we frame the message around their primary concerns, e.g. how we can help enhance the customer experience (faster account openings and easier loan applications through mobile apps, etc.). We call that “customer speak,” instead of techno speak, and it really helps us stand out from the cacophony of competitors touting their offerings.

 

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

Grant: Marketing never stops. It’s impossible to ever become complacent in anything I do or my team creates and delivers. In the past, you could sort of get the plates spinning, say your public relations and field marketing were going well, you could just let them run and focus on say bolstering digital marketing or fine tuning product marketing. Now, however, not only is the rate of change relentless, the mandate to continually improve is stronger than ever. We celebrate the little victories, but we can never rest of any achievement, we have to continually strive. Now this may sound daunting to some marketers, but to me it’s actually invigorating. I chose this career because it was dynamic and I’m restless by nature, so I love the disruptive innovation and measurability of modern marketing and all the challenges that presents. The only constant is change, and if you are adaptable and can thrive in what has become a very accountable function, there’s never been a more exciting time to be a marketer.

Final Thoughts

You can never have too many friends. Staying in touch with your digital community will keep your brand fresh and relevant. If you play your cards right, you’ll get plenty of referrals. All you have to do is maintain an active social media presence. (These show notes were prepared by Jay Tellini.)

Exercises to Improve your Marketing Fitness

Posted on by

Brace yourself for the most inspiring episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite thus far. In fact, our guest Coss Marte, had us choking back tears. His story begins a little over a decade ago, when he kick started his own enterprise as a teenager in front of a New York City bodega. By age 19, Marte’s business was raking in over $2 million dollars a year. He ran into trouble shortly thereafter, and in less than ten years he was scrubbing toilets at a reconstructed hotel to pay his rent.

The reason for Marte’s struggles is simple: his business was the business of selling drugs. He was incarcerated at 23 on charges related to peddling drugs, and spent seven years in prison.

Marte, now 31, is a free man and an up-and-coming marketing phenom. Upon his release from prison, he founded ConBody—a prison style fitness program where students work out with minimal equipment. Thanks to Marte’s marketing guts, ConBody is now one of the fastest growing fitness programs in NYC. To be frank, the young entrepreneur probably knows more about advertising than most CMOs. [Note: Drew was first introduced to Coss Marte at this year’s PSFK conference, a must attend event for any renegade thinker.]

You can listen to Marte share his inspiring story on the Renegade Thinkers Unite podcast episode embedded above.

As you might expect, the seedlings of ConBody—which is short for “convict body”—came while Marte was incarcerated. “I got my first medical examination and was told that I could die in prison because of my health issues,” he says. “As soon as they told me this, I went back to my cell and I started doing lunges, and any type of exercise I probably knew.” Marte lost 70 pounds in six months after customizing his own exercise routine. Not long afterwards, he helped over 20 inmates lose over a thousand pounds combined.

Having inspired others to make positive lifestyle changes, Marte started thinking about his past—and his future. “I started realizing that I was creating a web of destruction,” he says, “and for the first time I started praying and asking God, ‘How can I give back?’ And that’s when ConBody was born.” Marte mapped out a plan for an exercise center while he was in solitary confinement, and then turned those blueprints into action when he was released a year later.

Marte’s bold marketing tactics helped put ConBody on the exercise studio map. He began marketing his business by speaking to women who were doing yoga in public spaces. Simply talking to them about ConBody, Marte managed to steadily build a customer base. “There [have] been times,” he states, “where I stood on the train and said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, pay attention.’… I tell my story and I’ll tell about ConBody.” Marte says he continues to share his story about 20 times a day, never underestimating word-of-mouth.

ConBody has boomed since its inception. Upon speaking at a conference, Marte was approached by a woman who offered him the opportunity to open a ConBody location in one of New York City’s most famous luxury department stores, Saks Fifth Avenue. This change in fortune still gives Marte goose bumps. He says, “Every time I go up to the second floor [of Saks], I start smiling because the first thing [I] see on the floor is a mannequin with a ConBody t-shirt on.”

ConBody’s studio atmosphere is no doubt responsible for part of its success. With the intention of motivating participants, Marte designed the studio like a prison. Brick walls and prison bars line the fitness center. Signs that read “five minute showers” and “do the time” line the interior. At ConBody, you’ll find all the same body weight equipment as you would in a prison. This gritty appearance is one of the business’s most popular features, giving members a hardcore workout experience.

Following Marte’s lead, marketers should strive to provide consumers with a similarly exceptional experience. This is the driving force behind ConBody. “If I keep going and I keep delivering a great product,” Marte says, “no matter what I’m going to wake up, I’m going to be okay, and I’m going to live life.” (These show notes were prepared by Jay Tellini.)

How Mars Makes Content the Cat’s Meow

Posted on by

The customer should be at the center of every marketing campaign. Before selling, though, advertisers need to make the right impression. Content that connects with target audiences is king nowadays, as message pushing continues to wane in effectiveness. Businesses must adapt to their target’s needs in order to have a fighting chance at conversions. Award-winning content marketer Rob Rakowitz, Global Director of Media at Mars, understands better than most that catering to your audience drives brand engagement. (Show notes by Jay Tellini).

Hear Rakowitz share his marketing advice on this week’s episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite. You can listen to the podcast above. Here are this episode’s highlights:

Understanding how customers behave is an essential step towards marketing success. Mars’s Uncle Ben’s brand team noticed that consumers who start their meals with rice are more likely to select a lean protein or a vegetable to go along with it. Under Rakowitz’s leadership, the brand message was refocused accordingly. Rakowitz says, “Uncle Ben’s is about helping consumers make sure that they’re making great food choices on a daily basis.”

To promote this message, Rakowitz’s team launched health-driven campaigns for the brand. In the UK, for instance, the team created a series of short viral videos with a celebrity chef to show consumers how to prepare healthy foods. Given the correlation between Uncle Ben’s products and consumers’ healthy meal choices, the campaign yielded some savory results for Rakowitz’s team at Mars.

Rakowitz used behavioral data to manage the campaign and repurposed the videos for a variety of mediums. “We then figured out how to take that two-minute video and cut it down to 30’s,” says Rakowitz, “which we could put on TV and various social channels—Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.” This campaign owes much of its success to the marketing team’s willingness to learn about Uncle Ben’s target audience—what they want, how they behave and where they go to get their information.

Once Mars finds their customer insights, Rakowitz and his marketing team work to produce a clear and meaningful message. “Media is starting to hit more and more functions both within marketing and outside of it,” says Rakowitz. “The more you can simplify down what it is that [your business is] trying to do from a vision perspective, the better an idea travels.” Because the Uncle Ben’s team made the brand’s healthy eating message clear and executed it efficiently, Rakowitz had a more successful campaign on his hands.

A clear message also depends on defined goals, which Rakowitz says that Uncle Ben’s, Pedigree, and Snickers have all done well. “These brands truly understand that they need to reach more and more customers,” Rakowitz says. “The way that they’re going to do that is not just by throwing advertisers out there, but it’s by actually really figuring out what is their brand’s purpose.” Mars frames its products as solutions rather than simply as objects to establish credible brand identities in the minds of consumers.

Once those impressions are in place, it’s important that target audiences can maintain a healthy relationship with the brand. It all leads back to 4 C’s of conversion, according to Rakowitz: consumers, customers, communications, and commerce. When companies tie these pieces together, they’ll be well positioned to create and execute valuable messages.

Sometimes this means offering a service before selling. Like the Uncle Ben’s campaign, Mars also found value in educating consumers for the corporation’s Whiskas cat food product line. This team launched Kitten Kollege, a series of tongue-in-cheek videos that informed kitten owners about their pets’ life stages. Even though the campaign didn’t specifically push Whiskas, Kitten Kollege earned tangible results for Mars. Rakowitz says, “A lot of the insights that we shared were actually proprietary to Mars and we were able to connect them back to Whiskas.”

Offering a helpful service to customers was a core tenet of both the Whiskas and Uncle Ben’s campaigns. Rakowitz recommends that any other business do the same for its brands. “Don’t message push,” he says. “Think about creating an experience and a solution.”