Tag: CMO

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.

Transforming into a Design-Led CMO

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Marketers are often challenged with advertising a product as it exists. Even if that product has a glaring need or opportunity for improvement, there’s nothing the marketing team can do about it. Fortunately, Rambus CMO Jerome Nadel has something to say about that. He guides a design-led marketing team that influences product creation. This forward-thinking strategy helps Rambus stay on the cutting edge and deliver first-rate materials.

Jerome discusses the challenges and rewards of being a design-led CMO on episode 35 of Renegade Thinkers Unite. You can listen to that episode here. If you don’t have time to listen, you can check out this sample of our interview below.

Drew: From our past conversations, I’d describe you as a marketing renegade. Is that fair and is there room for you to be a renegade in your role at Rambus?

Jerome: I’d say independent of my role here, I would probably be a renegade with a capital “R.” As you mentioned in the intro, I was working in Paris and came here in 2012 — and was recruited by my current boss, Dr. Ron Black who I had worked with before in Europe. So he knew that I’m a bit quirky and not a typical marketer. He, as a serial entrepreneur, has been an advocate for the value of user experience and design thinking. When he brought me in, he knew what he was getting. I’d say that I’m not a typical exec marketer.

Drew: When did user experience and design thinking really take off?

Jerome: As we came into the 2000, the notion of differentiation through user experience became sort of the mantra for product success. So, as we go deeper in the conversation, what I’ll suggest is the difference between user experience and marketing or design-led marketing are really minimal. What user experience professionals focus on is the upstream concepting of, what’s the narrative that makes product great? Not just in terms of its features but how should it work and how does it support use cases? Often what marketers are focused on is telling stories about why products are great. If you connect the stories that made the product great with the stories that reinforce and articulate their greatness, you have beginning to end of full marketing. Ironically Drew, I don’t think that such a radical construct but I think it’s not embraced to the extent that it should be in the profession that we share.

Drew: What I thought I heard you say is, through the design process we can actually bake a marketing idea into the product. Did I oversimplify that?

Jerome: No, it should be simple and it’s exactly that. You know firstly –and it’s interesting for me with respect — I had come to Silicon Valley through my career on multiple times, even as an interface design consultant. I was so excited to be part of the CMO community out here. What I find is many people in very senior level roles, especially in larger organizations that sort of segment contribution, have CMOs today focused very much on downstream demand-gen, and lead-gen as their key priority and KPI. That’s important, but again, design-lead marketing embraces design-thinking, and is fundamentally connected to the product or service conception through, what I would speak to, is design methods.

Drew: Can you go a bit on what you mean on design-led marketing?

Jerome: So on that, we’re thinking about use cases and stories that are created to design the product or service, and are natural and believable. So they should be used in promotion, and I really advocate this approach. Simply what we’re saying when you think agile, lean development, is that the CMO organizationally might be more connected to product marketing. But from an NPI or a new product introduction methodology, the MRD (marketing requirements document) that lead to the PRD (product requirements document) and ultimately the engineer requirements, start with this way of thinking. So the stories that we create in product concepting, and the use cases around that should be what we reinforce downstream. We make better things. They’re easier to promote and sell.

Drew: Do you think a design led CMO can succeed without a CEO who understands and supports it as well?

 Jerome: Well you can be successful but I think you’re going to be constrained. You know you could look at the foundation of Silicon Valley — a lot of brilliant technologists become the leader of the company and they’re intrigued by the technology. Or you go to a public company where CEOs unfortunately feel (especially when you’re public) that it’s all about quarterly revenue and they get a bit myopic in terms of the value of the product. It’s more about the revenue it creates. I think it’s incumbent on the CMO, the marketer, to help influence, to show that more romantic view that good products do sell better. I love the notion of incremental, where this doesn’t all happen at once. You need to have quick wins where you demonstrate not only the leadership (perhaps your boss, the CEO) but to those that are in the engineering and development space, that this is working.

Drew: It feels like design-led marketing has the potential to be more strategic and more focused on the long-term. Is that a fair assessment?

Jerome: The design-led CMO is definitely connected more ethereally to strategy and asking, “Where are we going to be in a 3-5 year horizon?” But even more tactically should be intimately connected to the requirements that go into products. One challenge with Silicon Valley is often product requirements are highly function based or function feature. They’re not story based. So what user experience folks think about is, “What is the use case that we are trying to support? How would we do that? How does this work?” Products are not static — they support or services. More and more again, as we’ve gone from a hardware society to a software society, to everything is just service. Everything becomes a verb and there’s movement around it. I think the good design begins with looking at where are problems and opportunities? How might we solve them as we go to our classical market segmentation? What would the use cases be by segment we’re trying to address? How does that get codified into requirements for the product? What is the narrative around that? So I’m coming back to storytelling again and I think when a company begins to think like that, the quality and the value of their products and services are immediately improved. And then when you move downstream — and again I’m not backing off on KPIs connected to demand lead gen and a direct connection to sales — I’m just suggesting (humbly) that better products and services are easier to promote and sell. I think the remit of the CMO should go all the way upstream not just downstream to demand gen and lead gen.

SPECIAL NOTE: In the show, Jerome mentions providing a resource guide to design thinking and design-led marketing.  Here’s a great reading list to get you started:

 

Bankruptcy as an Opportunity?

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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

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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

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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

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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.)