Tag: The CMO Club

The Power of Crystal Clear Positioning to Turnaround Your Brand

Posted on by

Retail is not exactly rich with turnaround stories these days but that’s exactly what’s happened at Pearle Vision. CMO Doug Zarkin provides a step-by-step review of how the brand has gone from stagnant to revitalized, indicated by same-store sales growth, new store openings and a jump in ranking from >100 to #24 among best franchises to own.

Through a number of small but ultimately significant changes like renaming customers to patients, employees to eye care professionals and stores to eye care centers, Pearle Vision has been able to shift the conversation from deals on glasses to professional eye care. Most significantly, Zarkin and company figured out that people who come in for eye exams are far more likely to buy glasses and become repeat customers than those that are just shopping for new glasses.

 

On this episode of Renegade Thinkers Unite, Zarkin tells Drew Neisser about the methods by which Zarkin and his team embraces customers and keeps them in the fold.

You can listen to the episode here.

These are some of our favorite moments from the episode:

Drew: When you first got to Pearle Vision and recognized the need for a new positioning, how long did you give yourself?

Doug: If you know anything about retail there’s a sense of urgency. I essentially had six months to crack the code. In fact when I joined the company my predecessor actually remained on the team to essentially keep the business going while I was working on crafting the future state. And so within six months we had to find what the brand was going to stand for. We identified that we needed to update the iconography, that we needed to update the store design and we began the journey. But by no means does the journey begin and end in six months — it’s a journey that you have to continually press on every day. 

Drew: So that gives you three months to research and three months to execute. Talk about the positioning that you landed on.

Doug: The positioning became “genuine eye care from your neighborhood doctor” which came about from a philosophy that I learned from my first client-side job at Avon – you have to go out in the field. Any marketer worth his salt knows that a positioning that doesn’t make for great execution is just words on paper. And so looking inward to what we stood for as a brand required me to look outward from the boardroom and get into our locations, talk to our doctors, talk to our franchisees, understand what we really were embodying in a three dimensional way and then bringing that back and looking at what we as a brand could really own. As a brand founded by a doctor, Dr. Stanley Pearle in 1961, we had a heritage that we could stand for – eye care. We needed to do it in a way that was authentic. We wanted to be that brand that owned the neighborhood–that could win the battle for patients at the 5 to 9-mile level. And so every part of ‘genuine eye care from my neighborhood doctor’ means something. It most importantly means the art of sacrifice — there’s a lot of things we couldn’t do.

Drew: Some brands worry about circling back to their founder because it makes them feel old-fashioned. How do you keep your brand from appearing outdated?

Doug: A founder brand has inherently an authenticity to it. Some of the best in class marketers are always looking for that emotional connection point. We’re storytellers. We want to connect with the consumer on an emotional level and present them rational reasons to believe. When you have a founder brand like Pearle, if you actually do what many marketers don’t which is to have the humility to realize that sometimes taking a step forward is taking two steps backward, what you actually have is something that you can build a plan off of. Ralph Lauren is a great example of a founder-led, founder-driven brand. Ralph Lauren has a very distinct look on fashion. When Ralph started to go awry as a brand was when it got away from its DNA. Pearle did the same thing. Dr. Stanley Pearl was not there talking about buy one get one free. Dr. Stanley Pearle’s vision started with that best in class doctor and I see my job really is to a degree getting out of the way and allowing his legacy to continue in a way that’s modern, in a way that’s contemporary, and in a way that resonates. But why fight it? If you have it, embrace it! Leverage it; lead with it. That’s how you win.

Drew: Let’s talk about Pearle’s social media philosophy. What is your execution strategy?

Doug: For us, social media is really an opportunity to continue the conversation. It’s turned actually into one of the most effective platforms for driving exam growth. If you look at the marketing ROI in our category there are few things that are as efficient as search (trademark search as an example). Social media is really up there in terms of efficient ways to drive people to schedule their eye exams. We’re talking about paid. We’ve got a fantastic agency on board, Energy BBDO out of Chicago, who handles our social content for us. The healthy balance between leading the conversation, listening to the conversation, and actually having a conversation. Facebook is not a one-way communication platform. It’s actually an opportunity to do what you and I are doing right now, which is to talk. And so you’ve got to think about that as a dialogue. It’s a tennis match. Not every point in tennis, not every forehand or backhand is a winner. It sets up the next shot. We look at social media as an opportunity to essentially engage our consumer in a tennis match. Sometimes we’re going to win the point; sometimes we’re going to lose the point. Sometimes the points just go on and on and we’re going to wish that it would just end. The respect that we have for social, in particular, Facebook leading that charge, it is one of our strongest marketing platforms.

Bank on a Unique Brand Image

Posted on by

One of the most difficult but important things marketers can do is find a way to make their brand stand out from the competition. This is an especially weighty challenge in the financial industry, as Suzanne Copeland, the former CMO of Sterling National Bank, will tell you. Faced with regulatory restrictions and fierce competition, Copeland applied renegade thinking to separate Sterling from the pack. In this episode of the Renegade Thinkers Unite podcast, Copeland explains how the bank’s brand positioning allows it to provide one-of-a-kind customer experiences. (These show notes were prepared by Jay Tellini.)

You can listen to the podcast below or continue reading for this episode’s highlights.

Creating a unique brand experience is crucial not only to marketing, but also to business success as a whole. At Sterling, this was no easy feat. As Copeland points out, “Everybody tells you that their customer relationship is better. It’s kind of hard to really tease that out to some specifics that explain exactly how you’re better.”

Abstract problems like these require creative solutions. For example, Copeland’s content marketing strategy at Sterling went against the grain to reach to its audience, and you may be surprised to learn that digital marketing had little to do with it. The company wanted to bring its message to the consumer’s doorstep—literally. The finished product for Sterling was Connect Magazine, a print publication featuring the success stories of some of its clients. Copeland says, “We have been publishing Connect Magazine for over seven years now, and a key feature is that we do client profiles. We have a cover story with a client talking about their business.”

Connect Magazine continues to spread brand awareness for both client businesses and Sterling National Bank. Copeland continues, “[Featured clients] sprinkle in where Sterling has helped them with their business.” By mentioning how the bank has assisted clients, the publication also gets people talking about Sterling. As Copeland notes, “There is some relationship building with regard to the prospects and, quite frankly, most of Connect is mailed to prospects and that helps build our brand. But at the same time, it is going to our clients…It is also creating brand ambassadors that will praise our services.”

Like Copeland, many marketers face the challenge of presenting a uniform brand image. The team at Sterling is constantly maneuvering to keep all employees on the same page. “We have a lot of different sales people with a very specific approach,” Copeland says. “It’s really hard to be efficient with that. So, for us, the challenge is how do you have a really lean organization? How do you create some level of consistency and some configurability so that you can address vertical markets?”

Copeland urges marketers everywhere to hone in on their core business to find a unifying message. She says, “The other thing now I think that we can do ourselves is just be maniacal about focusing on our business strategy, really understanding what is it this company is doing.”

Perhaps the biggest blunder a marketing team could make is to seclude itself from the company’s other operations. “The biggest ‘don’t’ for me is getting cornered in the marketing world,” says Copeland. “You’ve got to be able to have relationships beyond that in the organization, and really understand what other parts of the organization are doing, and not just say this is the marketing domain and that’s the only place that I stay.”

Thriving in the ‘Give to Get’ Economy

Posted on by

Every brand strives to build emotional connections with its constituents but few have succeeded in the manner of Pete Krainik, founder and CEO of The CMO Club. Starting from scratch in 2007, Pete has built a remarkably collaborative membership of over 800 senior marketers that meet regularly in 22 US cities and several more around the world. In this episode (click here to listen now), we’ll reveal some of the secrets to The CMO Club’s success in recruiting new members and creating unmatched event experiences.

On this show, Pete and I talked a lot about the need to cut through in various ways. One is by building elements of surprise into your events regardless of the target keeping in mind that there is no B2B or B2C only H2H (as my friend Bryan Kramer would say). For the club’s twice a year US summits, Pete has arranged for a wide range of surprising guests including John Legend, Keith Urban, Rita Wilson, The Band Perry and Christina Perry among many others. At the most recent summit in Marina Del Ray, Rob Morrow, Melissa Ethridge and rappers Nelly and IT all made surprise appearances. Having seen all of these performances and watched the reactions of CMOs who are meticulous about getting the most out of every minute, I can attest to the fact that Pete’s unique approach has the desired impact.

We also covered what I call the “Give to Get Economy.” Give to get applies to just about any brand situation but is most easily understood when thinking about Google and Facebook.  Google gives us all access to a universe of information and in turn, they get our eyeballs.  Facebook gives us access to 1.8 billion of our closest friends and they too get our eyeballs. This value exchange is remarkably profitable for both Google and Facebook.

For The CMO Club, give to get means giving prospects a free dinner so they can “taste” the experience or sharing content that CMOs find useful via their website and mobile app.  It also means encouraging members to give their assistance to other members recognizing that karma is indeed a boomerang. The result is a highly engaged membership and a marketing lesson for all of you Renegade Thinkers.

You can also find this episode on iTunes, iHeartRadio and Stitcher.

 

Embracing the Art & Science of Marketing

Posted on by Drew Neisser

When I first met Dan Marks in 2011 during his days as CMO at First Tennessee Bank, he blew me away with a model his team had built that accurately predicted the impact of an increase or decrease in ad spending. This was a particularly useful model as the bank like most businesses at the time was still in recession retrenchment mode and Dan needed to defend his budget. This conversation led me to believe that Dan was the poster child for CMOs that believed in the science of marketing and explains why I featured him in my book under the element, Metrics.

Five years later, Dan is now Chief Marketing Officer of Hancock and Whitney Bank and his winning The CMO Club President’s Circle award occasioned another interview. And while Dan is still a big believer in the science of marketing, I couldn’t help but notice a lot more interest on his part in the art of connecting with prospects and customers on an emotional level. This shift, if indeed it is one, means our conversation below is a perfect primer for marketers looking to take a more balanced approach, one that emphasizes purpose, culture and customer centricity as much as marketing technology, testing and measurement. Amen to that.

Drew: What’s one way that you apply renegade thinking?

Dan: I believe that a great CMO needs to embrace both the art and the science of marketing and that might be a bit radical with all of the focus on either the science or the art today.

Drew: How do you make sure there’s a balance?

Dan: The critical part to a balance is to remember that we are ultimately serving people. People respond to purpose. Whether or not that’s b2b or b2c or our associates, we all have human needs and emotions and desires and thoughts so focusing on what we deliver, sell, and develop resonates with people is the art and emotion part. Science can be a powerful tool to make sure that what were doing gets results and helps us achieve and continuously improve. Just doing the science without starting with the purpose is a recipe for failure. Only stopping at the purpose and not getting to the science can also leave us falling short.

Drew: Where have you found inspiration in these other categories, and what were the results?

Dan: Banking has a foundation of embracing technology. There are a number of things from a technology perspective. Recently, we’ve looked at how Apple does such a beautiful job of showing and creating excitement about what they do. There are tangible parts of what we do that are inspired by showing, not telling, in an emotional way. More recently, we were inspired by the fact that really compelling brands do a nice job wrapping bigger story around their product and services. when it comes to merchandising design, we didn’t just put together a brochure, we actually created a catalog which wraps those products with the bigger story and it’s had great reception and helped launch some new products in a compelling way.

Drew: What’s the bigger story for Hancock and Whitney?

Dan: Part of our story is that from Hancock and Whitney’s founding, the bank was chartered to help create opportunities for the communities and the clients that we serve. We look at everything through the mission of how are we helping people achieve their goals and dreams? Money is certainly an important mechanism for that but there’s a bigger purpose and its beyond the transaction. When we launched these products we wanted to make sure that we were focused on the client and what we’re doing for them, how we’re helping them run their business better. Not necessarily just the features and benefits.

 

 

Drew: What’s your proudest accomplishment as a marketer at Hancock and Whitney?

Dan: Seeing the team elevated and accomplishing great things. We just wrapped up 2016 and our financial performance, our stock price was up very nicely, reflects the underlying business fundamentals. To pull that off, it really was having a team that’s coming together. Seeing the team come together and raise their game was so far my proudest accomplishment. That gives me great confidence that we can continue to put up even more remarkable accomplishments in the future.

Drew: What was your focus from a marketing standpoint? Did you launch a new campaign, continue a new one, in terms of overall brand?

Dan: We doubled down where digital is going. We went through a selection process, identified a new marketing automation platform, which is a stack of tools that work together. We assembled this stack, and that created capabilities. For example, last year we were significantly more productive per dollar spent in terms of revenue generation than we were the year before. The specific number is confidentially but it was in the double digits more productive.

Drew: How do you do that?

Dan: Team, tools, and processes. How are we focusing on our best opportunities, what’s the purpose, what are we trying to accomplish? Having the right toolset is important. The day is gone where you’re relying on an agency or a yellow pad. Having a fully integrated marketing automation platform is key. We run our website on it, we do our social publishing through it, email, host landing pages that connect offline, we do events through it. It’s really the centerpiece to stitch that cohesive message together. And to learn from it- what is resonating, what’s getting the engagement, what’s creating leads.

Drew: How did you end up staffing this? Did you find that you needed more people to manage the stack?

Dan: We did, not many though. We’re big enough for some resources with an overall company size of 4,000 associates. We’ve got some ability to make meaningful decisions but execute them very quickly. We couldn’t afford the biggest, most full-featured engine that needs a gigantic crew. We picked a marketing automation engine that we thought positioned us really well to be nimble and have a lot of ease of us, but also not require a ton of staff. You need that more analytical, operational mindset but even there, the flavor that we have is much more “hey, we’re gonna use the tool for the operational parts” so we wanted one that was very easy to use. A related example is that we said “let’s prioritize what we can do with the tool. Sure we can do 100 things but is having an absolute perfect way to make something look we need?” If we can get pretty close with some out of the box capabilities, we’ll take pretty close and shipping twice as fast. We went through a burn-in time period where we had to reject some work from one particular agency that was still thinking in the old mindset.

Drew: How do you make sure that you have the right metrics, that you’re not optimizing based on one metric that you see? 

Dan: Cost per acquisition or cost per whatever is a fairly dated metric. That’s an ingredient but if you stop there, you’ll miss what the actual value we’re generating is. Focusing on the revenue generated per dollar spent and defining that revenue as a lifetime revenue, we’re fortunate to be in an annuity-type business and by that I mean when we sell something it generates revenue over time, not just up front. We’re selling an ongoing relationship. Understanding the life of the accounts we sell and how that varies by segment is critical To understand the true discounted revenue impact compared to the dollar spent.

Drew: Do you have attribution modeling? In other words, can you say “search helped and the video helped and this helped” and somehow recognize the various contributors to that revenue?

Dan: We have an attribution model, but that’s something we can get better at. That’s where tools can come into play. The days of doing a traditional metric model are gone. I think a lot of brands realize that the potential from that kind of activity can’t be operationalized. When we look at further expanding our attribution, we’re focusing on leveraging very nimble tools that help us understand that quickly. We might give up some perceived statistical rigor but if I can get an 80% answer next week, that’s a lot better than a 95% answer 6 months from now.

Drew: What was the biggest hurdle to making all of this come to fruition?

Dan: The hurdle was just not enough hours in the day to do it all. Fortunately, there’s a lot of organizational and support from executives to take a different approach and up our game. We had to prove it so that there were incremental steps. It wasn’t go off and build the uber-platform for a year and then come back and get started. From the time I started at the company to the time we were running a campaign with the new platform was about 6 months and then we launched the new website the quarter after that. It was essentially changing out the tires while the bus is still rolling down the road.

Drew: What were the biggest lessons learned along the way?

Dan: One is that it starts with the client. What are we after for the client? Once you get past that, to your point about organizational hurdles, it’s critical. If you’re embarking on a marketing transformation and you don’t have 100% buy-in, that’s a good place to start with the credibility of the metrics. That’s where the science comes in a lot. You can’t start with perfection so start with a piece and work over time. Iterative and fact based is another lesson learned. We just don’t have time to spend on massive transformations that aren’t going to do anything for two years.

A Healthy Perspective on Hospital Marketing

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Driving into Hertz to return my car to the West Palm Beach airport on Sunday, I couldn’t help but notice they’d altered the drop-off point. A veteran of this particular facility, I wondered why were we so close to the bus loading zone.  And then it dawned on me because it was raining, they had us dropping off under the only large awning on the lot, a small act of consideration that I suspect went unnoticed by most. But not me. Caught without an umbrella, I was most grateful I wouldn’t have to sit on the plane soaked or scramble to find the one bathroom at PBI that had a hand dryer I could repurpose.

This story of going the extra mile for a customer is a great introduction to Arra G. Yerganian, Chief Marketing and Branding Officer at Sutter Health.  I met Arra through The CMO Club (he won the Officers award) and not only was he kind enough to share his thoughts with me below, he even agreed to rerecord our podcast episode after the sound quality proved deficient (stay tuned for my “9 Ways to Screw Up a Podcast” post!).  More importantly, Arra is leading a massive transformation in how Sutter Health not only markets itself but also how it delivers patient care.

Drew: Tell me about Sutter Health.

Arra: Sutter Health is a remarkable organization. We are an integrated team of clinical and non-clinical pioneers who are deeply rooted in our not for profit mission. And we really work together to change how you and I experience healthcare. In fact, through an independent study in the last few months, Truven Health Analytics (which is part of IBM) recently recognized Sutter as one of the highest performers (top five) amongst healthcare system in America. This study looked at things like saving more lives, having fewer complications, spending less per patient on episode of care, etc. This is truly an organization that’s unprecedented. We’re about $11 billion in revenue supported by 55,000 employees. I call them ‘members of our tribe’ and nearly 7,000 providers. These are people who develop the product and care every day that makes a difference in people’s lives.

Drew: Wow. So what does your role as CMO encompass?

Arra: Well, it’s a multitasking role for sure. I feel like I’m steering a big ship and I think for me it’s really about walking the brand promise. It’s about how we tell powerful stories and how we translate that into something that the consumer can really relate to. I often talk about this relationship that we have with the people we serve, not the “patient” and you need to understand the distinction. As healthcare’s going through the transformation in America, it’s not about putting the patient first. It’s about putting the person first. During every stage of being a patient you’re still a person. So it’s about leaning in. It’s about helping them understand you know them intellectually and emotionally and about the support and access we can provide. How we change the conversation around them and I think that’s our secret weapon for the healthcare system in Northern California.

Drew: Interesting. How does marketing fit into this vision?

Arra: For me, it’s about operationalizing the brand. It’s helping my fellow leaders understand that investing in marketing is an important endeavor, not just an expense. It’s changing the way the organization thinks about the brand. We’re helping the organization see that marketing can really add value. In fact, we can contribute to creative growth within this organization. I tell people we don’t necessarily need one more person to care for; we just need to take great care of the ones we have now. I call this the “love the ones you’re with” approach and it is a big differentiator for us since so many healthcare companies are just trying to acquire as many customers as they can.

Drew: How big is Sutter Health?

Arra: We are one of the largest healthcare systems in America and we’re really just in the Northern California footprint today. We service a geography of 12.5 million people and each of those three to three and a half million people that we care for every day are in the amazing care of our provider who truly go the extra mile and provide what I’m describing as intellectual and emotional support, going beyond the physical. It’s not just getting in to see the provider when you want to see them. That’s a given. To differentiate in a ‘sea of sameness’, it’s about that extra effort that we as an organization can deliver. We need to be the brand leaning in when others lean away. Remember, we care for people when they are at their most vulnerable. We have an awesome responsibility.

Drew: Let’s talk about a specific marketing initiative you’re particularly proud of.

Arra: I think this is somewhat unprecedented within the healthcare field; however, I had a vision when I arrived 16 months ago to create a brand management structure along lines of services like cardiology, oncology, women’s health, neuroscience, pediatrics, primary care, etc. This meant bringing professionals into the organization or nurturing those who were already here in marketing roles and focusing them all on these product lines and creating partnerships with clinical leaders who can help inform the content.

Drew: Sounds like P&G?

Arra: Exactly. These brand managers would build efficacy around their “products” and communicate the benefits to the mass market. I really wanted to understand what we do uniquely versus our competition. Where do we stand-alone as we service the consumers in our communities? With this new structure, we can get really specific and surgical. I call it ‘precision marketing’. You know there’s this movement called ‘precision medicine’ that’s become quite common. I think it really is about getting super targeted. I think about creating one to one relationships with three and a half million people and addressing topics that are of specific interest.

Drew: Makes sense. So how did precision marketing actually play out?

Arra: Well, for someone who’s suffering from coronary heart disease in a particular geography we can isolate by age and really dive in specifically to those individuals with a targeted message. Very, very different from the way most healthcare companies approach the challenge. I realized when I first arrived that lowest common denominator marketing is alive and well within the healthcare space. People talk about things like quality and expertise as if they’re differentiators. Seems to me that everyone expects when they go to a doctor to get quality care and that their doctor is an expert in their field, right?

Drew: Well, I certainly do.

Arra: Right, so let’s take it to a whole new level. When we talk about intellectual access it’s about being able to easily talk to the healthcare professional. Get clear information about things like pricing. Get the healthcare professional to lean in and not appear rushed. When I think about emotional access it’s treating the people that we work with like humans. Having our healthcare teams work together toward collaborative care so you are not being treated like a statistic–not being treated like a burden. These are the things that we as an organization are striving to do every day that really separate us.

Drew: Getting back to the brand management structure…

Arra: So when I implemented this brand management structure at this highest level we can, for example, sit with a cardiologist and ask him/her lots of questions: What really makes the work you do different and unique? What are the research breakthroughs? What’s helping you do better care for the people that we serve? By the way, we’re the second largest non-teaching research system in the country. This is a not for profit organization that truly understands the importance of giving back. Part of the way we give back is through this philanthropic effort of doing research in the community.

Drew: This must be a complicated branding challenge given the Sutter Health parent brand and now these service-specific sub-brands.

Arra: It’s actually even more complex because we were previously federated model with approximately 24 hospital CEOs, all managing in many respects, legacy brands that have somehow come together over the last 150 years under the Sutter Health umbrella. So in order to pay homage to those strong and uniquely positioned brands, particularly in our ‘out of home’ creative and even the via radio campaigns, we’ve put Sutter Health on center stage while paying homage to our affiliated brands, i.e., Palo Alto Medical Foundation, Alta Bates Summit, or Sutter Gould, for example; then we highlight the line of service, like cardiology, pediatrics, or urgent care before we do any discussion about the work that we do.

Drew: That is complicated. So how do you hold all of these communications together?

Arra: We created a very light-hearted campaign to start building familiarity in the marketplace and that’s called the “Smile Out” campaign. The whole idea is we choose somebody, for example, with a sinus condition and would say literally, “Sniffle in. Smile out.” Or for orthopedics, we say “Limp in. Smile Out.” When we talk about cardiology, we say, “Flutter in. Smile out.” Each of these is connected to a line of service, Sutter Health and our local, very community-based hospital systems. So yes, we have multiple challenges but it is very exciting that we can actually break through and create this connection across the multiple brands, the lines of service and the geography in which we are in.

Drew: How are you measuring and charting the success of your marketing initiatives?

Arra: We’re doing brand research in ways we’ve never done before. We’re also utilizing the amazing amounts of data that we already had more effectively. For example, we have the largest single installation of Epic, the hospital records management system, in the country. But all this wonderful data without insight, as you know, is useless. So effectively understanding, for example, that there’s a difference between awareness, familiarity and consideration is a big transformational idea in an organization that hasn’t really thought about marketing the way I describe. And incidentally, I’m the first Chief Marketing and Branding Officer this organization’s long and rich history.

Drew: Let’s dive into the research more. What kinds of things did you want to track?

Arra: Not surprisingly, our awareness is high and we are a trusted brand. We need to help consumers better understand what we really stand for; that which makes us uniquely different. 23.5 hours a day people don’t think about healthcare. So we want to make sure that the moment when you do have to think about your personal care or the care of a loved one, you think of Sutter Health…and it’s in the most positive light. That’s why making an emotional connectional is so important. I want them to feel confident, I want them to feel as if they’re in control and they own their own destiny. Because at the end of the day the brand strategy for me is to increase physical, intellectual and emotional access to healthcare so people can more confidently and independently engage with their health.

Drew: How did you persuade the folks internally to invest in this research?

Arra: So interestingly we’ve already made that investment. We have all the data, it’s really about peeling the onion back to understand how the data can inform the way we think about communicating with different segments of consumer. So, customer segmentation and segmentation research is absolutely at the forefront of our new strategy. Doing panel research, understanding really what makes people emotionally tick so that we can do the right thing when, for example, they’re giving birth. I love to tell people because I found this out really by accident. At Sutter Health; we give birth to three kindergarten classes a day! Funny enough, one of every three consumers that I meet throughout our Northern California footprint introduce themselves to me as either having given birth or having being born at a Sutter Hospital. That’s a meaningful statistic. In fact, we take care of one out of every 100 Americans, one out of every 4 Northern Californians. These are truly remarkable statistics. We have in our DNA the spirit of doing amazing things for people every day – we just need to bring those stories to light.

Drew: What’s your advice for your fellow marketers?

Arra: It’s funny — about a week ago I was at an even at the Avaya Stadium in San Jose, we’re a partner to the San Jose Earthquakes, a Major League Soccer team they serve the same 100 communities that we serve. And it happened to be Saturday so we brought our ambulances, helicopters, and providers and it was great opportunity to activate the brand with the 10,000 people in the stands and generate some good will.

So my six-year-old son, my youngest with three of his friends clamored into Sutter Health mobile clinic and within minutes, they tried out a stethoscope and other cool tools. They then switch their roles; first doctor then patient. I watch their intellectual curiosity, their flexibility, and their focus and realize that they could change the world if given the opportunity. If we look at the world through their lens, we could change the world. And in this period of rapid evolution requiring great curiosity, determination and adaptability, we have the opportunity to do so. So I encourage marketers to have the courage to think way outside the box. It’s okay to fail. I tell people all the time, “What would you do if you weren’t afraid?” I want them to really think differently; I think that’s paramount to success. Take some calculated risks; I think that’s super important.

How to Rebrand on a NPO Budget

Posted on by Drew Neisser

If you ever wondered about the validity of the old proverb, “necessity is the mother invention,” then you’ll want to read word for word my extensive interview with Dara Royer, Chief Development and Marketing Officer of Mercy Corps and winner of The CMO Club‘s Officers Award. Like her organization, Dara works miracles on a minuscule budget and in the process provides yet another illustration that the cool CATS of marketing get it done:

  • Courageous: Dara talks about courage as her secret weapon, noting that you have to “trust, in what you see and what you believe is an opportunity if you’re going to create big positive change.”
  • Artfulness: It takes a deft hand at the tiller to turn an organization in a new branding direction. As Dara puts it, “Being right isn’t always enough to get you to the finish line,” you need to listen and let others participate in the process.
  • Thoughtfulness: As a purpose-driven organization, thoughtfulness is at the core of the brand she explains, “If you want to create transformational change in individuals, in communities, in our broader world, you need to not only meet people’s urgent needs of today, but you need to focus on helping them build a stronger tomorrow.”
  • Scientific: In addition to tracking key business metrics like fund-raising, Dara is committed to constant improvement through a test & learn approach: “We’re evolving little things along the way to make sure that the brand is really usable for people.”

Drew: I have this theory that there’s at least a little renegade in every CMO. What is one way that you’re a renegade?

Dara: Where others run away, I run toward challenges. In fact, like a bee to honey. Truly, if you tell me something can’t be done or there’s no way that we can accomplish something, then to me that’s the clarion call to action. We’re going to take on that challenge and run square at it and try to wrestle it to the ground. For example, there are 2 million purpose driven organizations in the U.S., and at Mercy Corps we’re working to put ourselves on the map with a smaller marketing team and a smaller budget than some of the big dogs. We’re already making progress against that goal.

Drew: Running towards a challenge is certainly a very renegade thing. When you’re running at the challenge, and you are underfunded, what’s one nontraditional technique that you used with success?

Dara: We handle a lot of things in-house that most other organizations or businesses would outsource. A great example would be global brand research. There are many organizations that would pay big bucks to do that. We didn’t have those dollars so we actually trained our teammates that work in many of the different countries in which we operate. We taught them research methodology and we taught them how to talk to their fellow team members, government officials in the area, and the beneficiaries of the people that we help in order to pull out insights that are going to be valid for us to synthesize as part of a global brand research. The benefit of that was that we were actually bringing them along, our global teammates, in the process of building our global brand and that was actually the upside of taking a road less traveled.

Drew: We have a client who’s looking at a global study and its hugely expensive to do it right, to translate it into multiple languages and then to try to synthesize the data after it’s in these languages and then bringing it back to English. Using employees to field the research is brilliant — the tricky part is getting them trained. How did you make sure that they did this in a valid research fashion?

Dara: It’s a great question because as we all know, garbage in garbage out. If you didn’t have a solid research methodology, then you won’t have valid results. We did a number of trainings with the people who were going to participate and then we actually had them do mock interviews, because this was all qualitative research, so we could give them feedback on the way they were approaching the work. Every single person was trained in that same fashion following this research guide that we created. The proof was in the pudding. The results that we got back were consistent and valid, and the reason we knew they were applicable is because we were able to pull out the same kind of thematics regardless of the country in which the research was done. The same themes were coming to the surface–incredibly powerful, and much less expensive than the traditional way of approaching the work.

Drew: I’m curious, because we encourage our clients to do research for any number of reasons, how you used the research once you gathered all this information.

Dara: The research was the underpinning of our brand refresh that we did and it was important to help get the organization out of what I call the echo chamber, where we talk to each other, we nod our heads, and we all share a brain around what we believe the truth is. Yet, there are lots of different perceptions that exist out there. Part of what we were trying to do was show the organization some different perspectives that exist, so that was step one. We shared this information internally, and it absolutely informed how we positioned our brand strategy and ultimately our visual and our verbal identity.

Drew: We all know that it’s hard to get marketing messages to stand out. What’s the one thing you do to make sure that your marketing cuts through?

Dara: It is absolutely a challenge. We are focused on the overall epic, not the episode. What I mean by that is particularly for an organization like ours, that works in 42 different countries, our work is so vast and so diverse but we’re trying to tell one big story vs. lots of little stories. We want to make sure that whenever anyone is interacting with Mercy Corps and sees any kind of content, be it a video or a direct mail piece, that they’re understanding what that larger story is. Telling the epic, being consistent in the story that we’re telling, is a huge focus for us in trying to break through the noise. Because when you try to tell many different episodes, people start to not understand who you are, what you do, and why you matter.

Drew: I haven’t heard storytelling put that way, but certainly we all love epics. What is that epic story that you’re telling for Mercy Corps?

Dara: Our epic is rooted in this fundamental belief that a better world is possible. If you want to create transformational change in individuals, in communities, in our broader world, you need to not only meet people’s urgent needs of today, but you need to focus on helping them build a stronger tomorrow. Our response to an earthquake in Nepal or the way that we are helping millions of refugees who are fleeing war conflict in their countries has a common theme, which is that our donors, or the people that partner with us, are the bridge from a challenge today to a better tomorrow that we believe is possible in the world.

Drew: What are some of the tricks that you learned to make sure that you have a great story?

Dara: I’m going to tell you a story in my answer. First, you start with relevancy and an understanding of the audience that you’re trying to engage with. What is going to make a story relevant to their world and their life long enough for them to pause? The story I’m going to tell you is about our desire at Mercy Corps to talk about our conflict resolution work. Sounds like a snoozer, right? It’s important, though, because when we work with refugee populations and you have 2 million refugees flowing across borders, it can create huge tensions in communities. We set out to tell this conflict resolution story, and the story we ended up telling was from the perspective of a mother who had been part of a Mercy Corps conflict resolution program. She, and the other mothers in this group, ended up creating a playground where their children, Syrian and Lebanese children, could come together and play together. The result was incredible. These women all became part of a larger community and what you heard was her voice, you saw her tears, you saw the children playing on the playground together. It was incredibly compelling and it was relevant and relatable to any mother, anyone who’s been a child, or anyone who could get into the heart of the story. Yet it was on a very wonky subject. Kudos to our team and our producer for heading into this situation and saying “what would make this a relatable story to people?” You show vs. tell. We showed something vs. saying “we want to talk to you about the importance of conflict resolution.”

Drew: It’s amazing because it’s not preachy but it’s very clear and it’s very moving and that’s why we all like storytelling. What resource would you suggest other renegade marketers look to?

Dara: This is a personal resource that I think renegade marketers need to tap into. Simply put, it’s courage. When you’re a renegade and you’re disruptive, either in your organization or the marketplace, you’re going to have opinions that aren’t popular. You’re going to stand alone. You’re going to have to be able to dig deep and have confidence, and trust, in what you see and what you believe is an opportunity if you’re going to create big positive change. The one resource is that you have to be courageous.

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

Dara: Being right doesn’t always matter. I was schooled in speech and debate, and I competed for a long time, and I learned in that trade if you brought the right evidence to the table and you were a good speaker, you generally win. It doesn’t work that way in the real world and in business, particularly in today’s day and age. I think a lot of people will come to the table whether they work in HR or finance and everyone thinks they’re a marketer. You can’t just show up at the table like you’re hired to be the expert and you wear the CMO hat or you’re in charge of marketing and therefore everybody should just pause and listen to you. You have to have great negotiation skills, you have to understand internal dynamics and politics. You have to be a good listener. Being right isn’t always enough to get you to the finish line.

 

Drew: Let’s dive deeper into the brand relaunch and the key steps.

Dara: Step one was that we had to convince the organization that we needed to pay some attention to our brand. This first step was actually selling senior leadership and our board on the reality that there is so much potential for our brand to be stronger than it is, but it’s going to require us to find the simple human truth that exists at the core of our brand and reposition ourselves to be successful in the marketplace. Step one was gaining some internal buy in. Once we got that, we moved into really extensive research- qualitative and quantitative research at a global scale. With those insights in hand, the next step was building our brand strategy and there were three components: the essence or positioning, our attributes, and our behaviors- because we know brand is not just how you think or how you speak, it’s how you act as well.

Drew: What was the next step?

The next step was to build the visual and verbal identity, our brand standards, and a toolkit so that team members in our very decentralized organization could start bringing the brand to life themselves. The next step, which I will say is still ongoing, is what we called our rolling rollout. Rather than a giant “ta-da” launch, we started our rollout in Uganda about a year ago at our global leadership gathering. We continued to evolve the brand, create more tools and resources, bring the brand to life, and help our field teams bring the brand to life as well. It was a detailed, multi-step process, handled largely by our in-house team.

Drew: Was any of the brand development outsourced at all?

Dara: It was. For the quantitative research, we did work with an outside firm. The majority of the qualitative research we handled in-house. For the brand strategy, we did outsource the first piece of that work as well. The visual and verbal identity, the rollout, all the tools, and the creation of the brand book, was all handled in-house.

Drew: What were some of the hurdles that you had to overcome in order to bring this program to fruition?

Dara: As I’ve always said, your first audience is your internal audience. I’d say bringing the team, the global team of 5,000 people, along with us in this process. Even just helping people see that brand is not bad. There was a view in an organization like ours that brand is selling out and that our work should just be able to stand on it’s own. That was certainly a hurdle, bringing the organization along. I would also say it was helping people believe in something that they’ve never seen before. They’ve never really seen a brand process or been inspired by a brand product and we had to bring them along in that. That was a challenge.

Drew: What were some of the other challenges?

Dara: The budget was absolutely a challenge too. It was daunting to think about creating an entire visual, verbal identity for a global organization and then rolling it out globally with what was originally a $50,000 budget for all of those steps. I had a team here who had never done brand work before, who I turned to and asked to be a partner and to do this work in addition to their normal day job. When I say everyone said it couldn’t be done, there were certainly moments where I thought to myself “what are we doing here? Can this actually be done?” We just decided failure wasn’t an option. The brand needed to be as strong as our global work and our global mission. We plowed through, but it was certainly a challenge. When you have a field-led organization that has a very diffuse strategy, how do you get to a common factor that is our singular human truth? Getting to that essence was really challenging for us, but we got there, it’s resonating and that’s powerful.

Drew: Was there an “a-ha” moment when the folks suddenly understood, because I think the issue of a nonprofit organization having a brand is an interesting one. Did you find that they suddenly went “oh” and lightbulbs went off because you suddenly got them to understand brand?

Dara: The lightbulbs went off at the right moment, but it was a real nailbiter. When we went to the global leadership gathering in Uganda, there was an hour-long presentation on where we’ve been, where we had come to, and how our brand is going to come to life. That was the moment where the lightbulbs went off. It’s because people all of a sudden could see themselves in the brand. What I realized is that the fear people had was that we were going to tell a story that wasn’t authentic to who we are. When they realized that the heart of the brand was totally rooted in authenticity and was just shining a bright light on our work in a way that gave a nod to the diversity of what we do but also spoke to what tied us together and what united us as a global group, that’s when people got it.

Drew: How did your targets react?

Dara: They were so moved and tearful and I had people, from our country director in Iraq to the woman who heads our programming in Nigeria, come to me and say “I have never been so proud to be a part of this organization.” That was the lightbulb moment. They saw themselves in it and then they understood what it is we’re trying to accomplish. It wasn’t until that point, though.

Drew: That’s a great story. How did you measure success with the rebranding?

Dara: Step one was clearly the response that we were getting internally, because in an organization that’s not centralized, our team members in the field actually have to activate and bring our brand to life and if they’re not feeling it, and they don’t believe in it, they’re not going to do it. The brand would fall apart. Step one was that people bought in. Every week, I get photos from people in the field who are so proud to share with us ways that they’re bringing the brand to life themselves consistently. That tells us that we’re getting the internal buy-in we need to continue to move forward.

Drew: Do you have other measures?

Dara: The other thing that we’re starting to see as we’re being more consistent and bringing this to life externally is obviously greater response rates in terms of increase in giving. We’re coming off of our strongest end of year in fundraising and we’re seeing people who are more engaged too. They’re more interested in spending time with our story and hearing more. All of those metrics are moving in the right direction and that tells us that our story not only resonates with us internally, but it’s also resonating with other people.

Drew: What would you say the biggest lessons learned from all of this are?

Dara: I think there’s been an evolution in brand development over the past 5-10 years. The days of the big “ta-da,” the big reveal, where you would do a giant brand launch and you’d have a thousand page brand book and you’d say “look, we’ve answered all these questions now go forth and conquer” are over. Iteration is now king. I think we learned that it was important for us to be willing to not answer all the questions and that’s why we’ve called it a rolling rollout, where we are engaging in the stakeholders that are key to bringing the brand to life and we’re getting their input along the way. We’re evolving little things along the way to make sure that the brand is really usable for people, and that it’s responsive to how people need to bring the brand to life within a framework. I think iteration is a big key lesson.