Tag: The CMO Club

Content Marketing on a Planetary Scale (from Mars)

Posted on by Drew Neisser

By 5pm, I’m typically famished. If we don’t eat dinner until 8 or so, I’m approaching demonic, ready to rage at the slightest provocation especially if it threatens to come between me and my pointy fork. So you can picture the scene the other night at an otherwise lovely restaurant as our persnickety waiter decided to take several minutes to describe the white wine reduction sauce with locally grown shallots in interminable detail. Let’s just say I wasn’t in my happy place.

I tell you all of this because my interview below with Rob Rakowitz, Global Director of Media at Mars is a feast of insights on content marketing you’ll want to ingest without delay. Rob, by the way, was a winner of the Content Marketing award from The CMO Club. In the spirit of an amuse-bouche, here are a few of the delectable nuggets to seek out in the passages below:

  • How Uncle Ben’s tested its way to success with video content
  • Why Whiskas created Kitten Kollege
  • Why even big brands need to stay opportunistic with their media budgets

Drew: Media is a really hard and complicated job these days. It must be very challenging to sort all of these choices out for all of these different brands.

Rob: Absolutely, it is. And the main thing that you can actually do in a very large global organization is give teams the resources to navigate because we are dealing in a complex world especially in terms of the multitudes of tradeoffs and the marketplace pitfalls. And then you shift over to the dialog on measurement, viewability, fraud, agency compensation – there is never a dull moment in the media business! And the only thing that you can do in this role is really equipping teams with the right navigation tools so that they can actually wade into this unknown and increasingly complex territory and be able to actually drive growth from it.

Drew: Tell me one story about you in your personal life or professional life that will help me understand what makes you tick?

Rob: I’m part of a competitive cycling team and these days there’s a lot of data available thanks to the Internet of things and sensors that can help analyze individual and team performances. I love being able to distill this data down to useful information, which is pretty much the same thing I do when I’m in the office. And of course, cycling brings multiple functions together just like the office. This is especially true when approach a big race, having people on a team actually work together in a high-performance capacity, determining distinct roles, much in the way that you would for launching a really great campaign. I have found it really helps to bring multiple perspectives around the table. Also from racing comes the understanding that there are certain points in times that you’ve got to peak. For brands, this means being able to actually stand for something that you recognize and knowing when is the right time to engage in topical social media and moments in culture that actually matters.

Drew: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received from a peer and how has that influenced your career.

Rob: Keep things simple. Media is starting to hit more and more functions both within marketing and outside of it so it would be easy to make things complicated. I find that the more you can simplify down what it is that we’re trying to do from a vision perspective, the better an idea travels.

Drew: You received The CMO Club award for Content Marketing. What’s your overall approach to content?

Rob: We’ve done some absolutely fantastic content programs for Uncle Ben’s, Pedigree and Snickers. These brands truly understand that they need to reach more and more consumers and the way that they’re going to do that is not just by throwing advertising out there, but it’s by actually really figuring out what is their brand’s purpose, what is understanding culture and how can they actually provide the solution that brings the brand, consumer and customer together. It’s what I really like to call that idea of 4C Conversion, where we bring consumers, customers, communications and commerce closer together.

Drew: Let’s talk about Uncle Ben’s because I think some readers might scratch their heads and say, wait, Uncle Ben’s has a purpose?

Rob: Uncle Ben’s is about helping consumers make sure that they’re making great food choices, on a daily basis. It’s really interesting because when you get into the data. We find out that consumers who start meals with rice are more likely to choose a lean protein or a vegetable to go along with it. This actually leads to healthier outcomes from an eating perspective. And that’s actually what stands behind a lot of what we do from a content perspective and with a program like Ben’s Beginners, which aims to get kids and parents cooking together.

Drew: Got it. So what did you end up doing for Uncle Ben’s?

Rob: In the UK is we had this new ready-to-heat product that comes in this little pouch and is really quick and easy to make. What we found out was that consumers weren’t aware of it; they didn’t see it as being relevant. So luckily enough, we had smart agency folks and smart marketing folks — BBDO, MediaCom, and then our own internal associates, what we call our triads, working together. And what they decided is that a typical TV spot would fail, because it wasn’t going to reach the right audience and it wasn’t going to overcome the relevancy issue. So what we ended up doing was creating a series of short videos. Then we put them up online, looked at the behavior metrics, figured out which videos were popping and what recipes were actually working. The video idea, by the way, centered around a celebrity chef who shows up at a park, starts cooking meals, engages people who are living healthy and active lifestyles and shows them in two minutes how to actually cook a healthy meal.

Drew: Fun idea. What then?

Rob: With these eight videos that we had out there, we looked at the performance metrics. We then figured out how to take that two-minute video and cut it down to 30’s, which we could put on TV and various social channels (Twitter, Facebook and Instagram). It was a very content-driven idea backed up by behavioral data. We were able to use social media to make sure the content was as personal as possible. And it actually yielded some really nice business results for us.

Drew: Interesting that the whole program wasn’t 100% digital and that you ended up deploying TV as well?

Rob: I think that any marketer worth their salt today knows that if you’re dealing with mass audiences and mass reach, I think it’s not a question of “or” but it’s a question of “and.” What you want to have is a video-neutral approach where you’re thinking about multiple channels in combination. Are there certain brands where a digital-only approach will make sense? Absolutely. But for Uncle Ben’s, a combination of TV and digital was optimal.

Drew: How did you measure the success of the Uncle Ben’s program?

Rob: The two measures that we’re obsessed with are reach and sales. First, we look at the overall reach of the content program. And then also did some testing to actually make sure that there was a positive lift in sales. That’s generally, the way that we look at measurement. Now, within the campaign we look at behavioral metrics including likes, shares and comments. What we did for Uncle Ben’s was 100 percent behavioral, digital metrics that are available to a lot of marketers. And the question is are we truly leaning into those as the marketing community and embracing it as much as we could and should be. And I think that’s very much an agenda I had where a lot of my colleagues out there is taking more and more advantage of things and to drive better planning strategy and activation.

Drew: Let’s talk about what you did for Whiskas.

Rob: For Whiskas, we actually rolled out one of our first global content plays. Recognizing that people who are adopting cats or kittens rather weren’t equipped with all of the knowledge and insights that they should have as new pet owners, we created Kitten Kollege. Featuring irreverent tongue-in-check videos, we equipped kitten parents with all of the insight that they needed to understand the life stages and the leaps forward that their kitten is going through. Partnering with Google and YouTube and eventually some of our retail partners in local markets, we raised the brand’s profile, simultaneously educating and entertaining and then closing the gap with commerce.

Drew: I love that story because it fits into a framework that I call Marketing as Service in which marketing actually has value, inherent value, both obviously the entertainment but also the education. One thing that someone might say is well, you educated everybody about kittens, but what connects that to the brand Whiskas?

Rob: We did that via a serial content series that was done with a lot of the insights from our Pet Institute in Waltham, UK. This is where a lot of our pet research happens. So a lot of the insights that we shared were actually proprietary to Mars and we were able to connect that back to Whiskas.

Drew: So you mentioned global for Whiskas–did that mean that Kitten Kollege got translated into multiple languages?

Rob: Yes, it did. And we have been rolling it out market by market. In certain markets, I think we have it dubbed and other markets we actually have it subtitled. But yes, it is a global program.

Drew: From a media perspective standpoint, give me two “do’s” and one “don’t” for 2017.

Rob: First on my do list–get obsessed over the business challenge. Don’t be lazy about briefing the agency and really being able to uncover where your growth would be coming from and how that translates down to a real tangible consumer behavior. My second do — embrace the ability to be agile. Don’t plan your full budget to the last cent, hold some funds back for a timely opportunity. And my don’t — don’t message push. Think about creating an experience and a solution.

Want to Rebrand? Make Sure Work From the Inside Out

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Can one question change your life?  This certainly was the case for Gina McDuffie. In our podcast recording, Gina tells how when she was contemplating going to law school, her father asked her to give him three good reasons why. Turns out, she couldn’t come up with one and instead headed to Paris with $500 in her pocket and a willingness to try her hand at waitressing, bartending and even journalism.  A year later, she returned from the “School of Hard Knocks,” with a thorough understanding of who she was and her personal passion — “I love to build.”  This love of building drove her career choices, including her most recent move to VER, at which she presided over a major rebranding.

Brought in by new owners, Gina’s mission was to help transform marketing from a backstage afterthought to revenue-driving star.  Easier said than done especially with 1600 employees all used to doing business in a way that had worked for them for 30 years.  Recognizing the essential role employees play in any rebranding effort, Gina didn’t try to do the rebuilding alone and instead enlisted a core set of influencers.  This choice and more makes the interview below well worth your time and will make it easy for you to understand why The CMO Club honored Gina with their Rising Star award late last year.

Drew: Tell me about VER.

Gina: We are the amazing company that you’ve never heard of, but you have experienced. We provide production equipment and solutions to primarily entertainment industry and events industries. So any event you go to or pretty much anything you see on TV from the Super Bowl halftime show to the Emmys, the Grammys, the Oscars, major events around the country, VER is a part of it. So pretty much any event you go to, we are behind the scenes either providing the production equipment, working the equipment or coming up with a creative solution to make things happen that have never happened before.

Drew: Does the name VER stands for something?

Gina: Before I arrived, it stood for Video Equipment Rentals. VER started out more than 30 years ago renting video equipment solely. And then it just grew and grew and grew to now we provide lighting, audio, video, camera, LED, rigging, media servers, really all the production equipment you can imagine to major projects on six continents and we have 34 offices with 1,600 employees. It really has grown since its beginning and it was part of my job when I came in was to do a major rebrand.

Drew: You arrived at VER relatively recently. Was it an opportunity for a builder?

Gina: It’s good that I’m Gina the Builder because the company was 30 years old when I came in and there had been no marketing. The previous owner focused on customer relationships which served the company well. He told everybody, ‘go out there and make friends and if they want something and we don’t have it, buy it.’ So that was the marketing of the company. When I arrived, it had been just purchased by a private equity firm and there was no marketing infrastructure, no CRM program, no technology, not even an employee email list or a press list. There was nothing.

Drew: Wow! So where did you start?

Gina: So my job as CMO, first and foremost, was to work with the CEO on understanding and crafting a strategy. This certainly wasn’t about a revised logo or just changing colors. This was really figuring out the nuts and bolts in the strategy of the company, who we are, what we stand for, what services we offer and even what product categories are we in. Then it was dealing with all the tactical things that had never been done before, whether it’s PR, creating a whole new website, creating a digital environment, internal communication, lead generation and events. Essentially everything you can think of and it was starting from scratch.

Drew: Talk to me about the rebranding process.

Gina: Well there was one very easy thing about the rebrand and one very difficult thing about the rebrand. The very easy thing was customer and employee research. Everybody had very similar feedback regarding the company’s amazing culture, and that VER people will do anything for their clients. They are known for going way above and beyond, doing crazy stuff to get that one little piece that needs to be at the event and making sure the event is spectacular. And we are talking huge. We just did the Coachella Music Festival with 260 or more enormous screens. We’ve got guys hanging from the back to make sure that not one thing is out of place! So it was easy for me to understand the essence of the brand and the culture.

Drew: Okay, what was the difficult part?

Gina: The difficult thing was that we had 1,600 employees who didn’t understand that the company needed to change. What makes VER so special is the extremely talented and passionate people there. Many were skeptical of me coming in off the street saying VER needed to change. It was a really difficult time for me personally and professionally because I was trying to effect massive change that nobody thought was needed, other than the CEO and the private equity company.

Drew: So what were some of the key things that you did that enabled employees to get onboard?

Gina: Communication! A lot of it was talking with a smaller group of people who identified as influencers about why the change was necessary and to assure them that it was going to be okay and then to ask them to spread the word. It couldn’t come from me because people didn’t know me. I didn’t have credibility. They didn’t trust me. So I needed to work with people in the company who were trusted to get them to spread the word and to build trust.

Drew: I suspect part of the conversation was finding the bridge between the old and the new, right?

Gina: Absolutely. It was saying we are not trying to change what’s good, and there’s a lot that’s good. We are keeping what’s good and making it even better. We want our clients to understand the full scope of what we do. It entails talking about how our employee ensure our clients’ success and they are very weary of that because we’ve been behind the scenes for so long. Our entire purpose is to help our clients create extraordinary. It’s their vision and we make it happen.

It really was about assuring employees that the culture is not going to change. We are not going to change anything that’s good and there is so much that’s good. We are just going to make it even better. We are pulling on to the heritage and that’s why we didn’t change the name completely. We thought about dropping VER altogether and just coming up with a new name, but we couldn’t. We needed to hold on to the heritage because that’s really rich and strong one. And that went a long way with employees too.

Drew: How long did it take to get employees, and I’m sure it’s an ongoing process to buy into the changes that you help them realize were important?

Gina: I learned so much in this process. First and foremost, the anticipation of change is so much scarier than the change itself. Leading up to the major reveal of the brand, everybody was having a hard time with it and but then as soon as we changed it, as soon as they saw it in action and understood the reasoning behind it, they embraced it. It made me so happy and so relieved that on day two, people were wearing the hats, wearing the shirts, changing their e-mail signature, really getting behind it. And that to me was my measurement of success — how well the employees adopted the new brand.

Drew: Such a great reminder that rebranding starts internally. They have to buy in, right?

Gina: You bet. They are the brand.

Drew: How have you spread the word about the new brand externally?

Gina: We’ve done lots even just with our new website that hasn’t been done before and that was a big change for our customers. But more than anything, a rebranding can’t just be how it looks. There has to be a new user experience. So that’s taken a while to make sure that we are not just introducing the brand, but we are introducing a way of working with our customers that again doesn’t take away from what they had before because that’s working really well.

Drew: I’m guessing this transformation went beyond digital?

Gina: Indeed. We included a number face-to-face experiences and events. These can be time-consuming, but it’s really paid off for us to invite people into all of our facilities to spend time with our team and the equipment and just connect because we really are such a person-to-person business. I can’t stand that whole B2B designation. It’s all P2P for me. And this business really is person to person. We couldn’t just introduce the brand by saying here is our new logo, here are our new colors, that’s just not what it is. We needed to remind them of our love for our customers and we are doing that in person as much as possible.

Drew: Were there substantive changes to the way you actually did business that went along with this new brand?

Gina: A little bit after I arrived, we also hired a new COO, who came from Amazon and FedEx and we have been working to add more technology to our business and improving a lot of the processes, but not removing the personal touch. It’s been a major change on how we do business, always keeping the customer in the middle. At one point I was horrified because I realized that we weren’t answering a large percentage of our calls over the weekends. So I said, ‘everybody stop what you’re doing and let’s figure this out.’ Because it doesn’t matter what we are doing brand wise if we are not picking up the phone.

Drew: Such a key insight–no amount of branding can make up for a bad customer experience.

Gina: Right. My advice to marketers is that we need to get out of ‘marketing land’ and realize that customer experience, even if it’s not traditionally in our area, needs to be addressed for marketing to be effective. The brand can’t stand if the customer experience falls apart.

Drew: How are you measuring success from a customer standpoint?

Gina: Like I said, we are building from scratch. I still don’t even have a real CRM system in place; that’s still being built. The biggest metric I look at is what my CEO looks at and that’s profitable growth. The company has grown significantly year over year and that to me is a good enough indicator that what we are doing is working.

What to Do When the Circus Finds You

Posted on by Drew Neisser

If you’ve seen at least one Cirque du Soleil show, then you know this is not your grandfather’s circus. In fact, thinking about shows like Love and O, one might even forget to use the word circus when attempting to describe them.  So with such a differentiated product, you might think marketing could take a back seat and indeed this was the case for many years. But with competition rising, Cirque has had to up its game on the marketing front, adding talent like Alma Derricks, VP Sales and Marketing of Cirque’s Resident Shows Division.

In our extensive interview below, Alma shares some of the challenges she faced at Cirque, differentiating a portfolio of eight shows in Las Vegas, rebranding one of the shows, creating new customer experiences and even establishing a new line of business entirely.  It is little wonder that Alma garnered the Customer Experience Award from The CMO Club.  Read on to discover the high wire act of the modern marketer.

Drew: How did you end up at Cirque Du Soleil?

Alma: The circus sort of finds you, Drew. I can’t say that 10 years ago this was on my roadmap. It appeared as an opportunity. One of the throughlines in my career is that I run towards moments of inflection and Cirque, with its new private equity ownership, was definitely at one of those points when I joined last July. I love getting to ask questions, top to bottom, without any regard for how things have always been done. And that’s what I walked into.

Drew: So let’s talk about the Resident Shows Division at Cirque de Soleil. 

Alma: There are two major divisions at Cirque de Soleil. There’s the Residents Shows Division which oversees shows that are nailed down including our eight shows in Las Vegas and Orlando. We also have another team, the Touring Shows Division, that oversees shows that move around in the big top tent or tour in arenas.

Drew: That’s a lot of shows and seats to fill. 

Alma: In Las Vegas, we sell as many as 20,000 tickets a night. It’s a lot of inventory in a very, very busy town. My job is all about keeping our shows top of mind. For us, that’s usually an interesting continuum. Because we’re based in resorts, it’s not likely that you’ll see one of our shows more than once a year so, it’s important to stay in your peripheral vision. Once the decision is made to visit Las Vegas or Orlando, it’s really important that for us to break through the noise and remind you that we’re the most exciting thing that you can do in the evening. Cirque is over 30 years old. For the mass majority of those years, Cirque grew organically because it was new, different and dazzling. For example, a show like O, which is our flagship show at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, was sold out for two years when it opened. Marketing thinking is a relatively new thing for Cirque but incredibly important now that we’re not the newest kid on the block.

Drew: So what now?

Alma: Now, we’re in a different stage of life because we’re more established and face a lot of different challenges in the market. Vegas has gone through a number of reinventions over the past 30 years. Today, there’s a brand new 17,000 seat arena that hosts major concerts and will soon be home to a new hockey team. Special event residencies like JLo, Britney and Celine have emerged as an important part of the competitive landscape. So we have to keep reinventing ourselves in a space that, as you know from visiting Vegas, is a really busy place. We have to always make the loudest noise in that environment and make sure that visitors are still aware that we’re around, that we’re exciting and that we’re vital.

Drew: Must be a challenge from a portfolio management standpoint, right? Do people go to see a Cirque show or a specific show?

Alma: It’s a great question. What you’re hitting on is something really particular to Las Vegas because we have so many resident shows in one place. I’m always troubled when customers say that they don’t understand the differences between our shows. Some people think that there’s ‘O’, which stands out as “the water show”, and maybe one other production. One of the real challenges we have is needing to flip the brand script in Vegas and emphasize the show ahead of the Cirque brand. We need explain the differences between these shows. They all have very, very different personalities. And the thing that I’ve been working on quite a bit is, how do you communicate that each show is the only show you have to see.

Drew: Interesting. So how does this play out in places like social media?

Alma: I think one of the next new frontiers for Cirque is allowing customers behind the curtain a little bit more. It’s something that our founder was very, very cautious about in the early days of social media. But the world has changed and the expectation that an audience has about peeking behind that curtain is something we can’t put back in the bottle. So we’re trying to find ways to facilitate that via social media and social content and by creating events in Las Vegas that are complete behind the curtain experiences.

Drew: What would you look at now so far and say that oh, I’m really proud of this from a marketing standpoint that we were able to get this done and you been a relatively short period of time?

Alma: From a marketing standpoint, I think our highest profile achievement was actually rebranding our show The Beatles LOVE. I didn’t completely understand until we were well into the process that Cirque has never rebranded an existing show. For the tenth anniversary, we made quite a few changes to the show, the music, the technology and the visual identity. It was really interesting to rethink the entire way we were approaching getting that messaging out. I’m proud that we got through it and succeeded at so well.

Drew: What else?

Alma: I’m also really excited about offerings that give customers behind the scenes access. We’ve actually created an entire line of business called SPARK that serves as a learning laboratory for corporate teams. We provide business training, team building and will even create a customized curriculum. We’ve hosted companies like Adobe and Google onto the stage and into our training spaces so they can interact with our performers and production teams. It’s both an amazing bucket list moment and a chance to really learn about trust, team building, operational excellence and customer service in a very tangible way.

Drew: Very cool. I love the fact that as a marketing person you were so involved in creating a new revenue stream.

Alma: Thanks. Part of the process that I go through when I’m new to an organization, especially when I’m tasked with being a change agent, is to seek out these kinds of opportunities. I love the fact that we are able to build SPARK by leveraging our core business, our custom theatres, our performers, and our production teams. It’s taking off like a rocket, and has not only created a new way access the brand but also makes a strong statement about who we are.

Drew: By the way, I saw LOVE twice many moons ago. There you dealt with the common marketing challenge of taking a beloved brand and refreshing it.

Alma: True. With the refresh, especially if you are a Beatles fan, we’ve given you a new reason to see it again. We also recognized that technology changes and improves a lot in 10 years. Cirque has always taken pride in its fusion of technology and artistry so it seemed very natural as the tenth anniversary approached to rethink the staging, effects, and imagery. The original show was very nostalgic. Today it’s more colorful and, at the same time, showcases the fact that The Beatles are as relevant today as they were in the 60s.

Drew: Let’s talk metrics. Which ones matter?

Alma: Ticket sales are, of course, number one. Put that one in bold! But we also think about how our performers are evolving as creators and artists. Many artists like contortionists have a relatively short performing career. We are always thinking about what else interests them and how we can involve them in other ways with things like quasi-internships in marketing or sales. It’s an unusual thing but we’ve failed if we haven’t taken that into consideration along with our other marketing activities.

Drew: Do you have some advice for fellow marketers as they look ahead to 2017?

Alma: The first thing that comes to mind is proportionality. Just because the world is talking about spending more and more on digital doesn’t mean that it’s right for your business. For us, the real battle begins once a visitor to Vegas sets foot on the ground at the airport or drives into town. So, things like taxi toppers, building wraps, marquees and all those great out-of -home things will never stop being a priority in our marketing mix. It’s not about being modern or not, it’s about knowing your audience and understanding your context.

Drew: Totally agree. I’ve talked to a couple of CMOs that have pulled back their digital spend of late because it wasn’t performing as well as a mix with more TV. Do you have a recommend don’t for 2017?

Alma: Don’t get too absorbed by chasing big data, especially if it’s not relevant to you. Don’t let the pursuit of big data cause you to lose sight of the importance of instinct and intuition. It’s still the hallmark of what we do as marketers. You still have to have a gut instinct. Big data becomes a fantastic tool but, at the end of the day, you still have to know your products intimately and you still have to recognize a great idea even if you don’t have stacks of information to go on.

An Insider’s Look at Driving Change via Marketing

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Last Friday, I was in one of my “oh we’ve nailed it” gleeful moods as we contemplated a new business plan to focus on “agents of change.”  Our logic was airtight, or so we thought.  If we could just figure out how to isolate change agents as a personality type via a line of questioning, then we could narrow both the target and our communications approach.  To see if we were on the right track, I called my oldest brother Rick who has studied Myers-Briggs personality types for years as a hobby, with the hope that he could help us with the identification process.

Doh! That’s when I was reminded yet again how wrong I can be. Of course, intuitive inventor-types like me gravitate towards new ideas BUT that doesn’t mean we’re the only ones who can drive change in an organization.  In fact, traditionalists, may not want or seek out change but if shown factual reasons why change is required, they can be especially effective at making change happen in regulated industries like banks or insurance companies.

Which brings me to my interview with Melinda Welsh, CMO of Chase Auto Finance. Although I can’t categorize Melinda into a particular Myers-Briggs quadrant, I can tell you she is very much an agent of change, an approach that garnered her much success at Chase transforming marketing into a profit center and along with that, The CMO Club‘s President’s Circle Award. Read on for details on Melinda’s efforts and stay tuned in the event my brother passes along more humbling insights with his soon to be earned Myers-Briggs certification!

 

Drew: Tell me about Chase Auto Finance.

Melinda: Sure. A lot of people don’t connect a bank with a car; we certainly do and think that consumers should be thinking about their auto purchase a little differently than they are today – just to make sure they’re getting the best rate and the best kind of loans for their personal situation. It’s really important for us. Today, most auto purchases and financing are happening in the dealer. And we have a huge dealership network; it’s part of what we do. We support a lot of our sales staff in our B2B space;. That’s a really huge, important part of our business. We also recognize that when a consumer sits down in a dealership, they may not be fully aware of what their finance options are and they’re thinking just about their payment. But do they really know what their rate is and are they really educated before they walk in the door?

Drew: But that’s not always the case, right?

Melinda: Exactly, which is why they need talk to their financial institution about it and do their research. We’ve just launched our new end-to-end car buying and financing site, Chase Auto Direct.It helps our customers with finding the car, purchasing, and completing the financing before getting to the dealer. This end-to-end digital car buying experience is pretty progressive – it’s not for everyone, but we believe we should be giving our customers options, particularly those who are comfortable with all-digital experiences.

Drew: How is it going so far?

Melinda: We’re learning a lot, and it’s been really a fascinating ride in terms of marketing. It’s been primarily picked up as a fintech story, which we weren’t expecting. So we are switching gears a bit and thinking about a fintech marketing approach.

Drew: Is there another side of your auto business?

Melinda: Yes. We work with manufacturers including Mazda, Subaru, Jaguar, Land Rover, and Maserati as their private label financing partners. From a marketing perspective, we work really closely with all these manufacturers on co-marketing that helps their brands, which is good for our business as well. So that’s been a really interesting combination of B2B and B2C marketing.

Drew: The role of CMO seems to vary greatly depending on the company and the individual. Some control the customer experience and marketing, others new product development. How much does your role encompass?

Melinda: It’s an interesting discussion around here about if any one department owns the end-to-end customer experience and the answer is no. Today, it’s not as cohesive as it should be and it’s something that we are really working on. We’re developing our roadmap for next year and offering a more consistent end-to-end experience is definitely an opportunity. I see more and more of that coming into marketing, and a more holistic ownership of that customer experience and customer lifecycle.

Drew: What about product development?

Melinda: At Chase product development typically sits in lines of business, which are all my internal clients. Marketing always has a seat at the table for how we would talk to a customer about this new product. This is so important because it really helps, inform what the product ended up being. So I don’t see that moving into marketing, but we’re definitely a critical piece of it.

Drew: What would you consider your proudest accomplishment so far?

Melinda: When I got into this job I had a fantastic CEO who really wanted transformative marketing. She said , “I want you to come here to change things.” When I arrived it was an old-fashioned cost center marketing group, Our shared vision was to change marketing into a profit center, to move it from B2B sales support to B2C, and to be a really big important part of what the Auto executive team is interested in.

Drew: That must have been a big challenge, right?

Melinda: Yes. We had to figure out the types of functions we needed and build a group out. We needed to assess how we’re going to invest in digital and how we’re going to transform things like events, which are still important to our business. And figure out how we’re going to use CRM and connect with our customers. We really took everything to the next level in a relatively short period of time, which is what I was brought into do. I feel like there’s still a lot more to do, but that’s what I’m proud of in this role.

Drew: That’s great. So you came in as a change agent and you succeeded at changing things. What part of this was measurable?

Melinda: The new digital portal is easier to measure than some of our other programs. We can measure that because we are doing a lot of direct marketing tactics to drive people there, and we track what happens. We know for every dollar spent what is needed to get a return, It’s actually quite measurable in that way.

Drew: There must be some other metrics that are tougher to gauge given longer purchase cycles?

Melinda: I think there are especially since we work a lot of the luxury automobile segments. People don’t buy those every day, and they might think about it for a long time before they buy it. So we measure engagement, exposure, and leads in those cases.

Drew: I would imagine that measuring sales and profit would be really important in your role?

Melinda: Of course! We’re a bank and we’re dollars and cents oriented. So that’s the most important way we measure things, honestly. But there is another internal measure that I use which has to do with my colleagues who run businesses. Do they trust marketing? Do they want to invest more funds and in more marketers because they see the value that marketing is adding? If the answer is yes, and they see it as a critical piece of growing their business, then I feel like we’re really succeeding as a marketing organization.

Drew: The overall Chase brand must also be a big help.

Melinda: I think that the strength of the overall Chase brand helps us a lot. One reason I’m extremely lucky to be here is that we don’t have to encourage people to come to our Chase assets. Millions of people come into our branches and visit our website every day. It’s where they do all of their financial activities. So if we put our messages on Chase.com or in the branch, people read them. And, when they get to our website, they expect something really high quality. So we’re careful about what we put out across all of our businesses. We hope that what they find is something that’s very, very valuable because it has that Chase brand behind it,.

Drew: Do you have any recommendations for your fellow CMO’s to consider trying in 2017?

Melinda: Make sure that you’re still looking at non-digital marketing channels. I know it’s starting to become a buzzword again, but experiential marketing is well worth revisiting. And while some people are doing it well, a lot of people aren’t or they are not sure what to do to scale experiences. People really want something tangible and marketing can provide that. .

Drew: Love that. Renegade’s experiential program for HSBC (the BankCab) ran for 13 years and was actually cost effective. What else would you recommend?

Melinda: I think there’s something really interesting happening with video content within a platform like Facebook. I think advertisers haven’t really caught on to yet to the idea of creating “snackable” content. And it’s not about placing ads, it’s about really delivering content that people are going to be interested in a much different way than what we’ve been talking about for the past couple years.

Drew: Any other recommendations?

Melinda: I would say don’t just fall back on what’s worked before and really think about the next generation. My kids aren’t millennials but take my 11-year old daughter as an example, she does not watch TV! But she’s absolutely glued to video content on her phone, and what she finds interesting and relevant is very, very different than what we’re used to. So don’t ignore the signals and rely on what you’ve done before because there’s a whole new world of marketing and advertising that’s waiting to be tapped that we haven’t figured out quite yet.

 

Keeping the Customer Front and Center

Posted on by Drew Neisser

water skiing crash bigGripping tightly to the lifeless plastic handle I could only muster a fainthearted “hit it” to the speedboat skipper 50 feet away. This was to be my third and final attempt to rise above my skis and frankly I was already drained and shivering. The first effort had ended in a face plant with skis scattered across the surface like an old-fashioned yard sale. The second was only slightly less ugly. My already formulated excuse was going to be that the boat was too weighed down with passengers to yank my sad ass above the surface. Fortunately, the third time was the charm as I kept my weight back as instructed and let the skis do their magic. Once elevated, I hurled myself out of the wake regaining some semblance of the athletic confidence I usually take for granted and romped around the lake like a champ.

Had you not seen my false starts or heard any of the coaching I received before liftoff, you might have thought it was just another effortless and solitary accomplishment by an experienced (read middle aged) jock.  [Stay with me now as I deftly transition to the real story here!] This is not unlike the experience most of us have when seeing a finished product or a successful marketing campaign. Typically, we don’t bother to ask about the team behind the product or about any of the missteps along the way. As consumers, we take all that for granted as we should. But as marketers, we can’t afford such incuriousness. We have to go deeper. We must look under the surface. We must understand the process behind the success.
And yes, that’s exactly what I did during a recent conversation with Kieran Hannon, the CMO of Belkin, the makers of Belkin, Linksys and Wemo products. Kieran, as you may remember is featured in my book, The CMO’s Periodic Table under the element “Storytelling.”  This time we went even deeper, covering his impressive three-year plan, Belkin’s inclusive product development process, influencer marketing and more. While Kieran appears not to have had too many wipeouts along the way, what you will discover is a marketer whose seemingly effortless glide is wholly the result of determination, collaboration and well earned experience.

Drew: One of the things that you mentioned to me was your three-year plan. Where are you on that plan, and how is it coming along?

Kieran: We’re now going into year four. Year 1 was focused on the organization itself. It was aimed at educating our marketing teams across the globe, helping them understand their roles, the needs in the markets, and the priorities of the company. Essentially, Year 1 was building a team that could deliver global marketing programs and lead that development. Year 2 was aimed at aligning the region and the corporate goals because we were decentralized at that point. In Year 2, the global marketing teams were supporting all three brands. Some of the team members were dedicated to a brand but in a lot of other respects, the teams worked across multiple brands. For instance, the CRM team has worked across all brands. Now, CRM is embedded into each brand, they are in control of their own destiny and their needs as a great example. Additionally, we had designers sitting in 11 different functional groups around the world. Now, all designers are in one group in each brand, so there is a single management structure for each brand. Those are just a few examples of streamlining, and bringing focus and prioritization around the world.

Drew: What was the result of this plan?

Kieran: As a premium brand, Belkin is doing very well in a somewhat commoditized market. Our focus on highly differentiated products and experiences is making a big difference. For example, when you travel you’ll see Belkin in all the Hudson News stores around the US and around the world. For Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), Hudson came to us and asked if they could build a Belkin store because travelers find the brand so compelling.

At CES, one of our products, the Valet Charge Dock for the Apple watch and iPhone was voted Best in Show. That’s another example of the design innovation Belkin is reknowed for — and it’s been a tremendous success.

Drew: Let’s talk about product innovation and marketing and where product development sits relative to marketing. How do you ensure that there’s a marketing idea built into the product?

Kieran: Sure. Let me tell you about ScreenCare +, a new applicator system that we launched in all Apple stores. That is not just a product; it’s an experience. The product management team, the industrial design teams and the marketing teams worked very closely in the development of that program from embedded testing to the testing of different formats for training of store specialists. We have what’s called our “E2” planning processes with different gates and as a product goes from formation into development, marketing and other groups provide input and feedback. This insures alignment throughout our exciting and rewarding process.

Drew: It really is amazing how Wi-Fi is at the center of everything, the enabler of the Internet of Things.

Kieran: It’s such a key enabler. A lot of people have so many devices at home, they don’t realize they’re probably sitting there with a three or four-year-old Wi-Fi router and it’s wrecking the experience of these great devices that they bought. What’s worse than when you want to go online in the evening with your family to stream a movie, and all you see is buffering? A lot of the issues are because you have an old router and there are another ten devices connected to the Wi-Fi that are impeding the ability to deliver that signal. To help our customers have a better experience, you can now prioritize within the Linksys system your Netflix streaming device and de-prioritize other devices.

Drew: How are you incorporating influencer marketing into your overall strategy?

Kieran: We’ve done a number of influencer programs over the years and they’re very target based. We spend a lot of time ensuring that we get the right type of influencers that can really amplify our cause. Importantly, we let them drive the project. We just want our influencers to express their feelings about the brand, the products and the experience in a way that’s most meaningful to them. Full transparency is pretty critical and we’ve been very pleased with every influencer program we’ve done.

Drew: What are the pitfalls of influencer program?

Kieran: I think the fundamental pitfall is trivialization, either trivializing the audience or trivializing the role the product plays. It doesn’t mean that you heighten the role of the product in that experience but you don’t want to trivialize it either. So, I think it’s best to be authentic throughout the partnership.

Drew:  I think one of the challenges clients encounter is evaluating the success of influencer programs relative to other activities. How do you evaluate these programs?

Kieran: It’s the crossover between paid and earned media that’s really powerful and puts the icing on the cake. We have both consumers and retail partners as our audience, and how they talk about and relate to our brands is very important. We think about that as we build up these influencer programs.

Drew: As a company that introduces innovative products and services, how do you make sure your media and your marketing is innovative? Is the medium the message sometimes?

Kieran: Oh, absolutely. I’ll give you an example. A great program that we do with Hulu is at the point of buffering, we deliver a message to people that you don’t have to have that experience – you just need a more powerful router. So, the medium can absolutely be the message. On the Belkin side, we’ve done some great programs with other mobile platforms that really bring to life what you’re doing at that moment in time. So yes, the medium is equally important as the message in a lot of cases.

Drew: The geo-fencing program you did is particularly innovative. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Kieran: Yes, we are doing an interesting program with geo-fencing where we understand when the consumer is in the proximity of a retail partner and we can share with them the relevant personal message to that proximity.

Note: This is part 1 of my interview with Belkin’s Kieran Hannon, part 2 will appear on Social Media Explorer soon.  

CMO Insights: How Rebranding is Done

Posted on by Drew Neisser

Reinventing your brand is a lot harder than it sounds. Legacy perceptions, perhaps one’s that you worked for years to engender, are extremely hard to dispel.  Xerox spent years trying to convince us they weren’t just a copier company with modest success. Then there’s the need to get both management and employee buy-in which can be as hard as changing customer perceptions.  For example, Kodak management and employees never really adjusted to the digital era and its last minute efforts to reinvent came to naught.

One of the most dramatic ways to signify reinvention is through a name change since it risks resetting brand equity at zero.  Which brings me to my conversation with Michael Mendenhall, CMO of Flex.  Formerly known as Flextronics, Mendenhall and the leadership team recognized that customer perceptions did not align with what the company actually did and where it wanted to go SO they decided to drop “tronics” from their name, thus marking a clear transition from the old to the new.  It was hardly as simple as that so read on to learn just how effective this reinvention really was and why Mendenhall was recognized with the Growth Award by The CMO Club.

Drew: Can you start off by telling me what Flex does?

Michael: We design, innovate, and engineer smart products for the connected world.

Drew: How does digital marketing fit into that, and what were some of the digital initiatives you have focused on in the past year?

Michael: Well, it wasn’t just digital as an initiative that we accomplished this year. When I came to Flex over a year ago, this was a company that was transforming itself based on market demand. We started out 40 years ago in contract manufacturing, moved into electronics, and then evolved into a supply chain solutions company. The last four to five years, the company added a great deal of capability around design, innovation, engineering, and software solutions filling out the entire portfolio of products and services for companies who would want to commercialize products. We would provide them with the sketch-to-scale solutions, no matter if you were a small startup with an idea or you were a Fortune 10 company.

Drew: How did your team go about changing the marketplace’s understanding of Flex and the services it provided?

Michael: It was our goal to rebuild the corporate strategy of the company, evaluate the existing assets and capabilities and then ask ourselves, “What do we offer the marketplace and what is that the addressable market for our products and services?” The name of the company was adding to some of the confusion relative to our customer value proposition. The market thought we were electronic manufacturers or contract manufacturers. In fact, we weren’t. We were a very flexible, adaptive company that could commercialize your product from a sketch on a napkin, all the way up to full-scale global distribution, as well as logistics. So we decided strategically to drop the “tronics” from the name to reposition that brand against that new strategy. After changing the name, we then proceeded to recalibrate the brand, developing a new mission-vision-value proposition for the company.

Drew: Can you expand on how you modified Flex’s brand architecture and built on the brand identity?

Michael: We built out a strategy around a couple major pillars. One was corporate communications, which included strategic communications, financial communications, and analyst relations for the company. We aligned the communication architecture to the brand and corporate strategy of the company. This allowed us to build the mechanics in marketing around digital marketing, communication, brand, global citizenship, CSER and really go after what was going to drive customer and shareholder value.

Drew: What were the effects of the newly implemented strategies?  

Michael: The effect all of that had was pretty extraordinary. In the first six months after we had repositioned the company and launched the new brand and communication, we had already added 44 percent value to the share price. That wasn’t just from revenue growth, there was a great deal of that that was attributed to the strategic repositioning of the company, the new brand and the new communication architecture for the company. We also wound up bringing in a lot of new customers, both small startups and large enterprises. We’ve had great margin growth in the company based on this, all ending with a really terrific one-year shareholder price and return to the shareholders.

Drew: Wow, that’s a herculean effort doing all of that in a relatively short period of time. As you’re reaching new markets with a brand name that was unheard of, it must have been particularly difficult trying to get some credibility in the market.

Michael: We had existing relationships with VCs and private equity firms who knew our company well. They would continue to espouse our experience, knowledge, credibility and experience sending any software or hardware companies needing help in designing, engineering prototyping and production. We have extraordinary amounts of cumulative experience that could help brands eliminate startup mistakes, giving them velocity to market with quality and reliability. We focused on the brand reputation, not as much the equity and influenced the relations relative to those key stakeholder groups. We spent time building that capability in addressing those initiatives that then would move the reputation of the company. That was the part of the success, using all levers including digital marketing.

Drew: Do you see a big difference between B2B and B2C marketing?

Michael: I’ve always been quite frustrated with how companies, who are B2B, they generally believe they need to have to have a certain business tone and vernacular in approaching there market. Content in B2B is is incredibly important whether short form or long form, whether it’s a soundbite or a two-hour documentary. The narrative should be told in an approachable and easily digestible way. Not speaking over or under the audience. Simple, easy and quick. The channels then become important in whether you’re passive, active, engaged, etc. So for us, I always believe that you must have EQ in the narrative. After all we are all consumers at the end of the day.

Drew: It seems as though many marketers are experiencing a renewed interest in storytelling. Is this one of your focuses at Flex?  

Michael: For me, there is an emotion in decision-making, and a level of engagement that supports storytelling. Within storytelling, we follow a certain pattern of lead generation, lead nurturing, conversion etc. I wanted to build an approachable brand. We are in multiple industries and it could become very complex and sophisticated very quickly. We have to be approachable, yet understandable, and simple in how we appeal to the market. The narrative of you brand is incredibly important. It needs attention, discipline and focus.

Drew: What is the story you wanted to tell and how did you tell it?

Michael: We talked about thought leadership, as Flex is an influencer and thought leader in the space. That involved shaping those scenes and stories, and deciding how we would tell them. We then set out to look at the means by which we would produce the content. One of those was a magazine called Intelligence. We went after the intelligent, smart data, and the idea that product will move from using connectivity for operability to optimization and predictability. That becomes incredibly important because then you start to realize that your products are actually going to tart optimizing themselves and giving you new data points as a marketer. The magazine is basically an industry magazine for the intelligence of things. We curate content from some of the world’s best in their field; they write for us based on topics we believe would be interesting for people that are working on smart connected products. Every Company is a media company. Content is still king.

Drew: What do you think is the biggest lesson here for marketers?

Michael: I believe the biggest lesson for marketers is to remember that storytelling is still very important. No matter if it’s short form or long form, as marketers we have to pay special attention to the art of storytelling. We have to be highly disciplined and focused on that, and be able to tell stories in an approachable way, especially if you are B2B.