If there’s one part of the business that’s connected to the consumer, it’s the marketing department. Closely monitoring shifting consumer behaviors, eyeing critical trends in the marketplace and the culture in general, and deftly communicating the value of your brand to potential customers are all table stakes for any modern marketer with C-suite aspirations.

Indeed, according to a recent PwC survey, meeting customer expectations for their brands, products and services is the biggest concern for CMOs, with 37 percent listing it as one of their top three issues. So in recent conversations with some of the best and brightest in the industry, we inquired about what it takes to land that coveted role, and how to turn those aspirations into reality.

Brad Hiranaga, Chief Brand Officer, Cotopaxi: I think for marketers that are coming up, if there’s a way to have experiences on both types of brands, legacy nostalgic brands that you learn a ton of stuff on in addition to smaller, digitally-native brands that are built that way, it’s important to have both those types of experiences. Because otherwise, you can eventually pigeonhole yourself into being just a performance-based marketer, or just a big brand marketer.

When you step up into CMO roles and C-suite roles, you don’t have to be necessarily an expert on every single thing, but you have to understand how all of those parts fit together for the bigger picture of what you’re trying to drive. You have to understand the consumer and where technology’s going. So being curious and constantly reinventing yourself and your skills is crucial. [Read more from Hiranaga here.]

Ana Andjelic, Global Chief Brand Officer, Esprit: I would recommend a strategic and holistic approach, which means looking at where the marketing connects with merchandising, where merchandise connects with design, where brand connects with the product, and where all of the above connects with physical retail and the experience. Look at the entire brand experience. That’s your job. Sure, you can use data, but why? To connect better with merchandising, to give direction to design the product better, to set the price. I recommend a holistic view in this role. [Read more from Andjelic here.]

Kristen D’Arcy, CMO of Homedics: The conversation that I’m hearing in the industry is about the cookie-less world and how do you build up your first-party data so that you can learn a lot about your consumers’ market in a personalized way. That’s number one. Number two is social shopping. That’s something that a lot of people are discussing right now. And then three is, what is the role of influencers more broadly? Going back to our strategy, which was mass diversification in terms of where we put our media, what role do influencers play in terms of helping drive sales online? [Read more from D’Arcy here.]

Tyrrell Schmidt, Chief Marketing Officer, TD Bank: Sometimes people think about their career in linear ways, like “I need to move to the next level.” It’s also about understanding what experiences you need to get to the C-suite. Be open, be willing to try new things. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to stay in that role forever.

I urge people to think about “the what and the how.” What you deliver is important. Taking accountability for your area is critical, but it’s also the “how.” I’m a big believer in building relationships. As companies look to build more agile structures, being able to work with different groups of people on aligned goals and aligned KPIs and outcomes is important. [Read more from Schmidt here.]

The post The C-Suite Speaks: Cotopaxi, Esprit, TD Bank and Homedics Offer Career Advancement Tips appeared first on Chief Marketer.

With 20 years of experience leading marketing teams across a variety of business categories, from CPG to retail franchising to B2B2C to nonprofit, American Lung Association CMO Julia Fitzgerald is sure of one thing: Regardless of an organization’s business model, the fundamentals of effective marketing are essentially the same.

It all starts with knowing the narrative, she says. “What is your value proposition, what is it that you do, who do you do it for, and how do you do it differently than everybody else?” she told Chief Marketer this week. Then it comes down to branding, followed by evaluating—and optimizing—the team structure.

Below is our conversation with Fitzgerald, spanning a plethora of topics, including common marketing mistakes brands make when measuring ROI; ways to analyze and pivot your current strategy for more profitable outcomes; lessons learned from marketing in the private sector; and why consumer sentiment and AI are the trends she’s paying most attention to.

Chief Marketer: This is your first role in the nonprofit world. What have you learned from your experience working in the private sector?

American Lung Association CMO Julia Fitzgerald: I’ve been a CMO for just about 20 years, and I’ve spanned all types of different business models. I’ve been in CPG, retail franchising, B2B, B2B2C, and now finally not-for-profit. Yes, this is a new business model, but what I find in marketing is that regardless of the business model, what makes effective marketing work is essentially the same.

CM: What are those commonalities?

JF: It starts with with knowing the narrative. What is your value proposition, what is it that you do, who do you do it for, and how do you do it differently than everybody else? And next comes down to branding. How does your target market identify you in the marketplace? What does your branding say about you both visually, and your voice? My next piece is to look at the team structure. Is the marketing team set up to do the challenge for the organization? Marketing changes so frequently. So, do we have the right combination of people and agencies to do what we need to do?

And then it starts to get a little boring. I do a calendar audit. Because I frequently find that, especially with midsize organizations, you’re out of sync. If your really big get happens in January, don’t chase the semi-big win in November and then not be prepared to win in January. It’s looking at the calendar. Are we backed off enough to really make this happen? And then, you get to the part where everybody wants to start—and that’s the digital ecosystem and digital advertising. Whenever I come into an organization, [people say], “are we going to do a TikTok? Are we going to use influencers?” Right down to the delivery system, skipping all those other steps that I just mentioned. And while that is the sexy new stuff, it needs to come later—and it also needs to come after the content strategy.

The other part of marketing that I find ubiquitous from one business model to the next is “content plus the delivery.” You have to have the message, and then it’s how you’re going to get it out there. I tell my team that it’s the music and the words to make the whole song. You’re working on a content strategy. What’s the message? What do we want people to do? How does this need to sound before we decide if we need a micro-influencer or a TikTok campaign? And then the last piece is using KPIs and reporting to motivate that virtuous cycle. Is this working really well for us? Or, this is not worth the time of day—and taking it back to the beginning.

CM: Let’s talk ROI a bit. In your experience, what are some common marketing mistakes that brands make when they’re measuring ROI?

JF: I would say the first mistake is not to measure. Number one is not giving careful thought ahead of time to how would you measure success. The other part is inconsistent measurement of your KPIs. If you’re only going in occasionally and checking, and not looking at through lines and trends, it’s hard to understand what’s happening. I see that a lot when we look at organic traffic to our websites versus the paid traffic. If you only pay attention to it once in a while, you don’t get the whole picture.

And then the other one is staying attuned to where you’re spending big dollars. I think most marketers these days see that with digital advertising—understanding what’s happening to the cost-per-clicks, what’s happening on the investment side, and then what’s happening on the conversion side. Is this channel still working as efficiently as it used to, or did something shift and now I need to shift my mix?

CM: How do you recommend analyzing your current strategy to find out what’s not working?

JF: This is where you can look at the qualitative and the quantitative. When it comes to digital, the numbers start to tell you. Where this is a little bit harder is on the metrics that don’t move as quickly, such as awareness or consideration or participation or building up a certain market segment, because you can’t get a week-by-week KPI that tells you the direction that it’s headed. That’s where it’s incumbent on a marketer to have some feedback. Who else is really interested in this KPI? Is it your retail partners? Is it your board members? Is it some of your best customers? Having informal feedback circles to tell you: Are you hearing more buzz about this? Are more people inquiring about this? Are you feeling better about our position with your existing customers? That’s where you need to look at your whole ecosystem, from your customer to your clients, to decide who else can tell you if you’re winning on this or not.

CM: How would you go about pivoting to a more profitable strategy?

JF: First of all, are the people on your team nimble thinkers? When the conditions change, whether it’s the pandemic or inflation or one of the major factors that impacts your business, how good is your team? Have you staffed up with people who can do this? In a midsize organization that is especially important.

The second is staying aware of what the other options are for you. If you go back to digital, it could be channels. Our performance on Facebook was changing dramatically for a while as people were walking away from it. And Twitter… that really took a hit. Not that we do much advertising on Twitter, but we even had grants and people that we’re working with say, “Hey, do not use this channel.” So then all of a sudden you say, what channel can I use?

We get pushback, because as a public health organization, we do some work with partners who are federally-funded and now prohibited from having anything on TikTok. It’s understanding where else the target customer is consuming information and how you can still reach them. And being aware enough of your customer and where they show up, so that if one option is now off the table or not performing, you can look at the other options and meet them where they’re showing up.

CM: How does audience engagement differ in the nonprofit world compared to the roles you’ve had in the past?

JF: In some of my past roles, it was selling something very concrete, a product or a service. And what we’re providing [at ALA] is something that I don’t have to sell. It’s just information for people who can use it. That took me a while. My call to action is, “Here, I think this can help you.” Then the other part is selling the concept of what the American Lung Association does for public health, and finding people who care enough about it that they want to help us along our way and donate. That’s very different. The parts that are similar is finding motivators. What is it about our mission that would motivate other individuals to help us?

The other great thing about working for the American Lung Association: At every company I’ve been with, you drive to have the best possible bottom line. At the end of my first year, we made more money than we thought we had. And instead of saying, “There’s the bottom line,” my boss said, “I can’t believe we had this much more money. We could have funded another research.” I just loved that, taking whatever surplus win there is for the organization to push more good out into the universe.

CM: What are your greatest challenges as the CMO of ALA?

JF: Budgets. Typically, when someone asks me about marketing budgets [in the private sector], I could say, on a year of a new product launch, I have about 20 million, or 12 million… With American Lung Association and a lot of not-for-profits, that depends. So much of our budget comes from grants, from partnerships, from the ebb and flow. So while there is some predictability, it’s about, what does this year bring? It goes back to that flexibility and the ability to be resourceful with what is available each year to try to hit the goals.

CM: Lastly, what trends should marketers be focusing on this year? What do you have your eye on?

JF: AI. I wrote a book called “Midsize,” and I finished most of the writing in June or July. It takes a while to get these things fully made. I was writing about the future of this chat GPT thing and how that was going to come sometime in the future. And then on November 30th, it came in hard. So, the future’s here. The first thing I did was grab my team together. We are all writers. We produce content, so we have to figure out how we use this as a tool. It’s not going to stay free forever, but this is a game changer. It’s not going to replace writers, but the efficiency is amazing. And I don’t think we fully understand yet how this is going to change the whole landscape.

The other thing we should keep our eye on is consumer attitude. Coming out of the pandemic was a dark time. That might be the biggest understatement that we have today, but the tone was more somber, more serious. And as we’re emerging out of that, you are seeing that consumers are responding to more upbeat messaging, more solution-oriented messaging, versus darker and focusing on the problem. Marketers should keep their eye on the overall temperature of the public, and especially different segments of the public.

The post CMO Corner: A Chat With American Lung Association CMO Julia Fitzgerald appeared first on Chief Marketer.

TD Bank locked in a 20-year naming rights extension this month with Boston’s TD Garden arena, home to the Bruins, the Celtics and hundreds of mega entertainment events each year. From a marketing perspective, awareness is the obvious play here. But it’s one tactic out of many that supports community-building in specific markets.

“Our brand health is incredibly strong as a result of the fact that we are actually present in the community,” TD Bank CMO Tyrrell Schmidt told Chief Marketer. “And community is core to what we do from a sponsorship perspective.”

In addition to the naming rights, TD has a slew of activations and incentives designed to connect with fans and locals, including $15 million toward community programs, TD-themed events, concession discounts and rewards, and more. We spoke with Schmidt about the sponsorship, digitization of the customer experience, how the brand is using CTV to drive consideration in local markets and its overall strategy for growth.

Chief Marketer: What are the strategic marketing goals of continuing with the naming rights for TD Garden?

Tyrrell Schmidt, CMO at TD Bank: We extended our marquee sponsorship of both the TD Garden as well as Boston Bruins for a further 20 years through an early renewal. It kicked off in 2005, so it’s a 40-year partnership, which we think is historic for sponsorship. It solidifies our commitment to the Boston community and retains the beloved Garden name, which is something that we brought back to Bostonians in 2005.

There’s a lot of passion around that. It also gives us critical opportunities to engage with our customers, with our fans and with our communities, which are important stakeholder groups for both organizations. We have alignment in terms of strategic priorities, how we bring this to market, and who we bring it to market for. It also gives us an opportunity to be part of the fabric of the community, to drive engagement through our shared passion around two of the winningest teams in sports, and from a TD perspective, it gives us great visibility for our brand throughout our footprint.

CM: What are the KPIs for this partnership?

TS: Sponsorship is an important part of our overall marketing mix. Firstly, it can be very local. We have over 750 local partnerships and sponsorships, and they all tend to meet the objective of driving brand and allowing us to engage with our customers, because sponsorship is one of those ways that you can come into contact with your customers. That’s critically important when we think about the TD Garden. We know that our brand health is incredibly strong as a result of the fact that we are actually present in the community. And community is core to what we do from a sponsorship perspective.

Through this deal, as an example, we will give $15 million back to local communities in and around Boston, which is important as we think about our community focus, about diversity and inclusion, and bringing our brand to multiple different segments across these communities. It allows us to deepen our business relationships. An example is our small business takeover, where we share our [ad] space for a night with a small business. Someone who we have a partnership or a relationship with will really benefit from that type of awareness and visibility.

We’ll also invest in what we call Access the Arts. One program under that is called TD Guest List, which gives complimentary tickets to events all year to groups that are nominated or individuals from an underserved or an underrepresented community. We also have the TD Garden House Artist program that commissions local artists from underrepresented communities to create transformative art in and around the TD garden.

CM: Can you talk a bit about your cause marketing strategy?

TS: Firstly, we don’t really think of it as cause marketing. We think about it as delivering on our purpose. And our purpose is around enriching the lives of our customers, our colleagues and our communities. We have a program that we call the Ready Commitment that serves to guide where and how we support our communities. For example, [with] diversity and inclusion, it’s making sure that we are building an inclusive future for all—things like housing for everyone. Giving access in communities where they might not have the same access to banking and banking products is critical to what we do in our communities. And sponsorship is just one way to do that, but it is a deeply-held belief at TD, holistically, that we are here to enrich their lives. That’s more than just selling products and services; it is about making sure that we are building that inclusive and sustainable future for all.

CM: How did the pandemic shift your marketing tactics?

TS: We’re in a rapidly changing world and environment. That is something we always pay attention to. We know that community needs change. We understand that consumers’ needs and expectations of banks and of other companies evolve regularly. Our customers tell us that they are looking for ease, for value and for advice.

From an advice perspective, 40 percent of consumers say that they are financially worse off than they were a year ago. We believe that we have a role to play there. That ties back to our brand, of being unexpectedly human and understanding that behind every transaction our customers have with us, there’s a story. That is what makes TD differentiated in the market: our focus on the human behind the story. We believe that people matter most.

One other important proof point around what’s changed is this: Consumers want to be able to access you when, where, and how they want to. Especially over the pandemic, when overnight everyone was doing banking online, we made sure that we were bringing our human proposition to bear, no matter how people interact with us. It’s not just in the person-to-person interactions.

CM: Following up on that idea, digital transformation has been necessary for most companies in the past few years. How are you digitizing the customer experience?

TS: We are looking at the digital experience, but looking at it within the context of an omnichannel experience. We know that consumers have different needs and they will use channels for different reasons. Historically, we were very much an in-person, go-into-the-branch environment. We still have customers who that’s really meaningful for, but increasingly we are seeing that people are doing less complex transactions, in particular online, and they want to be able to do that 24/7, at a time that works for them.

But if you talk to consumers, even younger consumers who we think of as digitally-native, they probably won’t [often] go into a TD store or a bank branch. Yet we know that there are times [that they will]. So if they’re getting ready to, for example, get a mortgage, something that’s a little bit more complex, or something they’re doing for the first time, they will want to come in and often seek advice in-person. We need to be able to serve our customers how they want to be served. And we need to make the experience feel more human.

For TD, one of the things that I think has made us stand out is our approachability. Regardless of how we’re interacting with our customers, we have what we call a conversationalist tone. Banking itself can have a lot of jargon; it can have some complexity. We aim to make the experience one that our customers find easy, that gives them advice, whether it’s what we call “big A” advice or “big wealth” advice, right down to needing a tip or some guidance.

CM: Are there channels you’re working with in the coming year that are new for you? What are you experimenting with?

TS: We’re constantly testing our media mix. There are more channels and different ways to reach consumers—and different consumers prefer different media. One example is CTV. It’s an interesting space for us. When I think about linear TV versus CTV, at the end of the day it starts with your objective. Increasingly, we are looking at local objectives, so looking at our core markets and understanding that in some markets we’re relatively new. We don’t have a big store presence, nor have we had a big marketing presence historically. So we need to focus on getting reach in those markets and building awareness.

But where we’ve been in a market for a long time, where we have a defined, prominent presence, we’re leaning into more consideration and further down-funnel activities, and connecting those. And evolving the media strategy to drive that. Something like CTV is great for a market where we have a lot of awareness but not as much consideration.

CM: What’s TD Bank’s growth strategy for the coming year?

TS: With the acquisition of First Horizon, TD will be a top six bank. We’re a top 10 bank currently, so growth in our core priority markets will continue to be critical. We see a couple of opportunities from a marketing perspective. One is to continue the growth that we’ve had in our core products across our customer base. And marketing plays a critical role in that. Internally, we’ve continued to work with our product partners in new and different ways through agile models, et cetera, to drive more and more growth through marketing where marketing is making an even bigger contribution than it has in the past.

Secondly, we’re a steward of the brand, and connecting that to customer experience. When customers do business with a brand that has values similar to their own, and then also delivers a customer experience in line with the brand promise, that drives loyalty and builds trust. Those are things that really matter to people as they look to deepen their relationship or expand their relationship with you. Marketing’s role is crucial in both of those areas. But it’s not just marketing who can own brand and the customer experience. It needs to live across the organization.

The third area for us is to move beyond customer acquisition and deepen engagement with our current customer base. Currently, we have a wide customer base. By understanding customer needs and being able to make seamless, connected, relevant personalized experiences, we will drive a better experience for our customers and be able to expand our relationship with them.

CM: Being a CMO of a large bank, what kinds of trends are you looking at right now? What should marketers be paying attention to?

TS: Obviously from a bank perspective, constantly looking at the landscape, how it’s evolving, what’s going on in the macroeconomic environment is critically important. And making sure that you’re building product services and being there to help your customers as they navigate some fairly uncertain times. That’s important in banking, but it’s important beyond banking. It starts with understanding consumer insights, staying relevant and staying up to speed with those trends and with those insights, because customer behaviors are evolving faster than they ever have before.

There is also a trend toward a much more personalized experience. I don’t think customers look at one category any longer. They are judging every company by a “best of the best” [mindset] and defining who the best of those companies are. And then thirdly is purpose. Especially in an uncertain and evolving world, purpose really matters to consumers. Understanding what your purpose is, what gets you and your colleagues up in the morning, why someone should be a customer or come to work with you and stay, is crucially important. Increasingly, we all see consumers wanting to do business with companies who have aligned values.

CM: Lastly, what are some qualities or attributes a marketer aspiring to reach the C-suite should be honing?

TS: One of the things that I constantly talk about is being open to different and new experiences. Marketing is evolving pretty rapidly, so getting breadth of experience is important. Sometimes people think about their career in linear ways, like “I need to move to the next level.” It’s also about understanding what experiences you need to get to the C-suite. Be open, be willing to try new things. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to stay in that role forever.

For me, in our culture at TD and at other companies that I’ve worked for in the past, I urge people to think about “the what and the how.” What you deliver is important. Taking accountability for your area is critical, but it’s also the “how.” I’m a big believer in building relationships. As companies look to build more agile structures, being able to work with different groups of people on aligned goals and aligned KPIs and outcomes is important.

And then, be open to change. We often talk about change like it’s something bad. Change can actually be so energizing and exciting. So, it’s not being afraid of it. We are always changing, we’re always evolving, and that’s not going away anytime soon.

The post Brands on Fire: TD Bank CMO on Sponsorship, Supporting Local Communities and CTV appeared first on Chief Marketer.

The future of marketing depends upon two critical functions, according to Broadridge Financial Solutions’ Global CMO Dipti Kachru.

“You’ve got to obsess over your data strategy and your tech stack to be able to optimize and automate,” she told Chief Marketer this week. “That foundation is what’s going to help you deliver value, help you measure and prove that value add, and help you know what’s working and what’s not working.”

In addition to that, it’s important for companies—particularly those with brand marketing stories that are less obvious—to harness the power of storytelling. “We’re spending a lot of time with the team on how to break through the complexity of our business and make it more intuitive to people—because we have a significant role in driving the markets, but most people don’t realize that,” Kachru said. “We’ve got to work a little bit harder to be able to define how and why we are relevant, not just to the people buying our products, but to the industry at large.”

The former J.P. Morgan Chase CMO discusses her strategy for growth since joining the company seven months ago, the marketing tactics and investments CMOs should be prioritizing amid economic headwinds, how the democratization of investing is influencing the firm’s insights and solutions, and more.

Chief Marketer: Who do you count as your customers, and where are you looking to expand?

Dipti Kachru, Global CMO of Broadridge Financial Solutions: We’re a global fintech that provides technology infrastructure and communication solutions, so we primarily sell our solutions to asset managers, wealth managers, capital markets, firms, hedge funds. We’re talking to technologists, to operations and to the front office, because of our range of products, [which are] technology solutions as well as data and insights to help make better decisions around business strategy distribution. We’re also doing a lot of innovation on the client communication side and now talking to CXOs, chief digital officers and marketing leaders to think about how essential, critical communications, or even regulatory communications, can be leveraged as touchpoints to add value with our customers. We’re also doing a lot of work in healthcare now from a communications perspective.

CM: How are you are approaching brand marketing? What are the challenges there?

DK: A lot of people know us from being a premier player in the corporate governance space. We’re reframing the brand to be relevant to some of the newer audiences we’ve been talking about. It’s not this big brand effort that you expect to see in B2C, but rather a very surgical effort to continue to refine how we talk about ourselves, how we tell the stories around what we do and how we do it.

CM: Can you provide an example of that fine-tuning?

DK: Our wealth management business has multiple facets, where front-to-back platform providers help broker dealers and financial advisors operate in their roles. In the broker dealer ecosystem, what an advisor needs on their dashboard to help serve clients and how that connects through the processing and the back end is something we’re a market leader in. We’re being very specific in how we showcase what we do to that audience. It’s not just, “these are the set of products we offer.” It’s to help visualize what benefit that brings to market and to see it from the point of view of the user. In this case, our products are helping the financial advisor engage in more personalized ways with their client and use data to make better decisions to how they’re spending their time. The visualization of that is part of our journey of storytelling.

The other place where we’re starting to make a lot of inroads is in our insights business and how we’re using thought leadership specifically to bring through the intellectual capital that resides within the firm, given our unique vantage point within the industry and the amount of data we see through the clients we interact with. How we package those insights to then reach out to the audience is another way we’ve continued to harness the power of the firm.

CM: How does that thought leadership come through?

DK: It’s multichannel. You clearly find it on our website. We’re partnering with our PR firms to make sure that we develop the intellectual capital and it is being distributed in the right way. Social is a big strategy for us, which is something we’re building more muscle around, to distribute our content both from an organic as well as a paid perspective. The last thing is, we’re really building out our martech stack and our data capabilities to be able to understand both interest and intent from our customers to deliver more personalized communications to them, whether it’s relevant insights, news about what we’re doing or case studies we can share.

CM: How does sustainability factor into your messaging and the products that you offer?

DK: It’s a large part of it, as we play a significant role in the investor empowerment process. With the democratization of investing, more and more investors are coming into the market and want to know what they’re investing in. They’re very actively engaged around ESG topics. So, we are creating both solutions as well as insights for our clients. Whether it’s issuers or asset managers, we’re designing new products to understand what some of those critical data points are, what investors care about and how you deliver on those.

CM: What are the marketing tactics and investments CMOs should be prioritizing amid economic headwinds?

DK: I’ve been in the marketing business for 20 years, and there’s always ups and downs. Here’s the three things I think CMOs need to focus on. One is to have the ability to optimize and really understand marketing performance. It gives you the capability of being surgical when you need to pull back, and you need to know what’s working, what’s not working and be very aware about the strategic priorities of the moment. You’re not making sweeping changes; you’re being very specific.

The second is being agile as a marketing organization—being very planful in how we go to market, but building in the agility to be able to pivot and turn when you need to so you can capture both the moment as well as the opportunity, whether it’s to lean in or pull back.

The last thing I’d say—and we tend to do less of this, especially in headwinds—is to lean in to places where we can better deliver on the customer sentiment at the moment. So, by keeping your ear to the ground, very close to the consumer, whether it’s through individual interviews with clients, which we often do with pulse surveys, or just spending more time with the sales force. You start to understand how your clients or your customers are feeling and the role the brand can play that’s associated with their values, and being more empathetic versus being tone deaf. Also, when other brands and your competitors are pulling back, it creates white space for you to go in and establish or reestablish a connection with your most critical audiences.

CM: How are data and analytics reshaping the customer experience? And what role does privacy play?

DK: Data is critical to driving an improved customer experience. What we do with our clients, especially on the communications side, is about helping them harness the power of data to make the communications more relevant and engaging. Going the direction of more privacy-oriented rules is not in conflict with that. I think it actually gives organizations an opportunity to engage with the customer in a more authentic fashion. It creates greater trust when it’s the customer that’s giving you access to information. It reinforces that data belongs to the end user versus the organization. And by acknowledging that, it opens a channel of communication with the customer where, by earning their trust, you are on the hook for delivering value. And that drives more connectivity, and if you can deliver on it, certainly more loyalty. It’s a great opportunity for firms to continue to use data to better serve clients in more personalized ways.

CM: From your perspective, how has the pandemic has reshaped the B2B2C customer journey?

DK: The pandemic has been horrific for a lot of people. But as a marketer, one of the silver linings I’ve seen is the acceleration in digitization and digital adoption. In my current role, I see that happen everyday; we send about seven billion touchpoints of communication in a year. We’re seeing that migration from print to digital. It’s something we’re actively helping our clients through. Our data also reinforces that people are willing to go digital as long as it’s not just a replication of the print experience. You need to be able to rewire that experience to make it more engaging and add more value. There’s an acceleration in organizations investing in the transformation of their stacks, their data architecture, to be able to deliver that quality of engagement.

CM: You were recently CMO of J.P. Morgan’s Wealth Management division. What have you taken from that experience that you’re applying to your current role?

DK: I’m a big believer that marketing is a driver of growth for the firm. If you think about traditional B2B, that hasn’t always been the central driving reason that people fund a marketing organization. But my experience at J.P. Morgan only reinforced and strengthened that. I had a great privilege of leading marketing teams in the wealth space, the asset management space and in the consumer banking space, where we could take a lot of B2C principles on how you use data and automation to deliver value to the customer through the sales cycle and apply that to B2B.

A lot of what I spend time on with the team now is how are we building our data strategy and our technology to be able to facilitate the right outcomes in partnership with our sales teams. A large part of my focus is building that deeper bridge with the sales organization, not just philosophically aligned and in the trenches together and understanding what customers need, but importantly, does our technology work together? Are we able to power them with critical signals and beacons that help them be more effective at their jobs? And can we capture critical signals that they’re capturing as part of the sales process to make our marketing better?

The second one is the brand storytelling side. As a B2B brand, and a very complex one that serves many different clients with many different solutions, how are we strengthening our storytelling and going beyond just the words of what we do to better showcase what we do, whether it’s in video, whether it’s in the demonstration of our capabilities, whether it’s product demos. The third is bringing a sharper lens on the activation of digital strategies across the firm and how we go to market. There’s a strong foundation with incredible work that’s been done, but as we’ve grown and gotten more complex, we’re on a journey of marketing maturity as well.

CM: What are your goals for the company in terms of growth?

DK: We’ve got some work to do in building out our measurement infrastructure to be a little bit more predictive in the value we add. We look at performance as a marketing organization across three different areas. There’s work we’re doing on the brand side to drive perception of various critical segments that we are newer in. Are we engaging with certain customers more? Are they engaging with us through our content and our intellectual capital? Are we showing up with the right share of voice compared to our competitive sets?

The second one is enabling demand generation. We’ve got a demand generation ecosystem and we’re trying to light that up even more by understanding the connectivity of where the demand is being driven and how the demand is being converted so we can start to optimize. The third one is defining the scorecard around the sales nurture process. Marketing can help make the sales cycle more efficient by delivering relevant communications to complement the sales organization.

CM: Lastly, what are the trends that financial marketers should be following right now?

DK: It’s an evergreen trend you’ve got to obsess over: Will your data strategy and your tech stack be able to optimize and automate? Those are the two critical functions and the way I think about the future of marketing. That foundation is what’s going to be able to help you deliver value, help you measure and prove that value add, and help you know what’s working and what’s not working.

Second, while I’m obsessing over our segmentation strategy, targeting and tech stack to be able to get smarter and more effective, I also love the storytelling side of it. We’re spending a lot of time with the team on how to break through the complexity of our business and make it more intuitive to people—because we have a significant role in driving the markets, but most people don’t realize that. We’ve got to work a little bit harder to be able to define how and why we are relevant, not just to the people buying our products, but to the industry at large.

The post Marketers on Fire: Broadridge Financial Solutions’ Global CMO Dipti Kachru appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Claiming that your brand’s marketing philosophy is “social-first” is one thing. Truly walking the walk is another. Boardroom, the sports business media network founded in 2019 by Kevin Durant’s investment company 35V, is a shining example of the latter.

What started as a series on ESPN+ has evolved into newsletters, podcasts, premium video, written editorial and daily news that garners millions of monthly unique views and boasts tens of thousands of subscribers—all accrued in less than three years. Critical to the network’s growth was a test-and-learn strategy to pinpoint what content—and in particular, what format—worked best on social, and then applying that to developing its editorial strategy.

“While it sounds a little crazy to have done it that way, it was extraordinarily helpful because by the time we were hiring a full editorial staff, a full video staff and an audience development team, we already had these great use cases for what really worked for us on social,” Boardroom and 35V CMO Sarah Flynn told Chief Marketer. We spoke with Flynn about Boardroom’s growth strategy, its three-tiered target audience, experiential marketing plays and next steps for the brand moving forward.

Chief Marketer: Boardroom launched just prior to the pandemic in 2019. Today, it brings in 2.3 million unique views to its website, 216 million impressions and 8 million video views monthly. Discuss your growth strategy for the brand and how you achieved this success.

Sarah Flynn, CMO of Boardroom and 35V: When we first started growing the network, the most important thing was making sure that we had a differentiated voice and that we weren’t just another sports platform. People cover things on social media; there are a lot of different perspectives in the world. We needed to establish the “whys” of our existence. Once we started doing that, we were able to galvanize our network organically, through word-of-mouth, and have the athletes, entertainers, executives and people in our circles understand what we were trying to do and support it and promote it, which provides a halo effect and starts the initial organic growth.

Then, once we went through phase one, we were able to put our foot on the gas a bit more with an organic and paid social media strategy, digital marketing in general, and continuing to create awareness through the way that we cover different athletes, executives and entertainers, and making sure they’re sharing and reconnecting with their audiences. As well as starting to be more constructive about where we see ourselves out in the world, like being at VeeCon and the upcoming film we have, “NYC Point Gods,” and having that be affiliated with Boardroom rather than going full 35V. It’s being thoughtful about the places that we can be in the world, in addition to the “always-on-ness” of marketing on social media and continuing to drive people back to our site.

CM: So, the athletes and executives you cover are a key part of your word-of-mouth strategy.

SF: Athletes, executives and everybody in our network. We couldn’t do what we do from an editorial coverage standpoint if we didn’t have some of that buy-in from the early days. When we first started, we knew we had access and understanding. We used that as an asset on the content side, and it was also how we were thinking about it on the marketing side, because we knew that if we had buy-in from a lot of those people, they would start talking about it. They would subscribe to our newsletters. For a little while at the beginning, the core of our audience was actually the people that we were covering—and they were telling their fans.

And obviously, we have the force that is Kevin Durant. His fans knew early on, and that helped us get a jump start on follower and traffic growth, but also helped us understand what that audience and fans really want to see so that we were able to craft our content strategy around it. And the content piece and the marketing piece have to go hand in hand.

CM: After establishing your voice, how did you determine what your fans wanted?

SF: We did a lot of testing on social, and not just topic testing, but format testing, seeing what worked organically, seeing what performed well, if we put paid spend behind certain things. There was almost an entire year around building the social strategy where we didn’t have a full editorial strategy in place or a full internal team. We had not ramped up hiring yet because we wanted to do a lot of that content-type testing and make sure that the things we thought people wanted to see were really the things they wanted to see—before we actually grew our team and understood the needs that we had internally.

While it sounds a little crazy to have done it that way, it was extraordinarily helpful because by the time we were hiring a full editorial staff, a full video staff and an audience development team, we already had these great use cases of what really worked for us on social. [We would say] here’s some of the things that we’ve done, from a video and interview perspective, that have really worked well. And here’s how we think those things can translate to the larger editorial and content sphere.

CM: You used a social-first strategy to help build your content strategy.

SF: Yeah. Boardroom started out as a show that we did with ESPN, but even as we were doing that show, we knew we wanted to do more. We wanted to make it a network. So, piggybacking off of what we did with that show and transitioning it into something that was social-first was that initial incubation phase.

CM: You launched Boardroom just before the pandemic. How did that factor into your growth?

SF: The pandemic helped us focus on the things we knew we could do and what worked. From a sports business perspective, while it became very hard for places with live sports to understand where they needed to pivot, how they were going to make up for things financially, our coverage and our network is built off the business in and of itself. So, we were able to cover where people were putting sports spending dollars now that you didn’t have traditional sports on live TV, such as the NBA doing a 2K tournament on broadcast TV instead of having live games.

The business of it never stopped. A lot of people had to figure out how to innovate and do different things. We were really early to doing one-on-one interviews with people on Zoom, [and asking questions like] what are you doing? Are you thinking about your business? What does this look like? Being able to have those kinds of conversations early on helped us cut out some of the noise from a focus perspective, because we were able to double down on what was working.

Max Verstappen (Red Bull) -150
Charles Leclerc (Ferrari) +145
George Russell (Mercedes) +1800
Sergio Perez (Red Bull) +2400
Lewis Hamilton (Mercedes) +2800
Carlos Sainz Jr. (Ferrari) +5000

A breakdown ahead of the Baku Grand Prix. https://t.co/sJa5Nd0ILS

— Boardroom (@boardroom) June 12, 2022

CM: What is your current target demographic? And how do you see it expanding?

SF: There are three buckets of fans that we speak to in slightly different ways. One is what we like to call the modern day sports fan, which is somebody who can be a more casual fan, but who’s really interested in the sports business in and of itself. They might not watch every single game on TV, but they’re probably seeing the highlights on Twitter. They’re scrolling through their Instagram and understanding what’s going on. They do care about who’s the GM of this team, or who’s buying this team, or what’s my favorite player doing off the field. It does skew largely male, 18 to 34, but we’re seeing an increase in female followers as well.

Then there are two sub-audiences. One is young entrepreneurs—people coming out of college who are thinking about business and the world of work in very different ways. They want to know what’s going on in Web3, in crypto, and they want to know what’s going on in new verticals, new sports tech, things like that. The content that we provide can help educate them on that. They’re not going to get that kind of information at a place like a CNBC or a CNN anymore. They’re going to a place like Boardroom. They’re having conversations on Reddit.

Then the third I call the sophisticated audience, which is people who just want to be really well read. That audience skews a little bit older. They’re subscribing to New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, and want to consume strong information and be informed. That’s an audience that people market to a bit less, but it’s one we think about all of the time. And then from an expansion standpoint, we’ve started doing a lot more music business coverage in addition to sports business coverage, and finding the right inflection points from a culture standpoint. A big goal of mine is to make sure we have the same strategy for music fans/music industry people that we did on the sports side.

CM: How have you shaped your testing and content strategy specifically? How do you find those inflection points?

SF: It’s three things. One, seeing how content performs across all different platforms, what’s hitting and what’s not hitting, and how we position it. Two, we’re always going to go back to that word-of-mouth and that our-network-is-educated strategy, because the more that our network is educated and excited about it, the more that translates eventually to fans as well. And three, A/B testing how content is presented on our site and who’s coming back for what kind of stuff, as well as paid strategy. If we are targeting new music audiences and we’re bringing people to the site, are they staying? Is that meaningful, and why or why not?

CM: Are you planning on experimenting with any new platforms beyond the ones you use now?

SF: Definitely. We’re in the process of revamping our website and doing some other things that will help galvanize and foster more of a community piece. I’m looking at platforms and strategies right now that will help a community conversation and perhaps unlock some experiences.

 

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CM: How is Boardroom planning to play in the metaverse?

SF: The metaverse is such an interesting conversation for us because it is a little meta: We’re covering what other people are doing in the metaverse. And then from a larger, 35V company perspective, we know what’s going on in the marketplace and we have brands and companies that we work with that have been extremely early adopters.

We’re being very cautious about the strategy that we craft there. The one thing that I would hate to do from a brand perspective is what a lot of the metaverse conversations are doing right now—which is a press play. [They] created a thing in the metaverse that you get press around. It doesn’t live, it doesn’t do anything special that you can’t do in Web2. We don’t want to create that. We want to use the metaverse and Web3 technology to actually cultivate community and do new and interesting things. I don’t think consumers’ heads are where they need to be yet for that to happen.

It helps us have constructive conversations about where we can be and how we can build, but I’m not going to jump into something just to jump into it. Everything that we do needs to be really thought out and well planned. We have the information and the tools that we need, but we’re not going to just show up tomorrow in the metaverse.

CM: What’s your experiential marketing strategy?

SF: Experiential marketing is really important to us, and there are three different ways that I’m thinking about it. One, we can approach any kind of experience from an editorial perspective and that can be very valuable. We look at where the conferences and events are, and how our editorial team can cover them on the ground and come back and tell fans about it.

Two, especially over the course of the next year, as you know, events are now really back to normal—in the way that we said they were going to be last year, but weren’t. We’ll start to appear thoughtfully and strategically in places where we know that there are fans and new audiences that we convert. A great example of that is we had a section called Boardroom Bleachers at VeeCon last month that was a targeted area for people to book meetings and network with each other, and have a space away from like the fray to have meaningful conversations and get business done.

Then three is, what are the opportunities that we have as a company to create our own events? The “NYC Point Gods” film that’s coming out with Showtime in July is a 35V project, but it is also a film about the cultural impact of the ’80s and ’90s, New York City point guards, how incredible they were, how they changed the culture and the sport, and the world around them. You’ll see Boardroom branding on that when it comes out. We’re doing a special premiere event in New York. Being able to create smaller touchpoints and connect them back to Boardroom is something that I’m always trying to figure out how we capitalize on.

CM: When it comes to marketing as an industry, any thoughts on what qualities a modern CMO should have?

SF: It’s about so much more than marketing than it ever used to be. The old school way of thinking about a CMO was, this is the person that’s going to come in, they’re going to spend a lot of money on flashy campaigns. They’re going to do a lot of paid opportunity marketing and they’re going to do whatever they can for brand awareness. And then that’s also the first person who goes on the chopping block when there are budget cuts, because they were spending all the money.

I am a marketing person first and foremost, but I’m a product person. I’m a business development person. I’m always figuring out what our revenue strategies look like. I have my hands in every aspect of this business, very necessarily. And I think that it’s true across all C-suite and executive jobs that, especially at organizations that aren’t huge, those roles are no longer as siloed as they used to be. And they can’t be. If you want be a successful, modern day CMO, you have to be willing to learn other new skills and be willing to put your hands in other territories in order to make things work.

The post Brands on Fire: A Chat With Boardroom CMO Sarah Flynn appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Statistics about the importance of brand purpose and its impact on purchasing behavior abound in the marketing industry. Here’s one: 66 percent of online respondents would consider a company’s purpose when deciding to make a purchase, according to Porter Novelli’s 2021 Purpose Perception Study And the numbers increase when considering trust, loyalty and even forgiving a company if it slips up.

So, when Elizabeth Drori joined as CMO of Sperry footwear last November, she begin establishing a purpose platform—grounded in its 87-year history—designed to break through beyond the boat shoe. Following is our conversation with Drori about the evolution of the Sperry brand, fashion merchandising strategies tapped from her Walmart days, how the company uses data from product launches to optimize consumer messaging, and more.

Chief Marketer: For your new “Make Waves” brand campaign, who is the target audience and what are the strategic marketing goals?

Elizabeth Drori, CMO of Sperry: We launched our brand campaign “Make Waves” with the goal of driving brand awareness and desire for Sperry. It’s the first time in a few years that we’re really investing behind the brand and not just product stories. It speaks to a lot of what we stand for, but it’s also a rallying cry for our consumers and encourages people to make the most of every moment, make your own path, make a difference. From a targeting perspective, we’re serving it to households ages 18 to 34.

CM: Is this target a shift for you?

ED: It’s a shift from where our current customer is. We had this audience 10 years ago and now we’re looking to get there again. Brands often reach a cycle where they have a target audience and they grow with that audience. And now that audience is the next generation and you need to reach a younger consumer again. That’s where we are. Our current customers are a bit older, so we’re looking to drive that resonance with younger consumers in the next generation today.

CM: How are you accomplishing that through specific channels?

ED: From the media standpoint, the brand campaign is running on YouTube, for the demographic targets we talked about, as well as interest segments. But then we also market on other channels that resonate. We have been experimenting on TikTok. We do a lot on Instagram. We use influencer marketing.

CM: How are you evolving the brand to recruit those younger consumers once again?

ED: We’re doing a few things differently. First we updated our visual look and feel, which ranges from modernizing our logo, which we refreshed at the beginning of the year, to colors, fonts, the topography as well as styling. We’re trying to portray a younger, more fashion-forward audience just through our creatives and how you visualize the brand, no matter of the channel. We’re also partnering with brands and people of influence. As I mentioned, we work with influencers and style leaders.

We’re also doing a lot of product collaborations. One example is a collaboration with Warm and Wonderful, which is the British brand known for the sheep sweater Princess Diana made famous. That collaboration’s coming up later this summer; we shot a campaign with them and Madelaine Petsch of “Riverdale.” We have some of that creative out in the marketplace right now. And then finally, investing in the brand through the Make Waves campaign and also through a new purpose platform that we call “All for water, water for all.” We’re trying to create a desirable brand by making it more purpose-driven and more of a lifestyle brand.

CM: What are the challenges of marketing to a younger audience with a brand that has an 87-year history? How do you tap into its history while also refreshing it for new customers?

ED: Sperry has an incredible heritage and backstory. We were founded by Paul Sperry who had a passion for sailing and yet a problem with slipping on boat decks. Our story is that he noticed one winter day how easily his dog was able to walk across an icy pond without slipping, and after looking at the groves in his paws, he decided to invent boat shoes and sneakers that have those grooves cut out as traction. We have this powerful story, and it is still the foundation of our brand in terms of being innovators, adventurous, explorers.

We’re a brand that gets passed down from generation to generation, so we have a lot to build on. How do we stay close to our roots, but then make the brand feel relevant for today? This story gives us is a connection to the water. We’ve done a lot of research and exploration on what an association with the water means for consumers today. How do we unlock that power of water and harness the joy and associated emotional well being to the water for consumers today?

The second aspect of it is our role in fashion. Post-World War II, Sperry became known for an association with nautical, preppy-style. JFK wore us, Paul Newman wore us. We have these amazing associations, but we still need to modernize how to stay relevant in fashion and culture today. What’s wonderful for us is that preppy fashion is returning in a more modern aesthetic–more diverse, more open… we’re trying to hone in on that. How do we take this amazing legacy and focus on what it means to be connected to the water, and how do we unlock that? And then how do we continue to lean into the preppy trend in a way that feels current?

CM: You’ve had experience launching new brands at Walmart in the past. What did you learn that you’re applying at Sperry?

ED: At Walmart, we were focused on building fashion credibility. We had a strategy that we called “borrowing fashion credibility.” You can advertise yourself, but it’s even more impactful when other people talk about your brand and your product. At Walmart, we leaned heavily on influencers and content partners to change perception. At Sperry, to the extent that people perceive the brand as something only for the elite, there’s still a perception challenge to address. We’re leaning into partners and influencers in a similar way.

And then we’re also paying very careful attention to how we show up. We want to portray the brand in a relatable, youthful, approachable way, but we still love the water. We’re optimistic. We seek adventure. We don’t take ourselves too seriously. We’ve done a lot to portray ourselves as a much more open and democratic brand, and then also leaning into partners to drive that fashion credibility.

CM: How has Sperry’s brand purpose evolved?

ED: I mentioned that we have a new brand purpose platform, “All for water, water for all.” Before I got to the brand, we didn’t have a purpose platform. We were doing some things in the sustainability space. We supported the LGBTQ+ community, but we didn’t have anything that tied all that we were doing together. This platform was meant to create a purpose-driven strategy that’s grounded in our heritage. “All for water” is the sustainability piece. Water is the world’s biggest playground. How do we ensure we protect it? We have really great goals: By 2024, we want half of what we produce to be made from primarily recycled materials. We have a collection that we call “SeaCycled.” That’s growing more and more, and we’re very close to achieving that goal.

We work with Waterkeeper Alliance, which is the world’s largest nonprofit dedicated to clean and drinkable water. We’re doing a lot with them this year and making the sustainability piece a bigger part of our brand. And then “water for all” is something we’re activating this year. It shapes our vision for a world where everyone, everywhere, has access to the water and feels welcome there. When we came up with this platform, we started digging into some of the reasons why people of color don’t have access to water. It’s complicated. They’ve been excluded because of discrimination. There’s fear that dates back to slavery. There are socioeconomic factors. There’s so many reasons.

What we started to learn is that the solve is very grassroots. There isn’t one national or global organization that’s doing anything here. So we partnered with a media organization to create documentaries telling stories of entrepreneurs that are making a difference in the space in their own way and in their own communities. We’re starting to roll that content out this summer and will look to amplify their stories, and we’re really excited about having this conversation, learning ourselves, and then having that conversation more publicly later this summer.

CM: How does Sperry use data to achieve marketing goals?

ED: One of the biggest ways is through our product launches. We are launching new products regularly and we use data to assess their performance. We’ll track data that we get from Sperry.com to understand if we’re bringing in a new consumer. And if it’s an existing consumer, what are they cross-shopping? What’s their demographic information? And then we’ll also be tracking how fast product is selling through across all points of market, whether it’s Sperry.com or through our wholesale partners. Those pieces of information give us a solid feedback loop for how we can optimize our advertising and how to lean into what’s working and understand for future launches.

CM: Lastly, what are some marketing trends that the industry should be watching right now?

ED: One, for fashion in particular, continues to be influencer marketing. We see that evolve as new channels like TikTok come up and content changes. It’s an important validation mechanism and it can also drive sales. And it requires a lot of test-and-learn. There’s really no one-size-fits-all approach. The metaverse and everything that’s happening there is also a trend that people need to pay attention to and figure out if there’s a way in or not.

The post Brands on Fire: Sperry Footwear Chief Marketing Officer Elizabeth Drori on Building Brand Purpose appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Modernizing marketing operations within a 215-year-old global research and education company, itself comprised of 57 disparate brands accustomed to varying levels of marketing innovation, takes a level of commitment its customer base of researchers is renowned for.

Indeed, what surfaced when Wiley CMO Shari Hofer applied research, data and martech tools toward the company itself was the realization that it was not serving its customers at every stage of the buyer’s journey—which has the potential to begin during college and last until the advanced stages of their careers.

We spoke with Hofer about what Wiley’s rebrand entailed; how marketing technology tools helped support strategies for personalization; tactics used to maintain productivity across a global marketing organization during the pandemic, and more.

Chief Marketer: You’ve modernized marketing operations at Wiley since you came on board. What are some of the changes that you’ve made?

Shari Hofer, CMO of Wiley: We are a global leader in research and education, founded 215 years ago, so we have a pretty extensive legacy. Right now, we’re focused on driving forward the knowledge economy through scientific research, and then also using career-connected education. We work primarily with researchers, learners and employers.

When I started about five years ago, they were pretty far behind in their marketing delivery. Marketing was, at that point, an event-driven-type culture. We shifted the organization into a customer-centric organization. We’ve got about 57 brands that we’ve carried through that 215-year legacy.

We were on a mission to figure out how we could modernize and make those 57 brands relevant, and then do it how people receive marketing today. A big focus was getting the right people in the organization, upskilling them—because they didn’t have the type of skills that we needed to move the brand and organization forward—and then getting the marketing technology stack in-house that we needed to bring all of that to life.

CM: What strategies did you use to accomplish that?

SH: We had to take a moment and figure out the actual purpose of this brand. Why are we here? What’s our promise? What are our values in the organization? Then we were able to build what the identity looked like. We decided we were a hybrid and that Wiley was going to be the primary brand. And then we started looking at what our customers think of us overall.

From a modernization standpoint, once we had the brand and an understanding of what we needed the brand to do, we started to build a shared service demand center of excellence—because we knew we needed a way to activate it. That’s when we brought in the technology stack and formed an internal agency so that all of those elements of the brand could be delivered consistently to customers. We purchased the Adobe stack, for example, to transform this approach and make it more personalized.

CM: What’s an example of this new personalization strategy?

SH: Email was a big channel for us—in the late 2000s. It still is, but we weren’t getting to all the people in the ways that we wanted to. So, we experimented last year with TikTok, for example, which came to life through research when we figured out where people were. Videos were the highest-consumed piece of marketing from the audience we were trying to get to. And we did some experiments—believe it or not—on Pinterest. The results were eye-opening and tremendous. That led us to believe that we were not addressing the audience in a personalized way. So, we shifted a lot of our spend over to those two channels, and we’re still experimenting on them.

CM: What worked for you on TikTok? Where did you find your inspiration? 

SH: Our primary audience is individuals looking for education resources. They want to either advance in their careers or their personal lives. We created very short videos about how to find education resources and what Wiley had to offer. Step one was getting people to our website to see what was there. That’s not a way that we would go to market previously. As a traditional company, we would’ve given you a lot of information to digest. We would’ve led you to a lot of text to read. Instead, we did these quick little videos and got a huge amount of click-throughs.

CM: You manage a global team comprised of 600 marketers. What’s your approach to organizational culture and making it cohesive?

SH: We’ve had to change a lot over the last two years because we’re all at home. From a productivity standpoint, we put together a number of community-based programs, things like candid conversations. We held monthly firesides with my direct team of 130 marketers where we sat down and focused in on one team in marketing, what they did and why they did it, which then inspired people to cross-pollinate and talk and share ideas. It developed the culture that we wanted, along with upskilling digital marketing skills, to make people proud of what they do and continue to advance. And then we had a number of smaller programs that helped with mentorship, recognizing accomplishments and things like that.

CM: How did your marketing shift during the pandemic?

SH: Suddenly all of these researchers were at home and having more time to finish—maybe research that they hadn’t finished for years. We are competing with others to try and get that research. That’s where we flipped to looking at how we are actually engaging with them. We had a lot of always-on campaigns that were just churning out messages to individuals. But then we dug in deeper to try to figure out people’s motivations, where they were connecting and get involved in those channels and show up as a partner.

CM: With email now a less important channel, where are you reaching your customers now?

SH: It depends a little bit. We took a step back and looked at the personas, and then we dug into the motivations of the customers, which helped us figure out which channels that they were engaging with and interacting with more. On the personalization side with Adobe, it shed some light into where we get the best response. Email is still a big channel, don’t get me wrong. But it isn’t the only channel that we use, and we are doing more integrated campaigns and then focusing in on where we’re seeing better responses.

CM: How are you balancing consumer data privacy laws with personalizing experiences?

SH: As a global corporation, we do have to follow all of those data privacy laws. We have different ways of going to market in certain countries, depending on what the rules of engagement are in those particular areas. And we are pretty strict about that. When we put in double opt-in in some areas, we did see a decrease, which is why our focus on emails shifted. We needed to find other ways to do it where we were still compliant, but didn’t see that loss.

CM: You mentioned revamping your marketing tech stack. How are you leveraging the data that you’re collecting through new technologies?

SH: About 82 percent of our revenue comes from digital—people buying digital content from us. From the marketing and the data side, we engage with customers sometimes at the earliest moment of joining an education experience. Or maybe you are starting your higher education experience and an instructor tells you to buy courseware and it comes from Wiley. You may start with Wiley all the way through to when you’re advanced in your career and you might need to take a CPA exam again to keep your certifications for it.

We realized that we started with a customer at the beginning of their experience and we could work with them all the way through the end. And that new technology and data stack helped us understand when you were coming back and buying something from us, what stage you were in in your career. Were we doing the right things and delivering what you needed? This is now opening it up, bringing that product data, your purchase history and all of those data elements together. It’s helped us get a better picture of what we can do to serve our customers better.

CM: So before, you weren’t considering this lifetime customer.

SH: Well we considered it more by the brand. And then as we did the brand work, we said, well, wait a minute. This customer could be with us through the entire duration of their career or their education journey. And we’re not really serving them well. We thought about how we actually deliver the best for customers and make them aware that they can get everything they need from us.

CM: In the research and education fields, what are your biggest challenges from a marketing perspective?

SH: On the research side, we are moving to a direct-to-consumer model. But it’s not a model where we’re selling something directly, because your research goes in cycles. It might take you two years to write a research paper that you’re ready to submit. We looked at when you came to us last and submitted, and then we would check in with you over time, nurturing, constantly talking to you and making you aware of us for when you were ready.

Education is a little different, and we have to support the two models. If you’re in a course and an instructor tells you to buy something, you just need to know where to go to buy it because you need it for that course. We were really talking to the instructors, making sure they knew what we had to offer so they could offer it to their students. That’s why we brought all the marketers together to talk during these fireside chats, because the types of marketing they do are vastly different.

CM: And the types of marketing varies because the brands are so different?

SH: Very much so. Some of the research brands are very old. They’ve been around forever. They’re established brands that people have a lot of understanding of. And then on the education side, we have a lot of new, young or innovative brands that we’re starting up. So, it’s figuring out how to bring those two together so people don’t just see us in one way, but see us across the continuum of the journey.

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What does it take to reign supreme as a modern CMO in today’s multifaceted business world? What should marketers aspiring to reach the C-Suite focus on in terms of career advancement and developing specific skills? We posed these questions to three CMOs, and their advice centered around a trio of themes that marketers ought to prioritize: customer-centricity; developing business acumen specific to your brand; and embracing agility. Here are insights from chief marketing officers Amy Summy of Labcorp, John Sheldon of SmileDirectClub and Lisa Stockmon of Banfield Pet Hospital.

Amy Summy, CMO of Labcorp:

I’m passionate about really taking the time to understand the business language. Your business leaders don’t really speak in marketing lingo. Think about how you connect what marketing does to how the business operates, and how they think about growth, revenue and acquisition. Marketers have different skills. Some are super creative, some are very analytical—there’s so many different types. Be passionate about whatever you are.

Personally, I always naturally go to the customer. One of my first questions here was, who are our customers? Not the companies that we sell to, but the people. What makes them tick, and how do you get to them? However, I don’t feel like there’s a specific playbook. If you’re at Pepsi, you might be a different type of marketer versus here at Labcorp. It’s figuring out what your company needs and then leaning into that.

For more from Summy, read the full profile here.

John Sheldon, CMO of SmileDirectClub:

To me, it really comes down to three pieces. Number one is you’ve got to listen to your customer, in every possible way. Some of the ways that I do that at SmileDirectClub is I watch, on a weekly basis, videos of visits to our SmileShop to see what that experience really looks like—obviously with the consumer’s permission. Another thing we do: I sit on two hours of phone calls, just listening to customer care calls. And then lastly, our social media listening team is feeding me reports and insights throughout. You need to be able to listen to your customer, take that and then go do something about what you learn.

The second is deep analytical skills. Marketing has become more analytical over the last 20 years, since the dawn of ecommerce. So, making sure that you’re sharp on your analytical skills, knowing what statistical significance means and making sure your team is doing proper test design—all of those elements are crucial. And then lastly, stay creative—amidst all of what I just said, which is much more about observing and analytics. The ability to break through is about doing something interesting and creative. Empowering your creative team to do breakthrough work, to do something distinctive and interesting that’s going to get people’s attention, still matters a lot in marketing. It’s all those things together that can make for a successful upgrade into the CMO seat.

For more from Sheldon, read the full profile here.

Lisa Stockmon, CMO of Banfield Pet Hospital:

You have to be open minded. You have to be approachable, and you have to always remain strategic. One of the things I tell my team is that you have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable—and how do you welcome that? How do you begin to approach it with wonderment? There’s been so much change in the last 20 years. It’s about staying on top of the change that’s going to come about in the next 20 years.

For more from Banfield, read the full profile here.

The post The Road to the C-Suite: Top Qualities That Marketers Should Master appeared first on Chief Marketer.

If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make it sound?

The age-old question, typically considered a philosophical thought experiment, can be applied to marketing as well—specifically the experiential industry—as a way to gauge the impact of your campaigns. Because if no one is really talking about it, and if it’s not generating buzz, showing up organically on social feeds and making headlines, it might as well have never happened.

That was the advice from Pepsi CMO Todd Kaplan at sister pub Event Marketer’s Experiential Marketing Summit in Las Vegas last week as he shared lessons learned from his more than 15 years at one of the most iconic brands on the planet. Following are his tips and considerations for the experiential industry.

Deliver a Cultural Impact. Think beyond the physicality of where you’re activating, what you’re doing and how the program and concept will actually work moving forward, Kaplan says. “There are more brand messages coming to consumers on a daily basis—an hourly, minute basis—than you’ve ever had to process before. And you’re simultaneously overwhelmed by the amount of choices you have. It’s a difficult context as a marketer to be coming in and giving a brand message and talking about something they may or may not want to talk about.”

Marketers should aspire to connect with consumers on a deeper level to break through the barrage of brand messages. “You might be there, but that doesn’t mean they’re digesting and engaging with your brand in the right way. Cultural impact is this idea of creating meaningful consumer connection and doing it at scale… You’ve got to think beyond the onsite footprints as well,” Kaplan says. Moreover, consider what’s happening around the cultural moment in which you’re activating. “What are consumers feeling and thinking in those moments, and how can you pair it to those exact needs?”

Lean Into Earned and Social Media. The marketing industry significantly underestimates the value of earned media, according to Kaplan. “If you were to think of all the content you watched throughout the day, how much of it is actually paid usage versus you reading your news feed? Organic social media is where you’re actually spending your time. If your brand is organically showing up in these places, you’re going to reach your consumer versus the skippable ads and things that you’re shouting at them,” he says.

From an experiential standpoint, it’s about far more than just sharing a photo. “You want to create things that are creatively interesting enough, Instagram-worthy enough…that [make] people want to organically share these things. That should be a must-have as you build your event.”

Create Opt-In Experiences. Given the multitude of options consumers have, marketers should create experiences that inspire people to willingly opt-in to participate. It’s “not interrupting people with an ad or with a flyer or with a sample, but actually having them seek you out as the content. And then stretching your brand beyond events and thinking about new ways to activate your brain. It’s not just through an onsite footprint, but in new spaces and new forms, new formats, ways that your audiences haven’t thought about,” Kaplan says. “And then when they opt-in, you want make sure it’s distinctive so they remember what brand it was.”

Give It the Good Old-Fashioned Bullshit Test. Take a hard look at your marketing programs and ask yourself whether or not you’d actually share them with your friends. “If you didn’t work on this experience yourself, would you participate? Would you wait in line to go do what you’re building? Would you remember what brand it’s for? Would you share it or see it organically on your social feeds aside from the people at your company?” Kaplan says. If the answer is no to any of those questions, “keep working the idea and refining and building.”

This kind of pressure testing will keep marketers honest about their programs and unlock the potential to impact culture in meaningful and memorable ways. “I think this industry can go to that next level,” Kaplan says, “as you think about the role of experiences, especially coming off the pandemic, where everyone is seeking more connection.”

The post Brands on Fire: Pepsi CMO Todd Kaplan Shares Tips for Building Culturally-Relevant Experiences appeared first on Chief Marketer.

The wireless service provider space is a crowded and competitive one. So for Visible, an all-digital carrier powered by Verizon’s network, the goal is to devise innovative ways to cut through the clutter, often with tongue-in-cheek creative. Look no further than its unlimited “eyebrowsing” campaign, fronted by the brow-endowed star of “Schitt’s Creek,” Daniel Levy, where consumers could literally scroll through a website using their eyebrows. (Not kidding.)

Visible recently developed a campaign that catered to singles, a target market that might find its low-cost, single-line plan featuring unlimited data appealing. Ahead of what’s likely to be an expensive wedding season that benefits everyone but single people, the brand teamed up with Match Group’s portfolio of dating sites to create a registry for singles, featuring gifts like a pair of “Mine” and “Also Mine” tea towels, matching merch for a single and their pet, and a chance to win a gift card to Airbnb for a “Single Moon” of their choice.

We spoke with Visible CMO Cheryl Gresham about the campaign’s brand awareness play, the brand’s plans to build community among its customers, marketing lessons learned from her time at TikTok and how Visible is approaching the industry’s measurement challenges.

Chief Marketer: What inspired the singles registry and collaboration with the Match Group?

Visible CMO Cheryl Gresham: At Visible we have a wonderful single-line wireless service. You can get the same savings that other places give you on family plans or multiple-line services, but here you don’t have to bring a bunch of people with you. You can get it just on your own. One of the things we thought about when we were talking with the Match Group was that so many of us through our lives have been bridesmaids, [attended] bachelorette parties, [given] baby gifts, wedding gifts, et cetera. But if you are single, you are never on the receiving end.

We worked out this idea with the Match Group, which oversees Tinder and quite a few other dating sites, and thought, what if we created a singles registry where people could register for faux wedding gifts that they could get from all their friends and family and loved ones, just like a couple would do, but they can still celebrate themselves for being single? We thought it was a great way to celebrate the single lifestyle, single people and people who need single-line wireless.

CM: How will you gauge its success?

CG: Our main driver is brand awareness. We also love the strategic alignment between ourselves and the Match Group. The brand awareness amongst the community of people who use Match’s dating websites is something we’re going to be tracking as well. And obviously, all the digital elements, as in website visits, how many singles registries are created, engagement rates, share rates, et cetera. And we’ll be fulfilling on the gifts as well.

CM: Talk about Visible’s strategy with creative. The brand always seems to show up with clever, tongue-in-cheek campaigns.

CG: One of the things we love about the Visible brand is its sensibility and simplicity. This category is one of the largest categories of advertising in the country. And a lot of the advertising and communications look and feel and sound very similar. We know from studying Visible members that simplicity and directness are really important. What you see is what you get at Visible. That’s why we got a little bit more tongue-in-cheek and aggressive with some of our paid advertising that’s running in social, [that says] you’re getting ripped off on all these registries. We believe that’s the best way to communicate with our members and potential members. And it’s a great way for us to be able to stand out in this huge category.

CM: You recently led marketing, media and partnerships at TikTok. What are you bringing to Visible from that experience?

CG: At TikTok, there is this idea of showing up as a brand very honestly and openly—all the good things and the bad things. The things that do best—the videos, the creators, the brands on TikTok—are honest, straightforward and oftentimes helpful. It’s a community. For our members—we refer to them as members versus customers—we are building a community here and we want to help one another. We want our community to be able to see that there’s an easier, simpler way to get phone service. They don’t need to go into a store to get the phone service. They don’t need to have a bunch of things bundled into their phone service that they may not really care about.

And then, it’s important to make advertising that is endemic to the channel that you’re in versus force-feeding your advertising into that channel. We’re making sure that we’re showing up in the right way across all the channels. Our communications belong in the channels that we’re showing up in. Back to the singles registry, if you’re going to do something with the Match Group, how do you show up in a place where people are looking for companionship, love, whatever it might be, and show up in an authentic way that feels right for that community?

CM: Can you talk more about how you’re building community at Visible?

CG: One of the things we’re doing is making sure that we’re keeping our members happy. We’ve got a care team that is on-call, all day, every day, to make sure that the needs that they have, or want to know about or need support in, are taken care of. The other thing is we’re looking at developing a stronger community on social and how we can engage with our members. A lot of brands show up in funny, unique ways, but there’s also a care and communal support aspect.

CM: What is your experiential strategy in the coming year?

CG: We did a great event the first week I started here in New York with the Smash Room. We want to continue to bring that direct, no BS energy to experiential events, but like everyone over the past couple years, in-real-life events have been a little bit more challenged. So one of the things we’re looking at is how do we bring a fun event to our members and potential members through digital. As an all-digital brand with no retail stores, we have to live and breathe and do everything in the digital space. We’re looking at more opportunities like the singles registry that live in the digital space that can be “event-ized”… to bring people together, but with a digital experience.

There are two reasons we like that. One, we get to scale and reach more people who can engage with the brand and the experience. And then two, as the pandemic continues to flex and flow, it’s something that we can depend on a little bit more. The pandemic has taught us to be more creative with how we’re looking to connect. What we did many years ago with Red Rocks Unpaused was an example of that in-real-life, experiential moment, but it was also rooted in digital and scaled. So even though you might not be in the state of Colorado, you could still partake in the event. We’re continuing to look at how we can do more of that in the future.

CM: Lastly, I’d like to get your take on how Visible is dealing with the measurement challenges happening in the industry right now, particularly since you’re an all-digital brand.

CG: It’s been a challenge. We are pulling all the levers and resources that we can. Because Visible is part of Verizon, we have great teams within the organization who look at measurement, ROI, mix modeling, et cetera. What we’re finding is, for us, sometimes it goes back to the basics. Did someone have the chance to view your communications and hear it and see it all the way through? That’s a win; that’s something that we prioritize. Needing to build brand awareness, we are in some ways [using] the basics and the fundamentals of what I call “marketing.” We’re measuring our success in some of those fundamental ways to make sure that we’re reaching the right people, they’re having the opportunity to see, hear, engage and interact with our ad, and then, over time, continuing to measure brand health, brand awareness, and using all the instruments that we can to make sure that Visible’s marketing continues to grow.

The post Marketers on Fire: Visible CMO on Catering to Singles, Fostering Community and Building Digital Experiences appeared first on Chief Marketer.