When consumers think of Walmart as a brand, “innovative” may not be the first thing that comes to mind. But while speaking at a session at MMA Global’s POSSIBLE conference earlier this month, CMO William White aimed to dispel that myth, providing several examples of how the company is innovating across the board—despite its mammoth size. “You see it in all manner of our business, from supply chain to how we go to market,” he told the crowd. “Innovation is popping up in different parts of the company at all times.”

Take being the first retailer to offer drone delivery service, or rolling out a new open creator platform, called Walmart Creator, which, through influencer collaborations, incentivizes users to scale their businesses and drive sales. Each innovation, White explained, ties back to the brand’s relentless focus on how consumer expectations are evolving.

“Our business is fast,” he said. “We run from groceries to apparel to healthcare to financial services, et cetera. So we’re looking across variety of industries for, what are the things that are moving the needle? What are the things that are attracting customers? What are the things that are raising their expectations? And that’s done on a global scale.”

One way in which that has materialized is through its delivery options. Walmart currently offers drone delivery for 36 of its stores, and it also offers in-home delivery service for thousands more, which includes the added service of associates putting groceries away in the home. “That’s something that scaled pretty quickly,” White said. “And that was a small idea that we saw potential for and invested in it.”

Recently, Walmart has turned its attention to the overall customer experience. In order to keep up with customer expectations, senior executives across the company gather each Monday, White explained, to discuss and evaluate business results, from the in-store experience to the friendliness of associates to the speed of checkout to pick-up and delivery. “We gain a lot of insights into the things that we’re doing that drive positive and negative customer experience,” he said. “Everyone understands they have a role in the customer experience. And ultimately that’s a reflection of our brand, and really drives our way forward.”

The ability to evaluate customer experience is particular to the retail industry, according to White, who spent eight years as a global brand director at Coca-Cola. “The speed of retail is a lot faster than CPG… You see your scorecard every day, when you hit that early morning email with the previous day’s sales numbers. I think that the opportunity to make subtle, meaningful changes in the customer experience really moves the needle.”

Social commerce as a means to drive that customer experience is an area of focus for the retailer, White said. “As a marketing industry, we talk so much about different parts of the funnel… The cool thing about social commerce [is that] the whole funnel is right there… It’s brand building, it’s driving consideration and you can drive scale all in a very short, condensed path… It’s shortening that distance between inspiration and purchase.”

Case in point: Walmart recently jumped into the creator economy space with its new seller platform, Walmart Creator. “It’s an open platform where anyone can do it, and they’re incented and monetized based on what they sell. The great content is going to continue to rise to the top.” When asked whether creator economies are here to stay, White assured the crowd that the company believes it’s worth the investment. “Social commerce as a space is a large, meaty number with high growth,” he said. “I certainly don’t think it’s a shiny object or a flash in the pan. There are some creators that are scaling and driving greater power than others.”

The post Walmart CMO on Retail Innovation, Customer Experience and Social Commerce appeared first on Chief Marketer.

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.

Rumble Boxing, a boutique fitness brand known for its high-energy workouts and ’90s hip-hop vibe, was born in a city. But since its Big Apple founding in 2017, the franchise has expanded to 25 studios across the U.S. and, most recently, set up shop in Australia and the Dominican Republic. We spoke with Rumble Boxing CMO Rachelle Dejean about the brand’s growth strategy, marketing a boutique fitness brand, experiential strategies and how representation at both the national and local levels fuels its diversity mission.

Chief Marketer: Diversity and inclusion are a priority at Rumble Boxing. How are you implementing your strategy company-wide?

Rachelle Dejean, CMO of Rumble Boxing: At the end of the day, it really starts with representation. So, making sure that we’re showing our whole membership base, which is a very diverse one, from all backgrounds, shapes, sizes, athletic ability, fitness levels, from pro to amateur, and showcasing that, from content on social to emails to big campaigns. It was really important for me, as we started to scale up the new locations for our studios, that we’re not just telling the trainer story. Our trainers are very fit. They have become experts in their craft. But that only represents a very specific type of person. Bringing our members to a pedestal as well allows us to showcase real people, too.

So, representation would be first and foremost, and then we want to make sure we’re taking moments, not just in seasonal times of the year, to band with different charity organizations or networks that support and uplift different marginalized groups that may not otherwise have had that type of support. The easiest thing we can do is represent, and then on a larger scale, we fundraise and support specific groups nationally and locally. It’s really important for me to give my franchise partners in our system the opportunity to do the same.

CM: Do you have any advice to other women in business who are leading marketing teams at boutique brands?

RD: At the end of the day, we have a lot of tried and true processes. We don’t necessarily need to be reinventing the wheel when it comes to marketing. Social has been around for a while now. Yes, it continues to evolve, but that doesn’t mean you have to be on every single channel to be relevant. So, really lean into your KPIs. I work closely with our sales team because we know it’s not just the top of the funnel that matters. It’s what is at the bottom. And as a female sitting in this seat in this industry, I think it’s also important to trust your gut and speak up when you have the opportunity to do so when you feel strongly about something.

CM: What do you think makes a successful fitness brand in 2022?

RD: There’s so many great players in the boutique space that do their own thing really well. At Rumble, we need to lean into what makes us different rather than trying to replicate. So, finding what really sticks true to the brand and our core values and not trying to act like someone else, because then your members can get on board with that. You can start to build that community. Rumble builds this space for them, and it’s something that they can just come into, shut the world off and enjoy.

CM: What specific elements of the brand have helped create that community?

RD: When Rumble was founded, it was built on sneaker culture, black iconic influences and a ’90s old school hip-hop mentality, where you cut the fluff. There’s a New York attitude. What makes us great is the programming, paired with boxing and the custom equipment. We have a program that culminates with our freestyle Rumble rounds. You mix that with our sneaker culture, and it’s a different experience than what you might otherwise see at another workout facility.

CM: Where do you find your inspiration? Do you look to other brands in the marketplace?

RD: I love to look at brands outside of the fitness industry. For instance, what big campaigns are rolling out around the Super Bowl? How are they treating this video, this concept, this theme to relate it to their product? I find a lot of great ideas and inspiration from product-based companies that have no crossover into the fitness franchise space.

CM: What growth strategies are you using to expand the brand?

RD: Having spent almost four years with Club Pilates, we were able to hone in on identifying a scalable strategy for different markets. Rumble first came to market in densely urban populated areas. But now we’re going to be scaling across the country with 200 territories sold in some locations that maybe don’t have as much awareness of Rumble. When it comes to building that opening plan for our franchisees, we’re leaning into the tried-and-true marketing channels, but grassroots is a big canvasing, on-the-ground effort that we lean into as well.

CM: What are some results you can share that illustrates your success?

RD: Off the cuff, at Xponential Fitness we acquired Rumble with 15 locations open, and those flagship locations have now turned into 25 total studios across the U.S. We have a master franchise agreement in Australia. The first studio just opened a couple weeks back. We also have an international expansion happening in Dominican Republic. By the end of the year, we’ll have several more locations open in the U.S. We hit our first milestone of 200 territories sold in February, so we are excited to continue to ramp up.

CM: Rumble Boxing is inherently experiential, but are you creating any additional experiences outside of the gym?

RD: Currently, we are hosting our first-ever Block Party. It’s a seven-day challenge where you empower yourself to punch into seven themed daily playlists with [brand new] music and ideally reach a six class milestone. With experiences outside of the gym, we’ve been able to lean into building on brand awareness in new markets with Rumble-inspired, pop-up workouts outdoors, so potential new members get excited about signing up and joining us in the studio. Now, nothing is going to compare to the bags inside the studio, seeing those swing and feeling the reverberation as you punch them, but we like to offer that inspired workout in our communities as well.

CM: How did the pandemic shift your marketing strategy?

RD: In the midst of the pandemic, like many other fitness brands and boutique studios, we definitely had to pivot. At that time we started ramping up on demand and live workouts. That was on Instagram Live, our first on demand platform. Since then, we’ve obviously seen people want to get back to that connection in person with their trainers, with their fellow members in studio and group workouts. While that is going to be the biggest opportunity for you to participate with Rumble as a member, we do still offer on demand workouts. Our Xponential Plus on demand platform includes workouts from Rumble and our other Xpo brands.

CM: Lastly, how are you using data to drive your marketing?

RD: It’s all about those numbers, especially when we are working so closely with specific sales KPIs that we need to reach. We leave no marketing stone unturned. We do have a pretty extensive email marketing and automation process in place, but at the local level, we also have organic touchpoints that are going to continue to bring leads into that sales funnel.

We know we’re talking to a savvy, younger audience. Our core demographic is in that millennial sweet spot age. So, we may find them on Instagram and Facebook, but we’re also hitting them in their inbox and even text follow-ups. But I did hint earlier about grassroots and how that’s so important for ramping up and building that grassroots and community feel. Things like the Block Party that we have going on right now can be influenced by that face-to-face connection.

When it comes to data, we’re honing in on our email marketing strategy and how we continue to push into those conversions at the end of the day. But locally and nationally, we have strategies in place that our member management platform allows us to continue to track. We’re excited to see studios ramping up. Our first Denver location just hit 500 members and they opened not too long ago. It’s important for us not to just track our first milestones by soft-open and grand-open, but also retention. We have a lot of tools in place to help us do that, so we can keep the community strong, keep our members on that pedestal and ideally bring those return visits and help them reach their fitness goals.

The post Brands on Fire: Rumble Boxing CMO on Marketing a Boutique Fitness Brand appeared first on Chief Marketer.

What are the greatest challenges to your business from a marketing perspective, and what solutions are you implementing to meet them? CM asked four CMOs, leading marketing departments at a tech company, a wellness brand, a sports league and a media hub, to share their thoughts this week on the above. We learned that differentiation from competitors, leading with empathy and collaboration, and crafting immersive content to keep pace with younger audiences’ appetites are among the solutions making headway for their brands. Following is what CMOs from Qualcomm, Boardroom, Cheribundi and the Drone Racing League had to say. 

Qualcomm CMO, Don McGuire:

Our innovation cycle is very quick—almost every six months across many product and technology categories. Things are moving so fast and so it’s really challenging to keep up with the concentric circles of influence on our brand. So, we have to be nimble and flexible because the feedback loop isn’t linear anymore. There’s also so much divisiveness and so much polarization that threading the needle has become very difficult.

A big challenge right now for brands and marketers is how to lead through an era of psychology, attitudes and behaviors. If you lean too far one way, you alienate a part of your potential audience, and if you lean too much the other way you alienate another percentage of your potential audience. If you stay too neutral, you alienate everybody. Right now, we’re living in a time where we need to lead—and lead with empathy. We need to bring people together. Brands that lead with empathy, drive collaboration, cohesion and goodness will win with customers and consumers. I really feel like you can you can dive into a conversation from a pragmatic, logic-based and empathetic way by creating dialog around a core issue to the problem everyone can agree on without getting extreme on in either side.

Right now, we’re driving marketing initiatives and brand awareness for two brands, one more on the B2B side and the other on the B2C side—Qualcomm and Snapdragon. Qualcomm is our company name and we have a long and rich history working within the technology sector. Snapdragon really has a life and personality of its own and has much higher end-consumer awareness globally.

About a year ago, we decided to separate the marketing initiatives around these two brands to better communicate the core aspects to targeted audiences, while still intertwining the brands where it appropriate. Through this initiative we have seen significant traction. Our campaign to educate technology enthusiasts about Snapdragon’s premium technology capabilities, Snapdragon Insiders, has grown from 0 to 5.9 million in a year, while we are seeing more awareness about Qualcomm’s full offerings among a more targeted B2B crowd.

For more from McGuire, here’s a conversation from when he first landed the role of CMO.

Drone Racing League CMO, Anne Marie Gianutsos:

Gen Z wants competition so fast it happens in an instant. The days of sitting through hours-long, slow-paced games are mostly gone. That’s why drone racing is so well-positioned as a global mainstream sport—it’s thrilling action in the blink of an eye. In the Drone Racing League, the world’s best pilots race high-speed drones through spectacular courses during minute-long heats. We stream immersive videos captured from a camera on the drone, so fans tuning in genuinely feel like they’re flying. We cut this content for quick mashups on social, which is especially loved by our nearly five million TikTok fans.

For more from Gianutsos, enjoy this Marketers on Fire piece with the chief marketer.

Cheribundi CMO, Rob Willey:

The greatest challenge and most important responsibility of marketing is to inform innovation and creatively bring products to market that consumers want. It is our job to be the voice of the consumer and the reflection of culture to create real differentiation. In categories like wellness, there is so much marketing noise that we address those challenges by partnering with creators who used (and loved) our products far before we paid them to do so. Not only do they showcase the true benefits of tart cherry juice, they inform our innovation to make the next big thing in sports nutrition.

Boardroom and 35V CMO, Sarah Flynn:

The greatest challenge in the media industry as a whole is that for legacy brands, there’s not a lot of growth and innovation opportunity; for more niche or newer media platforms, the challenge is breaking through the noise and gaining, first, eyeballs, and secondly, a dedicated audience.

Boardroom lives in a niche between sports, business and entertainment media, which is an incredible spot to occupy but necessitates that we always understand where our point of view and our voice differentiates from other outlets’ coverage. As a newer media brand, keeping that voice and continuing to cultivate our dedicated audience is what is going to help us grow and cut through the aforementioned noise.

For more from Sarah Flynn, check out our Brands on Fire piece.

The post Four Chief Marketers Dish on Challenges and Opportunities Within Their Businesses 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.

The post CMO Corner: A Chat with Shari Hofer, Chief Marketing Officer of Wiley appeared first on Chief Marketer.

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.

BlackBerry loyalists were dealt a blow earlier this year when the company ended support of its iconic smartphones. Once hailed as the preferred devices for business executives, heads of state and other fans of handheld physical keyboards, the beloved “crackberry” is now a relic of the past.

In actuality, the company has not manufactured the phones for several years now, and for the past six it has been licensing other companies to do so. Marketing the services that it provides today is quite a different exercise. Effectively pivoting from a hardware focus to a software one, the company now specializes in providing cybersecurity software and embedded operating systems within vehicles, with an eye on securing automobiles within smart cities of the future.

We spoke with BlackBerry CMO Mark Wilson about the company’s pivot, the significance of competitor analysis in today’s business market, the role that brand equity plays in product differentiation and how compelling content marketing can help B2B businesses cut through the clutter.

Chief Marketer: Let’s talk about pivoting towards not producing BlackBerry phones. Were you involved in the messaging for sunsetting the product? What were the challenges of conveying that to the public?

Mark Wilson, BlackBerry CMO: It’s been six years since we manufactured a phone. Instead, we’ve licensed our brand to other people to manufacture phones and use our software. We’ve pivoted our business model from being hardware-focused to software-focused. It’s changed dramatically in terms of how we build things or support things. So in that pivot from hardware to software, we knew we would eventually stop supporting devices that were seven, eight, nine, 10 years old. We wanted to delay that as long as possible out of respect for our customers. In time, we needed to make a financial decision around what that meant, so eventually we ended support for those devices. We worked with our carrier partners to make sure that those customers knew that it was coming and they had ample time to kind of get ready for it.

CM: How are you involved in creating smart cities?

MW: Long-term, we see the IOT market and the cybersecurity market converging around the smart city. Everybody has talked about smart cities, but not a lot of people are actually delivering something for a smart city. But once you have all the automobiles and traffic signals and everything connected, in a highly secure way, we think that’s actually a sweet spot. Everything going on in the Ukraine right now is a great example of why you need that. They need to be secured because people can begin to take down the national power grids. The value of a smart city can quickly be eroded if that’s not secure.

CM: What’s the process for securing automobiles in smart cities?

MW: If you look at those electric vehicles, there’s more software in those cars than there ever has been. I think on average, there are a hundred million lines of software code now written into the car. So as these cars become more software-based, and as the experience becomes more software-oriented, you want to make sure you’re securing all of those types of smart things that are connected into the infrastructure of a city.

Our software is also in the signaling lights within cities. There’s something called vehicle-to-vehicle—how a vehicle is talking to another vehicle, as well as the cloud. We have a major partnership with AWS in terms of providing that car-to-cloud connectivity. Once you’re showing how all of those things are connected, that’s how you’re going to start to deliver into the smart city.

CM: When do you anticipate this becoming a reality?

MW: Things like vehicle-to-vehicle you can experience today. A lot of that will be government standards in terms of when those things get rolled out. We see it as several years away. It’s coming, and sometimes these things move very rapidly. With autonomous vehicles, it’s starting, but it’ll be a groundswell effect. We think that that’ll accelerate much faster. How far out is that? It’s difficult to predict. And then how quickly does it gain mass adoption? All of those things are to be figured out.

CM: Your business is primarily B2B at this point. Who are your primary customers and how are you marketing your services to them?

MW: Our customers are the largest banks, governments and auto manufacturers. In addition, we have a big focus on the mid-market, and we do this particularly around cybersecurity. We have an AI prevention-first approach to cybersecurity. We use AI algorithms to identify things that are coming into your organization that look like malware or ransomware. And then we stop them from actually executing in the first place. That works well with mid-market clients that may not have security operation centers or 24/7 support. Instead, we’ll deliver that as a managed service.

CM: What channels do you use to market your products and services to customers?

MW: We look at the buyer’s journey and then we map how we reach buyers at different parts of the journey. We’ll advertise in business publications like the New York Times, Wall Street Journal or Washington Post. We’ll do digital advertising and a lot across search marketing. We do a lot through social—organic and paid social, a lot of earned media. It’s omnichannel in terms of how we’re going after the market. We do a lot of thought leadership. We publish threat research reports that get picked up in the news and that’s also shared with our customers.

CM: What tactics are working well for you right now?

MW: We do incredibly well with content marketing. I’ve seen content marketing evolve in my career, and I think it’s a great tactic. The hardest part for marketers doing content marketing is having something interesting to say. They might fall back and create content that is not that compelling, which I think is a huge mistake.

For BlackBerry, we lean into our threat reports. We’ve done things like uncovering hack-for-hire organizations where nation states would engage for-profit companies to execute hacking campaigns and social engineering campaigns, as well as private companies using hack-for-hire organizations to go after competitors. We have our own research team that identifies these exploits and vulnerabilities, threats and actors, and we basically package that up and then go out and tell the world about it.

We do something called Threat Thursdays, where every week we’re sharing new vulnerabilities out in the market. Some of them are really big, like exploits in the mobile space. Some things are small that are more bespoke in terms of tactics, but every week we’re publishing something new. On a longer-term basis, every quarter we come out with very extensive reports.

CM: Let’s talk about trends generally. Are there interesting or up-and-coming trends in B2B marketing that you have your eye on?

MW: The digitization of marketing has been a boon for so many marketers. And your ability to understand your market has never been better. It’s not new, because we’ve been focused on it, but it’s becoming more and more relevant every year. Our ability to understand trends based on more data coming in has only gotten better.

The other trend is something we lean into a lot: understanding your competitors. If you did a competitive study 10 years ago, you would probably hire a research firm and do it once a year to try and understand what’s happening in your market. Today, we understand what’s going on with our competitors on a weekly basis. We’re much smarter about understanding what our competitors are doing, what seems to be working for them, what doesn’t work for them. We’re much more mindful of having an outside-in perspective in B2B marketing. I see this trend only picking up.

CM: What excites you most about the marketing industry right now?

MW: What’s interesting about B2B is product differentiation. That cycle only gets more and more compressed. Years ago, you might have a product advantage for several releases. Now, you have product advantage for a release. The differentiation at that offer level is more difficult to maintain or extend. I think that brand becomes more valued in terms of where you see the differentiation. Your ability to provide that level of trust as an advisor or as a trusted solution, particularly in the markets we’re in, where privacy and security matters, that equation of trust means so much from a brand perspective.

There are things that you want to build more brand equity in. If we can move past it being a nebulous concept into something that’s more concrete, that makes it more of board conversation. All of this is getting to more quantification of marketing. And marketing becomes a more strategic conversation

CM: How should marketers think about measuring that brand equity?

MW: I would do it across three things. We measure our brand awareness, brand perception and brand preference. That’s at the highest level as it relates to brand. If you know awareness deeply, and your awareness relative to your competitors, and if you know perception and preference, you can begin to get an idea how valuable brand is in terms of creating pull in that journey. Are you just pushing opportunities through the funnel or are you pulling them through the funnel? Once you begin to quantify that you can start to be much smarter in terms of how you allocate your investments across push tactics as well as pull tactics.

CM: Where do you see the greatest opportunity for marketers today?

MW: There’s so much opportunity for marketers right now. A lot of it has to do with all the data that we have access to and how we use it. There are more things that we can do now that we never did. That competitive analysis example: any marketer who’s not doing that, it’s a huge missed opportunity. Of course, they need to know their value proposition and the best way to get their value proposition communicated out to the market. But there’s so much more richness that marketers can do beyond just that.

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