VI. Noble Pursuits
Marketing is about commerce, and commerce is about money.
Our success or failure as marketers can be measured by several metrics, but at some point we all have to answer to whether or not the tangible effects of our marketing have justified the cumulative investment of time and resources. From this fact, one might superficially conclude that the “almighty dollar” has to come before all else in every marketing decision we make.
This begs the question: Are marketing campaigns and having a higher purpose inherently at odds with one another?
And perhaps also the question: Why do you get out of bed and dive headfirst into the trenches of marketing every morning?
Surely there’s a financial incentive for what we do, but—despite what the public may be inclined to think at times—it’s rarely the only incentive for the most successful marketers. Most of us who have lasted in this business got into it looking for not just money but also meaning. And then we learned it was a steep challenge to keep the bottom line strong while kindling the fire of our higher purpose, both on an individual campaign level and also on a career level.
There are times when it seems like there’s an either-or choice of more profits or more meaningful communication, and then we’re gripped by a sinking feeling that keeping our jobs might mean holding our collective noses and going for the quickest sale.
So with a tip of the hat to the Noble Gases that occupy the rightward column of the chemical Periodic Table, I present marketing’s Noble Pursuits. In the following conversations, you’ll hear from marketers who have unflinchingly pursued higher purpose in their work...and unflinchingly delivered outstanding bottom-line results.
Perhaps more than any other section in this Periodic Table, I hope you’ll use this one as a prompt for introspection. After reading these interviews, think about what your Noble Pursuit is. If you’re in marketing for the long haul, it’s so important that you stay connected to a higher purpose beyond mere fun and profit. Believe me, you will run out of gas sooner rather than later if you don’t.
Don’t get me wrong, Noble Pursuits don’t have to be some politically-charged permutation of “saving the world.” Certainly, many do pertain to social responsibility or being a good corporate citizen. But if it fits your business and personality better, yours can simply be a renewed and ultra-specific commitment to how you’ll serve your customers better than anyone else has ever served them.
When you read why people like the CMO of Audi of America (Loren Angelo, whom you’ll meet shortly) or KIND visionary Daniel Lubetzky attack their work every single day with the same zeal they did when they were starting out, you’ll see a diversity of options for how you can infuse your marketing efforts with meaning and a commitment to service.
Your Noble Pursuit is the “why” that will sustain you throughout a long and fulfilling career in marketing. After reading this section, I hope you’ll see it just a bit more clearly.
Well Done Is Better than Well Said
“We don’t do things just because they’re a trend; we do things because we think it’s the right thing to do for our customer.”
Soap box time. Of all the elements required to be a successful CMO, few are more overlooked than Marketing as Service. The basic idea is relatively easy to grasp: Rather than starting with what you want to say to your consumers, focus first on what you can do for them. Here’s an example near and dear to my heart from when Renegade worked with HSBC: The BankCab. New Yorkers who were HSBC customers and were lucky enough to hail this classic Checker cab were treated to a free ride anywhere in the city from the most knowledgeable cabbie in the five boroughs. It made headlines, and more importantly it made “The World’s Local Bank” more than just a slogan.
One company that practices Marketing as Service regularly and has done so for decades is American Express, which helps explain why AmEx has been my go-to source for content since I started blogging in 2006. Among my favorite examples is Small Business Saturday. The service in this case not only establishes a day that puts the spotlight on small businesses and rivals Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but also enables small businesses to be more competitive throughout the year with marketing toolkits that highlight their distinct advantages over their larger competitors.
And helping small businesses grow is hardly an altruistic endeavor for AmEx. Years ago, the company realized that when their customers grow, AmEx grows right along with them. Enlightened self-interest propelled them to provide highly useful content in the pre-Internet days, in the form of breakfasts, newsletters and magazines, and more recently in their carefully curated online OPEN Forum. Interestingly, this “do” turned out to be more than just a useful service to its customers; it also attracted prospects once AmEx decided to make all the content public.
Which brings me to my interview with John Hayes, the long-time CMO of American Express. Hayes, who started his career on the agency side, has presided over a successful stream of “Marketing as Service” programs from those mentioned above to Membership Rewards, CEO BootCamp, the Women’s Business Initiative, and two relatively recent social media experiments called Link Like Love and Card Sync. The commonality? A relentless commitment to doing the right thing for the AmEx customer.
Has a service mentality always been front-and-center at American Express? How does being a great service company affect your marketing?
American Express has been around since 1850, and when we first started, we were a freight forwarding company, not a payments company. Then we slowly moved into the travel business and the traveler’s check business. The company was 108 years old before the first American Express card appeared. Since the beginning, there has been a focus on being a great service company, whether that service was freight forwarding, opening up markets for people to travel and experience the world, offering a safer way to carry money with travelers checks, or offering something like the American Express card to simplify people’s lives and make it more rewarding. All of those things come from a service culture, a company focused on service.
As I understand it, there is not yet a clear link between OPEN Forum (AmEx’s content and networking platform for small business owners) and significant new revenue. Yet the program is very popular and widely seen as a success. How is this so?
I think there are some general trends that are very positive, but you’re right. When you get to a granular level, it’s difficult to say this program generated these many cards and this much spend for American Express.
We have a belief that if you serve people well, they’ll become your customers; because everyone wants and deserves to be served well. We don’t require people to be a cardholder to use OPEN Forum. We created the site because we knew that part of enabling the success of small businesses was helping them understand what other small businesses had already learned to help them be successful. That’s why we created it, and that’s why we made it an “open” network—so that small business owners could find others that would be of most value to them.
When you’ve contributed in a meaningful way to a small business’s success and then say, “Hey, I’ve got some other services for you. I’ve got a card that could help you manage inventory better,” they are quite open to it because they’ll say, “Well, you guys have already been helping me grow my business, enabling my success,” and that’s the philosophy. Some programs we can measure on a granular level, and some we can’t, but we’re careful not to overvalue the things we can measure or undervalue the things we can’t.
Given that everybody is creating content and other companies are targeting small businesses like you are, what are you doing to stay ahead?
What’s really important is that we don’t do things just because they’re a trend; we do things because we think it’s the right thing to do for our customers. In 1971, we started a publishing group called American Express Publishing. Wow, what a concept. Who was talking about content in 1971? But this company had the foresight to understand that in order to be a lifestyle services company for businesses and people, you need to talk to them about their life, not what they’re going to use to pay for something.
The philosophy that got this company to create a publishing group in 1971 is no different than the way we think about our company today. If you’re in the service business, every interaction with a prospect or a customer should be a service interaction. We provided those magazines as a lifestyle service and if you look at what we are doing with American Express UNSTAGED for example—bringing music to so many people around the world on a live-stream basis—the philosophy is the same. That is our way of serving customers, based on their life and passions. We should be helping our customers experience what it is they want to experience, and many of these experiences are open architecture because we also want prospects to know what it feels like to be a member.
Have you seen your role as a CMO evolve over the last ten years?
My role has evolved a lot. First, it’s evolved from the standpoint of understanding what is happening in the world related to media. How are people consuming media? How are they absorbing new messages? Those things have changed fairly remarkably in the last decade. Part of my job is to make sure I understand how the world works today whether that’s social media, digital, or traditional, and how it’s changing. How are brands being established in the landscape today?
My role is also about identifying which elements of American Express will not change from its origins and which elements absolutely will, in terms of how we go to market. Trust, security, and service will not change. This company has existed for 165 years because it has reinvented itself many times, but always grounded in the enduring values of trust, security, and service.
What role is big data playing in your job today?
Data is a fundamental part of what we do today and it’s a great opportunity because data can allow us to optimize on a much shorter cycle. We also see it as an opportunity to serve customers better and of course as a company known for trust and security, we believe in using it in a privacy-centric way. With data, I can anticipate your needs, I can help you with the things you want, I can begin to understand what you might need in the future, so data can be very useful in service and marketing. I won’t talk about marketing without mentioning service, because I think there’s a lot of marketing out there that is of no service to anyone and frankly doesn’t have much impact. The things that are sustainable are the marketing elements that serve people well. So data becomes an enormous opportunity not only to find prospects and continue the dialogue with our customers, but also to understand them and offer things that are a real service to them. This enables us to begin the relationship on a service level and not just a sales level.
As the CMO, how much influence do you have on the entire customer experience?
I don’t know of a company that is structured in a way where the CMO has control over all customer touch points and in reality it’s not practical. That said, it is the responsibility of the CMO to influence customer value and measure that value over time. This is fundamental to building a strong brand and business.
Further reading:
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Ben Franklin
The Twitterverse Is “Lovin’ It”
“Every customer of McDonald’s is important regardless of Klout, number of followers, or celebrity status.”
Somewhere out there, right now, as you read this, a marketer is hard at work trying to get more exposure on social media. And by “a marketer” I mean “a whole lot of marketers.” The ability to consistently (and, being honest, rapidly) increase a brand’s presence on social media has emerged as one of the most valuable skills in the industry.
But what do you do after you’ve got that huge following? If only the folks striving to get their brand’s name to ring out louder on the social media airwaves could spend a few minutes in Kim Musgrave’s chair... Until recently, Kim was the Social Media Team Leader at McDonald’s, which means it was on her and her team to manage the one mention per second Mickey D’s receives across its social media platforms. That’s 3,600 per hour, 86,400 per day, every day.
Some of those mentions are praise, some are complaints. All of them need to be heard. So how did Kim ensure that the people reaching out to McDonald’s on social media get the attention they need to remain happy customers? Whether you have 500 or 5 million followers yourself, Kim’s insights on interacting with your base are required reading if you want to win at social.
The Twitter handle @Reachout_McD is relatively new. Tell me a bit about the thinking behind this particular handle relative to @McDonalds and how it has worked thus far.
The @McDonalds Twitter handle was born in late 2009 as a way for our customers to follow us for the latest McDonald’s news and promotions. As our follower count grew, so did the opportunity to give our customers a place to share feedback, ask a question, etc.
@ReachOut_McD Twitter tends to be mainly listening and responding versus creating original content. Just curious, why?
Our social service team responds to @McDonalds customer service issues via the @Reachout_McD dedicated handle. We wanted a place to celebrate our customers who have great experiences at McDonald’s, so we retweet those as well.
There is a lot of chatter on Twitter about McDonald’s every day. What kinds of challenges has this created from a listening standpoint?
McDonald’s serves over twenty-eight million customers in the U.S. each day. In social media, McDonald’s is currently mentioned every second! While tracking total volume/buzz is one metric, we really want to get to the “meat” of the conversations. Due to the fact that about 80 percent of our mentions are from Twitter, this context can be challenging with slang, sarcasm, and profanity. Is “Just killed this Big Mac” positive or negative? We are currently testing tools to get to the sentiment and emotion behind the mention.
Given all the noise, how do you decide what is worthy of a response? Or said differently, do you have different policies for how you deal with positive feedback from customers versus negative feedback?
Our cross-functional team focuses on @McDonalds for listening and engagement seven days a week. This team includes Customer Service (both at home office and call center), Communications, PR, and Agencies. As the volume of mentions has increased, we developed a “Playbook” with guidelines for response and a very simple Red, Yellow, Green light system.
Everyone talks about social listening but not every brand is doing it. How well do you think your team is listening, and are there any tools that are working particularly well for you?
McDonald’s has been listening in social media since 2008 and the way we report to the business has evolved as we have communicated the value of social data. Sentiment is the most challenging, as I mentioned above, so having a tool that can capture the volume, then break down the context in an accurate way, continues to be an area of opportunity.
Can you provide an example of social listening that helped inform other business activities (marketing, product development, etc.)?
Improving the restaurant experience is one of the opportunities for McDonald’s customer engagement in social. These engagement insights are combined with the traditional voice of customer insights to identify opportunities: How fast, accurate, and friendly is the service? Trending this over time (i.e., monthly) can provide opportunities for operations.
If a comment happens to come from a famous person, do you handle the response differently?
Every customer of McDonald’s is important regardless of Klout, number of followers, or celebrity status. But we certainly do engage with celebrities when we can. McDonald’s tweeted Al Roker because he missed his first day of work in thirty-nine years by sleeping in. We thought it would be fun to post about it regarding McCafé, and then they mentioned it on Good Morning America.
Let’s talk about your social team structure. Do you have a separate group for brand social and service social?
We have a cross-functional team. Social customer service is my area, and I have a dedicated supervisor for Twitter customer service. We are currently working with a few of our call center agents to develop the social care process. Facebook is managed by an agency, but we stay very closely aligned and work on service processes.
How do you see service via social media evolving over the next 2 to 3 years? What kinds of things would you like to see improved?
I see the customer expecting brands to be very responsive (just like calling), but also authentic in social customer service—no auto replies. For brands with increasing mentions in social, having the best social tool for prioritization and routing will be a necessity.
Further reading:
Jeanne Bliss, “I Love You More Than My Dog”: Five Decisions That Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty in Good Times and Bad
Driving the Road Less Traveled
“A challenger spirit is crucial in everything we do.”
Creativity is not optional for any marketing professional. But for premier brands such as luxury car maker Audi, it must be applied very judiciously or else years and even decades of progress can be undone by one “crazy-and-not-in-a-good-way” idea. (New Coke, anyone?). And with fast-paced digital media as the ascendant force in marketing, the opportunities to screw things up are more abundant than ever.
So it takes an EVP/CMO of Loren Angelo’s caliber to ensure that creativity flows constantly for Audi of America, and also to ensure that only the best and most targeted new ideas reach Audi’s audience. Loren’s deep understanding of the relationship between form and function in marketing is just one ingredient in his astounding run of success at the brand, which includes forty-five consecutive monthly sales records and a 30 percent increase in brand opinion and consideration since 2006.
Creativity can emerge in a lot of different ways, from how you approach problems to creative marketing campaigns. How are you being creative in your current role?
Creativity is driven by staying authentic to your brand and your mission. I’m inspired by ideas where I can connect my brand with cultural moments that engage a conversation.
Some agency sages believe “it isn’t creative unless it sells.” Do you share that belief? If so, is there still a role for brand-building activities in your marketing mix that may not have an immediate or directly measurable impact on sales?
Building the Audi brand in America has been crucial to our current success of forty-five consecutive monthly sales records. Elevating brand opinion and consideration by over 30 percent since 2006 has come from an investment in repositioning Audi as the modern, progressive, luxury choice. When we bring smart, entertaining creative to market, demand rises and that drives sales.
Looking at the question above slightly differently, is there a case to be made for a brand like Audi that the medium can be the message? For example, does doing cutting edge marketing on, say, a mobile platform also say that Audi is a cutting edge brand that “gets it?”
Absolutely. Creativity comes in the message as well as the medium in which it’s delivered. Building the brand with time-starved, affluent Americans requires us to bring unique ideas to a variety of channels. In addition to our unique thirty-second TV communications that tell culturally relevant stories versus using traditional automotive speak, Audi has been leading in digital connections as well. For example, this year Audi introduced several new entry-level luxury products to first-time luxury buyers of which a third were young Millennials. We used platforms such as Waze and TripAdvisor to link our Audi Q3 “Stray the Course” strategy to consumer behaviors on those channels and for the launch of the A3, we introduced a completely new voice and visual execution on Snapchat for Audi in the Super Bowl, which we carried through the entire season of Pretty Little Liars that drew 125,000 new followers in just nine months on that channel.
Does risk-taking factor into developing truly creative campaigns? If so, how do you mitigate that risk internally and or externally?
A challenger spirit is crucial in everything we do at Audi. Therefore, pushing our communication to be anything but traditional drives us internally and is why we seek out clever culturally-relevant storytelling.
What role does social media play in your marketing efforts? Are there any platforms that are working better for your brand than others?
We identified an opportunity to engage in a conversation with America through social media several years ago. It was the ideal platform to reinforce our provocative messages while establishing a clear voice for the brand. While our fan base has grown organically from our engaging content, we’ve established Audi in over ten social media channels. Each has its own engaging characteristics for that community, but we’ve found Instagram to be an increasingly enthusiastic and responsive channel that has grown exponentially because of the personalized, visual nature of the content.
How are you leveraging storytelling in your creative endeavors at Audi?
This is crucial to bringing a brand into the conversation with today’s consumer. When we introduced TDI clean diesel in several of our new vehicles last year, we recognized that many of the misperceptions of diesel still existed, including that it was an old technology that was for slow, smoky, dirty old cars. Instead of just announcing that Audi had an all new line up of fuel efficient and environmentally friendly new TDI clean diesel solutions, we approached it with a story that exaggerated one of the misperceptions that high performance luxury sedans don’t use diesel.
In this communication, an Audi A8 pulls into a fueling station where the driver begins to use the clean diesel pump when in slow motion the many bystanders attempt to stop her thinking she’d made a mistake. Towards the end, she simply responds “I know” illustrating she clearly knows what she is doing while signaling to another Audi A6 TDI clean diesel driver who gives her a confirming nod. It was a clever way of telling the story that Audi has many TDI clean diesel models and those in the know realize it’s the smart solution for the future. The full campaign reinforced the range capabilities, and environmental benefits and dispelled many of the myths that brought the story to life in all consumer touchpoints.
Further reading:
Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, Bang!: Getting Your Message Heard in a Noisy World
But Is it Good for the Customer?
“Get rid of funnels and think past the buying. If you don’t have a good experience after you buy, you’re not coming back for more.”
When Ani Matson took the reins as CMO of NEA (National Education Association) Member Benefits, the company was sending new customers over fifty separate pieces of communications offering a wide range of products and services. But Ani quickly saw that this was a prioritization of expediency over customer experience. After substantial study and consensus-building, Ani and her team were able to reduce the number of new member communications to just six touches.
The results? A 20 percent increase in participation and a significant spike in customer satisfaction ratings. Less was indeed more. Ani’s move was risky, but by making the customer the center of the strategy from start to finish, she never doubted it was the right thing to do. While she’s moved on from her position at NEA Member Benefits, the lessons in her accomplishments there—not just concerning why to put the customer first but also how—are evergreen.
Could you explain the business model of NEA Member Benefits and its relationship to NEA?
NEA Member Benefits is a for-profit entity owned by the NEA, the National Education Association, which represents public school teachers and other staff who work in public schools. NEA Member Benefits provides mostly financial services products and services to NEA members and their families. We talked to top providers, we ranked them, and then we offered the benefits to members.
NEA Member Benefits markets to three million members plus their families. It’s certainly a very well defined target. How does that affect marketing?
You still need an intentional strategy. In fact, you have to be very precise because you are marketing to people who you want to have a relationship with for the length of their career and after they retire. It’s not just about finding an audience for your product, it’s about serving a defined group, with the best portfolio of products, in the most relevant way.
We can contact members via direct mail, which is the way we used to market for many years, but that doesn’t always work because you can’t just offer the same thing to three million people. So instead, as people go through their life stages, we try to provide relevant offers at specific times in their lives. At the end of the day, we are building offers and communications around a member’s journey as they enter the profession and join the organization.
What are the keys to sending the right communications to the right customers?
Everything is set up and automated and triggered so that members can receive the appropriate information at the appropriate time based on their behavior, what they do, and what they tell us.
We’ve scored the whole membership file, and based on those scores, we decide which offers are most appropriate to market to whom. The key is to watch members and understand them deeply, understand their behavior, understand their needs, and understand their attributes, in order to be able to offer them the right thing. It’s beautifully analytical. Like all of us, members have children, get married, go back to school, retire and as they go through those stages we have different offers customized for them.
Let’s talk about a win that you’ve had where you were able to get the right product in front of the right person at the right time with the right message.
The one that I’m most proud of the team for doing is the reimagining of the content strategy and the way we deliver the content to the members. What we are trying to do is optimize the content at the right gaps of a member’s journey. We have come up with a huge roadmap for delivering the right information to the right members.
But in terms of best results, so far the top results have come from the new member experience that we built. New members were cordoned off from receiving everything that other members would receive. Instead, we designed a different experience for them, basically welcoming them to the organization, showing them what’s available to them, giving some freebies to them, and just inviting them to come and explore.
By not pushing, we were able to get better results than the way we had done it in the past. We touched them only six times last year and increased participation by 20 percent. In the past, we had touched their comparable cohort fifty times.
That’s an incredible story. Did you have brand health metrics tracking so you know how people perceive you?
Yes. We were initially thinking of using Net Promoter Score, but then we came up with what we call a “Brand Index.” It is similar to the Net Promoter Score but it takes into consideration other factors we thought were important for our brand. Through a relationship with Harte Hanks, we have been running a longitudinal study and the “Brand Index” annually over the last seven years. This study has become a team energizer for us, because we present the results to the broader team of marketers and they see for themselves the impact their marketing has had on member perceptions of our brand and the parent NEA brand.
So, if you were to sit down with a fellow CMO, what sort of advice would you give them on these factors in order to get started?
Get rid of funnels and think past the buying. If you don’t have a good experience after you buy, you’re not coming back for more.
Look at the stages of the experience, the journey that any human being would go through when they have a need, and then as they look to fulfill their need. I would ask the question why, after every acquisition. What do they use it for? Where do they use it? And then I would start to build the experience around that.
Further reading:
Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Return on Customer: Creating Maximum Value From Your Scarcest Resource
The Ultimate Fan Club
“If you work with the community and built trust...the community will support you.”
It’s a dream of many, if not all, marketers to have their customers and fans come together in a self-sustaining community—these days, that usually means an online community—where they can discuss the products, help each other with support issues, and make friends.
It also remains a dream for most, and very few have succeeded on the level of the SAP Community Network led at the time of this interview by Chip Rodgers. In this interview, Chip candidly discusses the triumphs and challenges of growing and sustaining SAP’s massive Community Network. As you’ll see, it’s an ongoing process and the nurturing never stops. In this interview, Chip shows why it’s not as though once you hit a certain number of community members you can put your feet up on your desk and let the marketing take care of itself.
But with appropriate effort the rewards are great, and beyond just marketing, fostering community is a Noble Pursuit unto itself.
How big is the SAP Community Network?
We currently have about 2.5 million members, and it’s a very active community. We get between a million and a million and a half unique visitors a month and about 3,000 to 4,000 posts a day in discussions and blogs and wiki pages.
Tell me about its membership breakdown.
It’s about 50 percent customers and then probably another 30 percent partners and then we have a large group of employee members as well. There are also independent contractors, developers—just people who are interested in the SAP ecosystem. It’s open to anyone that wants to join. There are a few core pieces of information that we ask for, like a unique email address.
In terms of content, are you constantly feeding this beast yourself, or is it somewhat self-sustaining with member-generated content?
I have two teams. The content team works with about 400 SAP experts to feed the community with a lot of our formal content: white papers, articles, solution briefs, eLearning, videos, etc. I have a team of about 12 working with a group of stakeholders who are SAP solution managers, or folks from support, or people in solution marketing that have all the actual information, the expertise, and are the ones actually building the content. I’ve also got a group of 6 that are managing the community-generated content, so that’s our blogs and forums and wikis, and similarly they’re working with a group of about 700 moderators in the community.
The scale of this community is kind of mind-boggling. Can you draw a direct line between your activities and your ROI?
More and more, we’re able to show that there is a connection. We’ve gotten to the point where we’re running a lot of webinars on different topic areas, different product areas. We’ve really cut back with list-buying and some of those traditional marketing costs to get people to come in and listen to a webinar, learn about a new product area, and then take the next step as a pipeline opportunity.
Was it tough in the beginning to get management behind the community?
We laid a lot of groundwork for social media within SAP. We were fortunate that we had a board member who thought it was the thing to do and defended it every time. When we first opened the communities with blogs and forums and wiki, some executives were nervously saying, “Why should we create a place just for people to complain?” But our feeling was that there are plenty of public places for people to criticize the company, why not create the place where we can be a part of the conversation? And fortunately, our board defended it.
How do you handle it when someone starts vehemently criticizing the brand within the community?
What we’ve found is if you work with the community and build trust, and you’re open about how you engage and you answer questions and address issues that come up, the community will support you. It’s not always SAP that has to defend [itself] when someone goes haywire. We see this all the time where somebody says something negative or even a little wacky in the community, and your knee-jerk reaction might be, “We have to answer that.” And what ends up happening is a lot of other community members come in and say, “Well you might have a point here, but this is way over the line.” The whole group comes together.
With 2.5 million community members, your activities are dwarfing anything SAP has going on Facebook or Twitter. Does this create any tension with your social team?
We actually work very well together and leverage each other’s strengths on a nearly daily basis. But it’s interesting that when we were first having discussions about communities joining marketing, our CMO was saying, “There’s an opportunity to learn from what Community Network has done. We need to have more conversations and engage with our audience. We can’t just create another email blast with a bunch of creative and offers.” It’s been a cultural change within the company.
Author’s note: The remaining questions and answers are from a follow-up conversation I had with Chip right before this edition went to press.
Since we talked a couple of years ago, you’ve left SAP. Have you been involved in community building since and, if so, what lessons from your SAP days have you tried to apply?
Even with SAP things had changed since we first talked. One big change was that we de-emphasized number of members as a measure of community health. We shifted focus to measures of engagement: things like numbers of unique visitors per month, contributions to the community, numbers of blogs, questions, answers, comments, likes, and so on. Those are the metrics that really measure the health of a community.
Today I’m responsible for the Customer Experience marketing team at Ciena which includes social media and community, as well as all marketing events and executive briefing centers. Social media and community are so closely connected since they’re both about transparency and enabling all the smart people in the organization to engage more directly and openly with customers, partners, developers, and others in the broader ecosystem. I’m definitely drawing on the experience and success we had at SAP to help grow our engagement and deepen those kinds of customer connections.
Given that Facebook has essentially become a pay-to-play network for marketers and LinkedIn groups have limited functionality, do you expect more B2B brands to invest in building and maintaining their own private communities?
Facebook has become much more challenging than it was in the early days for brands. LinkedIn does have some interesting capabilities like groups and Pulse, but you’re right that it’s still not a great place to “assemble a tribe” and bring folks together around key topics for your company. But I also think the question about whether to build a brand-based community depends on the company and the markets they serve. Some organizations’ customers will be more receptive and more motivated to participate in a brand-related community. For example, technology companies have customers and partners that can be highly motivated to seek out and participate in an online community because they’re always looking for answers to tough technical issues, trying to push the boundaries of what the technology can do, trying to learn tips and tricks from experts as well as wanting to build their reputation among their peers.
That may not be true for B2B organizations in other industries. For example, is there enough inherent motivation for customers of a food-service organization to come together in a branded community? You really have to look at what motivates customers to decide if it’s worth the investment to build a separate community, or to work with existing communities or social channels like LinkedIn.
What are some of the pitfalls brands trying to build communities should try to avoid?
The classic advice that I believe will always be true is to make sure you have executive sponsorship and buy-in to what you’re trying to achieve with a community. Community building takes investment, resources, focus, time, and patience to really get going. So you’ll need to be in it for the long haul and that means having a good business case and an executive team that believes in the vision and ultimately the business benefits you’ll achieve. Without those things, you might get started but never have the chance to really make it successful!
Further reading:
Dave Balter and John Butman, Grapevine: The New Art of Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Green Is Good
“Find CSR programs and initiatives that aren’t just good for the community, but are good for your business too. That makes it easy to justify the investment, and makes the efforts seem more genuine and sincere.”
Cynics who insist that a deep, authentic focus on corporate social responsibility is incompatible with keeping a luxury hotel brand profitable and growing have obviously never met Tom Santora, CMO and Senior Vice President of Sales for Omni Hotels & Resorts.
At Omni, Tom has turned CSR—specifically, a focus on sustainable “green” initiatives—into big business, and the benefits are real for Omni’s bottom line, its guests, and the planet.
This interview with Tom not only presents an assortment of great ideas for how a business can be more green, but also outlines one of the most effective big-picture approaches to CSR I’ve come across. Whether your company’s CSR initiatives are environmentally-focused or not, listen to Tom.
How have you approached corporate social responsibility? Do you have a distinct set of metrics for CSR (versus product sales) that help rationalize these investments?
Sustainability is central to Omni Hotel & Resorts’ entire business—from operations and procurement to architecture and construction. For example, our two newest builds, the Omni Nashville Hotel and Omni Dallas Hotel, are LEED Silver and LEED Gold certified, respectively. Our goal is for all future new builds to become LEED certified.
While this is a tremendous achievement for both Nashville and Dallas, earning Gold certification for the Omni Dallas was particularly notable. With 1,001 guest rooms and 110,000 square feet of meeting space, the Omni Dallas Hotel is the largest LEED Gold certified hotel outside of Las Vegas, and one of the only LEED Gold hotels in Texas. We are extremely proud to be able to say this.
Achieving LEED Gold status required careful planning and a disciplined approach to design and development. We worked with recycled and regionally-sourced materials and incorporated significant natural day lighting into our design. We also implemented a keycard-based guestroom energy management system and utilized a construction process to significantly reduce construction pollution and rolled out a number of water conservation initiatives. Omni Dallas Hotel’s dining venue, Texas Spice, is even a certified Green Restaurant—two stars. Plus, the housekeeping associates collect unused soap to donate to the Global Soap Project.
We also are finding other ways to minimize our carbon footprint. We are increasing local and organic dining options by partnering with local farmers, growers, and seafood purveyors, as well as sourcing—and in some cases producing our own—environmentally preferred products. In addition, we are engaging our employees and guests in conservation efforts. For example, each Select Guest loyalty club member is invited to select “Eco-Friendly Services” in his other guest profile, indicating whether bed linens and towels should be changed only when requested. By giving our guests the option to re-use items that would normally be laundered in between uses, we can reduce water, chemical, and energy use.
Obviously, there are long-term operational cost benefits to building properties that consume fewer natural resources. This is one of our ways we rationalize our investments. But we also analyze guest feedback from Medallia to pinpoint how sustainability practices directly influence guest favorability and loyalty.
As CMO, what is your role related to CSR? Are there some initiatives that you think have been particularly effective?
As a smaller, privately held company, we are very nimble and communicate well across channels. As a result, I am usually involved in our CSR initiatives from the outset—particularly if they have the potential to benefit the guest experience and/or our brand reputation.
While our construction and development initiatives naturally fall outside the scope of my role as CMO, I often collaborate with that team to provide input on aspects of the design and development that will make Omni Hotels & Resorts more marketable to customers. For example, many large associations and groups seek venues or destinations that meet specific sustainability requirements. Naturally, our LEED Silver and Gold certified properties are extremely marketable to those groups. In fact, we have secured business solely because we have a LEED Gold certified hotel in Dallas.
How do you make sure that your CSR initiatives come across as a sincere commitment to doing good as opposed to being self-promotional?
We are fortunate in that our sustainability initiatives are not just good for our brand reputation; they make good business sense too. As I mentioned earlier, there are long-term operational cost benefits to building properties that consume fewer natural resources. We would utilize these practices whether or not they were marketable for our company.
These practices also deliver guest experiential benefits, making them even more appealing to our company. One of our core brand attributes is providing hotel properties that are unique and authentic to their local markets. By using building and design materials that are indigenous to the local region and providing culinary creations based on locally sourced ingredients, we can cater a true local experience. It’s what makes us unique and it’s what guests look forward to when staying with Omni.
What advice would you give to fellow CMOs who are just getting started on CSR programs?
My advice to other CMOs is to find CSR programs and initiatives that aren’t just good for the community, but are good for your business too. That makes it easy to justify the investment, and makes the efforts seem more genuine and sincere.
Further reading:
Daniel W. Bena, Sustain-Ability: How a Corporate Conscience Helps Business Sustain the Ability to Win
Unleashing Goodwill
“We all know that today’s consumers prefer to support businesses with a social conscience.”
As an unabashed dog lover and proud owner of a French bulldog, I’ve been a huge fan of PEDIGREE’s “Dogs Rule” campaign since its outset. In fact, it was the subject of my first post on TheDrewBlog in February 2008. What I particularly admired about this campaign was that it went far deeper than advertising. For example, employees were encouraged to bring their dogs to work. If the building owners didn’t like it, they actually moved operations to a more dog-friendly building. Salespeople were even allowed to bring their dogs to meetings with customers.
The coup de grace, at least for me, was setting up the PEDIGREE Pet Adoption Drive, a program that initially offered free pet food to individuals to encourage shelter adoptions. This program evolved into the Pedigree Foundation, which now inspires dog lovers to donate time and money to help find “loving and forever homes” for thousands of shelter dogs. Behind a lot of this goodness for the last three years has been Bo Segers, who became President of the foundation in 2015. Bo was kind enough to share some of his challenges and hard-earned wisdom in the interview that follows.
How much did you raise this year and where does that money go?
The foundation’s revenues were $9,349,550 through the end of 2014. We will exceed $10 million this year. The majority of our money goes into our grant programs for distribution. We’ve also directed about $1.3 million to an endowment fund. We operate an office with a staff of one.
What role does the Pedigree brand play with the foundation today?
The current Board of Directors is comprised of MARS Petcare Associates, so we are aware of the brand’s history of promoting shelter adoptions. We honor that history through our grant-making programs. We value the advice of members of the brand team and encourage their participation in our planning. Where there are opportunities to promote the foundation in brand media and marketing activities, the brand marketing team has proven to be a great partner.
As a private foundation, we are legally unable to directly promote the brand’s products, but we strive to build a symbiotic relationship with the brand. This is especially important because the public generally perceives us as one entity.
PEDIGREE Adoption Drive events are executed today in almost every PEDIGREE global location, so we are hopeful to eventually mirror those activities and expand our grant-making activities internationally.
How do you get consumers involved with the foundation?
Like everyone else today, we have a website and we’re active in social media. The brand creates promotions that benefit the foundation and communicates our message to the consumer. Additionally, we solicit promotional opportunities that are free or very low cost, just like any other nonprofit.
One of our best promotional activities is our grant-making itself. Our grantees appreciate the support we provide and they post about it to their own followers. The animal welfare community is small but powerful and we feel we have built a very credible identity through our grant awards.
What have been the biggest challenges at the foundation?
Resource development is the constant challenge we face: money and people. The number of requests we receive for support grows each year and our financial resources have not grown at nearly the same rate.
Since the brand is our largest donor, we have had to face the possibility that the demands of the business could impact the level of its annual financial commitment. So a few years ago, the board voted to create an endowment to ensure that the foundation could become less financially dependent on the brand. We would like to see an endowment of $40 million, but building a fund of that size doesn’t happen overnight.
The foundation also requires engaged board members. Currently, all the members of our board are in leadership roles with the business and they are very busy people. In 2013, the board hired the first full-time director for the foundation. Activities that had been outsourced were brought back in-house and we revised our strategic plan to focus on our goals and assure that our actions were aligned. To achieve our goals we need to grow our board and we’re currently considering a number of ways to do that.
What advice do you have for CMOs considering setting up foundations?
I would advise against setting up a foundation only as a marketing device. The PEDIGREE Foundation was created to support the philosophical ideals of the business: to make a better world for pets. That commitment to help homeless dogs and to promote adoption exists throughout the PEDIGREE brand and has matured over time to become a bedrock philosophy.
We all know that today’s consumers prefer to support businesses with a social conscience. It is the same with today’s workforce. We’ve found that the work of the PEDIGREE Foundation is a source of pride among current employees and is an outstanding recruiting tool.
What lessons can you share about building a brand-related foundation?
First and foremost, building a brand-related foundation takes more time and money than you ever plan for. So plan accordingly. I would advise having a solid financing plan in place for the first five years, so you can direct your energies to developing your program and making it meaningful.
Second, the people engaged in the endeavor (board members and volunteers) have to be passionate or you will never achieve your goals.
Lastly, don’t underestimate the impact of what you’re doing—both as a source of doing good in the world, but also in contributing to the recognition and regard for your brand.
Further reading:
Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval, The Power of Nice: How to Conquer the Business World with Kindness
Designing a Better World
“We are also acutely aware of our responsibility to contribute to sustainable homes and workplaces, environments that promote a better world.”
Before joining the board of New York City’s Urban Green Council two years ago, my understanding of designing and building environmentally responsible products was comparable to your average kindergartner. Thankfully I’ve bulked up on the topic since then. It turns out sustainable design is a remarkably complex and constantly evolving art form. The choices are not always “green” or “not green” and instead require a sophisticated ability to weigh the options while rallying the industry to aim higher.
Few know and practice this better than David Bright, Senior Vice President of Communications at Knoll, a leader in the sustainable design movement for home and office furniture. As you will see in our interview below, it’s not just a question of where the raw materials came from or how much energy it took to create and ship the product. Environmentally responsible brands must also consider the ongoing impact of the product on things like air quality AND be prepared for recycling once the product is worn out. Bright is a big proponent of third party certification, which as he puts it, “tells our customers that our commitment to sustainability is real.”
For marketers considering or evaluating CSR initiatives, the key word here is “real.” Today’s sophisticated consumers can sniff out shallow or disingenuous CSR commitments an eco-mile away. Earnestness must run deep within the corporate DNA. As Bright explains, it “is a core principle, an integral part of a culture that has made Knoll an industry leader.” Interestingly, in talking to companies like Knoll, the business case for CSR is less and less about “can we afford it?” and more and more “can we afford not to?” especially when the “we” includes employees, customers, shareholders and, yes, the world we all inhabit.
Unless you flipped straight to this chapter, you probably just read the interview with Tom Santora and how he’s adjusted the operations of Omni Hotels and Resorts to greatly benefit the environment (as well as Omni’s bottom line). Knoll is taking a different path to the same goal by zeroing in on design itself as the key to a greener future, and the results are very encouraging.
Can you provide an overview of Knoll’s CSR priorities?
The kind of work we do means that our practices have a significant impact on the workplace, an arena where so many people spend their time. When we think about sustainability, we are not only framing our own corporate philosophy, but also making decisions that will shape the daily lives of our customers for decades. As a company, we consider environmental, economic, and social sustainability in all our design and management choices, from what kind of materials are used in our products to the well-being of our employees. But we are also acutely aware of our responsibility to contribute to sustainable homes and workplaces, environments that promote a better world.
Is there one recent program that you are particularly proud of?
Our commitment to sustainably sourced wood. We know that curbing deforestation is essential to stemming climate change. So for more than a decade, we have been developing supply chain practices that enable us to certify where our wood comes from and how it is harvested. Today, most of the wood we use is available with a Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) certified claim (C028824). FSC is the international standard-setting body for sustainable wood. Many of our competitors offer FSC wood as a more expensive option on many of their products. We don’t give our customers a choice. If you buy standard Knoll Office products, you support sustainable forest practices.
Can you talk about the idea of sustainable design? Does this approach trickle down into marketing?
Sustainable design means considering the entire life of a product, from raw materials to the end of the product’s life. We use powerful analytic tools (Life Cycle Assessments) to measure the environmental impact of each stage and identify opportunities for energy reduction and material reuse. And yes, the data we collect through this process is passed on to customers so that they can make informed decisions. We are moving toward a uniform “Environmental Product Declaration,” a sort of nutritional information label for durable goods. This transparency is valuable to our customers.
How important is third-party certification?
Third-party certification is essential. It tells our customers that our commitment to sustainability is real. In addition to the FSC wood certification, Knoll products are also monitored by GREENGUARD for their impact on indoor air quality and by a range of industry-wide certification programs for sustainability. We maintain environmental databases for each of our products, which help clients build LEED-certified workspaces. Knoll does most of its own manufacturing, but when we outsource part of the process, we make sure our partners’ facilities meet the same requirements. The positive pressure that these programs put on our entire supply chain means real industry-wide progress towards sustainable practices.
How do you measure the impact of Knoll’s CSR initiatives?
We can measure some of our impacts, and these metrics are important both for internal planning and for marketing. For example, our manufacturing facility in Pennsylvania is now landfill free. And our recycling programs for products that have reached the end of their usable life divert many hundred of tons of waste from landfills every year. These are significant and quantifiable changes that we are proud to report. But I think a lot of the impacts from our sustainable practices are intangible. They will be felt over many years in the homes and offices of our customers, in the communities where we work, in the forests we have left intact.
Is CSR a source of competitive advantage for Knoll?
Knoll’s commitment to environmental, social, and economic sustainability is a core principle, an integral part of a culture that has made Knoll an industry leader. We are motivated to build furniture that is always beautifully and sustainably designed, and our customers and employees believe in these products.
Further reading:
Jim Stengel, Grow: How Ideals Power Growth and Profit at the World’s Greatest Companies
Selling Your “Why”
“I sometimes have to remind people internally that we don’t need to just rely on our own perspectives. If in doubt ask the kids.”
How deeply is your company’s purpose woven into the brand identity and marketing communications your customers see? Be honest. If it’s just an afterthought—or not there at all—then there could be rough seas ahead, as purpose-driven companies are seeing great results from infusing a strong sense of “why” into their marketing. And this is especially true if your customers are kids, as it’s the ultimate in cynicism to present one brand persona to your trusting, impressionable audience and then be someone else entirely once the transaction is complete.
The right way to do it is embodied by Cammie Dunaway’s work at KidZania. KidZania is a novel idea, to say the very least: It’s a family entertainment center the size of a soccer field where kids try their hands at jobs and careers ranging from factory worker to dentist to chef and beyond, and earn simulated money called “KidZos” which they can use within KidZania as they choose. KidZania’s explosive growth—sixteen locations worldwide with nine more under development—means they need someone who really understands kids (and parents) in charge of communicating the brand’s purpose.
Enter Cammie, formerly Head of Marketing at a company that knows a thing or two about kid-centric marketing: Nintendo. Now her task is to tell the world about a place where kids can start practicing essential life skills...and have the time of their lives in the process. Here’s a peek at how she’s doing it.
You were the head of marketing at Yahoo! and Nintendo before joining KidZania in 2010. What are the most notable differences between marketing a giant corporation and marketing a smaller, more experimental venture?
Whether the company is large or small, the role of marketing is to deliver profitable growth by understanding your consumers and delighting them with your product or service. At Y! we provided content and services that made our users lives easier. At Nintendo we made it possible for everyone from gamers to grandmas to enjoy video games. At KidZania we are empowering kids and training them for future success. Small companies tend to move more quickly and limited resources make you sweat each decision a little more, but the challenges of being relevant to consumers and accountable for financial results are really the same.
KidZania has plans to expand into the United States in the next few years. How has having such ambitious growth plans impacted your role as CMO?
The expansion of KidZania is truly exciting. When I started we had seven locations. Currently we have nineteen open and seven additional under development. The diversity of cultures and norms from Mumbai to Sao Paulo to Seoul creates some unique marketing challenges. Fortunately we see that parents everywhere want to equip their children for future success and kids everywhere love learning through role-play. Being able to travel around the world as CMO has given me lots of great ideas for what we can do in the U.S. I want to take the best practices from all of our KidZanias and create an amazing experience here.
Can you talk a little bit about KidZania branding and how that extends to employee titles and roles? While you’re at it, feel free to talk about your efforts to get the entire company engaged.
Story is at the heart of everything we do. We believe that KidZania exists because kids were frustrated with how adults were running the world and decided to create their own city to practice for the day they will take over from us and improve things. We bring this story to life in all aspects of our business from our titles (I am a Minister of Communication and a Governor, not a CMO and President!) We have a national anthem, monuments, our own special language and holidays. Infusing this into our culture starts with hiring practices—we have to hire people who really like kids! Then we constantly reinforce the culture through training and our daily practices. Everyone from the CEO down spends time in the facilities working with the kids. If employees are having fun and constantly learning, then they will be fulfilling our mission to empower kids.
How have you been able to impact the customer experience in your current role?
As a CMO you really need to find a way to bring the voice of your customer into the conversation. I sometimes have to remind people internally that we don’t need to just rely on our own perspectives. If in doubt ask the kids. We have a kid’s “CongreZZ” in each KidZania. It is essentially a group of children chosen annually that help us stay current and provide feedback on our experience. As long as I am channeling them, I am usually able to move us in the right direction.
Loyalty programs can be tough to get off the ground. If you have one in place, can you describe the program and talk about the costs/benefits of the program?
Our loyalty program, called “B·KidZanian,” is one of our most powerful marketing tools. Our CEO recognized that the investment, which was quite significant for a company of our size, would provide benefits both in more deeply engaging our kids and in developing an efficient new marketing channel. In our program, kids become Citizens of KidZania and receive a passport and stamps for the different activities that they do. The more often they visit and the more they participate, the more privileges they receive. Parents opt into the program and receive very personal communication about their children’s activities and offers geared to their unique interests. We have been able to demonstrate a measurable lift in visits and spending among our members and, most important, kids love the program.
Further reading:
Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
Killing It with Kindness
“There’s a trend for society to appreciate the power of businesses incorporating social purpose into their mission...when it’s sincere.”
The front-runner for my favorite “founder memoir” business book of the twenty-tens decade is Do The KIND Thing by KIND founder Daniel Lubetzky. As you might have read in interviews earlier in this section, I’m a bit of a sucker for brands that do well by doing good. But even if you’re not, Daniel’s book is gripping, and also essential. Why? Purpose branding—where a powerful sense of mission is baked into the entire marketing strategy—was not just a flash in the pan. If anything it’s becoming more important, and brands that reject it outright are working under an increasing disadvantage.
At KIND, Daniel is a purpose branding virtuoso, and I was really excited to sit down with him to chat about the book, the brand, the mistakes he made, and how he overcame them. The big question remains: Does a brand’s purpose have to be a social, “save the world” purpose to reap the benefits of purpose branding? Maybe, maybe not. At any rate, with each passing day the future of business looks more like what Daniel is pioneering and it would behoove us all to listen closely to him.
You’re a busy guy, to say the least. What compelled you to make the time to write the book?
A few things. One is that I’ve been the recipient of a ton of guidance and advice from people over the years. And I felt I needed to do the same things for others. The book also shares very honestly a lot of my mistakes and hopefully will help others avoid them.
The second one was that I very sincerely aspire for KIND to do something very different from what other companies have done—to really push the frontiers, to transform the company into a movement and a state of mind, a community that people connect to. And by no means do I think we are there. But to get closer to this aspiration, we have to share our vision with others and stake a claim to what we are and what we’re living to accomplish, to get a community to help us build the movement and take ownership over it. Writing a book was the first step in sharing more of our philosophy, a little bit of where we’re coming from, what we’re aiming to do so that people can hopefully join us in pursuing our vision.
Any other reasons?
I also wanted to write a book because, frankly, I’m very aware of my own mortality because my father was a Holocaust survivor and I just think about those issues perhaps more often than many others. I have four children and I just wanted to document my values and my way of life for them. And I also wanted to share these ideas with the KIND team, which is especially important as we grow. So there was a lot of motivation.
Speaking as an entrepreneur who made more than his fair share of mistakes, I love how honest you are about yours.
It shows a certain sincerity and ability to look at yourself with a degree of circumspection. It also makes your success that much more impressive.
You spend a fair amount of time in the book talking about purpose. Do you think every company needs a purpose, and does that purpose necessarily need to be tied to social good?
I think every company that is trying to succeed has to have a purpose, because it’s another way of saying that it has some sort of reason to succeed. As far as a social purpose, I don’t think every company has to have it, though I think companies that have it feel fulfilled and motivated more consistently. But it can be dangerous to inauthentically incorporate a social purpose. It’s not the same if the people that are driving the business don’t wake up in the morning and feel the purpose is important to them. Consumers will be able to tell if a purpose is not authentic and it will probably backfire.
Does having a purpose help you as the leader?
I personally derive meaning from having more than a financial purpose and doing our small part to make this world a little better. And I do think there’s a trend for society to appreciate the power of businesses incorporating social purpose into their mission...when it’s sincere. But I don’t think it’s a requirement and I think it’s very dangerous to force it into something where it doesn’t fit.
How else does having a purpose help?
I also think the exercise of talking to people about their core principles and asking about what’s important to them can help them pursue a bigger vision. But it has to really, really connect with their efforts, with their spirit, with their DNA, with who they are, with what they stand for and frankly with the brand heritage.
What about brands that don’t have a social purpose?
I think there are incredible brands like Snickers whose purpose might just be to satisfy a hungry craving. And they don’t need to pretend to be something that they’re not, and they play a role as a fun and delicious experience of a satisfying candy bar. I think there are many other great brands that they do what they promise to do and are very successful without a social purpose.
Further reading:
Daniel Lubetzky, Do the KIND Thing: Think Boundlessly, Work Purposefully, Live Passionately