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.

When Kristen D’Arcy took over as CMO of D2C wellness brand Homedics six months ago, she inherited a brand refresh at its first stage. But it’s what she created from those assets that made a difference. Actions such as launching a full-fledged brand campaign with a diversified media strategy, updating online creative, and incorporating ecommerce best practices to ease online navigation and encourage conversions led to an 80 percent increase in sales on Homedics’ new website.

We spoke with D’Arcy about lessons learned from previous marketing roles held at PacSun, American Eagle and Ralph Lauren, how influencer marketing is feeding customer acquisition, trends to follow in the D2C world and her plans to leverage educational content to tell Homedics’ brand story.

Chief Marketer: Homedics experienced a huge increase in website sales following a brand refresh. What made the campaign a success for the brand?

Kristen D’Arcy, CMO of Homedics: There was a brand refresh in the works that I inherited–a new logo, new fonts and colors. So when I joined, it was about how to bring this to life in a campaign format. We focused on the idea of living well and being well. That means that Homemedics can stay with you all day. When you wake up in the morning, you can breathe more easily because our air purifier is next to your bed. Say you have pain in the middle of the day. We have massage guns that solve that. And then at the end of the day and in the evening, we can help you put your baby to sleep easier, faster and better because of our sound machines. It’s how we show the brand coming to life and supporting our consumers’ journeys to live better, healthier lives all day long.

Then we created an ad campaign off of that. We updated the website from a creative standpoint as well as from a user experience perspective. We made the site much more easy to navigate, compelling people to experience all of this new content, but also showcase the breadth of our products. And then there was getting this in front of the right eyeballs at the right time at the right place. We worked with an outside media agency that had a very different strategy, both for the brand refresh and our holiday campaign. It was much more diverse in terms of where we put our dollars. And we saw the campaign take off. When we looked at the performance pre the campaign being in market versus post, we saw a sales increase of double digits and continue that strength through the holiday season thus far.

CM: Did anything else contribute to the sales jump? The creative, the targeting, the ease of conversions?

KD: It was a little bit of everything. So, new creative in market that we were constantly optimizing based on what we were seeing. New media channels where we haven’t played before–a much more diverse mix. And then a great retargeting program. We flooded the market with lots of upper funnel media. In late October in particular, we wanted to push holiday sales. And that retargeting pool was so big that when they came back, the conversion was incredible.

The last piece was the website enhancements. A totally new site from a creative perspective. Lots of of different tweaks on the backend were made. Navigation was a little bit different. Promo boxes were added to the cart right before checkout to reinforce purchasing. There were a lot of little best-in-class practices from an ecommerce perspective that were put in place on the tech side of things to help conversions.

CM: You’ve previously held marketing roles in the fashion and apparel industries, including CMO of Pac Sun a couple years back. So this is a shift for you. What are some lessons learned from your previous brands that you’re applying to this position?

KD: Apparel retailers have incredible online businesses, like American Eagle and Aerie. When I left, the online business was over a billion dollars, for example. They really know what they’re doing in terms of site experience, inventory management and site merchandising. I took a lot of that rigor with me over the years. That means treating this like you would any other business. It’s looking back at the week prior and trying to understand on the website what happened, how are the units moving, compared to the forecast.

It’s also about then trying to understand things from a site experience perspective. As I mentioned earlier, we added a call-out in the cart section that reinforces why you should go to the next step and actually check out with us. Did that work? Did we see a lift and conversion on that page? Are we moving them better through the funnel? It’s dissecting everything that’s happening on the site.

CM: How do you specifically work with the marketing team on analyzing these results?

KD: We took it even a step further from a marketing perspective and decided that we wanted to look at our results across every single marketing channel every Monday morning. So, we’re looking at what’s happening on the site, we’re looking at what’s happening in PR. We do this in partnership with the agencies, but it’s also affiliates, influencers [to discuss] what happened in the market last week to look at the bridge between the marketing activity and the sales results.

And again, that rigor was borrowed from some of these really great online brands–Ralph Lauren, American Eagle, PacSun. We do the look-back and then we start to plan what we’re going to do for the next week. Of course, we have a plan that’s set in stone, but this helps after we do the read of the marketing to understand if we need to pivot.

In addition to that, where are we seeing a lot of goodness? There’s a little bit of a shell game that happens among the marketing leadership team where we say, wow, influencers are really taking off, the cost to acquire customers is pretty low there. So let’s take from Peter to pay Paul and fuel that, because for whatever reason, that seems to be working really well. I’ve tried to make marketing think of themselves as business drivers and people who can truly help grow the brand from a sales perspective, both on our own site as well as our retail partners.

CM: It sounds like you’re applying data to your marketing on a daily basis. How is the brand dealing with the fluctuating world of online measurement and privacy consent? Are you leveraging first-party data at all?

KD: Not to the degree that I think we could, and obviously that’s incredibly important as we think about the cookie-less world in the future. More broadly from a data perspective, people are willing to share if you get relevant information served back to you. If you think about the brand campaign of living well and being well, if you can give them information on health and wellness and how that ties to our products, and help make their lives easier, better, without drugs, pain-free, et cetera, then I think there’s an interesting value exchange there. That’s definitely something that we’re thinking about from both the data as well as a content perspective as we go into 2023.

CM: So you’re making content a bigger part of your marketing efforts–the education piece–going forward.

KD: That’s exactly right. Over the last 30 years this company has been successful and grown based on incredible products. Now as we think about the future, it’s how do you tie those products to health and wellness content that people want? We don’t have a singular competitor because we play in so many different areas. Yes, we have massage guns and perhaps there are competitors that focus just on massage, but we also have stretching mats. We have paraffin baths, for example. We have our product Drift. How do you weave all these different stories together from a health and wellness perspective, and then serve up our products as a hero or a solution as well?

CM: When considering the D2C space in general, any thoughts on what you think high-level marketers should be focusing on right now?

KD: We touched on it a few moments ago, but I think 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?

CM: So they are playing a greater role at the brand?

KD: They definitely are. When you look at the cost to acquire a new consumer, we’re seeing a lot of benefit in the influencer space right now. Tying this back full circle, there’s a great opportunity not only to drive sales, but generate brand awareness and then content. We have an always-on influencer program, but we have two bigger sponsorships this year, and influencers have been helping us ignite both of them. The first is a partnership with iHeartRadio and Jingle Ball, and that was equal parts media play. And then also the content generation that comes from the influencers that we sent to three different Jingle Ball concerts.

We’ve been getting a lot of engagement with that on our social channels and are starting to put that content from a whitelisted perspective into ads to try to drive shopping. It’s showing how the brand can show up in culturally-relevant situations, and then use both that great content and the relevancy to drive back to shopping.

The post Marketers on Fire: Homedics CMO Kristen D’Arcy appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Officially sponsoring a major global sports event can be pricey. The just-wrapped US Open tennis tournament, for instance, rakes in millions of dollars from sponsors—which included Cadillac, American Express and Chase Bank this year—seeking to secure a presence inside the stadium.

But there are other ways to get your marketing messages in front of consumers through more unofficial channels. Take Santander Bank, the global sponsor of Spanish tennis champion Rafael Nadal, which leveraged the athlete’s presence at the Open with a brand awareness campaign featuring a TV spot he starred in, out-of-home advertising along attendee walkways and a cause marketing partnership with nonprofit City Year that included a coaching session with Nadal himself.

“We’re not spending the amount of money that probably some of the larger banks would do by being an official sponsor of the US Open,” Maha Madain, Chief Marketing Officer at Santander Bank, told Chief Marketer. “So how do we create a lot of awareness in a very strategic and economical way? Not being in the heart of the stadium, but surrounding the stadium.”

We spoke with Madain about the campaign’s strategic marketing goals, expansion plans for the future, the importance of leveraging partnerships and the challenges financial marketers face, particularly from a regional perspective.

Chief Marketer: What is the inspiration behind the campaign with Rafael Nadal?

Maha Madain, Chief Marketing Officer at Santander Bank: Globally, we are official sponsors of Rafa Nadal. Santander Bank is a globally known brand, more in Spain and South America. In the U.S., we’re relatively new and concentrated in the Northeast as well as Miami. The inspiration from a brand strategy perspective was, how do we create brand awareness by leveraging partnerships that represent our core values?

Rafa is known for his grit, perseverance, determination, commitment to the game and being in the business for 20 years, with all the ups and downs. Yet he’s committed and he’s there. That’s parallel to our core values, [which] are all about helping people and businesses prosper in a sustainable way. Our brand strategy, and this campaign in particular, is about how we create that relevant awareness in the minds of our audiences through these kinds of partnerships—where you meet them, where they’re interested, at moments that matter to them. In this case, it’s the US Open.

CM: Your campaign also has a live event component. How have you used Rafa for that?

MM: Rafa has appeared on social media talking about us and so forth, but this is our first time doing this in the U.S. He attended an event that we held with nonprofit City Year, whom we’ve supported for years. He gave us an hour of his time where he played tennis with young kids and coached them on how to manage life expectations and how to not let defeat hold you back. In our spot we demonstrate that we’re here for the long game, which is obviously what he’s here for, and how you need the right partner to help you achieve your goals.

CM: What KPIs are you tracking?

MM: We’re trying to lift brand awareness. As I mentioned, Bank Santander has strong brand awareness globally, but we don’t in the U.S. The name Santander in the U.S. started in 2013, so we’re relatively young, but we have plans for national expansion as well as digital transformation. We’ve announced a multi-year investment in digital transformation centered around the customer experience. COVID has taught all of us how important digital is. We’re going through a transformation of how we do business and relying more and more on social media and digital marketing to be efficient and to drive our messages.

CM: Why did you choose a commercial and out-of-home as marketing tactics for the campaign?

MM: We’re not spending that amount of money that probably some of the larger banks would do by being an official sponsor of the US Open. So how do we create a lot of awareness in a very strategic and economical way? Not being in the heart of the stadium, but surrounding the stadium. How do we do it with the right budget? As you know, there were very big names within the stadium. So how do we strategically create that awareness? That’s what led us to this out-of-home campaign, where we had significant billboards in the boardwalk leading up to the stadium that you couldn’t miss. We did takeovers of the subway station, outdoor materials and digital to display that message. If we couldn’t be inside, how could we surround it? We also leveraged a lot of our branches in the area with digital messaging on our ATM screens.

CM: What are some of the biggest challenges that you face right now as a financial marketer? And how are you meeting those?

MM: There are a couple of things. From a marketing perspective, how do I create brand awareness when all of this change is happening? You are rolling out new products and trying to address a lot of the activities that are occurring, but how do I create awareness within a certain budget? As a regional bank, we’re trying to build that momentum. That’s one of the challenges, and this campaign is a prime example of how we’ve addressed some of it.

The other challenges we’re dealing with is how do you transform your capabilities so that you are ready and prepared? I think all banks are working through that. We’ve learned through COVID that consumers yearn for doing business in the most friction-less way. They want be able to access their accounts in the easiest way. So we’re very focused on building our customer experience—not only from the physical channel, of course, which we do a very good job of—but also, how do we do it digitally, in a human way? How do you build those journeys to deliver that digital experience so that consumers feel at ease in doing it?

CM: What is your growth strategy for the brand?

MM: We touched on it a little bit, but it’s around how we leverage partnerships that make sense and reach audiences. One of the next partnerships we’re looking at is Formula One. That is a long-term partnership for Santander Global, at Formula One and Ferrari. We’re working with them on how we create awareness of our focus on sustainability as an organization. We’re looking for opportunities like that to showcase these core values: commitment to consumers and businesses, being here for the long-term, sustainability, equality in the marketplace. These are all pillars that we will be focusing on in the next 12 to 18 months to advance the brand message forward until we’re national and able to leverage a strong national brand positioning.

CM: What are the key trends that marketers should be paying attention to right now?

MM: To be a successful CMO, you have to be open to embracing new trends and changes. You have to embrace new mediums, things that are coming up, and see how they evolve. I also think it’s about being very data-driven. In everything we do, that’s the biggest pillar. Unless you’re part of a very large organization that spends a ton of money on marketing, how do you become very smart and surgically invest your budget—because you are the investor of that budget—in the most efficient way? The only way to do that is by being very data-driven.

My advice would be, look at how you can reach your target audience in the most effective and efficient way, and leverage great opportunities. You don’t have to be the biggest spender, but leverage what you have for how you can win in that space. And if you think that way, you could advance quickly.

The post Marketers on Fire: Santander Bank CMO Talks US Open Tennis appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Chief Marketer’s monthly Marketers on Fire series spotlights high-level marketing executives at the top of their game, leading agile teams, harnessing innovation and embracing the latest marketing trends that move the needle for their brands. Thus far this year, we’ve delved into the data-driven strategies honed by ZenBusiness CMO Ryan Pitylak, the pandemic-inspired pivots helmed by Labcorp CMO Amy Summy, the Drone Racing League’s social media success led by CMO Anne Marie Gianutsos, and plenty more. Explore the winning strategies used by these industry heavyweights and others in our latest roundup of chief marketers killing the game.

ZenBusiness CMO Ryan Pitylak

At a time when scores of consumers are reevaluating their occupations and considering employment options that are more rewarding and meaningful to them, owning a platform that helps entrepreneurs start and run new businesses is not a bad place to be. One such platform, ZenBusiness, has reaped the benefits, reporting a 400 percent growth in customers since March 2020. According to brand surveys, 49 percent of its customers say the pandemic gave them the inspiration to start their own business.

But marketing the service poses a unique set of challenges. We spoke with ZenBusiness Co-founder and CMO Ryan Pitylak about the company’s marketing journey; why emotionally-resonant creative is so critical to the brand-building process; the significance of unit economics and lifetime value metrics; and how the brand is approaching identity-based measurement.

PepsiCo FoodService CMO Scott Finlow

PepsiCo Foodservice, which counts restaurants, hotels, universities and the like as customers, is acutely aware of evolving consumer preferences—and for that reason, it’s hyper-focused on delivering technological innovations to meet those consumer needs.

Take the consumer delivery preferences that have evolved during the pandemic: 70 percent of U.S. adults are ordering delivery or takeout at least once a week, and two thirds of U.S. adults are choosing a specific restaurant because of their delivery options, according to PepsiCo Foodservice CMO Scott Finlow. We spoke with him about the company’s marketing priorities for 2022, how it’s leveraging consumer insights to launch new digital-first technologies and the role that sustainability and purpose play in the brand’s marketing strategies.

Visible CMO Cheryl Gresham

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

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

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

Labcorp CMO Amy Summy

The collective health of the globe’s population has been thrust into the spotlight over the past two years. But the result of our increased focus on battling one particular virus—albeit justified—has been the postponement of preventative and routine healthcare. According to a study from the Journal of the American Medical Association cited by Labcorp, one in five adults delayed their healthcare and 57 percent of adults experienced negative health consequences as a result. Market research conducted by the brand also indicated adults’ limited understanding of routine healthcare tests and treatments.

With its latest campaign, “Make Way For Better,” Labcorp is seeking to educate consumers on preventative care while also pointing to its consumer testing line, Labcorp on Demand. We spoke with Amy Summy, Labcorp’s first CMO (who joined the company right at the onset of the pandemic, no less) about the campaign’s strategic goals, lessons learned from its first foray in influencer marketing, how its purpose has evolved and the company’s strategy for growth.

Drone Racing League CMO Anne Marie Gianutsos

According to a fan study conducted by Wasserman and the Drone Racing League, approximately 800 million people across the globe between the ages of 16 and 34 are enamored with technology, but not when it comes to traditional sports. However, this group still craves tech-driven competition, innovation, gaming and cryptocurrency.

Enter the “tech-setters,” the target demo the Drone Racing League has set its sights on. And if the impressive growth experienced over the past year is any indicator, it’s been pretty successful at it. We spoke with Drone Racing League CMO Anne Marie Gianutsos about the property’s explosive growth, the expanded partnership with the U.S. Air Force announced this week, how it engages fans on social and its plans to compete in the metaverse.

The post Marketers on Fire in 2022 appeared first on Chief Marketer.

According to a fan study conducted by Wasserman and the Drone Racing League, approximately 800 million people across the globe between the ages of 16 and 34 are enamored with technology, but not when it comes to traditional sports. However, this group still craves tech-driven competition, innovation, gaming and cryptocurrency.

Enter the “tech-setters,” the target demo the Drone Racing League has set its sights on. And if the impressive growth experienced over the past year is any indicator, it’s been pretty successful at it. We spoke with Drone Racing League CMO Anne Marie Gianutsos about the property’s explosive growth, the expanded partnership with the U.S. Air Force announced this week, how it engages fans on social and its plans to compete in the metaverse.

Chief Marketer: You expanded your partnership with the Air Force this week. How did that originally come about?

Drone Racing League CMO Anne Marie Gianutsos: Our partnership with the Air Force dates back to 2017. When you think about why it makes sense for drone racing and the Air Force to come together, we have shared values around technology and innovation. Specifically, we knew that we could help them discover and enlist some of the best minds in drone operations, drone development and aerospace engineering. We’ve renewed this partnership annually over the past five years, and this year we’re announcing a major expansion.

This is going to be the first time that we’ll feature U.S. Air Force gates within our real-life races. And these are custom-built gates that are professional racing zones. Then we add a virtual component by building those exact same branded gates into the DRL SIM game that’s available on Xbox, PlayStation, Steam and Epic Games. So, pilots at home can download the game and fly through those Air Force gates on their own time, on the same maps.

CM: Why does the Air Force see players as an appealing demo? What marketing channels and tactics are you using to reach them?

AMG: There is a lot of synergy between the Air Force, the military and our fan base. When you look at us compared to the general population, our U.S. fans on social are 23 times more likely to follow the Air Force. And they are 33 times more likely to follow U.S. military accounts across the board. We’ve actually had pilots who have raced with us after serving in the military. When we’ve studied it, close to 20 percent of our fan base has reported serving in active duty in the armed forces, which is a higher than the military backgrounds of fans of the big five sports.

So that’s military, armed forces-specific, but generally when we think about the demographic, we conducted a robust fan study globally with Wasserman, our research and insight agency. During this process, we discovered 800 million people around the world between the ages of 16 and 34 that are obsessed with technology, and they don’t follow traditional sports or esports. But they love tech-driven sports, like drone racing, innovation, gaming and crypto. It’s the ultimate audience for brand marketers, and we dub them the “tech-setters.”

So, other insights that you might find interesting about our fan base is that 70 percent of our fans don’t follow the big five sports, so right in line with that tech-setter audience. We have also studied our fan base to see how they view DRL partners. Sixty percent of our fans report that DRL helps these partners look more innovative.

CM: How does the mobile game that you created factor into your marketing?

AMG: We believe that DRL is a sport for everybody, and if you want to fly, it does take real skills. So our mobile game, and our gaming strategy overall, is to help level up drone skills. We have the DRL SIM video game, on those four platforms, but we also have the mobile units. We launched Drone Racing Arcade, which is a fun and free mobile game on iOS and Android. A big part of gaming and drone racing is that we invite our audience in and every year we open up a spot where someone can win a professional contract to fly in the league. We call that the SIM Tryout Tournament, and that launched this year on May 19th.

CM: What’s the crossover between the gaming audience and your specific audience?

AMG: In our global footprint, we have a huge component of gamers, people that like to play anything from your mobile, casual games all the way to competing professionally on console games. The gaming trend seems to be accelerating. When I look at this past year alone, we’ve added 50 percent more players year-over-year. We also are attracting people through monthly tournaments so that players can earn cash prizes on our mobile game. We’re going to be launching a military appreciation tournament on May 21st just in time for National Armed Forces Day.

CM: Let’s talk about social media. To what do you attribute your success and follower growth?

AMG: Almost 90 percent of our fan base is interested in creating digital content. We think about that as a digital storytelling native. We engage with our fans on social media in a number of different ways. One of the most prominent is that we stream our races on Twitter. Last season alone we saw record viewership, at over 80 million views. We engage with the greater community by featuring race highlights and also incredible FPV, which stands for first-person-view content, on Instagram. And then we do all sorts of fun things with our content on TikTok with overlaying, mash-ups, FPV and layering in all the trending sounds. That’s been a secret to our success and growing our following on TikTok to over 4 million fans.

CM: How do you incorporate live events into your marketing strategy?

AMG: Think about drone racing as blending the digital and the real. We compete drone racing in real life, in stadiums and palaces around the world. We bring a fleet of 600 drones to every in-real-life race. We compete in esports on our DRL simulator game. And this year we’re going be competing in the metaverse, which will be a more immersive digital experience, one where fans can help impact the experience that they have. It will be more of a two-way communication there versus in esports where you’re watching something that’s happening on a feed.

CM: Do you have any tips for marketers who are looking to grow their social media followings and try new platforms?

AMG: Being curious and doing your own research is always a great tip to start. Understanding how your particular content is going to resonate, because not all social platforms behave the same or have the same audiences. TikTok is definitely one for us, but it may not be for other brands. We also encourage brand marketers to get out of their comfort zone. Try out some of the things that are trending on the particular platform that you’re focused on, and study that platform for trends in virality. And then we also think it’s important to work with the influencers that are making an impact on the platform of your choice.

CM: How will players experience the metaverse?

AMG: We’re doing a bunch of things in the metaverse. Our title partner is Algorand, a leading blockchain in terms of speed and sustainability. In addition to the professional race in the metaverse that will be part of our upcoming championship season, we’re also building a play-to-own game on Algorand’s blockchain that will launch later this year. Think of it as a Mario Kart for drone racing. It’s going to be fun and enable people to play for free and also play to earn cryptocurrency.

CM: So all these different iterations of the league connect together.

AMG: Yes. We want to be the professional drone racing league across in-real-life, in virtual stimulation and in the metaverse. We really see this vision as creating a new era of sport that bridges all of these different experiences that fans expect right now.

CM: Do you have any advice for brands looking to get involved in the world of cryptocurrency?

AMG: It’s always so important to know your audience. Our audience is 41 times more likely than the general population to be into blockchain and cryptocurrencies. So that was a natural indicator for us to move into this space. But for others, I would say it starts with understanding your consumer’s current and potential relationship with crypto. And that will really be the cornerstone of their strategy. It’s about asking questions. Are they engaged? Do they own a crypto wallet? Are they familiar with blockchain and NFTs? And that will help to dictate the strategy that you’re going to need to take to get into the space.

Another thing I would say is that we should always be reviewing opportunities to meet our consumers’ expectations and adding value to their lives. So if you have an audience that’s perhaps less comfortable, you’re going to want to create experiences where blockchain is more in the back seat; at the Drone Racing League, we have people leaning in, so we can go to the leading-edge applications for cryptocurrency, like play-to-own games.

CM: Lastly, what are some trends that you think marketers should be watching right now?

AMG: First and foremost, brands should be asking themselves, what does Web3 mean to me? I’m obsessed with this. I think Web3 is going to be such an important catalyst for change in how we experience our brand relationships and how we interact with the world. In the sports world, there’s a very clear line between spectating the sport and having a hand in the creation of the sport. And I think that’s going be the delineation between Web2 experiences and Web3 experiences with sports, with the expectation moving into the co-creation space.

Another one that I would watch in marketing specifically would be thinking about how to create deeply personal experiences for your customer base. And that is going be enabled by cross-platform, audience measurement. I’m seeing huge advances in this space. Cloud is going to be an enabler of this, where we can finally start to identify who is interacting with us across every single platform. And then serving back an experience that is very smart and tailored to how people are interacting with our brand.

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The collective health of the globe’s population has been thrust into the spotlight over the past two years. But the result of our increased focus on battling one particular virus—albeit justified—has been the postponement of preventative and routine healthcare. According to a study from the Journal of the American Medical Association cited by Labcorp, one in five adults delayed their healthcare and 57 percent of adults experienced negative health consequences as a result. Market research conducted by the brand also indicated adults’ limited understanding of routine healthcare tests and treatments.

With its latest campaign, “Make Way For Better,” Labcorp is seeking to educate consumers on preventative care while also pointing to its consumer testing line, Labcorp on Demand. We spoke with Amy Summy, Labcorp’s first CMO (who joined the company right at the onset of the pandemic, no less) about the campaign’s strategic goals, lessons learned from its first foray in influencer marketing, how its purpose has evolved and the company’s strategy for growth.

Chief Marketer: What are the strategic marketing goals of the Make Way For Better campaign?

Amy Summy, CMO of Labcorp: What we’ve been seeing over the last two years with the pandemic is that people aren’t taking care of their routine healthcare, and even treatments. We felt like we needed to educate people that it’s time to get back to your routine healthcare and take care of yourself. We did some market research about what people understood about it. Did they understand what tests they should be taking at different times? [We learned that] there’s a really low understanding of that.

From a business perspective, we are a diagnostic testing and drug development company, so having people go see their doctors includes diagnostic testing. The business objective is to create awareness and educate, but also to say it’s important to go to your doctor and get your testing done. We also have a consumer testing line called Labcorp On Demand. It drives awareness and demand for that, but it’s an overall message.

CM: How did you market this to consumers?

AS: We decided to use social media as the primary tool. It’s a digital marketing campaign, so, paid, owned, earned. The campaign is in over 70 airports for a couple of months. This was our first time trying influencers at this scale. It’s worked very well relative to some of the other campaigns we’ve done.

CM: Were there any lessons learned that you’re going to apply to future campaigns?

AS: When we first launched it, we had an opportunity to push people to go find their provider. We said, “talk to your doctor.” I would like us to say, “and what’s your zip code? These might be some telehealth companies or doctors…” A lot of people don’t have doctors. The younger you are, the more likely you are to be on your own. For millennials, as high as 70 percent don’t have a doctor. Generally, it’s over 50 percent. It’s this idea that you can do it on your own through our on demand line. However, in the future I do want to help people go through the journey of finding their doctor if they don’t have one.

The other thing is that with our healthcare plans and our healthcare customers and employer customers, we could take this whole concept and co-brand it with them for their audience. Because the message isn’t really about “go to Labcorp.” It’s more about taking care of your health, so it can come from us and a healthcare plan as well.

CM: Was this campaign more of a B2C approach relative to others?

AS: Our business model is primarily B2B, but it’s more B2B2C, because we serve patients—even if it’s through doctors and hospitals. We have 2,000 patient service centers. We’re in hundreds of Walgreens. We do a lot of patient-level marketing and outreach. I would put this in that category.

CM: How has your marketing changed over the past two years, in light of healthcare being more of a focus for people?

AS: I’m the first CMO at Labcorp. I started at the very beginning of pandemic. We had a new CEO who really believed in marketing, and I came on a few months after him. Early on, I had two gut feelings. One was that you could feel the seriousness of the pandemic. We are a global company, so by the time it got to the U.S., it had already affected our business in China. Testing was at the center of it at the beginning, and we’re behind almost every single vaccine and treatment. Our clinical trial business has been supporting those.

At the same time, as the new CMO and the first CMO, I was trying to figure out what marketing means for Labcorp. It’s basically a function that didn’t exist, or it existed in pockets. One of the fundamental questions was, what does the brand stand for? That made us realize how important we were to society and the role we are expected to play. That carried us into the spotlight—and then we changed the brand. It wasn’t intended to change the brand, but it all happened at the same time. We wanted to be the source for critical information on COVID.

CM: What’s your strategy for growth at the brand?

AS: The top areas on my mind are new markets and customer experience. The new markets are focused on the digital health, consumer area. Those are emerging markets that are growing, and we have a significant role in those already. We need to build more of our capabilities around that. Oncology is another new market. Cancer is not new, but there’s so much advancement going on that we need to drive into the market and lead.

Customer experience is a big one. Consumerism is hitting all of healthcare. When we look at our business, we’re looking at how we are serving our healthcare customers or our employer customers—everything from educating our customers to helping them interpret their results better. When you get a healthcare result, do you know what that means? Is it on your app? Can you share it with your doctor? Those are all things that are front and center as an expectation. Our industry is moving towards customer experience and helping people navigate a very complex health system.

CM: How do you set yourself apart from competitors in the marketplace?

AS: We have two major businesses. One is a diagnostics testing company that most people in the consumer space know us for, but the other half of our business supports clinical trials. So, we have two major competitor sets. We’re the only combined company in the market. In both of those spaces, we’re very science-driven. If you’re going to your doctor and you have a serious condition, you want to know you’re getting the most advanced tests and the best treatment. That is all rooted in science. We have over 2,500 MDs and PhDs, so it’s core to who we are. We have the largest data clinical data set in the world. That helps researchers dig for how they cure or treat the next disease. Data is the way we’re going to get advanced treatments.

The last thing is, we acquire small companies and we also innovate from within. We’re an incubation place for other innovators. A lot of science comes from small labs and independent scientists. That’s great if you just want to work in your market, but if you really want to bring it to everybody, you need a company that can partner with you. I think of it as an innovation factory, internal and external.

CM: For those marketers hoping to ascend to the C-suite someday, what qualities should they should focus on mastering?

AS: 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.

CM: What are the top marketing trends that the industry should be keeping an eye on right now?

AS: There’s a lot of talk about platforms like TikTok and Snapchat. Our new campaign did experiment with TikTok. If there’s one function in a company that needs to be experimenting on things, it’s marketing. So, let people experiment and see what works. Second, we’re lucky in that first-party data is something we have, and we just need to maximize the use of it. But if I were a marketer that didn’t have that, that would worry me. The last one is customer experience. Consumers are really in control and I think it affects all of our industries. And if you’re not paying attention to that, your customer base is going to erode. It’s just a matter of time.

The post Marketers on Fire: Labcorp CMO Amy Summy appeared first on Chief Marketer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

CM: How will you gauge its success?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PepsiCo Foodservice, which counts restaurants, hotels, universities and the like as customers, is acutely aware of evolving consumer preferences—and for that reason, it’s hyper-focused on delivering technological innovations to meet those consumer needs.

Take the consumer delivery preferences that have evolved during the pandemic: 70 percent of U.S. adults are ordering delivery or takeout at least once a week, and two thirds of U.S. adults are choosing a specific restaurant because of their delivery options, according to PepsiCo Foodservice CMO Scott Finlow. We spoke with him about the company’s marketing priorities for 2022, how it’s leveraging consumer insights to launch new digital-first technologies and the role that sustainability and purpose play in the brand’s marketing strategies.

Chief Marketer: What are the marketing priorities for PepsiCo Foodservice in 2022?

Scott Finlow, CMO of PepsiCo Foodservice: First and foremost, we continue to navigate through pretty significant change and disruption in our service world, as we do in our lives. Our approach continues to be people-first. That’s focusing on consumers, focusing on our customers, and also focusing on our own people on the team and in the business as well. The second thing is the role that foodservice plays. Our customers are restaurants, hotels, colleges and universities, theaters, et cetera. Those are businesses that have been in some ways more significantly disrupted than others, which has led to some of that focus.

And the other point I’d make is foodservice as a business plays a really important role for PepsiCo as a company. We are a leader in terms of growth, purpose-driven marketing and leading with different technologies and investments in that space. And that’s because a lot of behavior tends to happen first in foodservice. Therefore, we often and try to lead the way in order to adapt and meet those changing consumer needs.

CM: How are you approaching these priorities strategically?

SF: One theme, beyond being consumer-first, is being digital-first in terms of how we work, focus and help our customers in response to those consumer trends, and then continuing to lead with purpose as well. What we are seeing, whether it’s in areas like racial equality or sustainability, is that they are more important to consumers. They’re more important to our customers and they’re more important to our teams and our people as well. So we’re going to continue to be focused on those.

CM: What are some examples of those themes playing out?

SF: I’ll start with digital-first because it’s so important. We have a team which we call the Foodservice Digital Labs Team staffed with subject matter efforts to establish new capabilities on our marketing team, both internally and externally. It’s focused initially on helping to build our business and our brands in a digital-first world. We’re seeing that 70 percent of U.S. adults are ordering delivery or takeout at least once a week, and two thirds of U.S. adults are choosing a restaurant because of their delivery options. This certainly accelerated during COVID, but we’re seeing it be sustained and we believe that’s going to continue.

One of the most important things the Foodservice Digital Labs is doing is optimizing the consumer experience, that digital ordering and digital journey. We have a fairly simple model that we call the “Three Vs:” visibility, variety and value. It’s a basic and in some ways simple marketing execution model, but it’s driven some tremendous results when we adhere to the insights to ensure that our brands are represented in the right way. So we’ve got the right brands, we’ve got the right packaging, we’ve got the right images, we’ve got the right portfolio. And then the right value or bundles to ensure that we are helping our customers. We piloted it in 2021 and we are going to scale that significantly this year.

CM: What are some innovations that have come from the team?

SF: One example is the digital menu optimizer. This team has been working on emerging models that have come out of COVID or been accelerated in COVID, [such as] ghost-kitchen enabled businesses, including virtual brands. This is another area where we are seeing a sustained growth and we expect that to continue. We launched our own virtual brand enabled by a ghost kitchen together with one of our foodservice customers last year, called Pep’s Place. It was the world’s first fast beverage restaurant.

It was really exciting for us—the consumer experience we were able to create, the earned media that it generated for our Pepsi brand and the learnings we gained from the engineering, the backend and the partnership. We’re going to continue to do more of that this year and invest in that space.

CM: What are some of the consumer insights that are shaping the brand’s innovations?

SF: Convenience is even more important, and that convenience is manifesting in different ways. They’re expecting a seamless, easier user experience when they transact. The digital work I’ve talked about is one example of that. Another example is the Pepsi Quik Pick, the next generation of a vending machine. It’s enabled by computer vision and artificial intelligence. It enables you to tap and authenticate your payment. You open the cooler door, you choose whatever items you want, you close the door and then the payment and the transaction is closed. Super easy for the user and really easy for the operator, in the sense that no labor was required. It is, as we say in the industry, “unattended.” Importantly, in our pilot the technology has worked really effectively—99 percent of the time. And the user has said this is a really great experience.

From a commercial point of view, significantly higher revenues are driven by two things. One, people are more likely to choose more than one item when they do that. And secondarily, we’re able to present a wider range of products from our portfolio, including some that are more premium.

Another next-level premium experience: In partnership with a company called New Stand and Kansas University, which is one of our customers, we’ve taken a convenience store on campus, redesigned it and re-imagined it as an unattended, more premium store for the students. That’s one more example of where we’re testing and learning, not at the individual piece of equipment level, but at the entire store level, using some of the same technologies.

CM: Talk about your sustainability policies at the company, which I know rank high in importance for the brand.

SF: Sustainability is at the heart of PepsiCo’s strategy and vision, and we’re leading a strategic end-to-end transformation. This comes right from Ramon at the CEO level. We call it PepsiCo Positive. It’s at the heart of everything we are now laying out in terms of strategies. Some of our goals are achieving net zero emissions in 2040 and becoming net water positive by 2030. As a company, we have doubled down in the last three years on our sustainability strategies. And that’s because we recognize that the world we live in, the communities we serve and our own people require that.

In some of our colleges and universities in particular, they have in some cases asked us to help them provide solutions that don’t include plastic water bottles. We launched our product called SodaStream Professional a couple of years ago, a hydration station that we’re placing on campuses and in workplaces that creates a personalized user experience for people on campus to get their water. It allows you to customize your flavor, the intensity of your flavor, the level of carbonation you want, even the temperature of the product itself. Each one of those machines can save you in the ballpark of 20,000 plastic bottles a year. We’ve got some big plans to continue to scale that this year and beyond.

CM: Lastly, you mentioned in an executive roundup recently that to be successful as a CMO, marketers should focus on being purpose-driven. Can you expand on that a bit?

SF: For people in our world, whether they’re consumers or operators or our own employees, both sustainability and purpose are increasingly important to them. And we’ve seen each of them grow in importance through COVID, not shrink. In terms of purpose, [look at] what we did in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. We committed to invest $400 million dollars at PepsiCo over the course of five years to commit to a racial equality journey.

The example that I’m closest to and really proud of is Pepsi Dig In, which is a program that we created, developed and launched to support Black-owned restaurants. We recognized that there were a clear set of problems to solve around awareness of Black-owned restaurants, and we’ve implemented a number of different programs to support them. We’ve made a commitment to help them grow by $100 million [in sales] over five years. We established Pepsi Dig In Day on November 6th to provide focus, awareness, attention and drive traffic to those Black-Owned restaurants. We’ve got a program called Black Restaurants Deliver, which is a bespoke digital service that’s helped these restaurants build their own delivery capability. Many of them, because they’re smaller and more independent, didn’t have the point-of-sale systems and the ability to enable delivery during COVID.

[These examples show] our commitment from an R&D point of view and supporting those businesses and also the importance of that in the world we live in and for our teams. Purpose-driven leadership and marketing is so important, and that’s just one example of where we’re doing it.

The post Marketers on Fire: PepsiCo Foodservice CMO Scott Finlow appeared first on Chief Marketer.

At a time when scores of consumers are reevaluating their occupations and considering employment options that are more rewarding and meaningful to them, owning a platform that helps entrepreneurs start and run new businesses is not a bad place to be. One such platform, ZenBusiness, has reaped the benefits, reporting a 400 percent growth in customers since March 2020. According to brand surveys, 49 percent of its customers say the pandemic gave them the inspiration to start their own business.

But marketing the service poses a unique set of challenges. We spoke with ZenBusiness Co-founder and CMO Ryan Pitylak about the company’s marketing journey; why emotionally-resonant creative is so critical to the brand-building process; the significance of unit economics and lifetime value metrics; and how the brand is approaching identity-based measurement.

Chief Marketer: What role does data play in your marketing strategy and programs?

Ryan Pitylak, ZenBusiness Co-founder and CMO: Data underpins everything we do here at ZenBusiness. First, it starts with understanding how the market is shaping our business in particular, because the entry point for people with our brand is at the point of business formation. The number of new business formations that are happening each month matters, and also how much people are seeking work outside of their day job. So, what’s the trend that’s happening with side hustles? Then ultimately, we look at each cohort of customers—every month’s worth of customers—and get an understanding of what they are purchasing and how they are using our platform, and what the renewal looks like.

What we’re trying to do here is driven by the goal of helping people become successful business owners. We also take a look at how well people are doing, how successfully they’re getting to their first dollar, and onwards. Because this guiding principle of helping businesses be successful is at our core.

CM: What tactics do you use to determine what your customers’ needs are? How do you interact with them and use that data?

RP: We do a lot of different things to get a pulse of what our customers care about. That starts with both quantitative and qualitatively research. For every new product that we’re rolling out, we want to know which features are most important to the customer, and how they may value those features and the combination of them so that we can figure out how to price effectively.

The other major piece is qualitative. Absolutely nothing substitutes for just getting on the phone and talking with people. This can be done as part of a broader study. So, maybe we’ll talk to 20 different people and ask them a structured set of questions so that we can get a pretty rich readout of how a broader cross section of people feel about what we’re trying to accomplish, and even get their feedback on designs and feature functionality usage.

We also do a lot of research around the journey that people are on. When you’re starting a business, that idea starts well before you are actually working on the business, and before you go on form as a company and start finding your first customers. We found it incredibly helpful to understand that journey and how it varies for different customer segments so that we can most appropriately communicate with people at the right time and offer them what they want at different points in the journey—which at some points might just be support and education, and not something that financially benefits us, but gives them value while they’re on their journey.

CM: The job market is a lot different than it was two years ago, with more people reconsidering their options for employment. Has the pandemic actually helped your business?

RP: COVID-19 caused people to start new businesses in a way that we’ve never seen. It happened pretty immediately following the beginning of the pandemic—as early as May of 2020. What’s interesting is that that trend has continued. There has been a shift in the way that people think about work. I think that there are several reasons why this has happened, one of which is that the pandemic in some ways forced—but also enabled—people to take a hard look at their lives and look for ways to make themselves happier. There was an article out recently in the Wall Street Journal about how 50 percent of people in their day job are completely unhappy with that job. And that’s part of what leads to the Great Resignation.

But you ask people who are entrepreneurs, and they’re happy and motivated and excited about this transition to becoming their own boss. We see ourselves as an instrument of change in this trend. And ultimately, if we get it right, we want to be able to fundamentally change the way that people work so that no longer do you have to work for some employer that may not care about you. You actually get to do what you love and build it up to be as big as you want and create the flexibility that you want—especially in these times. I see this as a “forever change,” and I’m excited that we get to help entrepreneurs on this journey. It’s our mission to unleash this entrepreneur that’s in each of us.

CM: What’s your approach when it comes to brand-building?

RP: There’s this concept of brand marketing and performance marketing—and the reality is that the distinction is a little arbitrary. We think about collapsing this distinction between them, because all marketing needs to perform, especially for a business like ours with very ambitious objectives. I think about the role of the different channels. We’re now moving into video advertising more significantly, which started by including digital channels like YouTube and working with influencers. It’s now expanding into more streaming video and over-the-top-type advertising and hiring a full-suite creative agency to make creative that’s highly resonant.

For 85 percent of businesses that get formed, it’s the person’s first time doing it. So, somewhat by definition, it’s an action that you might only do one time in your life. It’s incredibly infrequent. As a result, from a marketing standpoint, it’s important that as we start to move into awareness-oriented marketing, the creative works extra hard and connects with somebody on an emotional level so that they’ll actually remember us when they’re going into Google to go make a search and make a purchase.

CM: So, some customers are not necessarily repeat customers.

RP: As a platform company, people typically are signing up for subscriptions with us. We provide them with company entity management services or website services, or financial technology services, like invoicing and payments and accounting and tax, and other things to help them manage their business on a day-to-day basis. So, we do have an ongoing relationship with our customers, and they do purchase more things over time. But the most important thing to do when growing any brand is to bring in net new customers. It has to be the number one job for the marketer.

Google ran a study which is really interesting. The reason why the investment in awareness media is so important is that when people go to Google to make a search, 66 percent of the time they already have a brand in mind, and 94 percent of that 66 percent end up sticking with that brand. If you’re going to grow your business, you have to get your brand into the minds of potential customers, otherwise you’re missing out on two thirds of the potential.

CM: Shifting gears to measurement… Can you talk about the significance of unit economics and lifetime value in relation to your measurement strategy?

RP: It’s important to have a complete measurement framework in place. It’s easy to just look at short-term measures of advertising performance, like how many clicks or conversions I got from this advertising. That works extremely well when you’re looking at advertising channels like Google. When you start to move into a more balanced approach to marketing, and reaching people across many different advertising channels, then you need to have a complete framework in place.

One of the metrics that you look at is unit economics, and everything ladders up to that. The role of advertising should be to drive new customers, and that is measured by the number of customers that the advertising drove in the short-term. But then you also want to look at these longer-term measurement items, like unaided awareness, intent to purchase, brand favorability, and other brand health metrics. There’s this concept called ad stock, which is how much media has been delivered, and what has happened to the level of awareness as a result and how much media do you need to have in the market to maintain that level of awareness.

With unit economics, one of the first ratios that people care about is the lifetime value to customer acquisition cost ratio—the LTV to CAC ratio. And the other metric is what we call CAC payback, or customer acquisition cost payback. When I say LTV, typically we’re talking about first-year LTV. In a business like ours, that has a subscription service element, we make money from our customers over time. But the reason why looking at first-year LTV can be so important when thinking about the effectiveness of your advertising is because you ideally want the money that you spend in advertising to be recuperated by the revenue that you get from your customers fairly quickly. That’s why we look at these ratios. They are the guardrails for the types of channels we can advertise in, and how aggressively we can go into the market to acquire new customers.

CM: In light of the company’s impressive growth, any lessons learned from focusing on these metrics?

RP: The big lesson for me is that increasing that first-year lifetime value is the path for making room to have enough money available to buy more customers. You want to find ways to deliver value to your customers so that they’re willing to pay you more. And then that opens up a world of possibilities in terms of the ways in which you can reach people in the market.

CM: When we spoke about the top trends in marketing right now for our recent executive roundup, you touched on the increased need for measurement and accountability of marketing spend. What’s your approach to identity-based measurement? Do you have any recommendations for marketers?

RP: It’s definitely top of everybody’s mind. The real impact of all this is probably going to be felt the most in about a year, when Google starts to change some of its rules related to cookies. But there have already been a lot of changes led by Apple, around Safari on your mobile device, for example. There’s already a loss of data if you’re just relying on cookies. If you’re going to have any chance at competing effectively with other major brands, then you need to understand the contribution that each advertising channel is having towards driving you new customers. And that can be difficult when you’re looking at advertising that’s being delivered across so many channels, including TV.

The best measurement frameworks are not relying on cookies. There are identity companies out there. I think two of the companies that are the best in this area are Neustar and Visual IQ. Neustar has an identity-based framework, because they power a lot of Know Your Customer (KYC) for banks, phone companies… it’s incredible how much data they have. They map all the different advertising to this person at the core, and then the marketer understands the contribution that every single channel had.

Furthermore, with Facebook, almost nobody has the ability to know when a particular person has viewed an ad. Visual IQ and Neustar have gotten behind the walled garden of Facebook and many other platforms, and those platforms trust Neustar because of their strength in maintaining the integrity of people’s data and identity. As marketers, we can actually get visibility into that. The ability to make smart investment decisions and media allocation decisions, and to be able to forecast appropriately, is all made possible with this foundation.

CM: Another trend you cited was the need for companies to do good in the world. If a brand is not hitting the mark in terms of resonating with its purpose, do you have advice?

RP: I’ll start by talking a little bit about our brand. We are a Public Benefit Corp., and that means that in our charter, we have a responsibility to all of our stakeholders. This stakeholder model is extremely powerful. It has to start at the top; people in leadership at the company have to believe that a company’s job is to do some level of good in the world. In our case, we enable people to take control of their lives and be happier, because they are able to become their own boss. And we will stop at nothing to empower people to be successful in that journey.

We think about our decisions through that lens. The investments that we made in ZenBusiness Academy, for example, which is education, and the future investments that we’re making in both the platform and different ways of giving back and connecting with our customers, are all with that framework in mind. And they may not always have a profit motive associated with it.

There are so many great things that come from being a business that has made a decision to do that, [such as] the ability to attract employees who feel like they want to make a difference in the world. When scrutinized by discerning buyers, like millennial and Gen Z shoppers, who care about buying from companies that align with their values, then we have the opportunity to win—especially against some large corporation that doesn’t really seem to care about its customers.

To answer your question about a company that may be looking to identify and find purpose, I would say, honestly, it has to start at the top. There’s a great book called Conscious Capitalism, written by John Mackey. It talks about the stakeholder model and how it can help an executive who’s trying to wrap their arms around how to do more good in the world with their company and a framework for that.

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

RP: There’s so many, but this is a trend that’s been emerging and the impact of it is going to be very broad. And that’s the rise of streaming video. Linear TV has been on the decline, and it’s notoriously difficult to measure. It’s possible to measure it, but it involves a lot of sampling. Streaming video is an amazing ad unit because it’s full screen, you have the person’s attention because they’re waiting to watch the rest of their show, and it’s not skippable like linear TV. As a result, you have an opportunity to make an impact with your advertising, and you can do it in a visual and audio way.

Furthermore, it’s addressable, meaning I can target specific people. If you’re watching a show, you might see a different ad than another person watching the same show. As a marketer, I have so much flexibility around showing my advertisement to the right person in the right context, in an ad unit that is immersive. And it’s growing like crazy, because people are cutting cords and moving over to app-based streaming. That’s a trend that is going to continue. I’m seeing it become an important part of a marketer’s media mix.

The post Marketers on Fire: ZenBusiness CMO Ryan Pitylak appeared first on Chief Marketer.

In the early days of the pandemic, small businesses were seriously struggling to stay afloat, inspiring many brands to offer free products, tools and services as a way to lend a helping held during trying times while simultaneously increasing brand loyalty. But for American Express, the goal quickly became to provide something highly useful for these companies in the long-term: business education.

We spoke with Clayton Ruebensaal, EVP, Global B2B Marketing at American Express, about how the crisis inspired the brand to take pause and deliver actual value to small business owners through its Business Class initiative. He also dishes on how American Express sets itself apart from competitors to maintain market share, its vision for democratizing business education and the trend he thinks the marketing community should be laser-focused on.

Chief Marketer: What was the impetus behind the “Business Class: The Series?”

Clayton Ruebensaal: One of the things I found really challenging as a marketer was the beginning of the pandemic. Consumers were getting bombarded by every brand. Everybody was going to help see you through the pandemic. At American Express, we saw that small businesses were struggling, but we wanted to make sure that we raised our hand and our voice in the conversation in a way that would be sincerely helpful.

We paused, quite honestly, for a couple of weeks. And what we quickly saw was that small businesses were not just pivoting, but [dealing with] a lot of questions, like, what do I do about my work-from-home policy? What do I do about a travel policy? What are these PPP loans? How do I get them? Should I get them? How do I pivot my physical business to be more ecomm? So, we started Business Class to answer these questions. We have access to great business people—small businesses, midsize businesses, big businesses, a lot of experts, a lot of our own content. The first step was taking our e-newsletter, which was—like a lot of big companies—more promotional in nature, and pivoted it to be an educational resource.

By starting to answer some of those basic questions, without much glitz or glamor or production value, just the information you need to know, we saw our open rates spike from 10 percent to 30 percent on top of going from sending it once a week to starting Business Class Daily, as we called it. If you go from once a week to once a day, you would expect the engagement to go down, but what I saw was that our customers really trusted the voice of American Express to help them navigate this. It was built on the shoulders of what we had done with Small Business Saturday, Shop Small, Open Forum… We have a long track record, thanks to our predecessors, of seeing a challenge small businesses are going through and building something to help them navigate it. That was the impetus for Business Class, and then it grew from there.

CM: How does the Business Class initiative benefit the brand specifically?

CR: As we started to get more serious, sophisticated and organized enough, the idea of democratizing business education could be a bigger thing. When customers engage with business content, they’re 132 percent more likely to buy. (One of the planners at our agency brought that to us.) If you learned everything about cars from a car company, you’d probably be more likely to buy your car from them. In this case, if American Express is helping you navigate the pandemic, can we grow into helping you learn common gaps of knowledge small business owners have? How do I do marketing? How do I do sales? How do I become a better leader? How do I do my financing? How do I do my budgeting better? If we can provide that content, it’s going to create a deeper level of engagement, a deeper relationship, and probably wanting to buy products and services from us.

CM: How has the program evolved?

CR: We’re putting more production dollars into the series with bigger talent on the director side, the host side and the production company. [We’re using] people like Tom Colicchio, Jonathan Adler and Rebecca Minkoff to continue to earn that attention. It’s going to get harder and harder overtime, because people are going back to business now. In those first days of the pandemic in 2020, people were stuck at home and literally quarantined. We had their complete attention. So, we’re taking the seeds that worked at the very beginning and then adding a lot more rigor, production value and talent to the mix.

CM: How are you getting the content from the Business Class initiative into the hands of these small business owners?

CR: It’s through most of our channels. The approach we took from a production standpoint was to be as efficient with our dollars as possible. We are investing a lot of money in the production, but with an eye toward how this can go through all of our channels. Social media is a big place where we market this. Instagram has been very fruitful for us. We’re marketing it through our newsletter, our website, through direct sales. We have a huge sales force and they’re meeting with clients every day. We’re doing so through online events.

We started something called Office Hours, which was just what it sounds like. We’d bring in somebody like Luke Holden from Luke’s Lobster to talk about how he was pivoting from a totally physical business to a much more ecommerce-driven business. We’re marketing it through some owned channels, some earned channels and PR, but also through paid media. On a monthly average, where we’re getting in almost half a million users and over 90 percent of those are prospects.

We want our customers to see marketing as part of the value equation. This is marketing to attract people to the brand, but it’s also marketing where every time you engage with an ad, a social media post, an event, the video series with Tom Colicchio and a small business owner from Mexico, you’re going to learn something. There’s utility in it. It also makes me proud as a marketing director. It’s not just pushing messages out there, but creating something that really is useful. And I’m judging that usefulness by how many people are opting in versus pushing it on them.

CM: How does this relate to American Express supporting inclusivity in businesses?

CR: We went through a flood of trauma as a society, first with the pandemic, being a health crisis, then it becoming an economic crisis, then with the death of George Floyd, a racial crisis. In that moment, we took this thing that was working and pointed it towards black business owners. This is a wild statistic that I love: Black women entrepreneurs were starting more businesses than any other segment in the country. So, we chose to focus on that audience initially. This was another place we could take our business education and be helpful, but also with a more formal rigorous education program for them which we call “100 for 100:” one hundred days of business education for one hundred select black women entrepreneurs.

We also saw it as a way of investing in the next business winners of tomorrow. We had black women entrepreneurs who were starting a really diverse range of businesses, from pharmaceuticals, technology, fashion, nutrition, fitness. It was a way from American Express to invest in these businesses that would become our next big customers. Every recession through time has created really huge businesses, from IBM and GE to Facebook and Uber. We’re optimistic that out of a group of 100 for 100 we might see some of the next Facebook and Ubers.

CM: Is this vision new for the brand or was it a direct result from the pandemic?

CR: It was percolating before that, but the pandemic really was when we started it. What was percolating was the need. We saw that small business owners go into business for one of two reasons: to put food on the table or because they have one expertise. I started a business a long time ago as an advertising agency because I was good at advertising. What I wasn’t good at was all the other stuff. I didn’t know how to sign up for benefit plans. I didn’t know how to do technology for my business. The major segment that we serve are people who own construction companies, people in the medical field, the restaurant business. They’re superheroes at one thing and that’s why they are able to make money. They needed easy access to critical assets that would help you in the real world. We saw that as a big gap and opportunity, but the pandemic opened our eyes to how and when.

CM: There are a lot of other options out there for small businesses in terms of the products and services that you offer. How do you differentiate yourself from competitors?

CR: When I look at what our competitors, whether it’s our traditional competitors in finance or the big tech companies, what they put out there is high quality. We think there are three things you have to do, and we think they all do two of them very well. It has to be useful, no question about it. The education has to be educational. Number two, it has to be digital. You have to make it easy to access. The things that we’ve done differently that is going to make us more successful is that we believe it has to be entertaining. We have always risen above the crowd when it comes to nailing lifestyle, whether you’re thinking about the black card, Coachella or our partnerships with people like Equinox. We do business education in a way that a lifestyle brand would do it, not the way a tech brand or financial services brand would do it.

CM: What are the most important trends in marketing that executives should be keeping an eye on?

CR: I think the biggest change is the reality of the cookie-less world, from European regulators to California regulators to the battle between Facebook and Apple. It’s going to change the landscape in a fundamental way. And I find it exciting. The people who will live are people who can earn traffic, who have large audiences, who can build larger audiences, and then keep them engaged. It’ll make the marketing more effective from an economic standpoint.

Data companies have done a great job with the effectiveness of marketing. They’ve gone much more into building out content ecosystems, investing in their CRM, and I’m inspired by that and learning a lot from that. We’ve been praying at the altar of performance marketing because it’s so trackable and therefore predictable, which is great. Over time, it’s made us a little bit less grateful for the other great channels out there that also command attention, whether newspaper or radio or outdoor or TV. It’s almost been a faux pas to talk traditional media.

Going back to the tech companies, the truth is they invest a lot in outdoor. I see them investing a lot in TV, even ones that said they never would. As a marketing community, it’s going to bring a more balanced approach to how we go out into the world. We’ll see the results over time rather than in real time. And I think we’re going to have to invest a lot more in earning our attention rather than stalking people—and I think that’s a good thing.

The post Marketers on Fire: Clayton Ruebensaal, EVP, Global B2B Marketing at American Express appeared first on Chief Marketer.