Latest / ContraMinds Podcast - Unlocking Personal Growth and Professional Excellence / Marketing Needs Humanized Growth | Marc De Swaan Arons | Ep01
Transcript
- 0:01SPEAKER_00: We can shape how billions of people think.
- 0:05SPEAKER_00: Think about the Dove Real Beauty campaign and a direct address to tell people, billions of people around the world, women around the world, that they are beautiful.
- 0:16SPEAKER_00: Not that they should start with the assumption that they're not and they need a cosmetic to correct their outlet.
- 0:22SPEAKER_00: So here is a discipline that I'm telling you come in and you can shape how people think.
- 0:28SPEAKER_00: Not only that, you can shape how they feel.
- 0:31SPEAKER_00: We create communities.
- 0:32SPEAKER_00: Whether it's a community around we love football or it's a community around protecting the earth, like Patagonia does, brands are communities of people that share an interest.
- 0:51SPEAKER_02: Hi Mark, thanks a lot for accepting my invitation.
- 0:56SPEAKER_02: And it's been a privilege talking to you.
- 0:59SPEAKER_02: And uh thanks for taking time and uh talking to us about the future of marketing, the way you see marketing uh transforming itself over the next decade or so.
- 1:10SPEAKER_02: So thanks for taking time and talking to me.
- 1:13SPEAKER_00: Thank you for having me, Swami.
- 1:15SPEAKER_00: It's an honor.
- 1:16SPEAKER_02: Thanks.
- 1:17SPEAKER_02: Um, Mark, uh, as I go through the illustrious career that uh you know you've had over years, uh one of the things that uh I see is that uh uh you know there was a moment in your uh you know when you did your uh education in college uh when you actually figured out that marketing is something that you're going to take as your career.
- 1:44SPEAKER_02: And can you talk to me about what was that moment and how did that happen?
- 1:50SPEAKER_00: So it's uh it's it was a pivotal moment because um I uh I'll go back one step before that.
- 1:58SPEAKER_00: I grew up in Amsterdam.
- 2:00SPEAKER_00: I was born in the US, but almost immediately moved over to Amsterdam.
- 2:04SPEAKER_00: Uh but when I was 10, my father's job took us to London and it took me to boarding school, and my whole teenage years uh after two years of boarding school were in London at the International School of London, which was a wonderful place to meet the world.
- 2:19SPEAKER_00: Um, however, I then moved back to Holland to study, and the really the only reason I did that was because I felt that my roots were Dutch and that if I didn't go then I would probably um be stateless uh in some shape or form.
- 2:36SPEAKER_00: But the transition was massive, it was very difficult, and um it's it's pertinent because my oldest just went to college and he refused to go to Holland, even though the schools there are just about free, and everywhere else in the world, especially here in New York where I live in the US, then far from free.
- 2:55SPEAKER_00: So there was an incentive.
- 2:57SPEAKER_00: But it was a real um it was a really difficult time.
- 3:01SPEAKER_00: The first few months there I felt very alone.
- 3:04SPEAKER_00: I um I was uh not easily adjusting to the Dutch culture, which on the one hand is friendly and open and transparent, that's what everybody sees, but it's also actually quite closed and um and it's very normative.
- 3:20SPEAKER_00: Uh it it there are sayings like uh the highest tree gets cut first, or uh you know, highest trees actually catch most wind, and the grass that grows the tallest gets cut first.
- 3:33SPEAKER_00: In other words, don't you know don't be different.
- 3:36SPEAKER_00: And um that's the backdrop for my first uh three months at college, where also I joined a very uh high-performing, high-demanding university, Erasmus.
- 3:48SPEAKER_00: And uh all of this as an excuse, I guess something uh around learning to drink also had something to do with it.
- 3:56SPEAKER_00: That um January of the next year after I studied, my father came down and spent the day with me because, as he wrote, you've failed everything.
- 4:11SPEAKER_00: And really, I did.
- 4:13SPEAKER_00: I all the subjects in the first semester or the first trimester, I had failed, every single one of them.
- 4:19SPEAKER_00: And uh the most painful point of it was that uh in um the the Erasmus University they have this test system where they they give you statements to react to, and you have to say you agree, you disagree, or you have no opinion, which is Dutch word, I haven't got a clue.
- 4:37SPEAKER_00: So obviously, if you were to go through and just guess everything, you have 50%.
- 4:42SPEAKER_00: So they don't give you 50% if you have 50%, they give you 20% if you have 50%, and so it's graded, and so there were many subjects where I'd scored less than a one.
- 4:54SPEAKER_00: Uh it was very painful.
- 4:56SPEAKER_00: But so my father, uh God bless him, he um he spent a day with me at the university, and while I was going to lectures of the second semester, he was in the library and we would talk during the coffee breaks, the lunch break.
- 5:08SPEAKER_00: And um, I think it was just after lunch that I came to him and I had just had my very first marketing lecture, and indeed I said to him, I think I found my calling.
- 5:19SPEAKER_00: Because that lecture by Professor Bunt in Rotterdam um connected at so many levels uh the human decision-making process, why do people want things, why do they feel they need things, uh, but also that there was a reply to that, that there was a way to think about that and commercialize that.
- 5:40SPEAKER_00: And uh I felt for the first time that the qualities that I knew about myself came together, and so it was indeed it was love at first sight, and it's been marketing ever since.
- 5:52SPEAKER_02: Brilliant, brilliant.
- 5:54SPEAKER_02: I think the story that you said and the way you kind of uh put that out was really, really interesting.
- 6:02SPEAKER_02: And uh when you look back now, uh Mark, uh marketing being extremely core to many organizations uh has become largely peripheral, right?
- 6:15SPEAKER_02: Because marketing is such a great uh you know subject in terms of the way you have to understand human behavior, the fact that it's an art and science.
- 6:25SPEAKER_02: Uh what's the reason you believe?
- 6:27SPEAKER_02: Because you've written a lot about that, uh, it's kind of uh you know gone a little bit south uh in terms of attention and importance uh in the boardroom.
- 6:41SPEAKER_02: What's the reason and what you believe uh is has happened over the decades that you started to where you are today?
- 6:49SPEAKER_02: What's happened to marketing?
- 6:51SPEAKER_00: Okay, well, that's a massive question.
- 6:53SPEAKER_00: And and and I have to uh just push back on the peripheral uh description because I don't think marketing is peripheral, uh, but some of the things you said are absolutely true.
- 7:05SPEAKER_00: Marketing has lost influence in many places.
- 7:09SPEAKER_00: Um where to start?
- 7:13SPEAKER_00: So I think the first thing, I'm I'm now living in New York City already 30 years, and the first thing to recognize is that when in America you say marketing, even though cottage is from here and so forth, many people go, oh, sales.
- 7:26SPEAKER_00: And that's a very important distinction.
- 7:29SPEAKER_00: Uh, marketing means so many things to so many people.
- 7:33SPEAKER_00: Um, I come out of a strategic marketing environment, Unilever.
- 7:39SPEAKER_00: There are probably another 20 companies, uh perhaps only 10, where uh you would really uh say that uh they are at the the base of um brand management, of uh recognizing in the 50s that uh the world is forever commoditizing, you invent something, and either as soon as the patent runs out, and probably a lot before that, somebody brings something to market that functionally does the same.
- 8:09SPEAKER_00: And um because they didn't have to invent it, they can probably do it for less.
- 8:15SPEAKER_00: And because they're not funding the innovation that is needed for the next uh functional benefit.
- 8:23SPEAKER_00: Uh so uh I think uh a a number of companies, but not a great number of companies, a number of companies developed, uh led by Proctor and Gamble, let's give the credit where it's due, the the discipline of brand management, which really said, look, uh this isn't a peripheral or typical function.
- 8:46SPEAKER_00: This is actually what should lead what we do as a organization.
- 8:50SPEAKER_00: We want to be um the people that best understand not just where consumers are today, but particularly where their unmet needs are.
- 9:02SPEAKER_00: And with a business analysis by the side, which by the way also falls in strategic marketing in my book, we want to um project forward where markets could come.
- 9:14SPEAKER_00: Where are the white spaces?
- 9:16SPEAKER_00: Where are the projected opportunities?
- 9:18SPEAKER_00: How big are those opportunities?
- 9:21SPEAKER_00: Um, what would it cost to develop a proposition?
- 9:24SPEAKER_00: Can we do that profitably?
- 9:26SPEAKER_00: And what can we do to do it in a differentiated manner so that we, once we go there, you know, we're not surprised by 10 competitors the week after.
- 9:36SPEAKER_00: And um differentiation takes many shapes or forms.
- 9:40SPEAKER_00: Uh, functional is one, but I've just said people tend to catch up with that.
- 9:45SPEAKER_00: Um uh but what Procter and Gamble really uh discovered is that by building brand value, in other words, adding emotional benefits besides the functional benefits, uh, that you could build loyalty, that you could build brand love, and that people truly start to uh build long-term relationships, which then insulates you against the functional parity that will always come, and um, and and to some degree gives you pricing power to just ask, you know, two pennies more or five pennies more for exactly the same product in terms of cost because you've built brand equity.
- 10:28SPEAKER_00: And so, strategic brand management, in my book, um, the way I learned it, is really acting like a CEO.
- 10:36SPEAKER_00: It is taking ownership for either an existing or a future product that's going to go to market, not as a product, but as a brand.
- 10:45SPEAKER_00: And then managing that in a manner that first internally aligns and inspires everyone in the organization to make this brand consistent with the brand description, positioning, if you like, that you have built or that you want to build.
- 11:03SPEAKER_00: Where perhaps the next day all those same people are working on another brand, but they need to realize that that's not necessarily done in the same manner.
- 11:12SPEAKER_00: The quality demands might be different because the pricing is different, um, the packaging luxury may be different, and it really goes all the way through to how we pick up the phone when someone has a question about the product.
- 11:26SPEAKER_00: So, brand management is first about understanding strategically where's the space, and then aligning the internal organization around the opportunity, then inspiring the organization to develop a proposition.
- 11:39SPEAKER_00: And I say organization, but it goes through a whole ecosystem that includes advertising and packaging agencies to make the value proposition, to launch the value proposition, and then to manage that over time.
- 11:53SPEAKER_00: Um, like he would manage anything that's important, like a hotel manages its reputation, and every day that somebody walks through the door, we have to do it again.
- 12:03SPEAKER_00: So, if that's where strategic brand management comes from, I would say that's very, very close a description of a CEO's role.
- 12:11SPEAKER_00: Okay, it doesn't include HR or hard finance, but you better be able to calculate what the actual real marginal and overall costs are, what those benefits are going to be once you achieve scale, so that you can maybe pre-fund equity building, which pays back once you start getting economies of scale.
- 12:31SPEAKER_00: And so there's a lot of business modeling, there's a lot of internal interactions and inspiration and communication.
- 12:37SPEAKER_00: Um, it's a full-fledged general manager role, I would argue.
- 12:41SPEAKER_00: So that's not true for every marketer.
- 12:44SPEAKER_00: There are lots of organizations, and we have to be honest to ourselves.
- 12:47SPEAKER_00: In fact, I get a lot of pushback on this, that probably that's only true for about 10% of all people that have the word marketing in their title.
- 12:57SPEAKER_00: Because there's a whole other world where people make inventions that are brilliant, and then they go to their marketing department and say, Can you please put the features in a brochure and send it out and make sure that my potential clients read about this?
- 13:12SPEAKER_00: And so I would call that the brochureware department.
- 13:15SPEAKER_00: And everything in between is called marketing.
- 13:19SPEAKER_00: So, what has changed?
- 13:23SPEAKER_00: Because this, I think, was just how things were, and perhaps, no, not perhaps, I think definitely, over time, more organizations were beginning to see the benefit of investing in brand building, which is why marketing has uh mushrooms as a capability and a discipline.
- 13:41SPEAKER_00: Um, in fact, supermarkets, the next people down in the value chain, started saying, wait a minute, I'm only making 10 cents per jar of peanut butter or mayonnaise, and these people, if I do my calculations, I have my private label product, and you know what?
- 14:00SPEAKER_00: I'm making 50 cents there, or maybe even a dollar.
- 14:03SPEAKER_00: So they're pocketing 90 out of the 100 margin.
- 14:06SPEAKER_00: I would like a little bit more of that.
- 14:08SPEAKER_00: So what we saw in the early 90s was that big supermarket change, the leaders I would say are in England, the best supermarket, the most strategic supermarket change, James Tesco, Wade Rose, uh Marks and Spencer, who started saying we can do that too.
- 14:24SPEAKER_00: And so now if you tap any English person on the shoulder and say, Tell me about the Tesco's brand, you're gonna hear a very, very qualitative, high position product.
- 14:36SPEAKER_00: They use the best ingredients, they're often a parity or better than what some of the fast-moving consumer goods companies, or CPG as they say in America, create.
- 14:48SPEAKER_00: And with it, they're taking massive chunks of the market.
- 14:52SPEAKER_00: The average, I don't I haven't seen the recent number, but in America, this has not happened yet.
- 14:58SPEAKER_00: The average private label share in the big categories, whether it's washing powder or margarine or milk, the private label um uh percentage when I last looked was about 15%.
- 15:11SPEAKER_00: In England, it's up to 50%.
- 15:14SPEAKER_00: Right?
- 15:14SPEAKER_00: So, yeah, strategic marketing, and what who were they hiring?
- 15:18SPEAKER_00: Ex-Proctor and ex-Unilever marketing people.
- 15:22SPEAKER_00: Look at the marketing department of Tesco's and Waitros, that's what you'll see in people's backgrounds.
- 15:27SPEAKER_00: They basically said we can play this game too, and why not?
- 15:31SPEAKER_00: In fact, they can do it better because they control the shopping experience.
- 15:35SPEAKER_00: So, fast forward a little bit uh to I think the the mid and late 90s when suddenly we had this thing called the internet.
- 15:45SPEAKER_00: And um, the internet, of course, is many things to many people.
- 15:48SPEAKER_00: I think it took a lot of people uh a decade to realize it was more than porn, and then they started to recognize.
- 15:55SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I say that jokingly, but there was a moment in Unilever where I was tapped on the shoulder to ask uh to lead a internet innovation project.
- 16:05SPEAKER_00: And uh, when in Unilever they ask you to lead a project, you know you're on your way out, so it was internet, and I was very worried.
- 16:14SPEAKER_00: Ah, this is when the sun breaks through.
- 16:16SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm gonna enjoy it for a little bit.
- 16:18SPEAKER_00: It if you don't mind, I'll keep it.
- 16:19SPEAKER_00: When I start to look like a monster, tell me and I will lower it.
- 16:23SPEAKER_02: Yeah, perfect, perfect, perfect.
- 16:26SPEAKER_00: So, what I think happened was that there were already a lot of marketers that weren't really marketers, they were either comms people or even further down the line.
- 16:39SPEAKER_00: Um uh they weren't doing strategic marketing, they were taking the value proposition as given and they were communicating it as best they could, and that's a craft too.
- 16:50SPEAKER_00: I don't want to belittle that in any way, but it is comms, it's not marketing.
- 16:56SPEAKER_00: Um, what happened when the internet came in?
- 16:59SPEAKER_00: We had a new channel where it took us first uh you know probably uh five years to get to 10% of spend, and now we're over 50% of spend, and so many things were possible, and so many things um that marketers had actually um been struggling with in the past became a reality, or at least a theoretical reality, like for example, measuring what worked and what didn't work.
- 17:26SPEAKER_00: I think one of the um the real sort of downfalls of marketing in the past has been that we were the biggest spender of the organization.
- 17:34SPEAKER_00: If you looked at a profit and loss, a significant chunk after cost of goods was indeed what we spent on advertising and other marketing expenses.
- 17:44SPEAKER_00: And when you asked us, or when we were asked as marketers, can you please talk about the effectiveness?
- 17:49SPEAKER_00: You know, we would sort of um um uh laugh and say, Well, you know, Wanamaker, Wanamaker said that he knew that half his spend was wasted, he just didn't know which half.
- 18:00SPEAKER_00: Well, no one called a marketer comes well out of that conversation.
- 18:05SPEAKER_00: No one earns respect with statements like that.
- 18:07SPEAKER_00: I am gonna lower my shade.
- 18:10SPEAKER_02: I think so.
- 18:10SPEAKER_02: I think so.
- 18:11SPEAKER_00: So it wakes me up, but sometimes it blinds me.
- 18:17SPEAKER_00: All right, so I'm back.
- 18:19SPEAKER_00: Um so forever marketers were accused of not being commercial enough, uh, not being accountable enough.
- 18:27SPEAKER_00: And I think when the advertising agencies and when the web companies like AOL started to talk to the advertisers and say, ah, but in our medium, we can tell you whether they clicked.
- 18:38SPEAKER_00: In other words, did it work?
- 18:41SPEAKER_00: Marketers were like, ooh, hang on.
- 18:43SPEAKER_00: You mean I can show accountability?
- 18:44SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
- 18:46SPEAKER_00: And I think quite frankly, uh that with that came a massive shift to digital spend, digital advertising, uh, if you like.
- 18:57SPEAKER_00: And um, and often we were able to measure it, but we were measuring completely the wrong things.
- 19:02SPEAKER_00: Yes, I can measure whether somebody clicks on something, but I can't measure and I can't make assumptions about how much that impacted that person's understanding of what I stand for and how much they can trust me and how I fit in their life choices.
- 19:19SPEAKER_00: So uh many of the soft things remain difficult to measure.
- 19:24SPEAKER_00: There is a lot of uh good work to do that, but it also always translates to KPIs, to measures that we perhaps understand because we can measure them across brands, and we can say this brand built more equity than this brand.
- 19:37SPEAKER_00: But they are goobly gook for the CFO, the CEO, the heads of sales, and you get painful situations where a brand equity has gone up in ranking and sales went down.
- 19:49SPEAKER_00: You know, that doesn't help us when we are trying to convince the rest of the company that we are one of them.
- 19:55SPEAKER_00: We're trying to build the business, we're trying to drive long-term growth strategies.
- 19:58SPEAKER_00: None of those things help us.
- 20:01SPEAKER_00: But what I think did happen is that with the digital, a massive uh decade to 15 years of digital distraction um came in.
- 20:12SPEAKER_00: Uh, people were able to do things that they shouldn't have been able to do.
- 20:16SPEAKER_00: People were convinced, you know.
- 20:18SPEAKER_00: Um, I have two examples in my own presentation.
- 20:20SPEAKER_00: One is of um the Alexa-enabled toilet.
- 20:24SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
- 20:25SPEAKER_00: Really?
- 20:25SPEAKER_00: Yes, okay, technology allows you to do it, but you can just see the CEO and the other executives at Kohler rolling their eyes when the marketer is literally launching a toilet that listens to you.
- 20:38SPEAKER_00: If there's one place I don't want them to listen to me, it's on the toilet.
- 20:42SPEAKER_00: Uh, but it exists.
- 20:45SPEAKER_00: Or uh an NFT for almond milk.
- 20:49SPEAKER_00: I mean, really?
- 20:51SPEAKER_00: You know, the people that suggested that almonds are a farmer's product, it's a collective, they don't have a lot of money.
- 20:58SPEAKER_00: And the fact that they spend money creating an NFT about almond milk, I think the people that suggested that should be somewhere summarily executed for hurting the marketing practice.
- 21:11SPEAKER_00: That, you know, and so obviously there were also a lot of things done that were smart.
- 21:16SPEAKER_00: Uh, but with the advent of the shift of spend with programmatic, where the name says it, we're not strategically thinking about it, we're just seeing what do people click on.
- 21:27SPEAKER_00: Um, we've gone down a rabbit hole where uh, you know, yes, it comes, yes, we can see whether somebody clicked on it or not, but that's about it.
- 21:37SPEAKER_00: And that's not strategic marketing.
- 21:40SPEAKER_00: And with all that distraction, because I think you know, marketing like IT the decade before has undergone such a big transformation, you know, you only have so many things you can think about.
- 21:52SPEAKER_00: There's so many things that you can find out or invest in or innovate in.
- 21:55SPEAKER_00: And I think marketing has gone down a rabbit hole, which is an important.
- 22:00SPEAKER_00: Channel, it's an important new way to actually create value and get closer and build relationships, but it's not the cure all for everything, and with that, I think we've lost credibility from our colleagues, and we've also been distracted from the strategic questions, not on how to win, but on where to play, which is strategic marketing, it's where everything starts.
- 22:29SPEAKER_00: What burgeoning needs do we see develop?
- 22:32SPEAKER_00: What white spaces do we see developed?
- 22:34SPEAKER_00: So I think our colleagues have looked at us, and I think they probably respect us more now as functional experts, because you know, we got our shit together and we know how to measure different things.
- 22:46SPEAKER_00: But we haven't been part of the strategic discussions of what are we doing as a company?
- 22:52SPEAKER_00: Where do we want to be?
- 22:53SPEAKER_00: What could we be?
- 22:55SPEAKER_00: And you know, quite frankly, when the strategic decisions take place, marketers have not been invited in the room as much as in the past.
- 23:03SPEAKER_00: And yes, that is indeed a marginalization, a loss of influence.
- 23:08SPEAKER_00: Now, we have lots of thoughts about what to do about that, but to answer your question, and it was a very long-winded answer, I apologize.
- 23:16SPEAKER_00: I think uh there has been some questions around the influence of marketing and our propensity to shape the strategic direction of companies uh because we've been distracted by the bells and whistles of digital.
- 23:32SPEAKER_02: Fantastic.
- 23:33SPEAKER_02: And uh I think the way you uh you know played the canvas and then got to the core of the problem was something amazing.
- 23:43SPEAKER_02: And when I use the word peripheral, Mark, I think the way I used it was I think marketing has to be the core of the organization, but I think we lost what I call as the strategic view of the company.
- 23:55SPEAKER_02: Uh I think that's really where I think uh a CMO's uh role needs to be there, and we just started looking at probably the uh, you know, what I call as the fluff rather than the stuff, right?
- 24:08SPEAKER_02: So that's really where I think that uh, you know, that's really the reason why we lost influence.
- 24:13SPEAKER_02: Uh which brings me into something that uh you know you do today, which is a framework that I think is absolutely brilliant uh in terms of humanized growth, right?
- 24:24SPEAKER_02: You really talk about a framework for the new Da Vinci CMO, right?
- 24:30SPEAKER_02: Where uh is that an inspiration because you know you were you were in Woodstock and you had a lot of arts and crafts there, and therefore, is that the reason you you know termed this the Da Vinci CMO?
- 24:43SPEAKER_02: So I really love the uh you know the imagery and the uh visualization that DaWinchi CMO would be.
- 24:50SPEAKER_02: And uh, can you talk to me a little bit about the Da Vinci CMO?
- 24:54SPEAKER_00: Yes.
- 24:55SPEAKER_00: Uh if you'll allow me, I'll just pick up a previous point that you mentioned in your introduction.
- 25:01SPEAKER_00: Because I had a conversation last week with the founder of the LinkedIn B2B Institute, Jan Schwartz, and he made an interesting point, I thought.
- 25:09SPEAKER_00: So many companies don't do the strategic marketing as we describe it or as I describe it.
- 25:15SPEAKER_00: However, they have product management, it's just not part of marketing.
- 25:20SPEAKER_00: So they've spread out the responsibilities that we're talking about over multiple disciplines.
- 25:26SPEAKER_00: And you have to ask yourself, well, if you're doing that effectively, um, you know, are we just trying to, you know, land grab by being against that?
- 25:37SPEAKER_00: I think that's a valid question to ask.
- 25:40SPEAKER_00: Uh, and I think the the only um really important criteria uh to the litmus test almost for is that working or not, is to say, are all the pieces consistent with each other and aligned against one strategy and one view of what's happening in the world and where the world will go.
- 25:57SPEAKER_00: Uh, because brand management in many ways has a coordinating uh characteristic.
- 26:02SPEAKER_00: And if the company has done that in a different way, a founder at Apple, I really don't think there was a need for a brand manager.
- 26:09SPEAKER_00: The founder coordinated everything, and if you got out of line with what Steve Jobs thought was Apple should stand for, you got either hit or fired, but you got corrected.
- 26:20SPEAKER_00: So it's not necessarily a bad thing that all these things don't sit in marketing.
- 26:26SPEAKER_00: But if you have chosen to be a strategic marketer, and that's another point I forgot to make, over the last 15 years, while I described this um this transition, a lot of people have entered marketing that I would say are not strategic marketers, but they consider themselves real marketers.
- 26:46SPEAKER_00: And they've done that part of the marketing and probably gone deeper and better than I will ever be able to go.
- 26:52SPEAKER_00: And so we're now really talking about competing, uh perhaps complementary models of marketing.
- 26:57SPEAKER_00: And I don't know if I'm ready to judge which is right or wrong, but I think there is a litmus test.
- 27:04SPEAKER_00: Is it all ultimately coming together in a way that consumers say, wow, consistently you're outperforming against needs that I didn't even know were unmet on my part.
- 27:17SPEAKER_00: Now to your question.
- 27:20SPEAKER_00: We did a massive study around what characterizes growth-overperforming organizations.
- 27:28SPEAKER_00: And we did that because, as you described, there was a sense of this lack of influence, this sense of being marginalized and not being invited in a room when the big growth discussions were taking place.
- 27:42SPEAKER_00: And so we ultimately wanted to drill down to the role of the marketer, but we had to start with what characterizes growth overperforming organizations, so that we could then ask in those companies that are outperforming their peers, is the role of marketing the same as in other places or is it different?
- 28:00SPEAKER_00: And uh the findings were very inspiring to me as a marketer and to many of the people that we've since engaged with the findings about.
- 28:09SPEAKER_00: Because the study, and it really it's called the IRG Growth Study.
- 28:12SPEAKER_00: I would encourage people to go to our website and read about it, the Instituteforreal Growth.com, identified that growth organizations that are outperforming think differently about growth.
- 28:26SPEAKER_00: Growth is a very interesting concept.
- 28:29SPEAKER_00: We did over 750 in-depth conversations with CEOs, CFOs, and CMOs.
- 28:38SPEAKER_00: And the first 20 minutes were always when we say growth, what do you mean?
- 28:43SPEAKER_00: Growth, what?
- 28:44SPEAKER_00: What is good growth?
- 28:46SPEAKER_00: There's also a whole degrowth movement these days.
- 28:54SPEAKER_00: That we are programmed to evolve and growth, and that channeling that growth in a good direction is what actually gets stuff done in on this little place we call Earth.
- 29:05SPEAKER_00: But if we start there and then say, so what is growth?
- 29:09SPEAKER_00: What we found over a quant and qual uh growth study, we saw that these companies talk about growth differently.
- 29:19SPEAKER_00: They don't define growth in terms of uh Friedman's, you know, everything is about the shareholder.
- 29:25SPEAKER_00: Forget about everything else.
- 29:27SPEAKER_00: Friedman literally in 74 said the only social purpose a company has is to drive the profit of its shareholders.
- 29:36SPEAKER_00: And we can laugh about that, but in all in all honesty and painfully, that has dictated the last 50 years of business.
- 29:46SPEAKER_00: So many leaders have uh almost weaponized the ability, starting with Jack Wells, a GE, that turned that company from being a socially caring feet in the middle of society organization that was as big as America was itself, to one where people were fired, even if they did their job well, but just because they were in the bottom 20%, and his dictate was you fire the bottom 20 so that you create space.
- 30:20SPEAKER_00: Um we've come out of 50 years of work where really companies said, if we do this, and then everybody else can take that money and they can spend it on whatever charity they want, but that's the role that we have in society.
- 30:36SPEAKER_00: And we've seen where that has taken us.
- 30:39SPEAKER_00: The the metrics, we talked about uh how digital brought a lot of metrics for marketing to prove itself.
- 30:45SPEAKER_00: Uh well, the metrics of capitalism, um, you know, let's take GDP, for example.
- 30:51SPEAKER_00: I think everyone listening to this organization would say GDP is a good thing.
- 30:55SPEAKER_00: You know, if you increase GDP, you're doing well.
- 30:58SPEAKER_00: But actually, there's some really crazy issues with GDP.
- 31:03SPEAKER_00: For example, did you know that when you cut down a tree rather than leave it standing in the forest, your GDP goes up?
- 31:12SPEAKER_02: Who is it?
- 31:14SPEAKER_00: A dead tree is worth more than a live tree.
- 31:16SPEAKER_00: I have this from Paul Palm, and it's not my original thought, but it was a shocking statement for me to hear the first time.
- 31:23SPEAKER_00: Yes.
- 31:23SPEAKER_00: Did you know that when you insulate your home against heat or cold, GDP goes down?
- 31:31SPEAKER_00: When you throw away your food, GDP goes up.
- 31:35SPEAKER_00: So many things are not right about some of the measures.
- 31:38SPEAKER_00: So, what we've seen on the one hand is a 50-year period of companies focusing more and more on profit, and at the same time, more and more people and peripherals getting damaged, notably Earth.
- 31:56SPEAKER_00: If I can dump my wastewater into the river without any penalties, I'm gonna do that unless something else is guiding me.
- 32:05SPEAKER_00: That's what GE literally did.
- 32:08SPEAKER_00: Now it's being fined, but the system isn't closed.
- 32:11SPEAKER_00: And as long as the system isn't totally closed and you're not really paying the total costs of the resources that you're using, and the fact that some of those resources aren't even replenishable.
- 32:24SPEAKER_00: And if you're making, I mean, I was in India not that long ago, and I, you know, I couldn't see the Taj Mahal for the smog.
- 32:32SPEAKER_00: No wonder is it that after 50 years of this, society has been pushing back louder and louder and saying, well, companies, you know what, you say growth is good.
- 32:42SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm not so sure.
- 32:43SPEAKER_00: Growth for whom?
- 32:45SPEAKER_00: For you, for your shareholders, or for everyone?
- 32:48SPEAKER_00: For the town that you're in, for the people that work on your lines.
- 32:53SPEAKER_00: So there's been a burgeoning, and I think slowly moving into uh avalanche um quality movement that says uh hang on, we can't just keep growing thinking that we only create value for shareholders.
- 33:10SPEAKER_00: And I think Bill Gate gets a lot of uh credit for raising this in Davos in 2008.
- 33:16SPEAKER_00: He said capitalism will be expelled if we keep doing this.
- 33:22SPEAKER_00: So a whole bunch of different descriptors like conscious capitalism and caring capitalism.
- 33:28SPEAKER_00: Um, Porter published in the HBR uh magazine, he part he published in 2013 an article called Shared Value, introducing this concept that actually you can create value and you know recognize the needs of the other stakeholders.
- 33:48SPEAKER_00: They are roughly, I mean, there are many definitions, but we use one that is the four C's, your your colleagues, the community you sit and serve, uh the customers that you serve, of course, and the capital markets that provide you the investments and funds to build your business.
- 34:06SPEAKER_00: And um over time, this recognition for what is now known as multi-stakeholder growth has become more important.
- 34:15SPEAKER_00: So important that our study actually showed that the multi-stakeholder organizations outperformed on so many metrics the shareholder primacy organizations.
- 34:29SPEAKER_00: Now, we weren't the only ones saying that, but the growth study was very clear in identifying that.
- 34:34SPEAKER_00: And if I just take that one step forward, a year later, I'd like to claim based on our research, but I'm not going to, the business roundtable, the largest US CEO organization, changed after 50 years, its purpose of the corporation statement, and changed it from a shareholder only to a stakeholder philosophy, saying we recognize all our stakeholders and the fact that we must create value for all of them.
- 35:05SPEAKER_00: Now that's a pretty big thing.
- 35:08SPEAKER_00: Now, I'll get back to the role of the CMO in a minute, but what's really happened with that is that now CEOs, and I am assuming that most CEOs are caring people, are intelligent people, want to do right by the world, their employees, their customers.
- 35:26SPEAKER_00: Who doesn't?
- 35:27SPEAKER_00: But if your investors are not allowing you to, and you're fired when you distract yourself from pure profit for shareholders, then there's very little wiggle room.
- 35:38SPEAKER_00: And so we kept getting that message of I'd like to do this, but I can't.
- 35:43SPEAKER_00: I'm an American company, we have different shareholders to those fuzzy wuzzy European shareholders.
- 35:49SPEAKER_00: That all changed when the um founder of BlackRock, Larry Fink, said, no, no.
- 35:56SPEAKER_00: If you want us to invest in you, and they invest in everything, then we don't just want your profit projections, we also want to hear the other ways that you are creating value for other stakeholders.
- 36:08SPEAKER_00: Now that was the loud signal that CEOs had been waiting for, and that's why the business roundtable made that transition, not our study, it was really his statement.
- 36:19SPEAKER_00: And so, since then, a lot of companies have been very active in defining how do we do multi-stakeholder growth.
- 36:27SPEAKER_00: And if you were to ask me what does that even mean, I would say it is that you grow your business because I think top-line growth is still the best recognition that you're creating value.
- 36:39SPEAKER_00: People are saying, oh, I want to give you my money because I like what you've made for me.
- 36:44SPEAKER_00: But, and this is the peripheral second condition, that you are also driving one of the United Nations sustainable development goals.
- 36:56SPEAKER_00: Now, why those?
- 36:57SPEAKER_00: Why not DEI or Equal Rights for Women or Sustainability or One and a half degree temperature change?
- 37:06SPEAKER_00: Because all of those are included in the United Nations global sustainable development goals.
- 37:13SPEAKER_00: So we saw that organizations that were able to define how their brands were growing and were helping one or more sustainable development goals, they were outperforming.
- 37:28SPEAKER_00: And now I will finally answer your question about the marketer.
- 37:32SPEAKER_00: Because when a CEO says we care about all the stakeholders, we want to create value for all of them, the next question is well, how?
- 37:41SPEAKER_00: What do those stakeholders even want?
- 37:44SPEAKER_00: What are their unmet needs?
- 37:46SPEAKER_00: What are value propositions that we can credibly offer them that are valuable to them?
- 37:53SPEAKER_00: Not us, them.
- 37:55SPEAKER_00: And those are questions which HR needs to ask about the employee, which CSR needs to ask about the community.
- 38:05SPEAKER_00: And guess who's a great partner to work with them to figure that out?
- 38:10SPEAKER_00: Marketing.
- 38:11SPEAKER_00: Because that's what we do, that's what we were trained for.
- 38:14SPEAKER_00: So what better to help the CHRO figure out the employee value proposition than saying, well, what's the touch point strategy?
- 38:26SPEAKER_00: What are the unmet needs on short-term growth versus long-term safety and career progression?
- 38:34SPEAKER_00: What is our value proposition?
- 38:36SPEAKER_00: How important is our purpose in driving the reason why people come to work here for eight to ten hours a day?
- 38:43SPEAKER_00: And how do we bundle that in such a way and communicate it effectively, not only to the people we're trying to hire, but the people that are already here and that we're trying to keep so that we increase retention, build loyalty inside.
- 38:58SPEAKER_00: And I can give you case studies for that and internal and external users where marketing is partnering with the organization.
- 39:06SPEAKER_00: So to now bring everything together, what we saw was that these real growth, we call it humanized growth, multi-stakeholder growth organizations, were outperforming the companies that just thought about money, just thought about the bottom line.
- 39:22SPEAKER_00: And secondly, that within these organizations, marketers weren't losing influence, marketers were stepping up and increasing their influence by partnering both inside and outside the company to make that a reality.
- 39:36SPEAKER_00: And those are the leaders of the future we call Da Vinci leaders.
- 39:42SPEAKER_00: I'll happily tell you more about the Da Vinci profile and how it was developed, but uh my sense is I should give you an opportunity to reflect and perhaps uh rebut anything I just said.
- 39:55SPEAKER_02: No, absolutely, absolutely.
- 39:56SPEAKER_02: I think uh what this really uh you know brings about, Mark, is how does the CMO of the future, therefore, uh you know, rewire himself or herself for this challenge that the CEO is throwing at uh him or her, right?
- 40:15SPEAKER_02: Therefore, how do the skills uh need to get rewired?
- 40:20SPEAKER_02: What are the uh competencies that a CMO should have, and therefore, what do they prepare for themselves?
- 40:29SPEAKER_02: Because if you look at a company and I saw your great example of a company like an Adobe, which actually said, you know, I'm a creative software company to a total marketing solutions company.
- 40:39SPEAKER_02: Okay, or you know, the example that you talked about, you know, I'm just not a pet food company, but I'm a pet care company.
- 40:47SPEAKER_02: Okay, larger platform, and therefore your ability to look at multi-stakeholders is a big shift in mindset and thinking, not just for the CMO, but even for agencies, because they just have to go beyond communication, right?
- 41:02SPEAKER_02: Therefore, the most important skill sets and competencies that you believe are very, very important.
- 41:07SPEAKER_02: And how do we train on them and how do we ensure that we start having those competencies in our arsenal?
- 41:16SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I'm just reflecting upon your comment about agencies, uh, because I think agencies have a very specialized role in um helping find effective communication, creative communication messages to cut through the clutter of today, but they need to be briefed correctly, and so often agencies have had to build additional capabilities like planners to compensate for the fact that the marketers weren't being strategic enough in the first place.
- 41:56SPEAKER_00: Um, what we've seen over the last uh decade or so is that agencies, in fact, the whole institution of planner has been decimated.
- 42:04SPEAKER_00: Why?
- 42:05SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, because um clients with this programmatic approach to marketing and media have cut everything into small pieces, and you pay this much to get this done, and this sort of sauce that used to be poured across the top, which was covered by the 15% uh fee over media, that was the one that paid for the planners, and often it was the planners, not the marketers, that were the strategic guardians of the long-term health and positioning of the brand, because the next brand manager would come in and want to change everything, and it was the planner that said, Excuse me, we've been doing this for 35 years, please go through the historic reel with us, understand what it is we stand for.
- 42:50SPEAKER_00: Now let's have the conversation.
- 42:52SPEAKER_00: Um, so I haven't thought enough about the demands on the agencies, but I think we can sort of wrap it all together as the marketing ecosystem.
- 43:02SPEAKER_00: Um, I think the biggest message is really if you don't want to be a peripheral function that gets paid to do a certain trick really well, but you want to be a strategic business leader, you need to think and act like a strategic business leader.
- 43:22SPEAKER_00: And you need to earn your place at the table first before you can do anything that starts to feel like influencing the decision-making process.
- 43:30SPEAKER_00: If you're not at the table, you can't influence.
- 43:34SPEAKER_00: So, what does that take?
- 43:36SPEAKER_00: And that's where we indeed, with Spencer Stewart, the leading headhunters or executive search, as they want me to call them, um, people, we worked on what's this profile of the leader that is indeed able to drive this type of growth, this type of development.
- 43:52SPEAKER_00: And it really goes beyond marketing.
- 43:54SPEAKER_00: It is a Da Vinci growth leader.
- 43:56SPEAKER_00: What we see is that this is a leader.
- 44:00SPEAKER_00: That brings everything together that Da Vinci brought.
- 44:03SPEAKER_00: Now, everyone I think knows about Da Vinci that he was an artist and a scientist.
- 44:09SPEAKER_00: That's what 99% of people will tell you made him special.
- 44:14SPEAKER_00: And so he was whole-brained.
- 44:17SPEAKER_00: However, we think that's not enough.
- 44:19SPEAKER_00: Because Da Vinci actually did one other thing that's far less well known.
- 44:24SPEAKER_00: He was one of the founders of the humanism movement.
- 44:28SPEAKER_00: Now you described already our purpose as being driving humanized growth.
- 44:32SPEAKER_00: That's exactly what this absolute brilliant leader did already in the Middle Ages.
- 44:41SPEAKER_00: Because he brought together not only the creativity to break through and go to places where no one else had gone before, which of course is the seed of the innovation, of new market developments, and literally of innovation in the sense that we address things that people haven't even told us they need.
- 45:03SPEAKER_00: At the same time, he was a scientist, a mathematician.
- 45:07SPEAKER_00: He was commercial.
- 45:09SPEAKER_00: He literally could do the math, which so many marketers are not able to bring together.
- 45:14SPEAKER_00: But that third aspect, left brain, right brain, was empathy, was humanism, was heart.
- 45:23SPEAKER_00: And I think in many ways, and you know, we've just had some elections here in the US, in many ways, in many societies, we've lost that caring, empathetic leadership ability.
- 45:37SPEAKER_00: And uh it's a painful reality.
- 45:39SPEAKER_00: I was speaking with a professor of a Chinese university late last night, my time, that with growth seems to always come that first spurt of growth for me and my richness.
- 45:55SPEAKER_00: And me, maybe my family, maybe my tribe, but it's a lot of me, me, me.
- 46:00SPEAKER_00: And so it I do very much ascribe to the Maslow theory that at some point, maybe because you're comfortable enough, you recognize that actually me growth is not real growth.
- 46:12SPEAKER_00: Uh, me richness is not sufficient.
- 46:15SPEAKER_00: And so with that comes this empathy of who else am I affecting?
- 46:21SPEAKER_00: And by the way, I don't want to position this as something new.
- 46:26SPEAKER_00: That's how companies used to be.
- 46:29SPEAKER_00: When Unilever set up in the north of England during the Industrial Revolution, it was worse there than some of the most, you know, terrible places in Africa, in India, in China, where you know there was no health care.
- 46:46SPEAKER_00: I'm talking obviously decades ago, but in some places in the world this is still true.
- 46:52SPEAKER_00: And so what they did was they built a company because when you started the company, you built a factory, you were gonna be there for 75 years.
- 46:59SPEAKER_00: Those bricks, they stand, they last.
- 47:02SPEAKER_00: You're drinking the water that your employees drink.
- 47:06SPEAKER_00: You go to the same church, you meet the people, you take care of them.
- 47:10SPEAKER_00: And so there were schools, there were health facilities, there were play and children care facilities, there were sports fields.
- 47:17SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and it wasn't just some fuzzy European concept.
- 47:21SPEAKER_00: Hershey's was created in the same way in the same year.
- 47:25SPEAKER_00: And, you know, we're talking about 1912, a whole town, GE after the war, was advertising how much it paid people and how it shared the wealth before you know Jack Welsh took over and uh took it in a very different direction.
- 47:42SPEAKER_00: This is how companies used to be part of society.
- 47:45SPEAKER_00: So all we're predicating is to go back to that, and the leader that understands that, of course, has to be creative and has to be commercial, but also has to be empathetic, and that's what we call the Da Vinci qualities.
- 48:14SPEAKER_01: We interview and learn from high performers so that you can apply these lessons on your journey to becoming the knowledge worker athlete you are meant to be.
- 48:22SPEAKER_01: The ContraMinds podcast is available on all leading podcast players.
- 48:26SPEAKER_01: And if you are interested in revisiting past episodes or taking a look at our show notes from this episode, please visit us at www.contraminds.com forward slash blog.
- 48:37SPEAKER_01: And now back to the show.
- 48:41SPEAKER_02: One of the points that uh I want your review on, Mark, is uh there's a lot of uh technology that's getting into marketing.
- 48:51SPEAKER_02: And one of the things that I see is uh I call it automation without soul, right?
- 48:59SPEAKER_02: Uh it just you know it requires a lot of imagination, it requires a lot of empathy, and technology alone will not be able to build that emotional bond between the consumer, between the customer, between the company, and its uh shared values.
- 49:19SPEAKER_02: So, therefore, is the future CMO while he has to embrace technology the first principles of how uh you know the creativity and the emotion should that be added and that is that and should he be the evangelist in the organization?
- 49:40SPEAKER_00: I think you've hit the nail on the head.
- 49:42SPEAKER_00: Um this is uh why it's so interesting and gratifying to see just a week ago, Airbnb confirmed that its strategic shift away from programmatic to brand communication has actually worked extremely well for it.
- 50:00SPEAKER_00: And they're seeing uh business growth and brand loyalty.
- 50:06SPEAKER_00: Um, what what happened, and I think we've already talked about it, with this going down a rabbit hole of technology, is that you know we had programmatic teasing out exactly what banner works, but at some point every iteration is known and tiredness of a piece of creative occurs.
- 50:29SPEAKER_00: We know that, you know, you can use it not just two times, but six times.
- 50:32SPEAKER_00: We get tired of it far earlier than our customers get tired of it, but still, then there needs to be the next iteration, and so the first thing that needs to be recognized, as you say, is that it really is about bringing those two qualities of Da Vinci together, that whole brainess of the technology gets you to get exactly in front of the right customer.
- 50:53SPEAKER_00: But then what is it you say?
- 50:55SPEAKER_00: What is it you do to engage, to build relationships, to creatively cut through the cluster?
- 51:02SPEAKER_00: That all the other things that this person is saying.
- 51:05SPEAKER_00: So I would say yes, the first argument is that creativity and the importance of creativity has been forgotten over the last few years, and I think now is being more and more recognized.
- 51:18SPEAKER_00: Uh, I was just at a presentation in Orlando of the A, and the CMO of uh ABMBEF, the beer company, presented the case of how they literally strategically elevated the importance of creativity five years ago, and it took them those five years to win a record number of Lions in Cannes and drive growth at a record level.
- 51:46SPEAKER_00: So there was business success through creativity.
- 51:49SPEAKER_00: So they achieved it, it took them five years, they made it a strategic priority.
- 51:54SPEAKER_00: Technology without creativity runs dry very quickly.
- 51:58SPEAKER_00: That's the first.
- 51:59SPEAKER_00: The second angle, which indeed you um you you you identified correctly as being the third Da Vinci quality, is empathy.
- 52:09SPEAKER_00: Because even when we cut through, we're asking ourselves, is this a brand I want to be in business with?
- 52:15SPEAKER_00: Is this a brand that I support?
- 52:18SPEAKER_00: Uh or am I reading that this brand is at the same time funding climate uh deniers or politicians that uh don't believe in freedom of choice, which I believe in, or are doing things behind my back at a corporate level that don't align with my values.
- 52:38SPEAKER_00: And so I think very much the um the three components have been out of balance and need to be rebalanced, and it is the Da Vinci leader that needs to lead that process of recognition.
- 52:53SPEAKER_02: So if I was a young marketer uh entering the field uh and uh I want to be a uh you know a potential CMO in the next say 15-20 years, uh, what are the core skills that uh you know you believe uh I need to start having?
- 53:14SPEAKER_02: Because uh you know many a times uh this this is something that is never talked about.
- 53:19SPEAKER_02: We talked about the CMO, but I am a young marketer walking with great dreams and aspirations about how to build a brand, how to build a great marketing organization.
- 53:31SPEAKER_02: So, therefore, what is it that I need to prepare myself for for a great future?
- 53:36SPEAKER_00: Well, this is a very relevant question because marketing as a discipline has a significant challenge on recruiting young people into the discipline.
- 53:47SPEAKER_00: Why?
- 53:48SPEAKER_00: Because they're seeing a discipline that they perceive as selling things to people they don't need that actually pollute the world and don't help anyone.
- 54:00SPEAKER_00: That's not a great reputation as a discipline.
- 54:03SPEAKER_00: I think if we do exactly what you say and say, what is it that today you want to do, you want to think about the discipline you're going into.
- 54:14SPEAKER_00: Uh I teach at uh at Oxford University, and um we had a session about this quite recently, and one of the for me aha moments was that if you look at the ambitions of um the young people moving into any job, and you said this person wants to lead like a CEO, uh I would say act like a CEO day one, act like the Da Vinci growth leader, act in a manner that recognizes, and this is where it gets interesting, that actually the marketing people could sell products that people don't want to people that don't need them that pollute the world, or you could be bringing uh massive changes in society that the world needs today.
- 55:04SPEAKER_00: Now that's a that's a big sell, but let me just try and back it up with some proof.
- 55:10SPEAKER_00: If you're going into a discipline where you can honestly change how billions of people in the world think, feel, and act, would that be interesting to you?
- 55:21SPEAKER_00: Does that appeal to your ambitions?
- 55:23SPEAKER_00: I would say yes.
- 55:25SPEAKER_00: Well, that's what we do.
- 55:27SPEAKER_00: As marketers, we absolutely shape how people think about everything.
- 55:32SPEAKER_00: I can give you 10 campaigns, like the one that always has in Africa, that helps fathers recognize that there is nothing stigmatizing about a woman having her period, about a 14-year-old needing always, but still able to go to school.
- 55:51SPEAKER_00: It's not as something to be ashamed about, it's not a sickness, it's the most natural thing in life, it's the continuity of the cycle, and it needs to be celebrated, but the person needs to be helped so that they can pursue a career and their schooling.
- 56:08SPEAKER_00: Now that is an educational task.
- 56:11SPEAKER_00: I can tell you about brands that have educated Indian fathers, that it is not necessarily great that the child is being admonished if they don't get a 10 out of 10.
- 56:23SPEAKER_00: But actually, that perhaps an 8 out of 10 is great if the second sentence said, and they took care of the other people in the class that needed help.
- 56:32SPEAKER_00: I heard a very funny joke, I have to share it with you, that apparently the mother of the new prime minister of England heard that he was going to be the first Indian origin prime minister, which I think is a massive thing.
- 56:47SPEAKER_00: And her comment was, why not king?
- 56:55SPEAKER_00: But but so we as marketers, and many brands have done this, whether it's about the color of the skin or it's about stigmas around education and participation, we can shape how billions of people think.
- 57:10SPEAKER_00: Think about the Dove Real Beauty campaign and a direct address to tell people, billions of people around the world, women around the world, that they are beautiful.
- 57:22SPEAKER_00: Not that they should start with the assumption that they're not and they need a cosmetic to correct their outlet.
- 57:28SPEAKER_00: So here is a discipline that I'm telling you come in and you can shape how people think.
- 57:34SPEAKER_00: Not only that, you can shape how they feel.
- 57:37SPEAKER_00: We create communities.
- 57:38SPEAKER_00: Whether it's a community around we love football or it's a community around protecting the earth, like Patagonia does, brands are communities of people that share an interest.
- 57:50SPEAKER_00: What great Nike, communities that exercise together by buying a shoe, but also by literally physically joining together on the corner of 11th Street and Broadway at 7 a.m.
- 58:02SPEAKER_00: Because the app suggested that, and there's 12 people to go running with.
- 58:06SPEAKER_00: We can do that as brands, and we can actually change what people do.
- 58:11SPEAKER_00: Tide has managed to move millions, if not tens of millions, of people to shift the temperature button on their machines from 65 to 35 degrees.
- 58:22SPEAKER_00: Imagine the climate effect impact of that change.
- 58:28SPEAKER_00: Colgate has literally gotten people to switch the faucet off while they're brushing their teeth.
- 58:35SPEAKER_00: It might sound completely trivial, but it's not.
- 58:38SPEAKER_00: Of the two total footprint, sustainability footprint of Colgate, the running the water while you're actually doing something else was the biggest component.
- 58:48SPEAKER_00: And by educating people and changing their behavior, Colgate marketers are helping make the world a better place.
- 58:56SPEAKER_00: So my first part would be to say we need to change how we talk about marketing to these people.
- 59:03SPEAKER_00: To ambitious young people that want to change the world.
- 59:07SPEAKER_00: I think there's many of them.
- 59:08SPEAKER_00: And when they hear this story, I think they will think very differently about entering marketing.
- 59:13SPEAKER_00: Then when they enter, I think it really comes down to act the way that I was told to act when you started, which is pretend you're the CEO.
- 59:25SPEAKER_00: My very first product was a coffee creamer.
- 59:28SPEAKER_00: It was 10% of the brand's revenue.
- 59:32SPEAKER_00: It was profitable, but it was a tiny product, which wasn't even a core product, but it actually made a lot of sense to have it in the assortment given the proposition.
- 59:42SPEAKER_00: But I was therefore the CEO of a coffee creamer company.
- 59:46SPEAKER_00: It had sales of, I think it was 12 million.
- 59:49SPEAKER_00: It was in every store.
- 59:51SPEAKER_00: I could see my product, I could think about how to develop it, and I truly talked to the production people one day, the innovation people another day, the buyers, because we didn't make it ourselves, it was just not strategic enough.
- 1:00:04SPEAKER_00: So the buyers that were dealing with the suppliers.
- 1:00:06SPEAKER_00: And all these things were in my job description day one.
- 1:00:12SPEAKER_00: I was a mini CEO, and it made me feel inspired.
- 1:00:16SPEAKER_00: Act like a mini CEO.
- 1:00:18SPEAKER_00: And this gets to the last point, which is a lot of companies have been acting differently for the last few decades.
- 1:00:26SPEAKER_00: So they need you to speak up.
- 1:00:29SPEAKER_00: They need the young generation to come in, and I think more and more often they're willing to listen.
- 1:00:35SPEAKER_00: Half my work is telling senior leaders to listen better and connect with the junior leaders in the organization who have this in them.
- 1:00:46SPEAKER_00: So when you say what should they do differently, first thing I would say is be themselves.
- 1:00:51SPEAKER_00: Maybe you don't need to be so differently.
- 1:00:54SPEAKER_00: Step up to the ambition you feel in your heart.
- 1:00:57SPEAKER_00: Bring what actually motivates you to the organization that needs it.
- 1:01:01SPEAKER_00: Be respectful.
- 1:01:03SPEAKER_00: You know, don't try and tell people that have done the same job for 20 years that they've made a mistake for 20 years, but be influential and practice your skills of slowly moving the oil tanker in a new direction, which is better for you, better for that company, and better for the world.
- 1:01:22SPEAKER_02: Fantastic, fantastic advice, Mark.
- 1:01:26SPEAKER_02: I want to just uh you know shift uh to the last part of uh our conversation where uh if you look at you talked about the client side uh you know having fragmented the services of marketing, and now when I look back to the agency world, I see a digital marketing company, I see a UIUX company, I see a media company, and I don't see a connected strategy for a brand.
- 1:01:56SPEAKER_02: Okay, and when I talk to the folks in each of these functions, a specialization, okay.
- 1:02:02SPEAKER_02: For me, the analogy is like a hospital, there are gynecologists, there are uh orthopedicians, but finally you're taking care of my health, right?
- 1:02:13SPEAKER_02: So, how do we make each of these specialists think like generalists, have the empathy of uh uh you know a hospital and where the brand lives and dies every day, right?
- 1:02:27SPEAKER_02: And therefore, how do we make that happen?
- 1:02:30SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm I'm I'm happy to hear about your hospital experience.
- 1:02:34SPEAKER_00: My my painful experience is different, and in fact, you know, they think I am uh the owner of a leg or the owner of an arm, uh uh a prostate and a few other aspects that people are interested in, and they don't talk to each other, so I want your hospital.
- 1:02:51SPEAKER_02: So uh but but but Mark, I think it's more an analogy to actually you know bring in the idea of how an ideal hospital should be.
- 1:02:59SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
- 1:02:59SPEAKER_00: No, no, I I I I I joke, but it's I think it's a huge opportunity and also risk uh if not uh addressed.
- 1:03:08SPEAKER_00: Look, right from the start, I said that strategic marketing was also about coordinating, inspiring, bringing together, aligning, directioning.
- 1:03:23SPEAKER_00: And um it is a hard fact that with developments, specialism has um has been created.
- 1:03:33SPEAKER_00: I'm just reading a book actually about the role of the generist in a specializing world.
- 1:03:39SPEAKER_00: And um I'm only in chapter one, so I'll share with you what I learned there, which was a contrast between Roger Ferrer and Tiger Woods.
- 1:03:49SPEAKER_00: And uh and it really is uh there's a fundamental discussion happening among academics whether the Tiger Woods model, which is practice something 10,000 times, you know, he was literally playing golf at age two, probably earlier, versus the Roger Federer, who played soccer, they all had balls, but he played every sport, and his parents did not push him.
- 1:04:13SPEAKER_00: Earl Woods really pushed Tiger, and we've also seen some of the uh you know the downsides uh at the individual uh personal level.
- 1:04:26SPEAKER_00: Uh, so I think that uh the the discussion of generalist versus specialist is only going to get bigger.
- 1:04:35SPEAKER_00: Uh, there is no way that you can be anything but a specialist that really has chosen their colors, has chosen to always be looking at the next technological development and be the person that has the answer when someone says, How could we do that in digital?
- 1:04:54SPEAKER_00: Or how could we do that in this new medium?
- 1:04:59SPEAKER_00: Versus, and this is of course the T leader description that I'm now going to, versus a leader that is a generalist and makes it their job to make sure the pieces fit together.
- 1:05:11SPEAKER_00: I'm not going to make any pretense that I'm clearly motivated by the latter, and I think strategic brand management, strategic growth leadership, has to, by definition, be that generalist.
- 1:05:27SPEAKER_00: Has to be the person that has enough appreciation of all of the still a lot of work just to do that.
- 1:05:34SPEAKER_00: We've developed a whole program around it to just appreciate what is possible in all areas, to understand that there are latest developments, and also to see through the bullshit that people that are caught up in their own developments and excited by the next thing, um, you know, so that you don't get an Alexa enabled toilet.
- 1:05:56SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, that you're able to filter those and across the Different uh specialities you are able to trade off what's important and what's not.
- 1:06:05SPEAKER_00: But I think that um marketing, strategic marketing, is really about being that generalist and being able to get people to play together and to not play, you know, my invention is better than yours, but to actually be inspired by being rewarded for their contribution to the larger need.
- 1:06:26SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, by collaborating across silos, because it actually makes everything better.
- 1:06:33SPEAKER_00: And we, the strategic marketers, the strategic growth leaders, need to be the ones that inspire that in people, perhaps even create the enabling mechanisms, the meetings, the uh the trainings to allow people who are being paid to be really good at something to see the bigger picture and think with you and others on how it all comes together.
- 1:06:59SPEAKER_02: Amazing.
- 1:07:00SPEAKER_02: I think I totally agree with you, Mark.
- 1:07:03SPEAKER_02: And uh uh the most important uh point that you make here is the need for the periscope and the microscope approach uh is really what I think you're talking about, and that's a beautiful way of uh you know uh saying that that's very, very that's so very important.
- 1:07:21SPEAKER_02: Uh the most uh important thing that I believe is while we have been talking about the CMO, we have been talking about the agency, we have been talking about the marketing department, uh often I've not heard you speak about now.
- 1:07:36SPEAKER_02: I'm the CEO, how should I enable it in my organization?
- 1:07:41SPEAKER_02: And if I'm a chief sales officer, how should I you know empower and start working with my marketing teams?
- 1:07:48SPEAKER_02: Okay, if I'm a chief customer officer, how should I work with my marketing uh department?
- 1:07:54SPEAKER_02: Okay, and therefore, what would you say are some cardinal principles that maybe they could try, which then starts this collaboration to happen?
- 1:08:05SPEAKER_02: Or I'm a CTO.
- 1:08:07SPEAKER_00: Well, so um it's almost as though I paid you to ask that question.
- 1:08:13SPEAKER_00: Uh, because uh drum roll, that is where our new study is going to be focusing.
- 1:08:20SPEAKER_00: Um where the working title for the project that we're doing with IRG and the University of Oxford is called Achieving Humanized Impact.
- 1:08:32SPEAKER_00: Um, what we mean by that is when that declaration by CEOs was signed about the importance of multi-stakeholder growth, um, undoubtedly it led to a wave of new initiatives where people, organizations, were trying to find ways to create growth for multiple stakeholders at the same time.
- 1:08:55SPEAKER_00: And some of those will have been a lot better for one and a little bit better for others in terms of stakeholders.
- 1:09:02SPEAKER_00: Some of those will have perhaps been negative for one stakeholder, but so much more positive for another stakeholder, and some of them will have failed.
- 1:09:10SPEAKER_00: What we're gonna do is we're gonna go back to the CEOs that signed that declaration and say, what worked according to you?
- 1:09:20SPEAKER_00: What according to you was net zero positive?
- 1:09:26SPEAKER_00: What initiatives, for example, I'll give you one that I've already, I think, safely defined or uh learned as to be important.
- 1:09:33SPEAKER_00: When you do things for the community as an organization, do it through your employees.
- 1:09:39SPEAKER_00: Because then you're hitting two birds with one stone.
- 1:09:42SPEAKER_00: A great example is Axo Noble, the paint company, Julux in India and in the UK, that uh have a lot of work around helping communities uh spruce up drop crime, create excitement by giving them paints to decorate the communities, paint the walls of the houses and so forth, paint the clubhouse of the soccer club.
- 1:10:07SPEAKER_00: When things change around you, you feel differently.
- 1:10:10SPEAKER_00: It's a big insight.
- 1:10:12SPEAKER_00: It was an even bigger insight when they had their own employees go do the painting with the local favela uh residents in Brazil, for example.
- 1:10:23SPEAKER_00: Now they were developing enormous pride and they were developing enormous brand love.
- 1:10:29SPEAKER_00: Now, I think those two probably go together very well.
- 1:10:33SPEAKER_00: What we're gonna do in this study is we're gonna talk to a lot of CEOs and say what initiatives did you undertake, and according to you, which were positive and why, and how did you tell the other stakeholders about their success?
- 1:10:48SPEAKER_00: What metrics did you use?
- 1:10:51SPEAKER_00: And, and this goes to the heart of your question, what changed about how you needed to lead those initiatives?
- 1:10:59SPEAKER_00: Now, I have a bias, I think we're gonna hear back the profile of a Da Vinci growth leader.
- 1:11:05SPEAKER_00: Because I believe we're going back to what was once very successful.
- 1:11:10SPEAKER_00: But I'm keeping an open mind, and in this work we will uh learn from some of the most interesting organizations around the world, and it's something that uh I really look forward to talking with you about when the findings come in after the summer next year.
- 1:11:28SPEAKER_02: Thanks.
- 1:11:29SPEAKER_02: On that note, uh uh Mark, uh, I'm coming to the end of this conversation.
- 1:11:34SPEAKER_02: I'm going to ask you a couple of uh rapid fire questions.
- 1:11:39SPEAKER_02: So, my first question to you is uh what does success mean to you?
- 1:11:45SPEAKER_00: Impact.
- 1:11:46SPEAKER_00: Success means when I see people acting differently in ways that I believe are purposeful, are good for all Cs.
- 1:12:01SPEAKER_00: Uh if we had anything to do with that shift, that to me is the ultimate success.
- 1:12:07SPEAKER_00: That's why we created the Institute for Real Growth.
- 1:12:11SPEAKER_02: Brilliant.
- 1:12:13SPEAKER_02: Uh my next question is uh, what would be your advice to an 18-year-old in an university today?
- 1:12:25SPEAKER_00: Well, uh we started this conversation uh about an 18-year-old boy at university.
- 1:12:33SPEAKER_00: I would say, and and I have an 18-year-old boy in university who called me two days ago and said, I've identified my major.
- 1:12:44SPEAKER_00: And he's only started three months ago.
- 1:12:47SPEAKER_00: And my advice was on the one hand, follow your heart, and on the other, make sure you keep an open perspective because you may not have seen enough yet.
- 1:12:57SPEAKER_00: And I think university and those years in our life are truly the life phase where we have to think big.
- 1:13:06SPEAKER_00: We have to open the funnel, we have to try things that we've never tried before, knowing full well that we may fail, and we have to accept failure as a lesson to then learn from and move on.
- 1:13:19SPEAKER_00: So I would say listen very closely to your heart because your heart will beat faster when you're involved in something that is for you, and at the same time, sort of hold off making the final judgment until you're 21.
- 1:13:35SPEAKER_00: Give yourself three years to look everywhere and then say, I'm gonna make a choice.
- 1:13:42SPEAKER_02: Beautiful.
- 1:13:43SPEAKER_02: I I'm able to see a fantastic uh picture as you're as you were talking.
- 1:13:48SPEAKER_02: So it gave me a vivid picture of how I should be thinking about my career as an 18-year-old.
- 1:13:54SPEAKER_02: Brilliant.
- 1:13:55SPEAKER_02: Uh, you would have got a lot of advice over the years you have worked, uh Mark.
- 1:14:00SPEAKER_02: And what's that one single piece of advice that you cherish and remember?
- 1:14:06SPEAKER_00: That's also a very good question, and I have an immediate answer.
- 1:14:11SPEAKER_00: I once had the honor to sit in uh the Concord, British Airways Concorde.
- 1:14:18SPEAKER_00: It was an amazing experience.
- 1:14:19SPEAKER_00: British Airways was discounting those tickets, and they were literally the same price as a normal business class ticket.
- 1:14:25SPEAKER_00: So I convinced my boss at Unilever that really I wasn't wasting money by taking this flight.
- 1:14:31SPEAKER_00: I was very honest about it.
- 1:14:32SPEAKER_00: I did sometimes have to duck under the seats because a CEO from the company was there who would have said, What the hell are you doing here?
- 1:14:42SPEAKER_00: But what I would do, because it happened a few times, is I would sit next to these incredible leaders who didn't have a laptop, they just had some notes, which was I thought very interesting.
- 1:14:53SPEAKER_00: And I always asked him this question.
- 1:14:55SPEAKER_00: I was 35 at the time, and I asked him, What do you wish that you had learned by 35?
- 1:15:01SPEAKER_00: And I sat next to an incredibly important banker.
- 1:15:05SPEAKER_00: He was on the board of governors of the Bank of England, but he was an American banker.
- 1:15:10SPEAKER_00: I don't want to say precisely who he was.
- 1:15:13SPEAKER_00: His advice to me was you seem like a smart kid.
- 1:15:18SPEAKER_00: When someone explains something to you and you don't understand it, ask them to explain it again.
- 1:15:26SPEAKER_00: But if you then don't understand it still, it's not your problem, it's their problem.
- 1:15:35SPEAKER_00: And he then told me the story of how he the bank that he used to lead had managed to avoid billions of losses that the competitors had gone into because he didn't go into derivatives.
- 1:15:48SPEAKER_00: He said, I didn't understand them, I still don't.
- 1:15:52SPEAKER_00: I know you can make money, and now we've seen you can lose a lot of money too.
- 1:15:57SPEAKER_00: And I thought it was a brilliant lesson learned.
- 1:15:59SPEAKER_00: If you're smart, don't doubt yourself.
- 1:16:02SPEAKER_00: Doubt the person telling you the story that you don't understand.
- 1:16:06SPEAKER_02: Nice.
- 1:16:08SPEAKER_02: Uh imagine uh you were to organize a dream dinner, and you were to invite three, four people who you would like to invite, make them sit on the table and talk to them.
- 1:16:23SPEAKER_02: Who would those three, four people be and why?
- 1:16:28SPEAKER_00: Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, and then probably Elon Musk, so that we are not agreeing with yourselves all the time.
- 1:16:41SPEAKER_00: You can say about the man what you like, and he is reaving havoc as we speak on Twitter.
- 1:16:48SPEAKER_00: But a man that has gotten us into space has re-engineered that we can reuse rockets, and as brought us Tesla, uh, has something to share.
- 1:17:02SPEAKER_00: And let's I would be honored to be part of a conversation, probably mostly an observer, between those gods.
- 1:17:13SPEAKER_02: Beautiful, beautiful.
- 1:17:15SPEAKER_02: Uh, what's one thing that you believe in, Mark, that others don't agree with you on?
- 1:17:29SPEAKER_00: I honestly don't have something that comes to mind spontaneously.
- 1:17:34SPEAKER_00: I I I think, I mean, you know, others, of course, I would I would think that every position I take, there are people that disagree with me.
- 1:17:44SPEAKER_00: I try to look up discussion and debate so that I'm not surrounded by a world of yaysayers.
- 1:17:53SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, I also cultivate an environment, and I'm very much an enabler of connections, of people that are like-minded and that are trying to help each other drive change.
- 1:18:06SPEAKER_00: So perhaps I don't look up the world of people disagreeing with me often enough, but spontaneously, I can't give you a different answer than that.
- 1:18:17SPEAKER_02: I think it's a very authentic answer, and that's what I like.
- 1:18:21SPEAKER_02: Uh, so my last question uh is uh now that you've gone through uh you know a conversation on contraminds with uh with me, if you were to recommend a guest who will carry the purpose of contramines uh over and over again for the next couple of years, who would you think you would recommend as a guest for us?
- 1:18:47SPEAKER_02: Who we will reach out and talk and carry this philosophy and legacy and the mission and the purpose forward?
- 1:18:56SPEAKER_00: Well, uh somebody does come to mind.
- 1:18:59SPEAKER_00: Um somebody that I was brainstorming with yesterday.
- 1:19:03SPEAKER_00: It's somebody that when we published our first book in 2010, uh, really read it, even though he was the CMO of one of the world's biggest organizations, and not only read it, but gave it back with 10 pages of notes.
- 1:19:16SPEAKER_00: Well, he kept the book, but he gave me the notes.
- 1:19:18SPEAKER_00: And although I was at one level slightly hurt and offended, uh, when I regathered my strength and confidence that actually that's who I want to be surrounded with, people that give uh very well-intentioned critique and suggestions.
- 1:19:36SPEAKER_00: And to this day, he plays that role in my life.
- 1:19:39SPEAKER_00: His name is Chris Bergrave.
- 1:19:41SPEAKER_00: He was the CMO uh at Koch in Europe, then globally for AB Imbeft, the beer company, uh, a Belgian, and um uh a very, very smart thinker that divides his time equally between NGOs and giving back to society, academics, and investing and um and helping smaller companies um uh grow successfully.
- 1:20:10SPEAKER_00: I think Chris would be a very good person for you to talk to.
- 1:20:14SPEAKER_02: Thanks.
- 1:20:15SPEAKER_02: Thanks on that note, Mark.
- 1:20:17SPEAKER_02: Uh it was a pure, you know, great refreshing ideas and thoughts that you shared on marketing, how marketing should transform itself, the core issues that how marketing can address and probably probably become extremely strategic to the vision of the organization and to the purpose and mission of the organization.
- 1:20:42SPEAKER_02: It was fantastic.
- 1:20:44SPEAKER_02: The body of work that you have done over the last so many years.
- 1:20:49SPEAKER_02: Uh, I think you leave a big legacy in the marketing uh world, and that's something that I think people should log in, read, download, you know, take in, and thanks for all the work that you do, not just for yourself, but for the marketing community, which I believe is a great service that you're doing.
- 1:21:11SPEAKER_02: Thanks, Mark, and thanks for your time.
- 1:21:13SPEAKER_00: Well, uh, I I'm humbled by your words.
- 1:21:16SPEAKER_00: I think uh if I live up to 1%, then I would be proud of myself.
- 1:21:20SPEAKER_00: Uh, but I appreciate your comments and I really enjoyed the experience of learning about you and your work.
- 1:21:27SPEAKER_00: I think what ContraMinds does is important, and uh and then actually participating.
- 1:21:32SPEAKER_00: So, Swami, it was my honor and thank you very much.
- 1:21:36SPEAKER_00: You are in your evening.
- 1:21:37SPEAKER_00: I'm going to continue in my early day.
- 1:21:40SPEAKER_00: All the very best from New York.
- 1:21:43SPEAKER_02: Thanks, thanks, Mark.
- 1:21:47SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening to this episode.
- 1:21:50SPEAKER_02: For selected links and detailed show notes, visit www.contramines.com slash blog.
- 1:21:58SPEAKER_02: Follow contraminds on social media and let us know who you would like to see next on the podcast.
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- 1:22:09SPEAKER_02: We are keen to know what you're thinking.
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- 1:22:21SPEAKER_02: Thanks for listening and stay safe.