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Episode hosted by: Fiona Davis, Global President at CvE
Fiona – 00:00:00: Welcome, everybody, to this week’s episode of Time for a Reset. I’m Fiona Davis. I’ll be your host for today. I’m the VP of Growth for Control v Exposed. And I have the wonderful Jordan Liebman with us today. Who’s joining us from BlueJeans by Verizon. Jordan, what I’m going to do is start by asking you to introduce yourself a little bit about your background and how you arrived in your current role.
Jordan – 00:00:23: Yeah. So first of all, thank you, Fiona, for having me today. As you said, Jordan Liebman, I am the Vice President, Global Demand, Gen and Brand Marketing for BlueJeans by Verizon, which just so happens to be Verizon’s video conferencing and collaboration platform. We acquired them about three years ago and ever since then it’s been a match made in heaven. So my role as the Head of Demand, Gen and Brand Marketing is just that, I oversee our global strategy for driving awareness, driving demand of the brand, working very closely with our B2B sales organization to ensure that our narrative about the brand is being executed successfully in a way that not just drives prospect engagement, but drives engagement to the point where actually generating sales, generating revenue. So I oversee everything from brand marketing to field marketing, lead generation, media investment. It’s quite a large portfolio. And so I’ve actually been with Verizon for a little over seven years in which I served in multiple capacities. I was on the consumer creative marketing side of the house for quite a while where I led a lot of our consumer campaigns here in the States for our Network Superiority Campaign, our Consumer Holiday Vampaign. An amalgamation of different partnerships across sports and entertainment and then actually spent a little bit of time in consumer product marketing before I joined the Blue Jeans team a couple of years ago. But before that, the overwhelming I’m not going to say how many years because it’ll probably age me a bit, but the overwhelming majority of my career was actually spent in advertising on Madison Avenue. So in account leadership positions for agencies such as Grey, BBDO, Publicis, McGarryBowen, actually, which was my last tour on the agency side where I had a client which was Verizon fell in love with the business, what they were doing from an advertising and marketing standpoint and so much so that I wanted to be a part of it. I saw the opportunity and it was literally a moment of where do I sign up and when can I begin? And it’s been a great time ever since then. I think that the role that I serve is a wonderful blend of the traditional side of marketing, right? So more of the performance and growth sides of it, but also being able to blend the creativity that I’ve had for so many years working in advertising, really bringing those two together and helping to not just evolve the business but be an agent for growth and category disruption and really shaking up the ways that brand marketing is perceived and actually needed in order for a B2B SaaS product like BlueJeans to succeed. And so that’s where we are today.
Fiona – 00:03:13: I was just going to ask you actually, Jordan, on the back of your sort of intro there, how have you found that kind of moving more into a B2B marketing role? Because the brand marketing for that and how you’re segmenting your audience there is quite different to when you’re doing direct to consumer type marketing. So have you found that to be interesting challenge?
Jordan – 00:03:31: Yeah, it definitely has been. I think that there are a lot of practices, a lot of channels, a lot of tactics that are used in consumer marketing that can still work very successfully in the B2B space. I know this is something that we spoke about before we jump on the recording here, but brand marketing is becoming more and more such an essential part, not just the consumer experience, but the B2B experience, right? At the end end of the day, as marketers our jobs isn’t just to advertise or market, right? It’s to grow the business and the category sustainably. At least that’s what I see. My purpose as a marketing leader is not just to advertise or market, but rather to grow the business and the category. And that’s something that I talk with my teams about all the time. And so I think a lot of the strategies, a lot of the practices, a lot of lot of the tactics in terms of how we engage our audience and get them excited about what we’re doing and then ultimately wanting to be a part of it it, it’s the same it’s a different product or a different service or it’s a different persona. But at the end of the day, it’s still the same thing for us. It’s just the entire world may know about Nike, but they don’t know about BlueJeans. But we could be using the same tactics. It’s all the same practice, it’s just different challenges, which is, I think, what makes it so much more exciting after having spent so many years on the consumer side.
Fiona – 00:04:59: Cool. Okay, so what do you want to press the reset button on?
Jordan – 00:05:04: Well, it should probably come as no surprise given what we’ve spoken about in the past couple of moments, but I think it’s how companies in B2B industries value Brand Marketing. I think that when it comes to Brand Marketing in the B2B space, results might be harder to quantify when compared with those marketing efforts that emphasize product performance. But underestimating the value of Brand Marketing is a major, a massive mistake that B2B brands can make right. Brand Marketing, it not only improves the brand, but other components as well, such as the Return on Marketing, Investment on Performance Marketing, Net Promoter Score, Customer Advocacy, even Employee Satisfaction. There was the study that I think the Boston Consulting Group did a couple of years ago. One of the things that they found in that study around B2B brand marketing was that nearly one quarter of B2B brands devote less than 20% of their marketing budget to brand. 20%. That’s such a missed opportunity. Companies that are more mature in terms of brand marketing are going to generate a higher return on investment on those efforts. But moreover, strong brand marketing capabilities actually reinforce performance marketing, which leads to better engagement overall. So I think the bottom line, when you ask me what I want to hit reset on, the bottom line is that B2B companies that under invest in brand marketing are literally selling themselves short. And I think that we need to go ahead and shift our perspective in terms of how and where we are investing in order to drive overall better performance of their business. And that starts with brand.
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Fiona – 00:06:41: So it’s interesting you bring this up because I was having this exact discussion with a client just last week actually around, I guess to the next question is around. How do you position that into a C-suite where they can understand very clearly the net effect of a performance marketing initiative but can’t quite see the connection between that halo effect of long term impact of brand marketing against short term performance goal and don’t really understand that relationship? So how do you articulate that to a C-suite of the importance of brand marketing?
Jordan – 00:07:17: Yeah, it’s all about creating alignment, right? And I think what that starts with as marketing leadership is, and I said this before, we have to look beyond the traditional role of marketing leadership and become architects of growth for the companies that we serve. My purpose as a marketing leader or the purpose of a CMO is not to advertise or market, but rather to grow the business and the category sustainably. Being an impactful leader and an effective partner is about working through others and building advocacy among our C-suite colleagues. So you ask how we create alignment. I think it’s really it’s three factors. I think first, it’s about collaboration. We absolutely must be taking a collaborative outlook to the work that we do and the organizations that we lead. The fundamentals of marketing are expanding so fast, Fiona, and so far that successful marketing leaders are those who manage change by fostering a collective sense of enterprise and collaboration which is pinned together by trust carried across the entire company. Collaboration can really be a powerful motivator when it’s weak or falls prey to competing interests, we risk achieving little beyond adding to the chaos. So I think it’s paramount that you have to have an appetite for embedding, cross functional advocacy and collaboration into your cultural fabric instead of just doing what we’ve always been told. I think the second thing is we got to be good at removing the noise. Simply put, we got to simplify what matters to the business and to the rest of the C-suite. You got to be clear to everyone about what will make a difference to your business performance. You got to stay focused on how marketing is contributing to the overall business goals and communicate the value to the rest of the company. And finally, we can’t be speaking marketer, right? I think that as marketers, whether you’re on the creative side, the performance side, the demand gen side, we have to abandon any marketing lingo in favor of business lingo. You got to be able to talk fluently at the C-Suite level about how a particular strategy is going to affect financial outcomes. You have to be a tenacious driver of growth, but you also have to understand that growth has to be real and sustainable. The strategies that you drive are going to be humanized and the metrics more holistic. And if you’re really committed to creating a brand and a business with a purpose that’s going to be both culturally as well as socially impactful, then inextricably you have to be committed to real growth and let your C-suite colleagues see that, plain and simple.
Fiona – 00:09:49: And presumably as well John, one of the things we are always preaching to our clients is you’ve also got to be brutal with yourself about the stuff that’s not working. Having that test and learn culture is actually pretty critical to go we tried this and here’s the stats didn’t work, we’re going to stop doing it, but actually this stuff really is working, so let’s keep investing. However, that’s kind of what gets a lot of people into that performance marketing loop, right? Where I’ll just keep putting the money where it’s working and I will forget about the long term impact of brand. So that’s quite typical of a conversation you will get into with the CFO within most companies. How have you managed to have that conversation with the Financial C-suite at BlueJeans, Verizon? Like, how have you managed that conversation?
Jordan – 00:10:33: Yeah, I think it’s a tough one, right. I think that CMO-CFO relationship, it’s quite a dilemma, I think, for marketing leadership, especially as cost cuts start to loom, whether that was with a recession approaching or whatever it is that we’re in right now, or the pandemic and how that impacted things. I think as marketing leadership, we need to champion a thoughtful balance between selective, call it budget reductions and strategic investments. And so I think there are key themes when it comes to that marketing leadership, financial leadership that can help us see eye to eye. I would say it’s really probably four things. It’s about defining customer and business priorities to support growth, like you said, evaluating spending, right. And performance measurement by the different customer segments and the tactics that we’re using. I was actually having a conversation about that yesterday with our marketing and business leadership about how certain tactics work really well for different segments, different products, but may not necessarily drive growth or at least revenue now growth on others. So I think that’s where that segmentation of not just your product portfolio or your service portfolio, but the audience that you’re speaking to and how you’re going to marry product and service with persona are critical. And so I think with that, it’s identifying a list of marketing tactics or activities that produce both the lowest and the highest ROI, but also the profitability. And then I think it’s about making the business case for just continued innovation and developing new capabilities. I think that if we bring, especially the CFO along that journey and like we said before, it’s about collaboration, really being a partner to the rest of the C-suite or in this case, the CFO, I think whether you’re in a time of crisis or not, business is underperforming, or for that matter, overperform. If you stick to those four things, it can make for a really successful relationship. And you talk about building advocacy across the C-suite, that’s where it really starts for marketing. And I think if you’re able to create that, then you’re lined up for something that could be tremendously satisfying for your marketing organization as well as the entire business.
Fiona – 00:13:04: Yeah. I mean, if you get to that point, right, where you’ve positioned the marketing organization as the growth driver rather than the cost-center coloring in team, which is sometimes a leap in some organizations that makes a very hugely beneficial relationship where they see you as more the person they sit down and plan their year out with rather than here’s what I need you to do type relationship. I was going to ask you a little question about what about downwards within the team? Like, how do you trickle down those business level goals into meaningful marketing objectives to the people that are actually in the marketing team so they can align themselves to those goals?
Jordan – 00:13:43: Yeah, I think it’s very similar. Right. I think as marketing leadership, whether you’re the CMO or you’re a VP, it’s about setting the vision, right? You set the tone, you set the vision for what is expected of that marketing organization. We’re responsible for taking those overall business goals and saying, okay, this is the vision for how we’re going to get to that. But then it’s allowing the freedom, the independence of each of our individual contributors or the various organizations throughout marketing to identify and define the strategies that are going to help drive that vision and contribute to that overall success. But also giving them the accountability that if those strategies and in those tactics are not performing where they need to be, they have to answer for that. And they have to be able to provide a solution, or at least a recommended solution, in order to succeed. It seems so simple. It seems so elementary, right? But it really is true. I say this all the time when it comes to talking about building teams hired. My job as a marketing leader is to hire great people who know what they’re doing and get out of their way and then only step in when they need you to bridge a gap or to open up doors for them that are going to enable that are going to propel greater success, not just for them as contributors, but for the entire marketing organization, for the overall company. So you ask, how does it trickle down? It starts with setting the vision, but then giving the freedom and the encouragement across the rest of marketing organization to let them do what they believe is going to drive them or drive that success. And then coach them, be their biggest cheerleader, show them tough love when they need to, but always having their backs and letting them do what they believe that they need to do in order to succeed.
Fiona – 00:15:50: I think also like sharing the learnings, because one of the most fascinating things for me to watch with really good, high performing marketing teams is the ones that are testing and learning all the time, where it’s okay for something not to work as long as we learn something from it and move on from it. And that constant sort of feedback loop within the team of just be honest about, well, we tried this. We thought we’d give this a go with this segment didn’t fly. So we’ve changed tactics and tried these five different methods, and this is what actually ended up working for us. So that they’re constantly learning across the team that kind of knowledge trickle down is really important too.
Jordan – 00:16:25: Totally.
Fiona – 00:16:26: Yeah. Okay, so in terms of B2B marketing in the space now, where do you see it going over the next five years? Because it’s obviously rapidly changing to your point, and also the markets change globally right now in terms of everyone sort of feeling some effects of recession. What do you think is going to change in B2B marketing now and in the next five years?
Jordan – 00:16:47: Yeah, I think it’s a really exciting time to be in marketing in general. Right. I think we’re in this era where creativity, data and technology are quickly becoming the keystones of marketing culture. And we’re kind of in this golden age of creativity right now, or creativity within brand marketing. So we talk about five years down the road. I would say by the year 2028, what’s really exciting is most things are going to be frictionless, right. Everything is going to be engageable, everything will be purchasable. So I think we’re looking at a way of really helping people in their lives and understanding how those brands, especially in the B2B space, can be more embedded in their lives and becoming a part of that day to day and those people becoming more integrated into our brands and how we do brand marketing. Brands are experiences and that’s going to evolve even further in the B2B space over the next five years. In order to really answer all of our customers challenges, we’ll have to become much more, say, full service and recognize that we’re in an experienced economy, understand the value of commerce and how to do that well and provide these frictionless brand experiences not just for our customers, but for our people as well. And so I think there’s going to need to be this balance with human creativity and machine creativity. Right. There will have to be this mix of convergent thinking and divergent thinking that will feed into bigger B2B brand experiences. And those brands that are the most successful in doing that will be able to create a brand marketing strategy that invites the customer not just to be a recipient, but to be a giver as well. To go on that journey with that B2B company, not just the company, but the brand itself and become just as integral to that story. Being a recipient of the story as well as they will be part of the storytelling. And so that’s how I think it really evolves over the next five years or so, is we start to become much bigger experiences in order to really succeed in our respective industries.
Fiona – 00:19:04: I was going to ask you, obviously the Pandemic was quite the boon for people working in your space, specifically with everyone remote work over a period of time. How much has that also accelerated the feedback loop that you get on products? For instance, with obviously a lot more people using remote communication systems, you obviously get a lot more frequency of use from people now than you did, say, five years ago. And does that help to accelerate your product development within your business because you’re getting that feedback all the time or has it not really changed?
Jordan- 00:19:38: No, I think there’s obviously been a greater demand or there was certainly a greater demand for that, the start of the Pandemic. So three years ago at this time. Absolutely. I think one of the things that’s spectacular that we as a company, we as a brand have is the relationship with our customers and taking that feedback within our customer advisory boards and being able to create better product experiences across our entire portfolio. Has that usage grown? Yeah. And so I think with that, the feedback has grown. The feedback has evolved. It’s in an integral way in terms of how we do business. And I can’t speak for the product development organization, but one would suspect with that feedback that we’re getting that’s real time qualitative research, right? You can’t put a price tag on that, especially when you have several customers who are saying the same thing. You got to take that to heart and continue to enable that product to become more and more integral, not just how they do business, but being transformative, enabling them in how they do business and how their customers perceive them, and also how their employees perceive them. So, yeah, to answer your question, it always has been an important part and most certainly continues to be.
Fiona – 00:21:05: What attracted you to BlueJeans by Verizon?
Jordan – 00:21:07: Yeah, great question. Throughout my entire career, when I was the agency side, I was very fortunate in that I was either helping to build category leaders and transform them into cultural titans and take challenger brands and turn them into category disruptors. Right. I worked across a slew of verticals, whether that was energy, consumer, packaged goods, sports and entertainment, luxury goods. It was always turning them into titans and behemoths or turning them into disruptors. This was an opportunity to convert another challenger brand, but from the inside out, while staying close to a brand that I love being a part of for so many years. Right. You got to remember that BlueJeans was acquired by Verizon in the thick of the pandemic almost three years ago. So to have that opportunity to come in at a time of major business transformation and to help lead the transformation of the brand the way that we drive demand and grow our business and really leveraging both my Verizon marketing experience as well as my advertising and creative marketing experience. It was a really exciting challenge to have to step outside that traditional role of marketing and become an architect of growth through the different aspects of marketing that I’ve loved for so long and being impassioned by and having such a deep experience on, why wouldn’t I want that? And it’s been that ever since. This is a brand that is constantly evolving, constantly transforming. We’re extremely innovative in the products that we’re putting out there in the video collaboration space. So to be able to go ahead and take that product vision and have it influence our marketing strategy in a way that influences everything from how we talk about our brand, how are we having conversations with our customers, what are the experiences that we’re creating, literally the physical experiences at events. Right. Who are the other brands that we’re partnering with? Who are we sponsoring, what new spaces are we getting into through marketing? It was tremendously exciting and there was just I couldn’t say no to that. Like it was when I joined Verizon over eight years ago of where do I sign up and when do I begin? I hate to sound like a broken record, but it was the same thing with BlueJeans and it’s been that for almost the past two years now.
Fiona – 00:23:42: Awesome. I was going to ask you sort of generally, what would you give advice to young marketers going into the industry, particularly just in terms of other brand marketers, how they would approach the same sorts of challenges that you’re seeing today. And also, I guess, from a career perspective. What are some of the things to look out for in a role that would elevate their own experience?
Jordan – 00:24:05: Yeah, I would say don’t allow yourself to go into one box. Right. Just because you’re on the creative side doesn’t mean that you can’t go to the performance side. Just because you’re in demand generation doesn’t mean that you can’t go into sponsorships or lifecycle marketing or advertising. Right. I think that marketing as a whole, especially if you’re a part of the right brand, you will have so many opportunities to experience so many different aspects of the marketing cycle, right. Whether that’s strategically, executionally anything and everything in between for those young marketers that are coming into the business. Give yourself the opportunity, or rather, don’t say no to the opportunity to learning and experiencing different parts of the business. You do not want to silo yourself, right. You don’t want to turn around 30 years into your career and be like, gee, I really wish I had taken that shot in getting into content marketing, or gee, there was something that was really interesting about CRM that I never raised my hand and wanted to learn more about, because you start to silo yourself. You start to basically paint yourself into a corner and next thing you know, I mean, I’m years away from this, but you’re on the verge of retirement. You’ve only done that one thing your entire career. What a shame when you’ve had such a robust experience and learned so much and become really a well-rounded marketer and contribute so much more to the organizations that you serve beyond one area of subject matter expertise. So I would say it starts with that learn, raise your hand every day, ask questions, volunteer to be parts of different projects. It seems so simple and so basic. But I wish that when I had first graduated from university, somebody had said to me, hey, you don’t have to do this for the next six months. You can always come back to it, go off and check that out. You’re going to learn a lot more and you’re going to benefit from it so much more 15 years from now. Like I said, it seems simple, but it’s so true. And not enough young people in marketing really seize that opportunity when it’s presented to them.
Fiona – 00:26:20: Switch it up. I was going to ask you, has there been particular stages of your own career where you made that shift? At what stages have you had the biggest accelerators, where you shifted gear or shifted industry or shifted into a different type of market where it really had an impact?
Jordan – 00:26:35: Yeah, I would say it’s really been in the past four years for me. Right. I had been a Creative Marketer my entire career, but I remember having conversation with another marketing leader and she basically had said to me, do you want to look back 20 years from now and just have been that guy that made granted amazing, extremely impactful and memorable TV commercials, or do you want to do something bigger? It’s like, well, of course I want to do something bigger. And that conversation actually ended up being the catalyst for me to leave the comfort of something that I loved so much in creative marketing and go into product marketing, which allowed me to see more of the performance side of the business where I was accountable for several million dollars in revenue generation. And then having the opportunity to join BlueJeans where it was a more Senior role and being able to blend those experiences not just at Verizon, but from my prior career or that first part of my career, and bringing it all together, this amalgamation of creative brand performance growth and putting it all together. And not to say that I didn’t have real skin in the game before, but every morning I wake up and I look at my dashboards and it’s to see how the brand is performing as well as how the business is performing and then having to make decisions about what do we need to focus on today in order to be sustainable and in order to perpetuate further growth. That’s what I would say. It’s really been the past four years.
Fiona – 00:28:08: I think someone once said to me, if you’re not 20% terrified in your job, you’re stagnating.
Jordan – 00:28:15: Absolutely. Yeah.
Fiona – 00:28:16: I think that’s great advice for marketers coming through that maybe have a few of those self limiting beliefs about I can’t make the jump into something else or I’m not. Especially during the recession and a downturn where people start go, I’m going to stick with what I know, rather than take that next step and take a risk on something different. You’re obviously saying, give it a whirl.
Jordan – 00:28:38: Yeah, definitely.
Fiona – 00:28:40: Okay, I was just going to wrap it, Jordan, and ask you any last words of advice to people in the B2B brand space for things that they should be thinking about in the next sort of 12 to 18 months?
Jordan – 00:28:52: Yeah, I would say so. What’s the piece of advice I would give to other marketers in general? It’s don’t be afraid to have and maintain a test and learn mindset. Marketing experimentation, if done right, can become your brand superpower. Right. A unified, company wide approach to experimentation can actually generate sustained business growth. If you think of marketing experimentation kind of as a microscope that reveals new data and insights at a very deep level, it starts to complement the telescope of traditional marketing or traditional marketing research, which is generally broader and can help inform which theories or hypotheses to test. And once established at a large scale, a robust approach to experimentation and capability can actually enhance your marketing mix and bring your business closer to its customers. It’s really a recipe for both that higher marketing return on investment as well as better sales performance or stronger sales. Growth and it actually has to become a way of life in marketing. But it also has to be effective. Right. Effective experimentation, though, it requires a cultural change throughout the entire organization so that the benefits are actually sustained over time. And I think like any sort of cultural change, this kind of one, or rather this one, requires a commitment from senior leadership to evolve and change our own behavior. An example of that. Yeah, it pays to celebrate insights, whether the hypothesis is proven right or wrong. But running safe experimentation that confirms only what you already know, that brings no value. So if we as marketing leaders send clear signals we spoke earlier about giving our teams autonomy, and I think it’s the same thing here. So if we as senior leaders send clear signals to give our teams autonomy and support, that’s going to help instill a discipline of progress over perfection and remove the fear of failure. It’s kind of like feel the fear and do it anyway. It’s something that my father in law has said to me for years, feel the fear and do it anyway. What’s the worst that can happen? Right. It’s going to encourage a willingness to take more risks, granted, calculated ones, but that’s going to allow us to quickly learn and evolve and grow your business too. And that arsenal of marketing tactics that you leverage to help grow that business and engage your customers.
Fiona – 00:31:28: Yeah. Words to live by, to feel the fear and do it anyway. I like that.
Jordan – 00:31:33: Right.
Fiona – 00:31:33: I will ask you one last question, Jordan. Have you got any examples of where you’ve seen that working really well? Like test and learn in particular?
Jordan- 00:31:42: Oh, gosh, yeah, it’s so funny. I was actually talking with some of my team about this earlier morning. I’m going to cite an example that’s a little old, but it’s one that’s near and dear to my heart. When I was agency side, one of our clients was facing an issue where traditional TV advertising wasn’t necessarily something that was working, right. We were in a category that consumers were on autopilot when they went down the aisle of the grocery store looking for it. And it was something that when traditional TV commercial came on air, they either completely tuned out, walked out of the room, or went on autopilot there as well. So it wasn’t as much as of an issue with breakthrough or memorability or brand recall because that was something that the brand had established for years on its own. But it was TV advertising is an important part of our marketing mix. How do we just improve upon it? And so what we decided we were going to do is we were going to create a ten second mini commercial or pre-commercial that was going to run at the bottom of the screen in the final 10 seconds of a TV show before the program cut to a commercial break. No audio, just a little bit of funny, charming animation that embodied the brand at the time and we’re going to see how it goes. Long story short, it was wildly successful. It turned into another form of TV advertising for the brand. It won a slew of awards, including a media line at Con that year. And it really helped to drive business growth and so much so that it became another media tactic that other brands within the company portfolio would ultimately leverage. It was one of those things that it goes back to recognizing that there was an opportunity for the brand to evolve, right? Not necessarily in the message, the message was already successful. But the way in which we communicate that message, what it did was it helped to drive better transformation for the business. It was already a category titan, but it also became a disruptor in the mix as well, which was something that I had never seen or I still haven’t seen since then until that moment. It opened up new doors of marketing innovation for the entire company, not just that one brand. And it was a great opportunity for us as a creative agency because we were providing greater value to our clients business. It completely unsolicited. We recognized that there was a challenge, we brought them a solution and it created a deeper, more trusting relationship which opened up the doors of business opportunity for us and with that client moving down the road. So it was fantastic.
Fiona – 00:34:33: I mean, you could see it during the pandemic as well, where the brands that were really settled throughout that period were the ones that just adapted very quickly, going, oh, people’s behaviors have changed, their online media consumption has changed, the way they’re interacting with my brand has changed. So I need to adapt my tactics quickly and try new stuff where they’re almost like in Greenfield, right? They had no idea what was going to work in that environment because no one had ever been through that environment before. So it was a bit like I’m going to throw this out there and see if it works.
Jordan – 00:35:04: Totally.
Fiona – 00:35:05: And you could see the difference. Some of the brands that were going like this during the pandemic and the ones that just plateaued or went down because they couldn’t adapt their tactics. So it’s a really interesting kind of space to be in when there is a danger to not testing new stuff. Because if you keep doing the same thing and the market around you is changing, then obviously that tactic is going to stop working pretty quickly.
Jordan – 00:35:28: Right. Absolutely.
Fiona – 00:35:29: It’s basically in terms of analyzing the role marketing has in the business. Do you think that marketing drives growth across the industry? And if not, how can marketers become that driver of growth within their organization?
Jordan – 00:35:41: Yeah, I think marketing absolutely drives growth. We have to it’s not enough for marketers to just advertise or market. We absolutely must grow the business. As marketing leaders, we have to be architects of growth for the company. I guess the question then becomes, like you said, how do marketers become the driver of growth within their organization? And I think it’s really several things. Like I said before, the first thing is we have to remove the noise and simplify what matters. But then we have to find a narrative that unifies. And as much as it is the narrative of your marketing campaign, it’s the narrative of your organization that matters, if not even more so than the narrative of your brand campaign. So we have to be active, integrators across the organization to deliver a great experience to customers from the very first exposure to the last product touch. Marketers, or even more specifically CMOs have to be the ones defining the overarching narrative. It’s what will be a driving force behind maintaining performance under the most difficult or pressurized of time. And marketing has to touch the entire organization. Collaborating with different parts of the company that have different perspectives is what is going to create success. We have to be able to partner just as well with people in finance and human resources as we do with product development or with our agency partners. Impactful marketing organizations are led with an understanding that it’s the collective work that matters, not the sum of individual work. I think the other thing that helps to drive growth within their organization is being curious. Keep learning, take a test, and learn mindset. The rapid evolution of platforms that we have at our disposal right now is causing fragmentation and an increasingly complex customer journey. However, if we have this curious mindset, if we test and learn and scale new ways of marketing to understand how this proliferation of marketing channels works and how they all coexist, who’s using them and again, where we can serve growth, then I believe that marketers can become bigger drivers of growth not just within our companies, but within our industries as well.
Fiona – 00:37:54: And also one of the areas that I think marketing has a huge impact on the business is just educating the business on that change as well. Because you’re sort of at the front end of it and seeing the behavior change both in consumers and in the brands that you’re working with and how they’re consuming media, how they’re interacting with you as a brand is changing so rapidly now. For sure you guys have the most probably up to date information and intelligence on that too.
Jordan – 00:38:19: Yeah, definitely. And I think that’s we’re talking earlier about accountability and responsibility of our individual contributors. I think, like you just said, that just as much applies as an organization too, and what our accountability is to the overall company. If we’re aware of trends or if we’re seeing things happen in the marketplace, then we have a responsibility to our peers. We have an accountability to the company to help perpetuate growth in any way possible, and that starts with education. So it’s just as valuable and it’s just as important as the work that we’re doing and the perspectives that we take to the work that we do.
Fiona – 00:39:01: Yeah. Definitely does. Okay. I think that’s all we have time for today. Jordan, I really wanted to thank you so much for your time. It’s been absolutely and your insights have been, I’m sure, incredibly helpful to the people that are listening in on this.
Jordan – 00:39:15: Thank you.
