Q&A

Why is the Incite Marketing Summit recognized as 2020s meeting of the marketing elite?

I’m honored to be included in the Incite Marketing Summit, which brings together some of the most-respected marketing professionals to share knowledge and ideas.

What are your top three priorities for 2020? Detail each priority by explaining why it is important now more than ever.

For the remainder of 2020, we have three top priorities:

1. First – figuring out how to navigate the coronavirus situation while staying true to brand values and continuing to drive growth. That involves making sure we are engaging, supporting and inspiring customers – from existing players to new ones coming into the category.
2. Second – staying true to our commitment to artists, as we recognize this is a difficult time for musicians everywhere. Artists are central to the product we make.
3. Third – supporting the retail network. We depend on our dealers for our sustained online growth, especially when brick and mortar is challenged. Our goal is to help them connect, acquire and retain relationships with customers.

This meeting is a call to end inauthentic, impersonal marketing. How are you ensuring your team are delivering the most authentic, personalized content to your customers?

Over the last several years overseeing marketing at Fender, one of our hallmarks has been being as authentic as possible with the consumer. We do this by handing over the creative reigns to artists for campaign content and by showing bespoke craftsmanship of the product we make – from the factory to the hands of the artists who create the music. We are trying to be as human and in the moment as possible with our messaging. A prime example of that is our “Play Through” initiative, in which we gave 1 million people three months free access to Fender Play, our complete online learning app for guitar, bass and ukulele. There was no brand strategy other than to show goodwill in the only way we know how.

What does purpose-driven marketing mean to you? Detail how you are driving meaningful customer connections with your brand story and mission.

One of the things we’re motivate by is telling the stories of our artists. This all ties back to the brand mission of giving artists wings to fly and amplifying their voices in our content, new product introduction and signature model launches. We built Fender Play to address the biggest issue impacting the industry: abandonment. We learned early on that 90 percent of people who pick up guitar will quit within the first year or even 90 days. If we keep more players hooked, we can grow Fender’s business and the industry. It’s not just a commercial concern, but one that’s grounded in fostering creative expression and putting more music out into the world. That’s essential to our business model.

Brand trust is at an all-time low. How is this impacting your marketing strategy?

We are actually seeing more positive sentiment than ever from fans on our social channels. We believe that comes from widespread artist adoption across almost every genre and our commitment to remaining authentic in our storytelling. We’re here to serve players throughout their lifetime with exceptional tools, products and services that help them continue their journey. This was more recently demonstrated through our “Play Through” giveaway – a goodwill gesture consistent with who we are. Brand trust for Fender is definitely at an all-time high. We work hard to continually improve and retain the trust of players and artists that use Fender. It’s something that has to always be earned. We think about that every day in everything we do, because as an experience and engagement-based brand, we are used every night around the world by players 24/7.

Q&A

What makes Strategic Marketing USA the must-attend virtual forum? Why is this meeting a priority for you?

It’s no secret this year has been challenging in a myriad of ways. But times of struggle also provide opportunities for reflection, creativity, innovation and evolution. At AT&T, we’ve taken this time to think hard about what people really need and do everything we can to give it to them. We’ve spent a ton of energy getting agreement as a company on and taking action, towards the big and small things that matter to people and businesses. And we think we’ve done a pretty good job of supporting our customers through a really tough time – whether they are parents, educators, first responders, nurses or victims of natural disasters. But, we can always do better. It’s ingrained in the DNA of our company -- and in mine. So, the Strategic Marketing USA virtual forum is worth attending because it provides us a chance to see the world through other people’s eyes and learn from other brands to make sure we stay meaningful to those who depend on us every day.

This meeting is a call to end inauthentic, impersonal marketing. How are you ensuring your team are delivering the most authentic, personalized content to your customers?

It all comes down to deeply understanding what our customers want and need, and then making sure we work hard every-day to deliver those things. That means we must listen extremely well, own a problem when it occurs, show them that we appreciate them and constantly remind ourselves that they have a choice. And people are really smart. They know when a brand isn’t being honest or authentic; they see right through it and they tune you out. I know I do when brands do that to me. So, we work tirelessly to make sure we reflect the diverse marketplace, we deliver on what we promise, and we present ourselves in ways in which our customers can see themselves.  Look, we are a brand that’s all about connection. Human connection. We help make the most emotional, meaningful connections happen every day –  watching a funny video or your favorite show with friends, a quick text to the one you love, calling your mom because you just miss her, getting that virtual high-five from your work pals because you did something really good, and the list goes on and on and on.

Brand trust is at an all-time low. How is this impacting your marketing strategy?

I think this year was pivotal in helping us to share who we really are. AT&T-ers are all about serving others and taking care of their community. So, that’s a lot of what we spent time doing this year – because that’s where we’ve felt people needed us most.

We created a special reduced-priced offers on our FirstNet services for eligible  nurses and doctors and we collaborated with Some Good News to create content that showcased our dedication to these amazing frontline workers.

We created the Distance Learning and Family Connections Fund, a $10 million fund to give parents, students and teachers tools they need for at-home learning.

We helped school districts ramp up their technological needs during a period of extended remote teaching by matching donations up to $250,000 for special needs school projects on DonorsChoose.org. We also offered teachers 25% savings on a variety of wireless plans.

We provided extra paid, time-off to thousands of AT&T employees to make sure they could care for loved ones and gave bonuses to our frontline employees who worked tirelessly to keep our communities connected.

Q&A

What makes Strategic Marketing USA the must-attend virtual forum? Why is this meeting a priority for you?

This forum allows marketers to share key capabilities and insights – and that kind of best practice sharing is critical as all industries come out of the pandemic and reset how we respond to changing consumer demands and behaviors.

What content distribution channels are you expecting to grow most in the next 12 to 18 months?

Online through owned sites, third-party players (e.g., Tmall in China) and retailer sites were the strongest performing channels for our company in and through the pandemic. Fortunately, we had a strong position in each online channel and DTC is a company strategy. It will increasingly become important, and my job is measuring share performance in just this channel.

Is the CMO role outdated? If yes, how do you imagine the marketing department restructuring? If not, explain how this role needs to adapt.

The CMO role is not outdated, but is increasingly moving to a mindset of leveraging technology for engagement and measurement. At our company, the CMO role is called “Enterprise Marketing and Chief Data Officer” where data and analytics is as critical as providing marketing leadership.

What are the most effective metrics to measure ROI in 2020?

Marketing Mix Modeling is still highly relevant in 2020. But the approach has evolved. At Estée Lauder Companies, we employ a multi-stage approach where we measure the marketing impacts on the upper, middle and consumer funnel and tie the results together. Our approach allows us to measure marketing that’s designed

How is influencer marketing changing your social strategy?

Influencers are part of a larger earned media strategy. We are focused on driving word of mouth through press / PR and other publicity efforts as one component, and influencers as a second component. Influencers are considered as content creators, product collaborators, and in general, we want to engender support from them about our brands and products.

Q&A

What makes Strategic Marketing USA the must-attend virtual forum? Why is this meeting a priority for you?

Today’s marketers must innovate for the customer and add value to help them navigate the perfect storm of a global public health crisis, a global economic crisis, and a global shift in the world’s consciousness around racism. There’s never been a better time to listen in as leaders across industries share their learnings on tackling the challenges we’re all facing.

How has COVID-19 impacted your 2020 marketing plans and priorities?

Like every marketing organization, since March we’ve leaned into virtual events over physical, and evolved our virtual event strategy to create more value and community for attendees. More specific to SurveyMonkey, we’re seeing every leader, in every organization and country navigating challenges they’ve never faced before, with the result that feedback is suddenly mission-critical. We’ve focused on building and marketing new solutions that address these new use cases: the need to engage and support employees who are suddenly working remotely, for instance, or to monitor and track the incidence of COVID symptoms among populations.

This meeting is a call to end inauthentic, impersonal marketing. How are you ensuring your team are delivering the most authentic, personalized content to your customers?

It all starts by understanding how the customer’s industry is shifting amid the current dynamics and determining how we can best add value to them. If ever there was a time for marketers to listen to customer feedback and help, not sell, it’s 2020. If you’re still engaging in spray-and-pray marketing, that will come back to haunt you.

What does purpose-driven marketing mean to you?

To me, purpose-driven marketing is about making sure we walk the talk around our mission, vision and values, and show up accordingly both internally and externally. As an example, SurveyMonkey’s value ‘Stand for Equality’ states that ‘We champion diversity and welcome individuality.’ That led us to think about how our technology can be used to further diversity, equity and inclusion both at SurveyMonkey and well beyond, resulting in a set of racial equity resources to help every company sensitively navigate the issues with their own employees and even their suppliers.

How is marketing changing to meet heightened customer expectations?

This year every leader on the planet has had to work overtime to adjust to and anticipate the needs of key stakeholders. It starts with developing empathy for your customers, looking at the data to understand their needs and experience throughout your customer journey, and asking a lot of questions. There’s no faster path to enlightenment than asking. SurveyMonkey’s mission plays right into this: we enable organizations to ask the important questions, and turn that feedback into action.

Q&A

What makes Strategic Marketing USA the must-attend virtual forum? Why is this meeting a priority for you?

Gatherings like Strategic Marketing USA are important to attend because they provide customer-centric marketers with a holistic, cross-industry platform with which we can learn from, share with, and inspire each other. These gatherings eliminate the “industry vs. industry” barrier and allow leaders who share a core passion for creating authentic brand stories and customer connections to connect and exchange ideas. This enables us to examine marketing with a different lens and stay up to speed on what is happening in other industries.

What are your top three priorities for 2020? Detail each priority by explaining why it is important now more than ever.

1. Build an understanding of, and trust with, Alibaba.com amongst U.S. small and medium-sized business audiences, media, and influencers. We are focused on making Alibaba.com a critical ally of U.S. SMBs as they seek to grow on their own terms, and during this pandemic, we’ve become more essential than ever. By building a greater understanding of, and trust with, Alibaba.com, we are accelerating our mission -- to be an essential ally to small businesses.
2. Drive platform adoption among U.S. SMB sellers and buyers. com is committed to helping U.S. small-and medium-sized businesses access the $23.9 trillion global B2B ecommerce opportunity - which is six times greater than the B2C ecommerce market - enabling them to unlock new growth opportunities and stay competitive in the digital age. Driving platform adoption will help more businesses access this large global opportunity and more quickly recover from the economic disruption.
3. Drive customer success. Supporting small-and-medium-sized businesses is in the DNA of Alibaba.com. Nearly 20 years ago, Jack Ma and his friends had a vision for helping small-and-medium-sized businesses to do business anywhere and that vision is still at the core of work we do to this day. 

How has Covid-19 impacted your 2020 marketing plans and priorities? Outline any changes to budgeting, investment, branding, content, overall strategy, etc.

A number of plans shifted due to the impact of Covid-19 - our team went remote, we prioritized supporting our medical professionals but most importantly we saw a huge shift to digital. U.S. SMBs were rapidly going digital and going global amid the pandemic: there was a 70% increase in U.S. buyers joining the Alibaba.com platform early this year over the same time the previous year and overall transactions by U.S. businesses on Alibaba.com were up 120%. Digital became not just a good-to-have, but a must-have for survival so we pivoted our plans to best support U.S. SMBs through this rapid digitization.

We implemented new efforts and launched new products and services to help support SMBs and their growth and recovery. We are committed to providing small businesses with the knowledge, resources, and tips they need to navigate the challenges as a result of COVID-19.

• Alibaba.com has created a daily resource series that we call “B2B Today” to help our customers and all small businesses navigate the disruption to the economy, their businesses, and their families.
  • B2B Today was launched in January as B2B Tuesday, an awareness and educational initiative to spotlight, celebrate, and support B2B-focused U.S. small businesses, highlight their contributions to the U.S. economy, and help them grow, thrive, and capture the $23.9 Trillion global B2B ecommerce opportunity.
  • We quickly evolved B2B Tuesday to B2B Today once we realized SMBs needed resources and support more than ever.

In response to the crisis, we’ve also accelerated the transformation of the Alibaba.com platform with new products and services that help overcome some of the biggest challenges of B2B cross-border trade, including cash flow, cross-border logistics, and finding supply & demand.

• In June, we announced three new solutions to support SMBs as they digitize their business to manage through this global crisis, including:
  • Alibaba.com Freight to enable American SMBs to secure ocean and air shipping for their orders,
  • Alibaba.com Payment Terms to provide cash flow control, and
  • Alibaba.com Online Trade Shows USA to connect US manufacturers and wholesalers with business buyers in an engaging online format.

Overall, our vision hasn’t changed. We are dedicated to being the essential ally to SMBs as they navigate entrepreneurship, and the crisis has not changed that direction.

This meeting is a call to end inauthentic, impersonal marketing. How are you ensuring your team are delivering the most authentic, personalized content to your customers?

One of our key priorities is to build more awareness and trust for our brand so we realized early on to do so meant we needed to deliver authentic touchpoints to our business. As Head of Marketing, I spend a few hours a week on the phone with customers listening to their feedback, hearing their stories and working through ways we can better support and showcase them. The NY based team has implemented a corporate “Customer Hour” initiative where every employee, no matter the role or responsibility within our organization, must spend a number of hours each month with customers. Giving our customers a line of communication with key members of the Alibaba.com leadership team has been essential to our authenticity.

Additionally, since May, John Caplan, President, North America & Europe and Global CMO, Alibaba.com has been going live weekly for a half hour virtual series called Transformer Talks. Each week he interviews business leaders and luminaries about lessons they’ve learned along the way and the transformation in their lives and companies so that small business owners can gain inspiration and ideas for navigating and overcoming the current crisis. Guests have ranged from Tom Colicchio, celebrity chef and founder of Crafted Hospitality, to powerful female leaders like Soraya Darabi, founder of Trail Mix Ventures, and allow us to share industry-specific advice for our customers. The talks have given business advice as well as personal insights from guests about building resiliency, promoting teamwork (even virtually), and the importance of pivoting and developing scenarios for various situations. Overwhelmingly, our customers have received these livestreams positively. 

What does purpose-driven marketing mean to you? Detail how you are living and breathing your brand mission.

Purpose-driven marketing means getting in front of customers, driving meaningful interactions with them, and being an ally. At Alibaba.com, we recognize that small-and-medium-sized B2B businesses are the unsung heroes of the U.S. economy. On the marketing and brand end, we make sure that we champion and spotlight them. Rather than promoting how great Alibaba.com is, we promote how great the small businesses are and the success they are able to achieve with the help of Alibaba.com through initiatives like B2B Today.

As a brand with a relatively new presence in the U.S., Alibaba.com uses purpose-driven marketing to bring our mission to life. We do this by featuring real customer stories in our advertisements, social media and owned content, doing research to get into the mindset of our customers, and hosting virtual trade shows and chats to allow customers the opportunity to meet Alibaba.com experts and our partners to better access the demand, supply, tools, and services available on the platform. For Alibaba.com, the goal of marketing is not just to promote our brand, but it is to actively work to help small-and-medium sized businesses to fully understand the magnitude of the opportunity for global B2B ecommerce, how they can tap into it, and how they can succeed.

Q&A

What is your favorite part of working at eBay?

My favorite part of working at eBay is being part of a company with such a rich purpose. From our founding, eBay has existed to empower people and create economic opportunity for all. We are a meaningful brand, with a unique legacy, and as a marketer I am drawn to that. Our marketplace is vibrant -- enriched by a seller community that has an incredible sense of belonging, pride and fondness for eBay; buyers who come to eBay in search of something unique and are delighted when they find it; and employees who embody the same passion.

What strategies do you use as a digital marketing leader to aim a target that is always moving?

I am a data enthusiast! Our teams use data to predict where the target is moving to next. We rely heavily on CRM to support our detailed journeys and segmentation, develop predictive models to determine where performance should be on acquisition trends, and if we notice deviations or drops in certain customer segments, we remedy through targeted communications. Given this emphasis, we not only work closely with our Analytics partners, but also have Analytics team members within marketing.

What is the importance of customer feedback? How does it play a role in changing marketing approaches?

Everything we do is in service of our customers -- our buyers and sellers. Customer feedback is paramount and the North Star for all of our team’s efforts. The genesis of our payments initiative at eBay lies in improving the customer experience by removing friction and creating a singular seamless customer experience. We conduct product, market and user research including ethnographic studies before any new launch, whether it’s expanding to a new market or launching a new product feature. We are continuously listening to what our customers are saying  through ongoing surveys, seller communities and forums, learning, and iterating. We also recently launched a seller advocacy panel dedicated to our payments initiative where our marketing, product and engineering teams and our customers, have direct access to each other.

What changes have you observed in both, B2B and B2C sales on eBay in the last few years?

I can't comment on this leading up to our Q3 Earnings call later this month -- let’s connect after.

What are your major marketing and advertising tactics to drive more buyer traffic to the site?

In my role, I don’t directly drive buyer traffic to the site but rather focus on driving buyer awareness, education and adoption of new ways to pay on eBay. By managing the end-to-end payments process, we are streamlining the checkout process by providing our buyers with more choice and flexibility with new forms of payment like Apple Pay and Google Pay as well as locally relevant payment methods like Afterpay in Australia and PayBright in Canada.

How important is it to adopt a flexible payment system to engage and target your client base?

Payments are critical to the health of any marketplace. With eBay managing payments on our marketplace, we are streamlining and simplifying the experience for our sellers with one place to sell, get paid and manage their business. And by offering new payment methods, we are opening the door for new buyers worldwide to join our community. It’s really exciting to be a part of this transformational initiative for eBay.

How has the outbreak of Covid-19 affected the sales of your company?

I can't comment on this leading up to our Q3 Earnings call later this month -- let’s connect after that.

What is your mantra for successful marketing?

My mantra for successful marketing is to always have empathy for the customer. Put yourself in the customer’s shoes, now more than ever. Treat the customer with respect, maintain transparency in communications, and maintain a high say:do ratio.