How This Sr. Dir of Marketing Transforms Autonomy into Accountability: Insights on Diving Deep

OK, uh, couple, couple of points and, and, uh, and, uh, I'll try to make this somewhat concise. Um, first of all, you know, at a, at a smaller company, it's not that hard to, to get, uh, uh, to stay close to what's going on now. Now, and I've been. Big is

company? Oh, we're, we're 35 people. We're 35 folks. Now, at, at bigger companies, so that I've been at Coca-Cola, you've got your, uh, PNG, you've been at Clark's as well in that, in that case, um, uh, there are a couple of things that I like to do. First, I like to ensure that my team knows that they have autonomy, uh, especially, uh, you know, what I try to do is hire well and let them do their deal. But what I, what I wanna do to stay close to them. I first of all, the classic one on one meetings. So I had them bring everything that they're doing to me and in some cases, I've, I've got 4 reports right now. In some cases, depending on the level of capability, I'll have that every other week. I have a couple where I do it every week to ensure that I'm staying close. Uh, the second is, one of the things that I try to do is I, I give them two strikes effectively. If I see that, uh, something isn't going well, I'll try to course correct and let them, uh, uh, go from there. But if it isn't going well from that point, again, then I'm getting uh more deeply involved. Then I'm, I'm getting into the meetings and that that's a. Specific, uh, uh, uh, thing that I'm actually going through right now, uh, you know, I created an organization as an example, uh, to compensate for the fact that we don't have a research arm. We do a ton of research, we hire a consultant to do our research or to, uh, guide us through a lot of the technical components of our research, but we don't have a research arm in. Internally. That's an outage. So what I wanted to do was create a loosely, I call it loosely fitting because it's not on the org chart, but a group of, of, of second-level managers if you will, uh, leaders that are, are uh emerging in the company and I'm creating something called a COE just basically center of excellence around research and insights and We have 4 specific projects. They weren't going that well. And the main reason they weren't going that well, frankly, is because there was a little bit of rudderless leadership. The person that I put in charge to lead it just didn't have the skills to do so. I found that out after figuring out that, that things weren't moving uh in the way that they showed as fast as they showed with the clarity that it needs to have. So, I'm much more involved now in. In terms of uh being there for every meeting every week. Um, I'm staying silent but only, uh, uh, uh, you know, if things are, are, are being handled well, you know, I'll speak up and, and, and try to redirect things as they get off course. We have smart people, just not the leadership we need on it. So that's an example of, of, of, you know, kind of jumping in when I needed to and staying close.

No, no, so the center of excellence is a group of of people that I put together at this organization, think of me as the executive sponsor.

You bet, you bet. I can absolutely do that. So I, I wouldn't get too caught up with the, and I, it's funny you say that uh bureaucracy, uh, point, because I, I said it when I came up with the name. I said, you know, guys, this feels way bigger than, than it should be in terms of saying the center of excellence thing. But frankly, what I brought to the table was it was very similar to what I was saying. It's that when you look at a siloed organization like this, we need to break down the Chinese walls in between them so that we are more aligned on a messaging, creative, and strategy standpoint so that we all move this train in the same direction and the consumer sees that happening that way. But it also starts with being again consumer-focused and using consumer insights that are consistent across all of these groups. The problem is that wasn't happening. So you have all of these groups that are uh uh doing their own research and, and what you find is, again, we're one company, one Brand and in the United States, we can only, we can only market in the United States by law. So why do we have such disparate sets of points of view of how the consumer looks at the category and looks at the brand? We need to fix that. But the only way to do that is we have to have representation of all of these efforts from across the organization. And we don't again have a centralized research team that would be doing that, research insights and data team. So effectively, I needed to create what think of it like the United Nations uh for, for avocados from Mexico, uh, to, to, to have representatives from each group. You know, in order to ensure that we are uh uh creating learning plans, uh, and, uh, executing those plans more consistently from the ground level using consumer insights that are consistent. And that is the primary issue. We would find, you know, as the brand lead, I would find that the food service team is doing something completely um We'll say uh against what my consumer insights suggests the right thing to do. Uh, why are they doing that? Well, they're doing it because they have their own research that says maybe they should do X versus our research that says why. We're too small to have that problem. It's, it's actually quite ridiculous that we have that problem and so it's trying to fix for that. Got it.

That's, that's a very good question. So, uh, from a, from a data standpoint, it's actually soft, uh, I'd say soft targets and hard target. The soft target, uh, will be, uh, am I seeing um conversation, execution, and strategy across different parts of the organization that are not aligned? If I'm still seeing that, then I'm not being successful. If that is fixed, if that is something that I'm not seeing uh at all, hopefully, let alone as much as I used to or, or was, uh, then on the softer side, this thing's moving in the right direction. From um a harder, uh, uh, side, uh, you'll be able to see that from some of our results, uh, example. We asked the consumer to um to rate the level of recall for uh online ads. Uh, right now, our online social media posts, for example, you know, they are developed by different groups. I developed the, the post for brand messaging, for example, my digital team develops the post, uh, uh, for non-specific brand messaging. But the problem is they don't look alike. The consumer doesn't know that this is well, brand message versus something about health and wellness. So we need to create that consistency and that will show up when the consumer is more uh often rating us high. On the levels of recall when we ask these questions in ad track or when we ask these questions in qualitative studies as well. Um, so those, those are the primary things that I'm looking for in terms of ensuring that we're getting and achieving uh success in this space.

Oh, I'm looking to do this pretty quick. I, I, I think on the softer side I should see that, uh, you know, as soon as now, uh, meaning we're going into planning and by the end of planning, I'm going to see everyone's strategies as part of our process and I need to see some, some consistency more so than I have since we started the organization. On the other side, give me about a year at least, I'd say a year to 1 year and a half. Basically, that will give me 3 studies uh per hour timing, uh, to ask the consumer are they seeing that consistency show up uh in different areas in terms of different assets and media channels? OK.