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The New CCO podcast from Page tells stories that explore the evolution of the CCO. From culture change to digital transformation to corporate purpose, we focus on the issues that matter to today's communications leaders.
Page is the world’s premier membership organization for chief communications officers, PR agency CEOs and educators who seek to enrich the profession and improve corporate reputation management.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Back in the day, brand building was done primarily through advertising, and it was more or less limited to magazine's, newspapers, and the major network channels on television. In those days, just being present in those channels was a win, but with shifting consumer expectations of business and increasingly fragmented media landscape and audiences avoiding ads like the plague, there's a new paradigm emerging. In this episode, we're featuring a highly rated session from our 2023 Spring seminar, featuring bestselling author and futurist Mark Schaeffer. He dives deep into the new ways branding is shaping our relationships with companies and their products. So get ready to scale El Capitan in Yosemite and be hugged by a global hotel chain. This is the future of brand management. I'm Elliot Mizrahi, and this is the new cco.
Speaker 1 (00:51):
Rivet 360 has been working with Paige to bring you the new CCO for more than six years, and that goes way beyond just editing and production. They're true thought partners, helping us develop our show's, unique voice and identity, brainstorm ideas and tell well riveting stories. To me, that's what makes them and our show so special, their storytellers, first and foremost. And as communicators, I know we can all appreciate the value of a story well told. So if you're thinking about launching a podcast or you have one that needs some fresh ideas, visit rivet three sixty.com to book a free consultation.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
I'm going to talk about some of my ideas and observations about, uh, influence. And I wanna start with a story. And like every great business story, this one begins with soap. Not just any soap, but my favorite soap, uh, as a marketing geek. Uh, I just love this iconic brand. Ivory soap was the first soap that was ever cut into individual bars and wrapped and advertised by Proctor and Gamble, one of my favorite companies. And they advertised this soap so much in the 1960s during midday television. That's how we got the term soap opera. Soap opera, that's right. This was the only soap my mother used on my precious little bum at bath time. Ethan, was I allowed to use that bum word? Yeah. Okay. Well, uh, that wasn't in the contracts, so, uh, and they did such an amazing job that in the 1960s, ivory soap had about 50% market share.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
A few years ago I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal, how many iconic brands, including Ivory that had been built with advertising, were in a free fall. In fact, ivory that had a 50% market share in the sixties was now below 3%. And I thought, how could this happen? Proctor and Gamble, they're the greatest marketing company. They have the best agencies. You know, we need soap. It's, it's not being replaced by chat G p T or something yet, right? We need, we need, so what's going on? Well, I went over to a friend's house for dinner and I kind of got at least part of the answer. I walked in their bathroom, uh, had a lovely dinner, and I saw this soap from a local soap company, uh, cucumber and Grit soap sounds delicious. And, uh, so I went out to the living room and I talked to the lady who made me dinner. I said, I have a question for you. Can you come into the bathroom with me for a second? , she obliged me. I pointed at the soap. I said, I wanna know why you bought this soap. Proctor and Gamble has been advertising to you for your whole life. Why didn't you buy Ivory or Dial or Irish Spring? Why do you love this brand? She thought for a moment and she said, I don't know if I love this brand. What I love, the hands that made it.
Speaker 2 (04:16):
She went on to tell me about the family that makes this soap, how they're involved in the community. They teach entrepreneurship classes at the local Maker Movement Summit, how they're trying to create a sustainable company. They treat their employees so well, and that means so much to this young woman who was talking to me. She said, they buy all their ingredients from local companies, and she was so enthusiastic talking about this company. It made me wanna go buy the soap, which I did. She said, you mentioned advertising. She said, I, I can't remember the last time I saw an ad. She said, I watch TV all the time, but I'm watching the Mandalorian and I'm watching Amazon Prime and I don't see ads and I listen to music all day long, but I listen to Spotify. I know I don't hear any ads, and I listen to audio books and I don't hear ads.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
She said, you know, now that you mentioned it, I'd say in the last five years, my consumption of advertising is probably down 95%. Now, this is more than just a little fun story. This is really sort of a symbol of what's going on in the bigger world when it comes to influence and how influence is being carried out in the world. This was a remarkable study done by McKinsey. Over a period of years, they dissected more than 200,000 customer journeys to see how were people making decisions. And they found that two thirds of our influence, two thou thirds of our marketing is happening without us. People are talking to each other. They're posting on social media, it's coming through testimonies, it's coming through reviews, it's even coming through these crazy people we call influencers. The the parasocial relationship was mentioned earlier today, and that's really what these influencer relationships are all about.
Speaker 2 (06:23):
Now, every book I write and every speech I give, I'm very careful. I always say, I am not going to tell you what to do, cuz I honor the experience and the wisdom in this room. But what I wanna do today is sort of expand the ideas of how influence is really occurring in the world, because I think this is significant. I think this, this really hints at a new mindset we need to adopt to be successful in the world today. When I was a young guy growing up in business, this was 90 10. The other way, if you wanted to learn about our product and our company and our services, you had no choice. You had to interact with our advertising, with our marketing messaging, with our corporate communications. Today, a brand isn't really what we tell people. It's what people are telling each other.
Speaker 2 (07:20):
And I think the successful mindset is how do we earn our way in into the, this two thirds, the panel discussion, talked about the importance of story. I think this is what this is all about. How do we create something so authentic, so interesting, so relevant, so unmissable that we earn our way into these, uh, conversations. And I think this is an important idea cuz I could argue by 2030, this is gonna be 90 10. The other way, I really think that we need to, uh, acknowledge what's going on here. What I thought I would do is dissect the soap story as a little case study and pull out three ideas about influence in our world and sort of tease that and, and flesh that out a little bit more. Number one, the personal brand is the brand. Uh, like many of you, somewhere, I've got a PowerPoint slide in my computer with a sales funnel on it.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
There wasn't really any sales funnel in this, you know, this young woman telling me about her enthusiastic embrace of the soap, sh the for, for her it was the people at this company. There wasn't any advertising, there wasn't any marketing. She was telling me a story because of her love of the people at the company. The personal brand was the brand. Another important point, the customer is the marketer. That's who we believe. We may not believe what we see in, uh, in the, in corporate advertising, but we do believe each other. And then finally, historically, branding, great branding is about creating that emotional connection between what you do and your customers, your audience or your fans. And often that's come through product attributes. You might buy a soap because it's lemon fresh or because it cleans better or even because it's less expensive. This young lady didn't buy that soap for any of those reasons.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
In fact, she spent 10 times more for that soap than a bar of ivory because her emotional connection was to the hands that made it. And that's especially true with the young generation coming up today. They wanna know who are these people at this company? What do they do? What do they believe in? What do they stand for? How do they treat the environment? How do they treat their employees? Increasingly, the emotional connection is moving toward humans. So let's break each of these down and we'll flesh this out a little bit more. Number one, the personal brand is the brand. Uh, I teach at, uh, at Rutgers University. I've taught there for 12 years, but I live in Knoxville, so I need to stay at a hotel when I go to Rutgers. Now, when it comes to hotels, I am a shop around kind of guy.
Speaker 2 (10:28):
I don't care where I stay as long as, as close to where I'm going to speak, except when I go to New Brunswick, I always stay at the Hyatt because of her. This is Terry. She works at the front desk and she knows me. And when I come through the door, she says, hello, Mr. Schafer. And a few years ago we had a blizzard in New Jersey, and if you're from this area, you know, there's rivers of slush in the roads. It's really quite remarkable. My flight had been delayed five hours. I missed my meetings, I missed my meals, and I walked through the door of the Hyatt as an exhausted Popsicle. When I got to the room, back to the room that night, I had a cheese and fruit plate and a RAF of wine and a personal note from Terry saying, Mr. Schaeffer, I hope your day goes better.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
And the next morning when a checked out, Terry came out from behind the registration desk and she hugged me goodbye. Now, I don't know if that's politically correct, , but I, I liked it. I liked it, and I was so moved by the singular act of humanity. I wrote a blog post about it. I said, how I was hugged by a brand, literally thing went viral. Hyatt loved it. Put it on the front page of their website. Terry gets a call at home, it's her day off. He said, Terry, you need to come to work today and you need to dress up. She comes to work and there is the president of Hyatt to congratulate her for hugging me. Three months later, Terry is named Employee of the Year.
Speaker 2 (12:24):
And, uh, I didn't even get a free breakfast outta the deal, which you know, is a, you know, but that's a story for another day. So the the idea here is that she is the brand. There is no amount of advertising or marketing communications that could make me stay at this Hyatt. Every single time I go to New Brunswick, I just wouldn't care. I stay there because of her. And I think somewhere we know that people aren't listening to us and trusting us as, you know, our, these corporate beacons, that they don't trust us like they used to. I know we've got people from Edelman here. I love the Edelman Trust Barometer. I read it every year, right? And what it has shown in most countries, trust in businesses and brands and advertising has declined for more than a decade. But who do we trust?
Speaker 2 (13:17):
We trust each other. We trust company leaders, technical experts, founders. We trust our friends, our family, our neighbors, our our. So one idea is that I think the personal brand is becoming more and more important. And I think a great opportunity is to help our executives become known. Now, when I say no, it's not famous, it's not, you know, like this. Don't try this at home. By the way, you did not sign the waiver. This is very difficult. When I talk about known, I mean having the presence, the authority, and reputation to get your job done. All all of us, everyone in this room has a personal brand. It's what people think about you. What what becoming known is and, and really creating your personal brand in a systematic and scientific and methodical way is to amplify you at your best. I think this is a huge opportunity that we need to think about as much of our traditional communications and marketing and advertising, as much of it doesn't work like it used to.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
Should we start thinking about redeploying our assets and our budgets to support executives that can be known in our communities, with our employees, with our stakeholders, with our uh, customers. I think it's a huge opportunity. Let's move on to number two. The customer is the marketer. Anybody recognize this guy? He was in a movie called Free Solo a few years ago. Raise your hand if you, um, about 25%. This is Alex Honnold. In a moment, I'm gonna show you a two minute video that I think is one of the best pieces of corporate communications I've seen in the last 10 years. There are only two sentences at the beginning. The voice you'll hear is Alex, we see him here. If you look closely, he is climbing the north face of Al Capitan in Yosemite National Park with no safety equipment. He's not wearing a hat.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
He's not, he doesn't have a rope. Now, the people in this sport said this was the greatest achievement in the history of rock climbing. This was the moon landing of rock climbing for a mere mortal like me. You know, I just, I'm thinking like, how did he explain this to his mother? Because, and I don't wanna pigeonhole people, but I mean, it just seems a little crazy right now. It turns out that is the life they live, that they do not live a traditional life. They don't have traditional jobs and they feel I very isolated and very alone. North Face knew this few years ago, north Face was facing a problem. The the age of their customers. They were, they were aging out. The average age of a North Face customer was 45. They needed to reconnect with this youth customer, with this youthful, uh, especially in extreme sports. So they sponsored this and they created this video, and I think it's one of the most extraordinary videos I've seen.
Speaker 3 (16:50):
It is weird having tons of people questioning your motivations, questioning your your sanity.
Speaker 4 (16:57):
Miles to no
Speaker 1 (16:58):
Way. At this point, mark shows a North Face video that feels more like a mashup of extreme sports clips than an ad for an apparel company. The video isn't doing the usual thing, glorifying the people in the video for their adventures. Instead, it focuses on just how grueling, dangerous, and still exhilarating That lifestyle is from frostbitten hands to malfunctioning equipment
Speaker 4 (17:22):
To reach
Speaker 1 (17:23):
To the breathtaking view from the mountaintop. This video highlighted the grit, tenacity, and sometimes the questionable sanity of these people. A group with whom North Faces is able to build more than a relationship. It's building a community.
Speaker 4 (17:41):
Miles nowhere.
Speaker 2 (17:43):
Pretty crazy, huh? So this was posted as a video on YouTube. Uh, you can see here it's been viewed about 8 million times. 7 million of those views have been me because I just love this so much. I, and I, I think if you think about really connecting to the world today, there's a lot of lessons we can, we can learn from this. And one of them is what got my attention is one of the first comments that was posted under this video. Wow. We know that we're in a streaming economy. People are paying lots and lots of money for Spotify and, you know, Disney Plus and all these streaming to, to get away from a lot of the advertising. And here is the universe kind of saying that's how you do it. So what made this great? Number one, I think it's interesting. They made the customer the hero.
Speaker 2 (18:47):
This is one of the things that disappoints me about a lot of marketing and communication consulting today. I hear this a lot where you say, okay, our strategy begins with our why. I like Simon Sinek, but I don't really like this part, right? Uh, it, our story begins with our why. It begins with the narrative. What is the arc of our story? And here is the truth. Nobody cares. They care about their narrative. They care about their why. And that's, I think what made this beautiful, and this is an essential idea, I think as we try to connect with our audiences today. Number two, we already talked about this, the customer is the marketer. I'm such a marketing geek. I always like play these mind games like I'm imagining North Face, sitting in the office with their advertising agency. And North Face is saying, oh yeah, we want people to scream in agony.
Speaker 2 (19:47):
We want them to bleed. And most important, we wanna see them crying in a ho in a hospital room. No one can tell this story better than the customers. And that's what made this so authentic, so real and so believable. Now, there's one other point that I think is very significant. What were were they doing with these negative words? They're taking these negative words like obsessed and flipping them over to devoted. It hints at a big idea in our culture today. It was already hinted at a few times earlier in other sessions. What North Face is saying here is, you know, we, we know you think you're not in the mainstream, but you are. Okay, you belong, and specifically you belong to us. And this leads us into the third big idea I want to talk about is this opportunity we have to help people belong.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
Why this is the time, why this is the moment to be thinking about this as a marketing communication strategy. Uh, this, uh, I'm so grateful for the Page Society to offer my Marketing Rebellion book. Many of the ideas I'm talking about today are in this book. This is a new book I came out with a few weeks ago, belonging to the Brand. And it really hits at this idea of how we're building a connection to companies and brands through this emotional connection instead of product attributes. One of the things that spurred me to write this book a few years ago, I saw a headline in the New York Times that said, the loneliest generation is talking about our children, is talking about our teenagers, the, the record levels of loneliness and isolation and depression. I was talking to, uh, uh, a friend of mine and she said, uh, my daughter is just so isolated and lonely and depressed right now.
Speaker 2 (22:07):
She spent the last year and a half year and a half of her college experience online studying at home and she just got a remote job. And this critical part of her life, the last two and a half years of her life has met moving from one room to another. She's so lonely, she's so isolated. I don't know about you, but I'm seeing this in the news all the time. I thought it was really significant to see how these ideas about belonging and community are starting to sneak into corporate communications and corporate culture. During March Madness last year, uh, Powerade had a whole campaign called Pause. Now Powerade is about power and about doing great at sports. And their spokesperson was Simone Biles. And they said, it's time to stop. It's time to hold on is try to connect in a new way. One of the things I talk about in this, in this new book is thinking about social media as the beginning of a process of the beginning of a process of emo an emotional continuum of a new way to connect with our consumers.
Speaker 2 (23:28):
The beauty of social media is that it allows us to reach almost anybody. People that we might not normally have an opportunity to connect with. But from an emotional standpoint, it's a weak relational connection. You know, I don't know about you, but when I post something on social media, sometimes it feels like throwing a message in a bottle out into the ocean saying, I hope this does something. Now, the beginning of the process, the opportunity is how do we take these connections on social media and bring them into our company? How do we get them to opt in to our communications? How do we get them to subscribe to a blog, a podcast, a video series, an Instagram account? Because that takes us to a new level of emotional connection. What's happening is, in a virtual way, our customers are raising their hand saying, I believe in you.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
I like you. It's okay for you to communicate to me. And it raises this emotional connection to a whole new level. It's reliable reach. Unfortunately, this is where most companies stop. They're not taking these relationships to the most profound emotional connection that happens in community. Now, community isn't new, but 70% of brand communities today are dedicated to, to customer service. You're having problem with our software. Oh, go into our community. Someone there will help us. That's perfectly fine, but we're missing the whole opportunity of brand connection and emotional connection that is unique to community. Now, a lot of people confuse audience with community and there's a big difference. An audience is one way. I have a blog, I have a podcast. If the blog goes away, the audience goes away. There are three defining elements of a community versus an audience. Number one, there's communion.
Speaker 2 (25:44):
People in my au in my audience of my blog, they don't know each other in a community, people know each other. They become friends, they collaborate, they co-create. You're creating a new layer of emotional switching costs for your brand. They're not gonna leave you cuz if they leave you, they they, they're leaving their friends in the community. They belong to the brand. The second big idea that's different is purpose. And this is different than a mission statement or a marketing point of differentiation. A marketing point of differentiation might be, we have the biggest selection of used automobiles in the tri-state area. That's great if I wanna buy a car. But that's not a reason to gather. So a key element of creating an effective community is finding something about your purpose as a company that intersects the purpose of your customers. Patagonia is one that's easy to understand, right?
Speaker 2 (26:52):
And I mean when you think about Patagonia, you know what they stand for. I have a very good friend who says, I will only buy Patagonia even though it's more expensive. It's not as maybe good looking as some of the other brands, but I believe in them. I belong to this brand. What can you do as a company or an organization that's bigger? How can you have a bigger impact, a more profound, uh, result in this world if you bring your customers along with you to help achieve it? That's a good way to start thinking about this intersection of purpose. Then the final thing that's different is that the, the the, the culture of the community flows. There's a progression and that's one of the power, the powers of community is that it's connecting you to what's relevant. So as the world changes, the conversations in the community change as well, it's a progression.
Speaker 2 (27:56):
Now there are, I talk about my book, three big mega trends that taught that really define why this is the time for community. We've already talked about two of these. Marketing doesn't work like it used to. We've got this mental health crisis around the globe. The last one is new technology. These are some ideas you've probably heard about. Web three tokenized communities, NFTs, metaverse. I don't think there's any real good definition for for web three, but the idea is that millions of dollars are being spent on new ways to help people connect. And by the way, gen Z is surging into these places and they're invisible. So we need to be aware of this for a number of reasons here. This is in my own community. We meet in the Metaverse and we have people from all over the world and the first thing we do is we dance.
Speaker 2 (28:51):
That's the back of me right there and it looks like there's gold bars over my head that's actually butter cuz I'm churning butter. That was something that I just learned. And if you look very carefully, people's arms are going through other people's bodies. That's perfectly okay. We're learning how to move now. In our last event, we got into a fake hot tub. This is a, this is a fake hot tub in my fake penthouse, which I still haven't explained to my wife why this is on my credit card. But we had people from Ireland and Asia and Australia and the UK gathering in this hot tub to talk and to laugh, and you got a beautiful fake sun going over the fake, you know, snowcap mountains. And this was so sublime and so beautiful. People took pictures of this and posted it all over the internet to, and, and the feedback was, I feel like I'm missing out. Mark, how do I join this community? My friends that is entering the two thirds through the advocacy of community. Community, I believe is the ultimate connection, meaning marketing, communication. It's the future of community because this is the only type of marketing people will actually love, embrace. This is marketing that can also heal. Thank you, my friends, for listening to me. We'll take some questions.
Speaker 1 (30:25):
That's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed today's episode of the new cco, be sure to check out our latest episodes and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, leave us a rating and a review. We want to hear what you think so that we can keep making this podcast more interesting and valuable to you. To find out more about what's happening at Page, please visit us@page.org. Special thanks to Rivet 360, our podcast partner. Without who support, we simply would not be able to bring this podcast to you. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you next time on the new cco.