Joe Tripodi | Lessons Learned From a Storied Marketing Career | Former CMO Coca-Cola, Mastercard

0:00The CMO Confidential Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit IHearEverything.com. Welcome to CMO Confidential, the podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions, and choices that go with being the head of marketing. Hosted by five-time CMO Mike Linton. Welcome, marketers, advertisers, and those who love them, the Chief Marketing Officer Confidential. CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions, and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite.

0:55I'm Mike Linton, the former Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance, and Ancestry.com. I'm here today with my guest, Joe Tripodi. Today's topic, lessons learned over a storied, and I do mean storied, marketing career. Now, Joe has been the CMO for some great companies. I'm going to take a really deep breath and read them off. Subway, Allstate, Coca-Cola, the Bank of New York, MasterCard, and Seagrams. He also has significant board experience, having served on the boards of Voya Financial, PlayFight Sports, and Zeus Fire and Protection. Full disclosure, I have known Joe since we met at the first meeting of the Marketing 50 in, I hesitate to say this year, 2004.

1:43I thought it would be great to pick Joe's brain on several marketing topics and hear his advice for those looking to advance their career. Welcome, Joe. Thank you, Mike. And I say we've come a long way, baby. You know that? Peace perfectly out. Still kicking, too, while we're at it. I'm just saying. So it's great to see you. And let's just start. The most important lessons you learned during your career. You were at big brands, big budgets, a bunch of different industries. What are some lessons, constant lessons or constants you would share with our listeners? Yeah, I think, well, one that's actually a little sad is once you no longer have those big budgets, no one knows you anymore.

2:26I know. It's like, who are these two guys talking on this podcast? You're everyone's friend. but don't take it personally. I think what I found my number one lesson, it's all about teamwork. And, you know, if you think it's going to, if you think you're going in as a savior and you have that mindset, that's not the right approach. It's all has to be how you work together as a team. It's also very critical in my experience, understand the operational side of the business, not just the marketing. I was fortunate at Coke to be chief marketing and commercial officer.

3:00So all those kinds of things. Uh, you know, at all state we had, uh, in the marketing group, we also had a customer experience group, which was great, uh, to understand that. And of course at subway, I also, not in addition to marketing had a food product and safety and food safety, which was kind of an important thing in a, in a QSR business. So, you know, those were kind of some of the lessons I would say. Um, and also, you know, uh, I think advertising just cannot solve all business problems. And, you know, when you, when you get into some of these jobs and let's say the prior CMO has exited and you come in and, and they think you're the savior and they think maybe naively, even at a board level, that an ad campaign is going to change the trajectory of their business.

3:46That's, that's just not going to be the case. It may, we, you know, it may well be that you have a, a pricing problem, a distribution problem, a quality problem, a lack of innovation problem, all those things contribute to the success or the failure of a brand. And, you know, getting people's head around that, including your ball, your ball, the CEO, including the senior management team, because frequently, you know, they think of marketing as advertising. And that's been certainly something I've seen in my career. And you have to correct that. And you've got to say, well, it's a lot, you know, advertising is one part of the pie, but there are all these other dimensions of this job.

4:21So those are some of the, I would say, the key lessons that I've picked up over the years. I think that is dead on, spot on. And I will say personally, I never have fired the agency when I showed up. Because that is a signal to the company that you're going to solve all the problems with a new agency and some new creative. When usually, if you look at the ops, yeah, sometimes it's the marketing, but usually it's not the marketing that's causing the company to not win. And if you don't understand those financials and how the company really works, you will actually make a promise you can't keep.

4:55Oh, Mike, you're a thousand percent right. And I've always felt the same thing. You know, now I've had some tough conversations with agencies when I've got to and I said, listen, we need better. You know, you made this brand look small. It needs to feel bigger, you know. But at the end of the day, you know, you have to figure out how do you work with them to improve, I suppose to say. And you're so right. You set yourself up. Well, the agency came in, they covered a new campaign, but our business didn't change. What happened? So that is something that I think, particularly as a new CMO coming in, you don't get in that trap, because if you're in that trap, you've got a big problem.

5:29Totally agree. So when you change a lot of industries, what's the biggest difference when you change industries? Well, I always say a widget's a widget's a widget. So, you know, I think the principles of consumer engagement and marketing are the same regardless of what you're selling, in my view. And that, you know, that's going to be, you know, ruthlessly focused on the customer, you know, on innovation, on teamwork, on the ability to share wisdom, learning, knowledge out around your company as much as possible globally. You know, you can't have people operating in silos. You've got to come in as CMO and say, listen, we're going to work together kind of in a network model where we share the good, the bad and the ugly more aggressively.

6:11That will help us. So I would say, you know, it's it's from my perspective, it's always been how do you get people on the team in the boat with you and not just the people working for you? Also, the senior leadership team that you're working with, you know, and your CEO, because you've got to manage those expectations very, very carefully. Otherwise, they think there's going to be magic and instant change is going to occur. And frequently, that's not the case. So I've been very fortunate to work with a lot of different CEOs and all of them had a different style, right? But I think it's critical that when you get in there, you kind of take them down the path of here's how things are going to evolve and change.

6:49So there isn't some unrealistic expectation on the front end. Hey, so you've had a lot of successes. and I'm sure there's a bunch of disappointments. You want to share a story or two, or would you share a story or two and what you learned from that setback? Yeah, I've got a lot of failures I can talk to. And number one was, I woke up one day, I was in the office at MasterCard and this kind of vision came to me that we would rebrand MasterCard as the future of money. And this was basically in the early 1990s when chip cards were just starting to get into the consumer's hands, even though there was no functionality to chip cards.

7:33So we went out and launched this campaign, MasterCard, the future of money. What I did realize at the time, quite frankly, was that the person, the customer of MasterCard, if you looked at pictorial imagery techniques, the picture that kind of really, really kind of was the essence of what a MasterCard cardholder was, was a small forge in middle America with a little soft light on. It wasn't the future of money. So I was trying to leap to something that was out of the DNA of the brand, you know, which I would say is also probably some of the lesson from Bud Light. You know, probably don't try to go someplace too aggressively.

8:12You've got to kind of wean your customer off of that. That would be one. I would say another thing that I learned was kind of waiting for perfection before launching a product. We had, I thought, a very good business card product, a fleet card product, a MasterCard, and we waited to get it perfect. Vita came in with a less functional product, and they captured the marketplace. Another one is Martel Cognac when I was at Seagram. You know, fun brand, but we were targeting kind of old gentlemen's clubs when really the market was African-American in bars, you know. And so we said, geez, we're missing who the overall customer is here.

8:51And so we pivoted at that point. And then I would say, don't underestimate, particularly when you're in kind of a multi-market or transnational alliance with the company, don't underestimate the politics of branding. I can tell you that the battles I had in Europe with Europeans who owned Eurocard, and they were a partner with MasterCard. And I was trying to say, wait a minute, your consumer wants a global product. They don't want to be European. They want to be global. And those were huge battles because it was very emotional for them. It signified control, that MasterCard wanted to take control of the payment system in Europe.

9:30And that really wasn't the case. We were looking for greater synergy in order to gain greater velocity of the business. And that means giving up power if I'm on the other side of this and giving up my choice to run the brand and accepting from central tenants. That's a super hard one. It is. What's a lesson from that on how to do it? Yeah. Well, I think you've got to, you know, ultimately you, if you're not engaging with them and not threat, you have to appear not threat. This is, we don't want to threaten you. We want to be a business partner. I can remember doing a lot of conversations with very senior bankers in Europe, but, you know, at that point, They didn't really see, they didn't see the credit card business as an opportunity to make huge profits.

10:15I said, look at it, Citibank's making billions of dollars a year in credit cards. Why aren't you German, the German banks, the biggest German banks, some of the biggest in the world. They didn't want to play there. And I said, well, why would you want not to have a presence in that space? And it was more the fact that they saw the whole thing as control, right? And they wanted to control the payment system. And they were afraid that MasterCard, just like we did in the U.S., was going to license the industrials. GE, GM, AT &T. And they didn't want that. They saw the banking system in Europe was for the banks.

10:47So that was a tough sell. Eventually, though, it caught up with everybody. And eventually, they realized that it was better for them and their consumers to be global and have a global acceptance. Because we were going to put Eurocard stickers on the doors of millions of merchants in the US. That wasn't going to happen, right? The other final one I would say is when we were at Coke, you know, all with good intention. We did a whole, a can that was white, a white can, in order to kind of put money towards polar bear, polar bear survival in that kind of world. And sometimes this is the consequence of the consequence.

11:24You know, the can was white. In some airlines with flight attendants, they thought that was a Diet Coke. Really, it was a full Coke. It was regular Coca-Cola. Gave that to some passengers who might've had diabetes. and we had a little problem there. So we quickly kind of scrambled and we should have thought of that when we did the packaging design around that. So I could go on endlessly, Mike, with mistakes, but fortunately we had a few more hits than we had errors. And when you make the mistake, I guess the thing is incorporate it into your head and don't do it again like in the Coke can. Think what's the worst thing that can happen, not what is the best thing that will happen because the best thing is easy to manage.

12:08The worst thing is really hard to manage. So you've got to really think that through, right? Oh, yeah. When you have to recall from the bottlers, like billions of cans, that's not a good thing. It can get you canned, in fact. So you talked a little bit about Budweiser. I know you recently contributed to an article on brands taking a stand on issues. and one of your co-authors was Kim Whitler, who's been up to go three times, I think, or maybe at least three. Tell us a little bit about that article and then what advice you would give to marketers on this issue. Yeah, I think Kim is a wonderful person to work with.

12:50She's a great professor. You know, I think she created a very simple matrix on how you should be thinking about this. And your organization, first of all, it would be your organizational position on issues, social issues or wherever you're playing. Economic issues. It should not just be one person's decision, right? It needs to have kind of broader support, including at a board level, if you decide to go down that path. And I think some of this was don't let activism, you know, distract you from your purpose as a brand and as a company. it was it's easy to get sidetracked on those things and I also would say don't from my own personal experience is don't try to solve all the world's problems find one or two things that are aligned closely with your business and what you do and support that in a deep way as opposed to being a mile wide and an inch deep but I think the big lesson from Kim's study was don't turn off your base of customers and your distributors and everybody in your ecosystem by taking a stand on something that might not resonate with them.

14:03And I think she cited a number of things in the article, whether it was, you know, obviously the Bud Light, it was also Coca-Cola and their position on the voting rules in Georgia, which, you know, robbed a lot of not only bottlers, but also other entities the wrong way. So I think those, it was very simple. So she just created a simple matrix, understand what you stand for, understand who your customers are, understand your whole ecosystem of the people you work with, and then just take a systematic approach to this as opposed to an emotional, oh, that's one person's cause. I need to support that.

14:43And that makes so much sense for companies to do that. Just step back and think about the implications, as you say, the consequences of the consequences, right? And these are super consequences. For our listeners, we did a show with Kim Whittler, who was also previously a CMO before she became a professor at the Darden School, called the Budweiser case, you know, how not to manage the political stand, which is these are asymmetrical risks. If the people that are mad at you stop buying, the people that are happy with you usually don't buy anymore. So you are, in order to make a point, in many times you are hurting your brand and because your customers are really walking through the grocery store, picking a hundred different brands based on their social political stand, but they will pick against you if they're mad at you.

15:40And that is an important thing to absorb. Now, we're touching on this. I'll just get right to the question. Seth Matlins joined us to share his thoughts that the CMO job is the hardest job in business. If it's not the hardest, it's truly one of the hardest. Your thoughts? Yeah. Well, I don't necessarily. I think that might be an extreme position. my sense is that marketing is a multi-layer kind of team sport. And I think if the CMO is positioned or seen as quote the savior, you know, in my experience, you need to get everybody in the boat. You know, you need to, as I mentioned earlier, and you know, I think you're the guide, you guide people, you got to get there on board, understand this is where we're going.

16:32So it can be a hardest in business because the expectations can be unrealistic. you know, around, you know, the ad campaign is going to solve all our business problems. But I think if you set the proper expectations and pace it accordingly, here's what we're going to do. And you inform everyone, then there are no surprises. Because in my experience, you know, and this goes through the board level and senior leaders and all and mostly all the companies that work for, they really think that sometimes the ad, that a new ad campaign is going to solve broader business issues. And that's a little naivete.

17:05So, you know, I do think that there's so many shifts going on in marketing, you know, digital, social, mobile, gaming, AI, you know, et cetera, that these are tools though. They're tools to help you. Don't get seduced by the tools. In my view, you got to stay focused on your customer's need and kind of sometimes bring your customer along with them. Many are ready to leap into some of these things right away. And many customers are not prepared to leap in right of the way. So, and in our experience also, So particularly at Cope, we looked at what we call 70-20-10. Let's put 70 % of resources against those things that we know were, and we're very confident.

17:41We're 20 % innovating off of that 70. He said, okay, we're going to do innovation off that. But then 10%, that's far out, different, way off the range, and take the risk and just ring fence that. Now, unfortunately, many companies, when they cut the budget, they cut 10 % and you're stuck, right? But, you know, and there are cases, Mike, where the brand needs a complete overhaul and a complete transformation. But, you know, in some instances, it needs some tweaking or just some reinvigoration of what it stands for. But sometimes the brand, the complete brand overhaul is not necessarily the solution for you.

18:23Well, and this is also expectations, which is it's easy to say we need a complete overhaul. It's really hard to do one within the company, much less so all the consumers that may or may not want that overall. Correct. And so almost always to me, this is a thing about expectations, which is if we're going to overhaul the brand, we got to be pretty serious on how long that's going to take and where it might not work versus. And this is where I think CMOs get in a lot of trouble. They say, well, overhaul the brand. We'll chase the creative. We'll put in this new stuff and it will be all gold. And boy, that is a marketplace waiting to turn on you and eat you alive.

19:07I agree. Yeah. So when you look, the CMO job is evolving at speed. That's one of seven points. And the old tools are failing maybe faster than the new tools can be measured. What do you think about that? And is that the biggest challenge facing CMOs today or is it something else? Yeah, well, yes, I think everything is happening so quickly now, Mike, that it's hard to keep pace with everything if you're the CMO, particularly in a large multinational. You know, there's just so much going on, but that's why it's so important to, I've always believed, you know, that people need to get out of their silos.

19:45People are way too siloed in big organizations and sometimes they have their own agendas. But you, I said, my role is to connect. I may not break down your silo, but my, my role as the, as a leader would be to connect all the silos so that we're sharing the best practices. We're sharing the wisdom, learning knowledge. What worked there in Australia? That's just a great example for Coca-Cola. We launched, we had, I can remember two young marketers came to see me in Atlanta at Coke. And they said, you know, Joe, we have this idea that came from an agency and it's going to be to take the name Coca-Cola off the bottle and can and put in the 50 most common first names in Australia.

20:25And I said, are you out of your effing mind? I said, are you kidding? You think I'm going to go and be able to sell that to my boss, you know, the CEO? And then when I got into it and started digging in, I said, well, you know what? This is very interesting. The business had flatlined in Australia and we needed a jolt, right? And so this was actually became, there wasn't a lot of media with this. It all was on social media. It was people, it was right when social media was getting bigger and bigger and bigger. They would see that can with their name, their name or their friend's name. They said, hey, I found this can, I'm buying it.

20:57So then what happened then, it turned around that business. Instead of growing at 1%, we started growing at 3 % or 4 % in Australia. And then, lo and behold, other countries, Japan wanted it, China wanted it, and they wanted their own version because it wasn't just about names. And then ultimately, it spread to Europe, and then it spread to Latin America, and then ultimately, finally came to the US. And that was, you know, share a Coke, share a Coke with a friend, basically. I can only imagine how much the bottlers and the packaging folks loved a challenge. yes they always say well what would happen if uh these names aren't popular no one wants to buy them well then they'll have a million ian exactly so right here but that turned out to be the most successful promotion in coke's history and it just came you know so the ability to see some an idea a powerful idea and kind of kind of reform it a little bit tweak it a little so it can work broadly, that was a great learning.

21:56Hey, so one of the things that is always challenged as CMO, or we think it is, is when you get a new CEO, you were at MasterCard and made it through three CEOs. What's the advice you would give someone when they get a new CEO? How did you do it? Yeah, it's a great question because I came in with the first one who I knew well, he was a great fellow. And then he left and another fellow came in named Gene Lockhart. Gene was an incredibly bright guy. And I can tell you my first meeting with Gene, who met me in my office, we sat down and I said, Gene, here are the 10 things you need to do here. So it was brutal, candid, and very, very spot on.

22:39Here are the things, in my view, you need to do to fix this business and getting it rolling in the right direction. To this day, Gene, who I see here around in town, he always says to me what I loved about Joe was he gave it to me straight right there on the first day. And so I think he did. He came to your office, which is a pretty big signal that he really wants to hear you. Exactly. I agree. And that's advice that I give to people. Just if you're starting doing a job, don't sit down in your big chair in your office. Go to them. But I would say that was one of the, I think that's a way to kind of, you know, to get their trust and to say, listen, I'm objective enough to say we didn't do everything right.

23:19Here's things that we need to do better. This is what you should be thinking about. So he really appreciated that and others appreciated that, that I, that I used that technique on. So that was one thing. And then, and then just kind of manage expectations. Let's have checkpoints in, you know, every 30, 60, 90 days that we're talking about what progress, what are we all aligned with? with? What do we have to do and get accomplished in this next time period? So those kinds of things, just no surprise is management. Let me follow in on this because I've had, I agree. Most CEOs want that want direct feedback, but some of them don't.

23:51And they will take it as an immediate challenge to their authority. How do you sense that out or suss that out before you go full direct? Or do you Just say, I'm going direct. And if you don't like it, it's probably not going to work anyways. Yeah, my experience was, I think, after a couple of meetings, either as a, let's say, as a senior leadership team meeting or one-on-one meeting, you can get some kind of sense of whether that individual is receptive to hearing the truth, so to speak. And the fact that may need to be change required. Who was the general who said, if you don't like change, you like irrelevance?

24:31yeah and i always add or unemployment even less so you know so you've got to be thinking and most of the ceos are coming in they kind of have they understand they're coming in because they're well that could have been a retirement i just talked to that with uh one of the boards i'm on you know retirement and and you know they're new in the chair and they really appreciate you know someone saying a board member or a senior leader coming in saying here are the things that you need to be thinking about as you take this take the reins here you know here's the things that are going well Oh, and here are things that we can improve upon.

25:02And my sense is you can get that sense in the first few meetings with an individual of how they would do about that. Right. And beneath that whole discussion point is if you think they're not receptive, you may not want to come in with the full. Right. Or is because, you know, I have had an experience with the CEO that said they wanted to hear all that, but then really did it. Took it as very threatening. Right. And I pulled back when that CEO started going around the room after discussion saying, let's rate the other functions on a scale of one to 10. And I'm like, I can see where this is going.

25:42Yeah. Way back. That's a tough one. One of the things that has happened in the course of your career is that evolution of marketing. And we just talked about tools and setting expectations. If you're sitting in the seat, what recommendation would you give CMOs or folks that work with them on how to manage AI and big data and all these new tools that are coming in? How should they be preparing for what's next? Yeah. Well, I would tell anybody, my advice to anybody in those kind of situations is understand, try to understand at least a minimal level, the emerging trends in marketing and your industry and how you marry the two together.

26:30And you don't need to be an expert. You just need to build some awareness and speak the language and have the ability to ask the right questions. That's if that's critical. And then I would say, you know, as you go in and look at the changes that are occurring, you've got to find people that you value, value teamwork, integrity, low ego people. All of those things are very, very helpful. But I think it's all about people have to have that kind of spark in them for continuous learning and evolution. And you're constantly pushing your people to say, you know, maybe this AI is a very new area. I'm fully supportive.

27:02You're going away for a week and doing a deep dive and course on AI and what it could be for our business. as long as you come back and then share that information. So, you know, in my experience, you know, you have to understand these trends. You don't need to be an expert, but you need to understand them. And then you've got to try to apply your skills and marry the two things together. Because things are, those are just tools. AI is a tool. How we use that tool. Social is a tool. How do we use it to advantage our company and our brand? Beneath this advice you just gave, correct me if I'm wrong, But I hear you saying one size does not fit all for these tools.