Nancie McDonnell Ruder | CEO, Noetic Consulting | You're Brought In to Fix the Brand - Now What?

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1:25welcome marketers advertisers and those who love them to 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 i'm mike linton the former chief marketing officer of best buy eBay, Farmers Insurance, and Ancestry.com. Here today with my guest, Nancy McDonnell-Ruder. Today's topic, you're brought in to fix the brand. Now what? Now, Nancy is the founder of Noetic, a consulting firm that focuses on strengthening brands from the inside out.

2:07We'll talk about what that actually means in a bit. She started her career at Leo Burnett, where she was a vice president before leaving to form no edit. Welcome, Nancy. Thank you. I'm so happy to be here. I am a huge listener, Mike. Thank you. Thank you. So, Nancy, let's start by clarifying exactly what we are talking about when we say this problem. There's so many ways of saying it. Fix the brand, stand up the brand, build the brand, relaunch the brand, reposition the brand. Tell us what you mean when you are looking at a brand problem here? Yes, there is a whole range and people do use a lot of different words to describe it.

2:54And truly they can be anywhere on that range. So at times there's a brand crisis and truly they need to transfer more transformation. At times it's refinement and oftentimes it's somewhere in between. So what we always recommend is look at what your audience is that you serve, what they really think about you, where are you right now. And so we say like, lead with your who in order to know your what, and what is it about your what? Like, is it healthy? And what do you have going on? So for example, a few years back, we were working with Georgetown University in DC, my undergrad alma mater, and they really just needed refinement.

3:40They were, they still are, highly regarded, both by, you know, the students who seek to go there, their parents, the current students, alumni, faculty, internal staff. But their challenge was that their marketing is so decentralized, and it remains a challenge for them. But at the time, it had really gotten very scattered. Well, let's back up. Tell us this problem because that means my guess uh every college at georgetown was doing their own marketing yes and there wasn't any overarching hey this is what georgetown is about it was this is the business school this is the law school this is you know that's exactly right and that's exactly right actually figured out they had a problem because probably all those it was at the highest level.

4:28I was at the highest level. So our main client was the right hand of the president, but it was really driven by, he was their head of overall strategy across all the campuses. And you're exactly right. They had marketing folks in each and every one of those organizations. The only place they had shared marketing was across grad programs, but medical school, different, law school different, grad program, undergrad, all different from each other. And so they had never defined the brand at that master or global level. And they were seeing a little bit of softness in what they call yield. So yield is a very big metric in higher ed.

5:13It's like the number of people you let in versus the number of people - Yeah, you want a whole lot to apply and then you only want to let in like four. So you can - Right. Your acceptance rate is - Right, exactly. So you want a low number when it comes to like, you know, how many you're letting in, but you want your yield to be high. So the people you really want, you want to come. So they were seeing a little bit of softness there. But I mean, all you really had to do was Google their, you know, Georgetown logos and you could see the mess that they had. And so it was really like a problem that was going to become a bigger problem if they let it fester.

5:52So, you know, we call that refinement. So that's refinement. Let's talk about, you know, crisis. Give us just two or three other examples, and then we'll go into the what's the real issue versus the perceived issue. Yeah, great. So I would say most often there's two other flavors besides refinement. One flavor is we've actually never stood up the brand. We just haven't done that work yet. And you'd be surprised sometimes just the size and scope of companies who haven't ever stood up the brand before. And one such company is Mayo Clinic. We started working with them back pre-pandemic. Just one thing, when you say stand up the brand, that means the brand has never been purposely managed.

6:38Is that what you mean? That's just about right. So, you know, I'm sure you've seen like in certain organizations, marketing is actually more so just communications. Yeah. Right. There's not really like a marketing function really within the organization. In some industries, it happens more than others. Some industries are just not as advanced, you know, in that area. And healthcare has been one. Higher ed is another. Those are two sectors we do a lot of work in. And so in the case of Mayo, while they had not done the work to define the brand, they did have metrics and they could see how they were doing versus their competitors.

7:20So, you know, we're talking like like Cleveland Clinic or Anderson kind of thing. And they were starting to see a lot of encroachment. Yeah. We're always like, you know, Mayo is Mayo, right? We don't have to. We don't have to do anything because we're so amazing. Right. Right. And, you know, lo and behold, like their competition was starting to do a lot of marketing and defining their own brands. And so they really needed to do that work. So that's definitely a flavor is like we got to stand at the brand because we've not done that work yet. And then I would say the brand crisis. So we are working with a big health care system right now.

7:59I'm not going to share their name. They are in brand crisis. So this is a situation where their audiences, for them, primarily their community. So the community within communities within which they reside are not are are not happy with them, have a negative perception. It's it's it's mostly, frankly, an uninformed perception. And so situations like that where you're really on decline, you know, that's that's significant. That that's really brand transformation work. So it really can exist on a spectrum. I do want to say like every one to three years, you got to really be looking hard at your brand, but you should always be caring for the health of your brand.

8:43It should be not ever a set it and forget it. Great. Now, one of the things I have to point out is the three companies, the two you named and the one you didn't name, they all feel like nonprofits to me, which feel like nonprofits are in my mind very late to the party to think about their brand. uh it's is this when you look at these problems are they pretty much like lodged into a lot of non-profits um there's a fair amount of four profits who also have not you know stood up their brand and i and you know you don't see organizations lead with brand in their marketing you know and and i wouldn't even recommend like at the startup level you know companies you don't need a brand You don't need it yet.

9:27You don't have a story to tell yet. But it can often get neglected where it's like high time. And I have seen that happen in a fair number of for-profits. I do agree with you, though, that in nonprofit, there's a lag. I think there's definitely a tendency to lag. And one of my theories as to why is that they're very mission-driven. And oftentimes people can think, well, if we have our mission and we're clear on our mission, then, you know, we're good. We have our focus. But mission and brand are not exactly the same thing. At Publis is Sapient, we're not just talking about AI. We're delivering real results today.

10:09With Sapient AI, we speed up software development and save clients thousands of hours. We revolutionize how travelers discover their perfect getaway. and even turn a simple fridge scan into a personalized meal plan. Making AI work for you, it's what we do. I would agree with that. So let's now, we've kind of laid out the problems. Let's say now you're talking to a leader here and you say, all right, the company thinks they have an issue whether they're profit or nonprofit. that may be the issue, but there also might be another real issue. It might not be the brand. It might be this crisis of this company, the company who shall not be named.

11:01You know, it may be a brand problem, maybe a marketing problem. A lot of times it could be a totally different problem. How does, but they just say, look, we just want to market or PR this whole thing away. How does the leader actually wrap their mind arms around the real issue, figure out is that real or not, and then get the company to align, especially if it's different than the company thinks? That's a huge, long question. So take this. It's a multi-part question. It's a great question, though, particularly as it would relate to, like, do we have a product problem of some kind versus do we actually have a marketing problem?

11:44Well, you know, and the answer is found in the data. Like what data do you have? What data is looking troubling? And really pulling that together into a hypothesis that you then have to test out. So you really got to be looking at, you know, what are people responding to? And if you have only the signals to the problems in the data that you have, then you got to go do some primary research to figure out the root cause. So let's go back to the Mayo Clinic and look at their data. Because a lot of nonprofits, they have data by stack, like they have data by school and then someone combines it all.

12:18But there's nobody looking at the whole thing. Yeah, they actually were looking at brand data. So they could see things like awareness, affinity, and propensity to travel, which is a key component for them, like travel for. Yeah, I'll travel because you have the best people. Exactly. Exactly. And while they might be in your backyard, like good chance a lot of their patients are not. They really did have those diagnostic metrics at the brand level. But you're right. Like a lot of organizations don't. What they're instead seeing is maybe they're seeing a softness in sales. Right. Maybe they're seeing their competitors, you know, starting to do better than them or, you know, really outpace them.

13:05So oftentimes it's just in the financial data, not just. It's in the financial data. And so when you are looking at the problem, but you don't have the hypotheses on why, rather than jumping straight to brand, you really got to do some digging and look across to see what kind of a story you need to pull together. So quick example of that, Samsung some years ago, they had super high awareness. Everybody knew them. Yeah. Very low affinity. so people knew them and they didn't really care to purchase them you know they just didn't have loyalty and as they were really working their way into the mobile market mobile phone market um they and rightly so felt that they really needed to stand up their brand at a different at a different level you know couldn't be about kind of you know features and um just staying in that product world.

14:03And they were getting, at the time, I'm guessing this was a number of years back where Sony was kind of it and then Samsung was coming in. But you also had Hoshiba. I was at Best Buy, I think, when Samsung was starting to rise. There was a bunch of people out there, LG, everybody making noise. Sony had the best position and Samsung had actually probably a lot of good stuff but no one actually knew it that that's exactly right and do you remember when they had the galaxy when they when they did like i mean from a an objective stance on the technology the galaxy was superior and it had you know it had the best as as mobile phones were really coming into mainstream they had the best cameras they had the most features so they knew that they had or rather they knew they didn't have a product profile, right?

14:58But they did have a brand problem. They had an affinity problem. So being really careful about like, why is the data looking the way it's looking? And, you know, I'll say for our part, like we do ask a lot of questions upfront when, you know, organizations come to us because we don't want to take on work that's not, you know, brand related. Like if it really is, you know, a product that is subpar to what the competition is offering. You know, people are just going to go elsewhere. Okay. So I'm sitting in here as the leader and I figured out, okay, I've got, this is a marketing problem or a brand problem.

15:41How do I go about then moving forward? Like I, or I'm just parachuted in. let's talk about the best practices and the worst practices, the worst thing you can do if you're given this kind of issue. Yeah. So I've seen a lot of things over the years. I do like to talk about the glass half full. So I'm going to talk a lot about like best practices, but I, but I will mention in terms of worst, I think one of the worst things you can do is not do your homework with your customers. So like we often say to people, even if you have a very modest budget, really make sure you understand how your audiences feel about your brand.

16:26Like don't skip it. There are times I have seen organizations, they just kind of think they know. Well, they have a belief. They have a belief that they've had for a long time and that belief is slow. But if I don't have any money and I just, I have this belief, how do I actually, especially if I have no money or no time, how do I actually go do this? Like, I agree, you have to have some real marketplace data, not the collective judgment of a team that is convinced, you know, people should pay a 15 % price premium for your product, even though it's the same. How do you go get the data if you don't have money and or time?

17:04Yeah. Well, so I think you need to have, you have to have at least time. And if you don't have time, you need to figure out who you can get, who will have time. And there's lots of scrappy creative ways you can do it. You know, with social, you can get access to your customers at any time and any place. If you have something in store based or online based, you know, you can do social listening, you can do walkthroughs in stores. Like there are a lot of really low or no cost ways that you can get a sense for how people are interacting with your product. So really getting creative about it. It will cost you time, whether it's your time, might be somebody else's time.

17:47Hire an intern, get somebody junior and do it with a lot of guidance. Like how can you get access to that data? Or can you afford to do something very thoughtful and qualitative, you know, small sample so you can check your hypotheses because I just think to skip it is perilous. Well, that's one. I bet there's a best practice. I want to go over the best practices and then the worst things you can do that make sure you're not going to actually solve it. Yeah. Okay. So, so we'll go to the class half the best practices. So for best practices, I actually have five. So if we have time, we can talk about all of that.

18:28Why don't you just tick them off really fast and then. Okay. Okay. So I have actually labeled these, Mike, as though they are Taylor Swift songs. All right. Let's go with it. They're not Taylor Swift songs. If you want to sing them, we're okay. I might sing a little. I might get you to sing a little, right? But she's such a prolific. There's a limit to what the host can do on the show. If I could get you to sing, yeah, I think people would. Let's hear them. Give the people what they want. Okay, so number one, teach me tonight. This is about education about brand. Number two, in harmony. This is about internal alignment.

19:13There's the Georgetown problem. Yeah, okay. Number three, voices unite. This is about getting your key stakeholders to create the brand strategy with you. Spark within. I mean, that's definitely a song she would write, right? That's about truly activating the brand internally. And then the last one, and we were just talking about, is measuring the moment. A little bit of alliteration there. Wow. And that's about having the right KPIs. Wow. All right. Well, you know, I'm not going to even attempt harmony because I would ruin it. So let's pick one of those, which is the most common you see in the world.

19:59The most common that people trip up on? Oh, yeah. Well, this is a glass half full. So the most common where you go and then we're going to reverse it and talk about the empty part of the glass. Yeah, very good. Okay, so I would say that the thing that most commonly is it's like this invisible thing that gets in the way is the first one. If you want to get everybody. So Teach Me Tonight is about educating about brand. I'm not talking about your particular brand. I'm talking about like what is brand. And it's just not well understood sometimes in the marketing function, but certainly outside of the marketing function.

20:44Well, so at college and I'm teaching at a college, I'm teaching at Case Western and they have a CMO. They have a system wide CMO to work on stuff like this. But this would be the college or the brand is bigger than any component of the brand. And here's why. And that's what you have to teach at Georgetown. town. And so you're going to hum a few bars of your song now, right? Yes, that's exactly right. So to teach me to never, what you have to do is you have to get people within the organization to really understand that holistic view of what brand really means. If you don't do that, a couple of things typically happen.

21:28People just think in terms of a brand campaign, They see this as a project, you know, something that is kind of costly. And then, you know, months down the line, they're questioning like, hey, what did we ever get for that? And worst of all, they don't embody it themselves. The truth is in organizations where brand is really alive and well and everybody's quote unquote living the brand, everybody understands that they are the brand. Everything the brand does is a touch point. I'm going to go back to Mayo for a quick sec because I think they do this so well. Okay. When people walk into a Mayo clinic, these are people who are so stressed out.

22:16And the way they get treated by the staff is like they're coming in to a home where they're going to put their arms around them and they're going to do their damnedest to get them a true diagnosis. These are people with complex illnesses, sometimes multiple illnesses. They may have been down a path for a year or longer trying to find out. Now, a lot of brands don't have that life or death, right, situation. But the reason why it's so powerful when you walk inside Mayo and you feel that isn't just because people are in these dire straits. It's because the people inside Mayo live the brand. They understand that they are the brand.

22:56And that is the part that gets missed in teaching people what brand is. We're going to go to the negatives. You just said dire straight. So I want to make another music joke, but I won't. That would be very good. That would be money. That's like lower tone. So you'd have to sing that. Yeah, I would, Mark Knopfler. So let's go. You already talked about one of the worst practices, which is you think the brand is a ad or an effort done by the marketers versus it's an entity that interacts with the marketplace. Let's talk about some other Hall of Fame mistakes leaders make when they're standing up or fixing the brand.

23:38Yeah. So I would say mistakes is like keeping that brand effort really narrow in terms of who you're involving within the organization. So this is my in harmony and where we should be singing together. So right up front, we highly recommend to clients do an active listening tour and socialize what you're doing. If you keep it really tight, like, you know, we're just going to have this working team of marketers and, you know, then we'll launch it later. It the antibodies get it. And when you're involving those people up front, most importantly, you need to involve those people that you worry might be skeptics.

24:26Yeah, you got to get the negatives right in there. And I got to get them right on in there. Funny story. I have never fired an agency when I've started because a new CMO job, because then I'm signaling to the company that I'm going to solve all the problems, regardless of what I actually know when I come in with advertising. And usually it's not the advertising that's hurting the company. Right. So that's problem one. Get everybody on board. What's worse? You know, do not, do not hog this to your little self. And then come out like you're Albert Einstein with a piece of genius. What's the other problem people or Hall of Fame worst practices people make?

25:06Yeah. So another one would be to black box what the brand strategy is going to be and do a big ta-da with it. Oh, a reveal. A reveal. right because when you do reveal inevitably anybody you're revealing to then then is sitting there thinking about the with them right yeah how is this gonna affect me in my world and inevitably it's changed i mean we don't use the term change management because it freaks people out but it is that is what it is and so if you do like a big reveal you're gonna you're gonna buy yourself a world of Hurt, we actually do a process, Mike, where we involve the stakeholders in co-creating the brand elements.

25:54And it's, you know, some people may think like, well, isn't that like Tom Sawyer? Like you're getting everybody else to paint the fence. Like, weren't you hired to help with create that brand strategy? But it only gets you to drafted elements, but it gets people rolling up their sleeves and doing it with you. And then they can't sit back and cross their arms and be the naysayers. So avoid the black box. Yes. Look, I always let them contribute. I don't let them vote. Which is, you know, I'm going to listen a lot. And a lot of times you're going to be right, but this is not a democracy. This is a collection of information.

26:34Is there any last worst practice you want to throw down on before we move on to a look at the marketplace? Yeah, I'll go to the spark within, which is about activating internally. So the thing that people can get overly focused on, like, yes, if you're standing up your brand, refining your brand, you're definitely going to do something out in the marketplace to communicate that. But don't neglect or a short shrift on what you're doing internal to the organization. So if you've done that brand education up front and then you do some really thoughtful things within the organization to help everybody know their role, people can get excited and be a part of it, which is what you really need to fully live the brand.

27:19If instead you're really just focused on the external, it's just going to be a brand campaign six months down the path. You're going to have folks saying to you, you know, hey, like that project's done. You know, a lot of folks are watching the Jaguar or Jaguar campaign, you know, where they are. You know, they came up with this just flashy, completely over the top video. and we'll see if there's anything behind it or if that was just one of the mistakes you referenced. Which brings me to my next question. If you can look at the marketplace now, not necessarily your brands, brands on the way to needing help or a brand that has successfully rebooted itself that aren't yours.

28:17so i think uh two brands come to mind that i think are a little wobbly uh one is sephora and the other one's apple so the deal with sephora like have you ever gone into a sephora store just once did you run out of there run out of there i looked at it because i thought it was interesting retail but obviously it's fascinating retail yeah it's fascinating right like a million skus it's it's just an amazing feast for your eyes and full of teens and tweens and my mom who loves it there and she's 86 which is which is a whole other story but she just loves like cosmetics and retail or whatever and thinks it's fascinating the thing about sephora though is that like that's a really fickle customer base and there are so many interesting innovations happening in cosmetics and skincare and fragrances that you can get not from Sephora and so they have this store experience but they're really getting infringed upon by a lot of competition like with People, though, like Apple, you know, they're under a lot of pressure right now.

29:37And particularly out of Asia, you know, there is an awful lot of discounting of perfectly good technology. So and I think at least I'm a big Apple user, but I think we all have a little bit of a low key like brand erosion going on, you know, with the prices. and always I need a new plugin and the updates that don't give me anything better. Like there's just kind of a low key erosion. Look, it's hard to stay great for really long. It is. I mean, they're so big, right? And so we like to really, you know, criticize the behemoths. Yeah, it's hard to stay great. I would say on the flip side, like a brand that, you know, we don't work with, but I really admire what they've done is Domino's.