Duolingo CMO Manu Orssaud on What Gets Destroyed When the Street Decides Your Strategy

29:17And am I right in remembering that you were pretty involved with Spotify Wrapped and its creation? Yeah, that's right. It's such a brilliant case study of so many different things. But in particular, it's here's my, you know, we live in a world where it's I share, therefore I am. Right. And when I share, it's not just that I'm sharing something about myself. If I send you a funny meme, it's not just to say, hey, I found this funny. It's so that you think I'm funny. Right. Exactly. Right. Because I want to make you laugh. Therefore, what do you know? What do you understand about identity, individual and then expressed, right?

30:01So internal and external, as you put it, and its role in value creation, enterprise value creation. Well, I think what we see is that in general, people want to express themselves. I think that's the first thing. Fundamental human need. fundamental human need is help help i want you to help understand me and i i want to build a relationship with you and the way i build that relationship is by you knowing who i am and i think this is what motivates people to share at a heart it's you know this is my identity this is a part of me that uh i decide to release to you so that you understand who i am um and and it doesn't always work, right?

30:50Because they are parts of your identity you don't want to share. But I think the ones that are being shared is because you are projecting the person that you want to be and the relationship around this. The crafted persona. The crafted persona, the persona that you want to portray, right? Like, you know, the person that is on Instagram, let's say, is not necessarily the person that is in the real life. I am committed to people thinking I'm actually 6 '2". but yeah it's it's all part of that right it's part of that journey of of sharing with the world who you are and and and portraying this identity with your friends with your network so that they understand you better as a person and so i think this is a big driver of of that and i think music is one of them music is very connected to your personality yes humor is one of them you know which is why i think a lot of the work we've done building this brand has worked so well is because humor is very personal uh the fact that we were tapping into you know uh trends and insights that were not for everyone but we really focused on this specific audience and it was very much you know if you know you know and people who get it they're so proud of it or they find it even funnier that a brand like geolingo understand them understand that you right understand that insight which in return they will share that with their friends and so yeah it's identities and everything.

32:12And I think the best marketing is that type of marketing, the one that really leverages your identity, makes you feel that you care about something, and give you those moments of delight where you are able to share with your friends. You've brought up humor, you brought up the owl, you brought up the brand a few times. I'm going to bring us back to Duolingo for a moment. There's a moment in some brands' lives when they have to decide whether to double down or evolve. And you all were built with such an irreverence, right, in the best way. And I'm wondering, as you've looked at the evolution of the brand, right, and playing with the owl, And what, as the CMO have, what process have you gone through to decide, all right, maybe there's some things, if not so much that we want to leave behind, that we want to evolve a little bit moving forward?

33:18How have you looked at that calculus and what decisions have you had to make to sacrifice certain things to ensure the brand is helping facilitate the growth of the enterprise? I think we got here, as you said, because we took risks, which I think is important for any company, any brand to really stand out. Did they feel like risks when you were doing it? Yeah. Because, I mean, it's superficial. Superficially, it's like they all fucking paid off. Oh, it really paid off. But yes, I mean, along the way, we found out it was actually a really good risk. Yeah. Yeah, a risk worth taking. But when you start, right?

34:03When you start, you don't know where that risk is going to take you. And that's the hardest part. Yes. But yes, it paid off for us. And we were able to be different. We were able to stand out, use a tone that was very different from other brands, even different from what we had in the products. If you look at our products and how you interact with the brand in the product, it's very safe. It's very wholesome. and our brand persona outside of the product is a lot more, we call it unhinged, right? But that's also because it's much harder to capture attention outside of the product. When you have people in a product, you know, they're here, they're with you.

34:42But even that, right? And I've never stopped to think about it before, but the moment you said it, I was like, absolutely. Because as a user of the product, that's a really interesting decision in and of itself too, which is to have kind of an external voice, a communications voice, and a product voice that are similar but not the same. Yeah, it is. And I think there's been this word that's been going around and around for years, this idea of you need to have brand consistency. Yeah. right and you know the any cmos will tell you know oh well well i really want to have brand consistency i want people to see me and understand me and understand my tone understand my personality across every touch point i think that's not right today and in particular for duolingo in our audience we've actually done some user research where people actually are smart enough to understand this is the same brand but depending on the context i see different facets of the brand But that's what makes it interesting.

35:45Well, I think you use the word consistency, and I think a lot of times people confuse consistency and sameness. Right, exactly. You can be consistent without being identical. That's right. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. There's plenty of consistency. You know, the owl itself is consistent. You know, it's our trademark. It's our IP. It's people associate this owl with Duolingo. So that's consistent. But the tone, how we engage the brand on different platforms is very different. And I think that's also, you know, it's very human as well, right? I mean, I'm sure you're not the same with your parents than you are with your best friend.

36:20Identical. When you go to have a drink in a bar. So, you know, that's exactly the same for brands. And I think it just actually makes our brand more human by having this crazy owl on TikTok that is also your best friend on the app. And people like that. They like that variety. And it makes our brand more interesting. But going back to your question, which was, you know, where do we go next, right? You're absolutely right that I think we're thinking a lot about the evolution of the brand right now, where I think people have come to expect the unexpected from us. Yeah. Right. Uh, but that becomes almost the expectation, right.

37:03And I want to, I want to sort of deconstruct this now. I want to find ways for us to bring something new to the table that is not necessarily, um, increasing the shock factor. Yes. Because this is a race to the bottom in many ways. I agree. And, you know, we've given the L a BBL and I don't know how far. What's a BBL? A Brazilian butt lift. That was two years ago. And so, where do you go from that? Put it out on Ozampic or something? I don't want to go and go further and further into this escalation of shock value. So we're going to have to find ways for us to be fun, unexpected, in a way that is not just about adding more shock value.

37:49Yeah, because shock value can't become the brand. But shock value cannot become the brand. And we see that with, I can think of a handful of brands where they now have to hurdle their own unexpectedness, which can take them so far off course. Unexpected becomes the driver as opposed to a means to an end. Exactly. And I don't want to go into that race, but it doesn't change our approach. our approach will continue to be focusing on entertaining our audience creating their daily connection with them outside of the product um telling them stories that matter to them um and and you know we've done something i'm very proud of the work we did in last time i saw you in november we were releasing a duolingo anime series right so serialized content on youtube uh i think it's a minute a minute a minute 30 per episode so very short uh five or six episodes and the you know the inside there is you know anime is a huge fandom with our audience people love consuming anime is the reason why they learn japanese on the app on the platform and so we created this entire storyline uh in an anime style and that worked extremely well with the audience And, you know, this is great craft.

39:10This is not shock value, but it's still something our audience really consume and very much enjoy. So I want to bring this type of content more to life as a brand and continue to be in places that our audience will love, listening to our community a lot, listening what they care about and finding ways to insert our brand into those moments.

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41:03you know you said um i think in your answer to my very first question excuse me you talked about how large the tam is when the tam is as large as syrian refugees and bill gates and everybody in between how do you decide where the um reflective pool of targeting is, right? Where you drop a stone for this audience that will ultimately reach out to Bill Gates and the Syrian refugee. Obviously, a lot comes from the product itself. As I said, I think what we have, we build a product for everyone. We know the kind of company, you know, when I started at Diolingo, I asked, you know, what is our segmentation?

41:43Do we have personas? And none of that existed. What do you think about personas? I hate personas. Yeah, I hate personas as well. But I just wanted to know if that's the company we're thinking about. That was the right question. But it doesn't work. I've never found any useful meaning in personas. Agreed. But what we figured out is that actually, no, we really believe in this mission of universal access to education. And therefore, what we do is build a product for everyone. And everyone will find value in these products. And, you know, the way we've been running this company has been through this data-driven machine where we run tons of experiments and we see what works at scale.

42:22which guide us towards our audience, right? It guides us towards what people care about and how do we retain them. And that creates that flywheel of people called, you know, recruiting others. When it comes to the brand, it's a very similar approach, actually. You know, we really look at, first and foremost, our community, our existing users. We try to find stories, find inspiration within what they say about our brand, what they share about our brand. And in turn, this allows us to resonate with our for the brand to resonate with that audience and you know our belief is that if if we are able to get you know this volume of people within this audience then there's probably more of them therefore you know it's this same same brand flywheel that happens right so that's the way we think about marketing a lot is it's really through this lens of trying to talk to our audience first and letting them do the work to tell the world around what's great about us is that we tend to cater for a young audience.

43:23We found real strong success with Gen Z and Gen Alpha. And I also believe that for a brand to be successful, you need to capture the young people first, and then eventually this will actually reach older ages. Depending on the brand. Depending on the brand. But I think in tech, that's usually been the case. It was a case at Spotify. So I feel good about how we're pushing the brand for that reason. As we get to the last few questions and time, I'm wondering, not so much just within Duolingo, but do you as an individual have a perspective on how to, for lack of a better word, measure value creation?

44:06And I'm not just talking about kind of what's working today, right? Because there are metrics for that. You see it in DAUs, you see it in any number of different benchmarks. But do you have a philosophy on how value is created and equally how value or when value is destroyed, again, at an enterprise level? Yeah, it's a big question and depends on the business, obviously. but for the way I look at it is, yes, you can measure direct impact from marketing. And there's plenty of things that we can measure. But there's also a lot that we're not able to measure. So for instance, what can't you measure?

44:51What can we measure? Brand momentum. I'll tell you, China is a market that is growing super fast for us right now. we've been working on creating a standout brand with our playbook that we've we've run in the us and other markets in china and we've been at it for two years and we've seen a significant increase in daus but also you know user-generated content brand mention impression on our social media number of brands who want to collaborate with us which i think is a really good actually leading indicator. We worked with celebrities, influencers, and through that process, we could tell, okay, well, there's good growth coming from performance marketing.

45:35It's efficient. It's working well. Influencer companies are driving X, Y, and Z in terms of growth. So very tangible. But the growth isn't coming from performance marketing, would you say? The growth is coming from the brand where the performance is capturing. It's able to capture. Exactly. But the brand work is really hard to measure. But, you know, I was just talking to my team in China and my analytics team in the U.S. just last week, and we were looking at what's happening in China because it's going really well. And we looked at it and 60 % of it, we could say, okay, yeah, I mean, this is coming from people that we acquired a long time ago through performance marketing or influencer campaign.

46:10And it's 40%. We can't explain it. We cannot explain it. And we have just strong conviction that this is actually brand momentum. them. It's basically the efforts that we've put in the markets over the last couple of years that are paying off. The fact that we are much more visible as a brand, the fact that there is real positivity around the brand, and that affinity is actually creating this head. No one doubts it in the company because we've been able to prove that over the last five years, that investment in brand has really paid off across the world. as a corollary what happens to value when an enterprise only measures and considers what's quantifiable it's the race to the bottom i mean at some point you know it's if you don't have a if you don't try to build a brand if you don't try to actually create something that resonates with people that is meaningful that is part of their life that interaction that word of mouth from friends etc if you don't try to fuel what is at the very top at some point you're not going to have many people to capture at the bottom right that's right you can't capture demand you haven't created yeah and um and i think that's that's that's really key and it's it's hard sometimes and i've luckily i'm not in that position where i think at duolingo we really understand the power of the brand and we've had again like really successful story for the last five years to prove it but yes i you know it's especially in tech companies where where you you it's very easy to to go from you know a performance ad to a result because it's so measurable and so direct to just have the pressure from your ceo from your cfo to say no like we have to we have to please the street we just need to invest every single penny into direct growth and having that pressure and not being able to defend brand investment, it's really, really difficult.

48:08But I can see how of a struggle it is. But I'm lucky that we're not in this. As people, to your point, as we said earlier, is people confuse consistency and sameness. People confuse attribution with correlation. I'm sorry, with causality. And it's a race to the bottom. It's a race to the bottom. It's a race to the bottom because everything will inflate all of your cost-per-users, etc., that you'll drive from, those sort of lower funnel channels. So, yeah. Before we get to what will be the last question, one more from something you said a few minutes ago that I wrote down that I just loved for its simplicity.

48:49You talked about reassuring the audience that they've made the right choice, right? And that's obviously a set of actions that go across the enterprise. Right. That everything the enterprise does, everything the company does, has to reassure the current user that they've made the right choice, the prospective user that they've made the right choice. Yeah. And that's true for any business and every business, product, service, tech, CP, I don't care. Yeah. How focused are you? like like if i will use that phrase i'll always credit you i promise um from now on because it's just so simple reassure them they've made the right choice do you actually have a process but like as you're making decisions do you think to yourself okay this is this is the ultimate metric right does this add up to that or is it something that happens more implicitly i it's something that that happens implicitly, but I'm constantly focused on.

49:56We talked about consistency. Consistency is that. It's about the brand promise that is delivered and delivered well for the end user. And that to me is ultimately the best role of a CMO, is to exactly marry those two things. I'm gonna tell you what you're gonna get from me if you choose to start using Duolingo, and I will be focused on actually delivering what I said I will deliver for you. And that comes across everything, right? Our point is fun. Our brand platform has always been this idea of when we have fun, we go further, right? So if you look at our social content, if you look at all this, it's meant to be entertaining.

50:37It's meant to be fun. Why? Because we want to show you that actually coming to Duolingo, you will have fun. So that consistency, even if it's not obvious, it's actually rooted in the strategy. of fun as a concept, as a differentiator, and how we bring that into the world outside. And it's also everything we do in the product to celebrate you, celebrate your milestones, give you opportunity to share your streak, share your Duolingo score with your friend, give you the year in review where you're proud of your achievements. All of those things are here to reinforce that credibility and reinforce that promise that we make at you from the moment once you come to the product.

51:17One of my observations broadly, and I talk about this, is there are a lot of marketers, a lot of businesses that confuse objective strategies and tactics, in particular culture, entertainment, fun, as the objective rather than the strategy, as the means to the end. What do you have as a watch out for those companies? Which is, do you have a word of advice for the CMO or the CEO or anybody within the enterprise where you're confusing being outlandish, being culturally so-called relevant with the means to the end, which is driving the business forward. For us, what we always try to do is approach it from a very authentic way.

52:04You can't force this. I think it's easy for brands to say, you know i'm going to be more culturally relevant i'm going to do this but if if it doesn't feel authentic to your brand then it just is in competition with your direct outcome for for your business so you need to find what's right for you as a brand that will actually feel right for the business in general um you know all the all the fun and the humor that we've built we've done that because our product is fun because our community was actually talking about creating memes about our brand and we just doubled down on that so it felt right for our brand and it was driving business value the problem is companies that really try to do things that are not that are not connected to their world and and their environment and their product and try to do things because they hear all the brands doing it without really thinking whether that's right for them and i think that's where things get get get at odds right and and i i think many companies just just don't focus enough on that yeah understanding how people perceive their product understanding the promise and the expectations that they did that they that people have right yeah and not delivering on that first yeah and and i think that's really where the hard work is right it's like understanding this the environment of your brand and your product uh that and then with this figuring out how to how to build the right strategy yeah all right we end every show the same way i'm I'm going to give you a magic wand.

53:35And with that magic wand, and through any lens you choose, doesn't have to be about business, can be personal, be a hybrid. With that magic wand, what's one thing you'd create tomorrow and one thing you've destroyed tomorrow? Okay, one thing I would create in this world of attention economy, right? Which is very cool to Duolingo because we call pete-free attention on a daily basis. As does every brand in the world. As does every brand in the world. I would invent an algorithm that is not here to trap you, that is not here to steal your time, but is actually trying to give you value back. An algorithm that is here to know Seth is in a mood for entertainment right now, or Seth is actually in a focus mode and can grow and learn and do something, right?

54:32Seth is in his, leave him the fuck alone. Yeah, exactly, exactly. You know, algorithm that I hear to do something good for you, that I hear to actually give you value back for the time that you spend. I think we got into this race to stealing people's time as opposed to capturing time to deliver value to them. Yeah, I agree. And I really think that the world needs to move in this direction, right? Where the algorithm are smart enough, but they're not here to trap you. They're here to actually give value back to you. Can I ask you, if you think about where the majority of downtime goes, which is to social media platform, you think that that will ever happen?

55:16Which is to say their business model depends on... Yeah, on capturing this attention all the time. Capturing and without so much focus on the edification and the efficacy. I think it will change. is going to have to. I mean, you know, you've seen the news. It's in your mouth, yeah. You've seen the news, right? They are under a lot of scrutiny for this addiction. So I think there will be some change in the industry in the next few years where people will actually, you know, have to, I mean, those companies will have to rebalance things one way or another. Yeah. At the risk of getting banned, right?

55:51Yeah. Like it is happening in Australia and soon in the UK. In the UK, yeah. Right. So I think there is a shift that is needed. And I hope it's a ship that is positive for self-growth and for giving people more than just empty eyeballs. All right, what would you destroy? The fear of failure. I think it's the hardest thing to get right. It's the hardest thing to combat on a daily basis for many brand leaders. right the pressure the pressure to deliver the pressure to be right and many humans many humans many humans but you know when when you work in creative industry like ours right it's uh it's difficult to not choose the path of least resistance which is the the sameness which is the the vanilla that will please everyone the least common denominator exactly and and but but that's that's not how good work gets created uh and work that is resonant and disruptive and work that stand out and it's it's hard it's really hard it's a battle on a daily basis both for myself but also for my team right because they feel pressure they feel pressure for numbers they feel pressure to deliver and how do you create a culture that gives them the permission to fail to fuck up to try yeah as long as it's with the right intent yeah it's it's a battle on a daily basis.

57:17My way of doing this is really put the focus much more on the learnings than the results. I try to de-emphasize whether something has worked or not. And I try to really emphasize and put all the efforts for the team on explaining what we've done and what learnings we have from it. And if we had to do it again, what we would change. And I think it just helps.

57:43It am I right or am I wrong to more, you know, what have I learned and what will help us moving forward? It's, I'm not saying it's 100 % perfect because we all human and everyone wants to be right and succeed and when it doesn't happen, it's always painful for people, but I try to remove that fear of failure as much as I can in the team for that reason. Let that be the last word. Manu, thank you so much for joining us. I really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you.

58:15To wrap up this episode, consider this. Renaissance legend Michelangelo, he of the fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and the sculpture of David is credited with saying that every block of stone has a statue inside it and the sculptor's job is simply to discover it. Michelangelo described his own process not as building something from nothing, but as removing everything that wasn't the figure and carving the angels until he set them free. 500 years later, what's worth considering is that most enterprises think about value creation the opposite way, and maybe they shouldn't. VW, which we talked about a couple of weeks ago, is one example.

58:52Instead of removing the unnecessary so the necessary can speak, words Johnny Ive is credited with saying, and words Michael Antelow would certainly approve of, today's companies add an ad. More features, more products, more messages, channels, campaigns, content, complexity, more, more, and more. Because The instinct in business is too often that more is how you grow and less is how you don't. But some of the most consequential value creation stories in recent memory are acts of removal. Apple eliminating 70 % of its product line when Steve Jobs returned. In-N-Out served essentially the same menu for 75 years.

59:28And just last month, Volkswagen, as I referenced a minute ago, announced it's cutting up to half its models because the complexity of offering everything to everyone had eroded its margins to under 4%. As Einstein's credited with saying, because I haven't quoted enough people in this segment, everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. The disciplines in knowing the difference between what's essential and what's accumulated, between what the customer values and what the enterprise added because somebody in a meeting thought it was a good idea. More, and the incremental complexity that often results, isn't evidence of ambition.

1:00:03It's often evidence that nobody asked what could be removed without the customer noticing or caring, and what, if removed, might actually help them better see the value that's there. Michelangelo didn't add the angel to the marble. He removed everything that was in it. And the question worth considering for every function inside every company is whether you're sculpting or just accumulating. That's worth considering. Today's episode was produced by Art Chung, Jim Mackle, Manolo Moreno, Brandon McFarlane, and Ashley Futterman from the Fox Media Podcast Network and The Wisdomist Company. Support for the show comes from Injun.

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