Marketing Myths and CMO Truths from a Coca-Cola & Uber Powerhouse

0:00Any marketer at any seat at any table needs to know how they'd answer the question how do you bring value here? Where is their new value to create? Forget the job description, because that's how you dispel myths about marketing and even how you dispel myths about yourself. How can a marketer think about this environment now? Marketing has to connect to the growth agenda of the company. It's just an imperative that we work cross-functionally, that we invite others in, that we use language that others can relate to, that we tie our goals together with theirs. Global just meant who you were serving, not necessarily where you sat.

0:31And it gave birth to this idea of networked marketing, which really turned us from a function, but more to a collaboration model of how we networked the work and how we wired the work. And I think it's very, very relevant today, maybe more than ever. I think operating models are an innovation and infrastructure. When all else fails, innovate your operating model and I think you can have great results with your teams. You don't hear many people talking about that. That's so opposite from like how so many team structures work. That's not just relevant for marketing. That's everywhere.

1:00Hey everybody, and welcome back to Marketing Trends. I'm your host, Stephanie Postles, and today I am so excited because I'm joined by Rebecca Messina. Rebecca has over 30 years of global marketing experience, being the first ever global CMO at Uber. Plus, she also led global marketing efforts at Coca-Cola for 22 years during its peak success, and she was also the global CMO at Beam Centauri. Today, she's a senior advisor at McKinsey, together with an an expansive private advising practice. Rebecca, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me, Stephanie. So excited. You know, since the second I met you, I was like, we need to get you on this show.

1:36You have way too many stories. Aw, it's all the same way about you. Yeah, I'm glad that we made it happen. So I love to just jump right into it with some of my favorite people. So with you, I wanna go into, I mean, you've been leading marketing efforts in really traditional places, but also very high growth companies. And so I wanna hear, when you step into an organization today, what are some common misconceptions about marketing that you see at the executive level? Yeah, I think so many people step into a new role and they think whatever I did in my last role will work here. So that's, and we can certainly go there for a minute because I've got some horror stories.

2:12But importantly, you have to know what environment you're in. So said differently, look, marketing is the Coca-Cola company. Marketing is the center of the universe. Marketing at Uber wasn't even a seat at the table for the first 10 years of all that growth. So to believe that those two contexts and what people in that company thought about marketing, they were vastly different. And so the misconceptions are often kind of tied up in what that company is and how its relationship with marketing has been. So if you're at Uber, to some degree, you're going, well, most of our growth hasn't come from having marketing or having marketing in this more traditional way with a global CMO and things like that.

2:50At Coke, they couldn't imagine a world without it. And Bean was really somewhere in between, but definitely very, very, a marketing and a big seat at that table. And so the misconceptions are largely just tied to whatever that company's growth agenda and the relationship with marketing has been. But maybe if there's a red thread, it's in all of them, even in the Coca-Cola company, there is sometimes some skepticism around marketing and its role in growth. I think you have to recognize just where you are in that. Coke is a very expansive role for marketing. You lead the R &D agenda. You lead the product agenda.

3:28That is not what is happening in tech-centric, product-centric companies. I always say just know the context you're operating in makes a huge difference when you're stepping into not only the executive role, but any marketing team you may come on is to just understand what's in the hearts and minds of the people that you're going to interact with because that's their context of marketing and that's what you're up against. Okay. So let's get into like how to do that. So if you're stepping into this new company, how do you go about auditing these leaders and figure out like, what do you care about?

3:56How do I speak it back to you in your language? Like, what does that look like for you? Yeah. So obviously now first I grew up at Coke. So I knew the language. I knew who they were. I knew how they thought, which actually is a curse and it's got a lot, you know, there's a lot of good to that too. Right. So as I grew more senior there, I knew how I knew the language. I knew the role marketing played, but I also believed in white space. And that's a framework I think everyone needs to have and never more important than today. What I mean by that is I never went into a role, any new role. And as I ascended and accelerated in my career, like it was always like, where's their new value to create?

4:32Forget the job description, because that's how you dispel myths about marketing and even how you dispel myths about yourself. So like, where's their new value to create, chase that. And typically when you chase that, you start to create a way that marketing maybe gets a more expansive view, or maybe marketing's welcome in a form it wasn't welcome in before, or maybe marketing's now got a chance to talk to other people in the C-suite it wasn't talking to. So I found that that's really, really helpful in any of those environments. I'm going to contrast that with walking into Uber. And there first in those early days, I didn't have 22 years growing up there.

5:09I was an outsider in the industry. I came at that point from CPG because I brought things that they didn't have. But at the same time, I didn't have a lot of what got them all of that expansive growth that they had experienced for those first nine years. And so there was a lot of really going this way, going across the organization and listening. And one thing became very clear to me that I would say, watch your language. So another framework is watch your language. What I mean by that is, had I shown up there and I had the horror stories of my in-between role of where I brought just too much Coke with me, had I shown up there using that CPG language, I think it would have been really hard to set the agenda for marketing in this new company.

5:54And so the framework there I used was one of like language that met them where they were not language that I was most familiar with. So here you have this person who at this point has, you know, 26 years of marketing experience leading brands in these huge companies. And I'm avoiding using the word brand. I am avoiding with all of my heart and soul how to avoid using that word, which seems crazy for a person who's been brought up in a brand building world, like the Coca-Cola company and being Suntory for as long as I was, but it was the divisive word. It was the word that in that world signaled department, not value.

6:30It doesn't mean that that department didn't create value. It just meant that it was like it pitted performance and brand, did a lot of things. And it didn't do what it needed to do, which for me, what it meant was value and meaning. And so instead I talked about how do we bring meaning to the company? How do we bring meaning to our performance marketing efforts? How do we use meaning as a way to generate growth that much easier? How do we use meaning to connect with consumers and drivers? And that language just kind of took the tone down of like, oh, you're talking about the department? No, no, no.

7:02I'm talking about the work and the value creation is one of the things that we can do as marketers. And so that was really, really helpful was knowing that context and really recognizing that my language could fundamentally change my interactions with engineers and with the product team, everyone I interacted with, and really using language that they felt they could understand and they could relate to, even if it was uncomfortable for me. Yep. I love it. I had a funny skit in my head at one point around marketers changing the words of things, even though some of them are kind of the same thing of like, no, no, no, it's not brand awareness.

7:36It's top of funnel awareness. Very different things. Can you sign off on my budget? Yeah, there is a little bit of that, but it's also like getting rid of the fancy jargon, right? Like if brand's a decisive word, at the end of the day, it's a meaning, it's a way of creating a navigational device that people can assign meaning to. And so if I could get rid of that word and it could help, I was all in. Yeah. What other things did you have to navigate? Because to me, Uber feels like Uber is what companies are today. I mean, to me, at least the world I see is like less Coca-Colas and way more companies like Uber that marketers have a chance to get into.

8:16So like what other things are happening today that are kind of similar to these days? Yeah, well, I will say, and while I 100 % agree with you, there are some fundamentals there that I see the Ubers of today could benefit from as well. Oh, okay, like what? Tell me more. Yeah. So, and I see this in a lot of the companies that I advise because the fundamentals of, you know, call it data-driven versus insight-rich, you know, like in the absence of things at a company like Coke and a lot of your CPGs mean that you try harder on other things. So the way we had to navigate consumer landscapes at Coke and understand what people cared about, we couldn't get that from data.

8:58We had to get that from sitting with people and ethnographies and in-home. And you had to extrapolate and you had to predict. I mean, you had to really use past behavior to do that. And so some of that kind of ethnography, in some ways, maybe even anthropology is, I think, was really as helpful as I think about like what I can now do in the companies that are, let's call them 21st century companies born of a different ilk and in a different way. And so some of that I miss sometimes when I get inside companies and I just don't see that, that like the whys and the way we asked whys, I just think was really different.

9:34That said, Stephanie, I think as we look at a lot of, let's call it today's companies, again, born in the 21st century and the marketers that are inside those, one is not foreign to the other. Again, it's a product of the value that marketing has been, has created inside that company. And that, but the the biggest one being the role I think that marketers play in the creation of product agenda or not. And I still believe that there is a bigger role for marketing to have closer to that agenda, maybe not leading it the way it does in CPG, because of what I said about those fundamentals, because of what I think a marketer can uniquely know.

10:16I mean, I think if marketing is what, consumer-driven growth. Who else knows the consumer maybe in that way than I think a marketer with maybe some of that background. So bringing those two worlds together, I think is awesome. And I love it. What I also think I really quickly grasped was, you know, if Coke plans, Uber iterates. And those two things don't really coexist very well. Because if you're a manufacturing company and it takes you a long time to make what you make, your ability to iterate is just almost unnecessary and maybe even some days, some ways dangerous, right? And so what we make takes a long time, takes a long time to produce.

10:57It's got to go through a lot of approvals and it can't quickly be brought back in. Unlike, you know, the Ubers of this world where a mistake is made, we shipped a product, we can quickly fix that bug. We can quickly send you an update and things will be better. And so I think that mindset also plays a really big role. And I think your ability to kind of lean into either of those two environments. And I would say, if I could take the planning rigor of Coke and the iteration mindset of Uber, you are like, you are creating an incredible marketer because you have this ability to plan for the long-term, creating incredibly long growth agendas and yet pivot along the way, which is what today's marketers need to do.

11:38Do you think there's a space for that? I mean, to me, I'm like, it seems like that sounds like a perfect solution to me. So where are the gaps? I do think there's a space, a big space. And I think there's a number of gaps. I think some of them are in our own selves, right? Like, you know, when I look at how we led at Coke, it was layers and layers of approvals. Again, the planning mindset, the de-risk, the ensure everyone's bought in, everyone's behind this, because our ability to go back was almost impossible. Undoing something was so hard to undo. And so I think we put a little bit of that on ourselves, right?

12:14You know, and particularly, and one thing I would say, that's right for the manufacturing team as well and the supply chain team, but it's not right for a marketing team. A marketing team can't take on and own all of that manufacturing mindset. Marketing today has to pivot and iterate and optimize. And so I think like, why does marketing, the one closest to the consumer agenda, need to house all of that, dare I say, burden of that? And then I look at Uber and I do think, or any of the companies that I'm inside that are of this generation, and I think about in the spirit of iterating and optimizing, I think sometimes there is a lack of a depth of certainty of where we're headed, of planning for that future.

13:01I was inside a Japanese-owned company, Beam Suntory, for almost three years. We wrote religiously 10-year growth plans because that's in their culture. That's how they think. and I will never forget what it feels like to be able to see that roadmap. And again, you know that there's gonna be a thousand pivots along the way, but to have a sense of where this company's going, remember they make products that sometimes you have to bet today on a whiskey that's gonna come to fruition in 20 years from now. And so it actually makes a lot of sense. But the same is true for some of the technologies that need to be really thought about and planned for.

13:36They don't need to be that different. They're really mindsets, sometimes tied to the business model of the company. and I think it's a lot of how we lead. We can lead our marketers to be more innovative. We can lead our marketers and incent them to put more thought into plans. That's on us as leaders. What does that look like when you're saying put more thought into plan and having these marketers think different? I mean, we always hear about marketers having a hard time, especially now it's like you have to do more with less. You're going to have the same budget you did four years ago. How can a marketer think about this environment now now and really make sure that they're being heard, that people are understanding the goals that they have, that the goals are correct?

14:14I mean, how can they audit the space that they're in right now so that when the CEO gets what they want to do, it's like, ah, yes, of course, this makes perfect sense. Like, what does that look like? And I'm asking because I know you go into all these companies and you do this all the time. So I think marketing has to connect to the growth agenda of the company. And even if in that company, marketing isn't at the center of the universe, a la the Coca-Cola way, where the growth agenda is tied to these products that marketing created and on the innovation agenda, any marketer at any seat at any table needs to know how they'd answer the question, how do you bring value here, wherever you sit.

14:47And the ability to answer that question can come in, you know, short snippets of, I'm going to do this in the next three months to answering the question of how does marketing bring value, right? And so, but I think we have to be able to answer them at both levels. I think we have to be able to say, here's the unique mission that marketing plays inside this company, any company, everybody inside that market need team should be able to answer that. And then take it all the way down to the individual of how I contribute to that marketing mission and that marketing mission, which is connected to the company's mission.

15:17That line, and I can tell you from some of the private advising work that I do in the research we have, that line is rarely drawn, rarely. And so what a CEO sees as a marketer over here is disconnected from the growth agenda. And that plays back to some of those myths you asked me about earlier. That marketing isn't center of growth, doesn't have growth top of mind, isn't as accountable for the metrics as maybe other teams are. And so I think one of the things I try to do, and when I mentor folks as well, is can you draw that line, no matter how senior or junior you are, to the mission of marketing that dives to the mission of the company and where you fit into that?

15:58And could you answer the question of how you did that for the short term, but also how you do that in the long term? And again, it's just in how we ask the questions. Yeah. In a couple of the other interviews I've done, the CMOs I've talked to have talked about like the importance of this cross-functional collaboration now more than ever of like, if you're not talking even to your CTO about what you're doing, like if they don't know, there's a problem because a lot of the tools that you're buying, they probably need to know about, and they will probably give you, you know, red flags and ideas of what not to buy.

16:24And your CEO, you better know what they're doing because like you said, you have to tie the growth plans and the actual company plans. Do you see this evolving in the spaces you're playing in of like this becoming more crucial? Crucial. What's the understatement of crucial? It's imperative. And it comes across in research. McKinsey has. It comes across in research I've seen in my private side. I will say the company least expected that did this the best was actually Beam Suntory. I had a CEO who forced collaboration across the functions. I will tell you, he was masterful. and what he didn't do, I've seen other companies do this where they pit the leadership team against each other and it almost becomes a competition.

17:06And there's some value to that. Who can get there faster? His was the opposite. If you walked in with a problem as a single function, so head of marketing or head of innovation at the company, I was marketing innovation and I had R &D under me, I walked in and only talked about the problem that I had that could be solved if I went with others, he would literally give this to me, which was walk out of the room, go talk to your peers. And only after you and the peers can't solve this, do you bring it to me? And that became a muscle of mine. So in the beginning, I probably used old habits and I thought, well, my boss will help me solve this.

17:48And he refused to. And the way he incented us was as a team, not as individuals. A very small percent of our bonuses as the ELT was even made on the individual level. It was what we achieved as a team. And so it was incented. The behavior was not tolerated. He didn't let us pit each other. And it was extremely helpful and helpful as I went into this kind of more unknown environment of Uber, where again, to go fast, to go alone, one of the things I tried to do was indeed forge more of those relationships cross-functionally with the tech team, with the product team is my first point, and with the finance team.

18:29Those are probably the four areas together with marketing that needed to work the closest. And I really thank my boss in that middle space who forced that collaboration. And I think it's something that we can force on our teams. It's a must. I saw a number where marketing only owns 60 % of the marketing activities inside a company. I don't know if the number's exact, but it's astounding. Marketing only owns 60 % of the marketing activities inside a company. You can't find another function with something similar to that, right? Finance owns 85 % of the finance activities. And so as such, it's just an imperative that we work cross-functionally, that we invite others in, that we use language that others can relate to, that we tie our goals together with theirs.

19:18These are must-dos. I love it. So when it comes to the world we're in today, at least from my perspective, is that it seems like marketers are a little timid now to take big bets because there was a while when they did and maybe there wasn't as much oversight of metrics and then all of a sudden, you know, the budgets got pulled in and then like every dollar counted and there was no brand building and there was no, you know, those bets. It feels like we're moving into a better space, hopefully now. That's my optimism saying that we are. But what do you think about like taking big bets? I'm assuming you've done this at Uber and like the other places that you've been, but I'd love to hear some stories around like what you've done and especially times when you're like, this might not work out.

20:00I'm a little nervous about this one. Or this one crashed and burned, but was like a great learning experience. So, oh, big bets. They're like, how to be a hero or how to be the - Get fired? Yeah, at the door. So, first of all, the idea of big bets, we had big bets in our plans at Coe. We called them that. You were obligated to name them. And big bets, ironically, were the things that had all the cross-functional collaboration. And it's something I loved and have taken forward, which is a big bet can only be a big bet if it involves more than your area. I like that. Right? And that is such a simple framework, but so powerful.

20:46Because if it's big, it requires more of us, maybe even all of us. If it's big, it'll get the attention of more of us and all of us. And so I think the bigger question is how to determine what the big bets are. Because once they get that status, if in fact you buy into the perspective I just shared with you, then how you do it is it's going to be through collaboration, through metrics that are measuring a multifunctional, multilayers, because they're by definition, a bet this company is making that it believes it's big. It also means that the risk is shared. And so you're more likely to do better things if you're not going down alone.

21:29And if in fact, you have the confidence and the comfort of knowing that the resources are behind you as you go at this. Big bets don't fail because the idea wasn't big enough. They often fail because they weren't resourced properly. They didn't have the cadences. We got distracted. And so that for me is like how big bets succeed. I was fortunate that I was enabled, empowered to lead a couple of those. And that feeling of knowing that I'm taking a hundred people with me, let's just give you an example, like really like there's a hundred people on the sheet of paper that are owning this bet with me is huge and both, yeah, daunting that you get the privilege to lead it, but also there's tremendous comfort and power in that.

22:11Not the power I have, but the power of knowing that like, wow, I've got a hundred people signed up to go on this journey with me. And I felt an enormous responsibility. And I think you just try that much harder to not let people down. But in so doing, sometimes you will need to pivot. You will need to walk in and say, time out. It appears that as far as we've come is where we need to stop. And knowing when to do that is as much art as science. And I don't know that I always got that right, but I always tried to own the role I had in either the success or the failure of it. But setting it up right for success is, I think, the number one thing about big bets.

22:51And I really think when we did it well at Coke, we did it better than anywhere I've seen. What about it? Did you do anything at Uber that - Well, they were all big bets. Yeah. I would say coming in as like the first CMO. Yeah. So maybe that was part of, you know, like some of the things we did didn't have some of that foundational elements to it. We were still doing big bets and putting them on one person. Right. It's just some of those fundamentals weren't there yet. And so, yes, there was a couple of big bets we did. We did one around the Superbowl in 2019 that I don't think, you know, it, it didn't fizzle, but it didn't have the impact that I think we had believed it would have.

23:29And when I go back and I think about it, when we debriefed it as a team and did our like, you know, learning review on it, it was clear. It was like the insight wasn't right. It wasn't the rigor that we should have had to call this big bet. We didn't bring in the other functions sooner. All the things I'd known, but we were moving really fast and it felt right. But yet again, it's a good example of where I think I failed on my own bringing of the fundamentals forward that I knew. And so, but also I think it really sometimes felt like everything was a big bet, you know, or at least everything was a new bet because there was so little tried before, particularly on a united marketing front.

24:06And even similarly on how we thought about the org, you know, some of the biggest things we were doing in those days was completely reorganizing and reshaping how the teams across the world work together. And I mean, imagine at that point, marketing was distributed across 80 countries, but really distributed, meaning like all of those 80 places that we were operating had leadership that went one way. So there was no collaboration this way, right? There was a lot of duplication, but again, that's how they went fast. So what we were really trying to do was network that organization to be unlike any other, to work in new ways and recognizing which capabilities needed more global or like centralized leadership that could be shared and where you still needed to keep that really close tethering to the local market to move really fast more on some of the, like kind of call it in field work.

24:57And so that was a big bet, right? We were betting on an entirely new way of working on a company that had experienced great success. But as we were looking down, you know, barreling down the eyes of an IPO and kind of the next phase of the company, it was required. And that was really seen as a big bet. Yeah. I mean, it seems like that's something that's going to be more important than ever now is like thinking about global marketing efforts and how to manage the team. And I've definitely seen many times where a company will try and centralize things and it just, like kills the uniqueness of that team of like what they're best at.