Checkout.com’s Playbook for Beating Global Giants: Pick One Fight.

0:00You and I are going to like to pay for anything, so payments should never be noticed in that sort of customer journey. If it's not a word you'll use at the dinner table, please take it away. B2B marketing can get back to simplicity and start using normal word. Marketeers find it so hard to work together. It drives me mad. We're all trying to get to the same customer marketing as a commercial concept. We invest company money to help businesses grow. That's the very simple definition. You hear the word curious and you hear the word creativity. So connected. That is the greatness of creativity. How do we inspire marketeers to keep that creative?

0:32We are a challenger brand in our sector, much smaller than some of the global payments businesses that we compete with.

0:37Rory O'Neill:I learned more at BlackBerry than any other stage of my career. I'm Eric Fulweiler, and this is Scratch, bringing you marketing lessons from the leading brands and brains, rewriting the rulebook from scratch for the world of today. Hey, everyone. Special edition of Scratch today. I have Rory O 'Neill, the CMO of Checkout.com. And if you notice, checkout.com. The billboard is right behind us. And that is our office right there. That is Rival London. Serendipity. But I actually sat down with Rory at South by Southwest London and had a spontaneous conversation. Neither of us knew that the interview was going to happen until about 15 minutes before.

1:13And we completely winged it. There was no script for this. But Rory is a fascinating. And the experience that he has is incredible in technology. So he comes from BlackBerry. He was the head of marketing at BlackBerry. I asked him to tell me a story about marketing at BlackBerry. Samsung, and then got into the world of payments, built a very successful challenger brand in payments, and I was doing the same thing at checkout.com, one of the biggest brands that you've probably never heard of. This is a business that powers a lot of the payments for some of the biggest companies in the world that has been the invisible brand until now, and Rory is now taking them on a consumer marketing spend and spree here in the UK, but also going big in the US to make them a brand that you have heard of.

1:56Amazing conversation. I'll leave it there. Please enjoy my conversation with Rory O 'Neill. Rory, how are you? I'm doing great, Eric. How are you? I am good. Well, this was very serendipitous. I don't think either of us knew this interview was going to happen until about 15 minutes ago. And so while our teams did put together a brief, we decided when we sat down, we're just going to wing it. It's great. It's great. And thanks for taking the time to spend with us today. Yeah, of course. I appreciate your flexibility and openness to just wing a conversation. But I did tell you there's a fixed question in the beginning and a fixed question in the end.

2:28Fixed question in the beginning. What is your favorite challenger brand and why? Great question. Look, I think I could easily say South by Southwest because it's plastered behind you and credit to the team. We're bringing South by Southwest to London. London is our home, Checkout.com. We're very proud to be here. We are, of course, a challenger brand in our sector, much smaller than some of the global payments businesses that we compete with. But look, I've been in tech my entire life, working at brands like BlackBerry at the day when it was a challenger and then it wasn't. And then, you know, even at Samsung and beyond.

2:58But look, I think the brands I use every day like Sonos, I think they're still a great tech challenger brand. They liberated music for me along with Spotify. So maybe I could say Spotify and Sonos, but it's still hanging out there challenging too. Tell us a story from the BlackBerry days. Oh my goodness. It's a great one. Look, I mean, a lot of people ask me like, what happened at BlackBerry? What was the thing on there? Look, I think the first thing I'd say is that Apple and Samsung were very good. Let's be honest. And that's the sense. But look, I think there's much been written about it. There's lots been filmed about it.

3:31You won't believe you played me in the movie, Eric. And that sort of sounds, but look, I mean, I think that BlackBerry grew so fast, so quickly. And ultimately, it was a talent question, right? Like, you know, BlackBerry had like 18 ,000 people worldwide, a lot of them in the district of Waterloo, Ontario. Fantastic people, but it was a market that moved so quickly. It was growing at hundreds of percent a month on month. And the whole smartphone wave just took over great. So I learned more at BlackBerry probably than any other stage of my career. It was a tremendous place to work. Loved every minute of it and learned an awful lot.

4:06Yeah, that's awesome. All right. There are some, you know, many interesting things about your background. I'm sure we could spend a whole podcast talking about. But of course, we want to talk about Checkout.com. So for people who aren't familiar with the business of the brand, can you give us an overview on what it is and where it's at right now? Yeah, Checkout is a global payments provider. and we process payments for some of the world's largest digital brands. So our customers are Spotify, eBay, Uber, Pinterest, HelloFresh, TikToks. And the problem we're trying to solve for them is when you put your card in a machine, Eric, 99.9 % of the time worldwide, it will work these days.

4:42When you use the same card online for exactly the same goods and services, that acceptance rate can drop to about 80%. So if you're processing millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions or billions of dollars online, that acceptance rate chasing one basis point can mean millions and millions of dollars. So what Checkout does is uses AI, data science, machine learning to optimize payments, making sure that payments data transactions are successful so that our customers have the highest possible acceptance rates in payments that they have globally. And we have to do all that and be completely invisible because you and I, Eric, don't like to pay for anything.

5:23So payments should never be noticed in that sort of customer journey. And so I guess a few questions come to mind within that. The invisible brand, essentially, right? The brand behind the curtain that's making it all happen. Your marketing, I know you're here at Selfie, right? And I know we just looked at the picture of the billboard that got painted literally behind our office in Shortage. So you're doing some consumer marketing, but for the most part, the marketing is B2B, right? Yeah, 100%. We're a B2B brand today. And we painted the mural in Tabernacle Street, Eric, because we were desperate to get in front of you.

5:59Yeah, exactly. So we did that placement for that reason. Mission accomplished. But look, I think for Checkout, we are very well known in our core target audience, which is a head of payment inside of a big brand that's processing over$100 million or more online a year. The challenge we have is that 60 % to 65 % of all payments contracts are signed by the CFO or they're signed by the CTO. And Checkout is less known in those markets. We're also more known in London than we are known in the US. We've got a great proposition for the US now. We've got our own dedicated license. We're investing in the US heavily.

6:35So we're a European brand that is growing in the US. It's our fastest growing market worldwide. But we're less well known in the US. So we have to invest in the brand because quite honestly, Eric, if people know who we are, then actually our sales cycle should move faster. People will buy more from us. And we can track all that data in our pipeline and all the great systems we have these days. But we actually have to build and grow the brand so people recognize us and would, when they go into a payment cycle, they would prefer to buy from checkout. So our whole creative campaign is like, look, you don't know who we are and you shouldn't know who we are.

7:12And we're the brands that are behind brands that you would really recognize. And we have a bit of fun, a bit of like, you know, humor, hopefully by leaning right into that. So we had a, we do this series of CMO roundtables, which now that we know each other, you should definitely come to one because we do them in London regularly. But we did one in New York back in March and the head of research at LinkedIn came to it. He was talking about some of the research that they've been doing, obviously, on kind of B2B marketing and sales. And to get the stat right, it was something like the brand of the business that is known to all of the buyers in the room is 20 times more likely to win the contract than the one is not.

7:49Amazing. Yeah. And so, you know, it's the classic kind of nobody got fired for hiring IBM type of mentality. Right. The fear of messing up versus the fear of missing out.

7:58Rory O'Neill:OK, so what is that? Let's talk about the U.S. then. Let's double click on that. What is the strategy to or I guess you're already growing really quickly in the U.S., but there's a lot of opportunity for you. What's the marketing strategy for the U.S.? Is it only B2B doing consumer as well? How does that all fit together? Yeah, it's only B2B. but look I think the reality when we looked at the media profiles of the people we're trying to reach and we have a disproportionate need to reach people in New York and San Francisco it's just where our target map is is set the sea level executives or the executives are trying to reach they're on the transport networks they're going to industry shows they go to South by Southwest in London they'll go to obviously Austin they'll go to Tech Week in New York you know they they hit these kind of events and they hit the transport networks so what we tried to design was like a high impact media buy that would really blitz transport networks of key cities when major events was were actually in town and like everybody we film all of our out of home we put it all in digital we use that in our retargeting and our performance marketing to make sure the contacts we're trying to reach in the accounts we want to try and reach are actually getting to look at the adverts.

9:08So yes, we pick them in high football, high impact areas like, you know, we're on Times Square this week. You know, we've got spots at the World Trade Center, like amazing 100 foot out of home where you wouldn't normally see a B2B brand. But we're after that executive buyer, we want to make an impression there. And we want to capture all that stuff that looks amazing. And then actually, it just looks higher impact when we use it in our digital performance marketing. When did you make the transition? Or I'm assuming you made the transition from B2C to B2B, blackberry samsung and then plan it i believe and check out and i'm sure i'm missing a couple

9:41Rory O'Neill:in there but um when did you make that transition and i guess one what changed most significantly for you and also what didn't change like what have you kept from your b2c days that's effective because what i get from you i don't feel like i'm talking to kind of like let's say a traditional b2b enterprise b2b marketer right i get some kind of b2c spice and flavor to how you're talking about things but tell me a little bit about that evolution of you as a cmo yeah i mean look i think you'd expect me to say this. I actually begun my career in B2B and then moved into consumer through the growth of BlackBerry and away from heavyweight enterprise into like the professionals and entrepreneur world and obviously hard into consumer and continued that as I went to Samsung and beyond.

10:20But look, I think there's going to be a lot of consumer marketeers in B2B in the coming years, Eric. And I think for a couple of reasons. I think one is consumer marketeers are grounded in data, insight and action. And it's our ritual, if you like. It's the way we look at things. And I think that the world of B2B now is now fueled with a lot more data and the insight that we're taking action on. I think the second thing is brands important. Look at the brands that are here at South by Southwestern London. Thought leadership in B2B is brand building in any other language. And then the third thing I think is, you know, is just, I find fascinating is, is the level of performance marketing in B2B versus the level of performance marketing and consumer.

11:05I mean, look, Eric, it was 10 years ago I was buying ads on Facebook and there was four and a half different thousand ways to buy them. These days, if your level of personalization in B2B is like, hi, Eric, you're the CFO of a company, would you like to buy a photocopier? You know what I mean? It can be that basic. The outreach can be that basic. So I think for those reasons, the data, I think the brand building and I think the performance marketing skills as a consumer marketeers can be very powerful in B2B. And then what is different, I think it's fascinating to understand, is when you're selling to a consumer, ordinarily you're selling to one person or you're selling to a consumer or you might have a shopper that buys on behalf of that consumer.

11:47In B2B, you have complex maps of stakeholder relationships. And how does the CTO influence the CFO? How does the recommender of a payments decision influence the technology buyer? So that's super exciting to me. I think that that map of influence is really, really interesting. And it's clearly different from the consumer world. But understanding how that happens is critical. And you're right. I mean, the LinkedIn data is very similar to data we have. When B2B buyers go through their cycle, 95 % of the time, brands or vendors that are on the day one top five list are the brands that win the deal.

12:23So brand preference is the most important thing when buyers are spending 60 % of their journey before they even contact a salesperson at any brand. So I think that for that reason, the way that people do their research now, which is only going to be compounded and amplified with the LLM world that they're going to live in, grand matters. Well, I for one welcome it as a former B2B, or I guess in a way I kind of am a B2B CMO. Well, our audience is B2B. So we sell B2B, although my job is less and less marketing these days but before starting rival i was b2b of a sorry i was cmo of a b2b fintech okay and i'm passionate about b2b you know i always joke with my co-founder because she's like b2b marketing sucks and i understand where that's coming from right like she's a media planner and buyer it's usually a little bit less exciting to do that job for b2b companies although to your point it's changing but man i just always i thought there was so much opportunity to challenge the convention of how B2B is done.

13:22Because to be honest, like if you oversimplify it, so many B2B businesses are sales led and how they think about growth. Marketing in many of those organizations is a support function of sales. And so it's kept the bar low in terms of what B2B marketing is. And so you bring a little bit of consumer, a little bit of humanity, a little bit of creativity to the world of B2B. And it really, it really blows things up. It can pop. And I think like, I think that's why we try and stand out in that way. I mean, I think there's, there's so many brands in B2B or in the payment space that was promised, seamless payments with one single API on a global platform and all these, I'll be honest, blah, blah, blah words that people don't understand.

13:59I think you can cut through and make a big impact just by showing up and being real. I think that the team at checkout has done an amazing job working with teams worldwide to go back to guys, what are we really going to stand for? What is the purpose of this brand? And what attributes are we going to amplify? And we want to be you know we want to be uh seen as a very expert brand because you have deep science in what we're doing we know that we want to be unconventional we want to turn up in places that people wouldn't expect us to even south by southwest london and you know checkout as a payments brand isn't one you'd expect to be first on the list of this show and we were very proud to support this show and it's an overall year because this is our home um and we know we're great believers in this show we can come back to in a second but like so so expert you know uh unconventional are very important to us we want to be humble because at the end of the day we process from merchants that are way bigger than us and it's a real privilege to be able to work with the brands that we work with and you know so it's always about them um in in that sort of sense and i think that you know we want to build on that in our advertising campaign we actually invest and buy ads on behalf of the merchants that work with us um we'll run an ad on the left and then we'll let the merchant lean into it on the right.

15:15So I think it's important to build on that way. And look, we're deeply ambitious. So those four attributes, expert, humble, unconventional, ambitious, is what shapes all of our work. We do that on the brand side. And we firmly believe that every time you touch the brand, you either polish it or you dent it. And those principles are very, very true in all our work, from the tiniest performance marketing ad to the stuff that you see on billboards. They always have to follow those attributes. Why did you come to checkout? I'm assuming you must have had lots of options. And one of the things that I think is fascinating, particularly in the world of B2B, because I hear from so many B2B CMOs or senior marketers that are like, how do I get the CEO to believe in brand to let me do something interesting, et cetera.

15:57And, you know, of course, there's many conversations to be had around that. But part of it and what I always think about and how I chose to go to the B2B company that I did is I think you got to pick the company. You got to pick the CEO. You know, you got to make sure that the way that you want to do marketing is something that that company and that CEO is set up to do. it was really hard to change people at that level, right?

16:15Rory O'Neill:And I was just thinking, like hearing you talk, I was like, you must have had a lot of options. You chose to go here. It sounds like it's been a really good fit. Thinking about our audience, what was kind of the process you went through to decide like, yes, this is the right fit for me? Oh, that's a great question. Look, I think the one thing I've always harbored is, you know, we spend, there's two things in life we spend a disproportionate amount of time on before we make a decision. and one of them is buying a flat probably in London or Boston you know we originate from but like you know in London you probably get 12 minutes to see a flat and you're committing yourself to a 25-year mortgage so that feels a bit odd and then the second one is a job process on a job interview you might get what like three four hours with a with a with a team and then you're going to sign away your life for the rest of the five years and gonna you know give your hours and energy to it so I think one of the things I always spotted at checkout was it was a robust interview process and I spent a bucket load of time with the team and I think that you know I hadn't worked with a founder directly previously and Guillaume Pizaz who's our CEO and founder, founder of the company in 2012, I think you know remarkable individual for sure I'm sure he won't mind me saying but like I think that when you get close to a founder you have this authenticity of the person that uniquely reflects the brand and i think there's something super exciting about helping a founder tell their story um and try and scale it with some of the brands i've worked with in my previous and in my career so i think that was super exciting i also think that you know payments i've got into payments um after i left samsung and into planet and payments at the time felt like it felt like the mobile phone industry of 2000 in it right like uh you You know, it was so obvious that the world of payments was going to go digital.

18:02It was all going to go on our phones. So when I started at Planet, like I was fascinated with the payments industry and I fell in love with it because it's super complex. It's super difficult. It's always changing. It's highly regulated. It's fragmented as you go around the world. And as a marketeer, you sit there and go, you know, one of the great things about our space in tech is, you know, this isn't brown sticky liquid in a red can and brown sticky liquid in a blue can. These things do things for companies. They do things for people. And I think getting that balance between the brand and the product marketing and making sure you tell that story really well is something that's fascinating.

18:38So it's some combination between the market and then I think you're dead right, the CEO that you work with. And I'm very fortunate that I think you get a unique sense of a brand when you're working with a founder. Great answer. So I mentioned when we sat down, you know, our focus and the focus of this podcast is understanding the playbook of challenging brands. um you know samsung maybe not a challenger but planet and what you did there a challenger taking on the incumbents in a different portion of the payment space and now checkout definitely a challenger taking on some of the big incumbents in the space how do you think about the term challenger brand and challenger marketing does that mean to you uh gosh that's a great question i think the look i think it's about just i think it's about defying the category norms and really sort of trying to find a new edge to compete, like in that sort of sense.

19:28So we compete with amazing brands and articles. And they're really, really good at what they do and good for them. And I think that they've established category norms that honestly, we shouldn't compete against them in those domains. So for us, it's about picking a focus area. We only do digital payments. We only try and solve this one problem for our customers right now, which is optimizing digital payments and making sure those acceptance rates are as high as possible. Our competitors will be in three or four different product lines. They'll be in three or four different business lines. They'll be in three or four different segment areas.

20:04They'll be probably more worldwide than we are. Right now, that focus is really helping us generate profitability from the core business. and then the levels of what we build out from that is then number two and this is really important to the team is we then think about the Europe the human operating system that supports that business and I think as the company grew very quickly after COVID you know we probably didn't put enough attention on codifying what we required from team members at checkout where we were going with checkout what the vision was and what was really needed on that kind of like exchange of beliefs between employee and employer and we spend a ton of time like on the performance culture and what it takes to get ahead and the types of people that we want to work with at checkout and those kind of pieces investing in communities and all those pieces and then the third thing is when you have those two things is you have capital that you can then reinvest in new product loads um and i think that those those sort of three elements are what allows challenger brands to compete against the category nodes yeah and then one of the most i think strategic question we ask ourselves is you know what do we do the same as a competition because we just have to um and that is only ever going to be points of parity and then what we love is like what are we going to do different yeah um and that is such a powerful simple strategic question that actually we have a lot of fun trying to answer it's interesting a couple things bubble the minds in your answer i mean first where you first went made me smile because you know we start every engagement because a lot of some of our work is with challenger brands a lot of our work is actually in the whole idea with the business is to take the challenger playbook to incumbent brands right like how big brands think and act like challengers and we start every engagement with what we call mapping the category convention and i was thinking as you were talking because we're working with a payments company right now and we started it's kind of like a brand redesign and some other things and we started with you know literally putting up i guess it was virtually on a mirror board, but you put up on the wall, the competitors and just what the message is, what the visual identity is, how they show up at events and all like that.

22:07My God, it's just a C is saying this.

22:09Rory O'Neill:I don't remember if you all were on the wall. You might not have been in my head. A different competitive set. But in order to differentiate, you first have to understand what you're differentiating from. And so starting with that exercise, I think is something, you know, I talked about it earlier when I did the interview on the stage with the founder of Light Phone. That's something anybody can just go through that tomorrow. I think so many of these conversations, so many of these interviews or talks at conferences, I'm always fascinated by the amount of time and content that goes in and the actions and the impact of those actions that come out.

22:44How do you widen the channel for the input to turn into actionable output that creates value for people? And I think some of that is talking about things at this level, but being like, go do this tomorrow. Sometimes people need to just be like, just go do this tomorrow and see what happens. And so I think that exercise of like sitting down and just pick your six competitors, print their most recent brand campaigns and just put up on the wall and see what comes out of that. And I think that that's one of the ways that you certainly get to differentiation. Yeah. And how important is the, you know, how important is the customer need that sits alongside that?

23:21Do you help those brands think about like the category norms? but because it's always it's also the category norms and then it's i guess what the customer cares about yeah so we at the end of the day all growth comes from delivering value to the customer in a better faster cheaper way right like growth comes from the customer at the end of the day and you know being in a product business before starting rival in this fintech company we use jobs to be done as a methodology for how we build products right and i found it i was like oh man this is how how are we not thinking about brands this way why are brands not built with jobs that's Like, where's the customer?

23:55We're talking about this. And so, you know, the methodology, if we take kind of positioning or really anything that we do, because it always starts with strategy before it goes into any type of execution. It fundamentally starts with what are the needs of the audience. Right. But what we see, you know, our business model is based on what do we see challengers do differently? And then, of course, how do we use that to develop methodologies to deliver the services, which is actually how we make our money, starts with the needs of the customer and then the value of the product. And particularly in technology and particularly in B2B technology, that's where a lot of brand positioning stops.

24:28It is, what do you need and what do I do? Here's the message. That's right. And so what we introduce based on what we see challenger brands do so effectively and how they do more with less is they have the third element that's what's different from everybody else. and depending on the category depending on the business that gets dialed up or down to be either the primary message or the secondary message or whatever it might be but it's really how those three things come yeah it's such a it's such a useful framework for people to think for you it's like um uh it's funny when i was at samsung i worked with a wonderful cmo uh david lowes who was ex-unilever um and david sort of brought wonderfully simple language to like the way we we were thinking about things and one of the things he used to write on the board was like guys what is the job to be done yeah um and of course like it was all it was very novel for us at the time but it's like no guys who are we going to get to do what how where and when yeah and there isn't a single media plan or marketing campaign that can't be just sharpened if you're really precise on the job to be done yeah um and so we we use the language of checkout all the time we have three major jobs to be done we've got anybody that's in market we've got to make sure that they want to choose checkout anybody that's not in market the next time they do we want them to put checkout at the top of the list and for those that are existing customers we want them to grow we want to buy more products and that simplification of the marketing process i think just helps marketeers get greater currency in the commercial motions of the business and that helps us get to the lingua franca of the organization so we're not talking about you know likes or posts or we're talking about the actual way that the business is run.

26:09And that's where marketing has to sit. That's our seat at the table. We did some research last year on the future of the CMO role, and actually we're kicking off the iteration of it for this year now. But that's really what it came down to, interviewing all these CMOs and CEOs and VCs and private equity and kind of like, why is it the lowest tenure role in the C-suite? Why is it that only a very low single-digit percentage of Fortune 500 companies have a CMO or like all the headlines why is it and fundamentally what it comes down to is like the role of the CMO is not marketing the role of the CMO is growth marketing is a means to an end and too many marketers and to be honest too many CMOs certainly too many agencies are marketing for the sake of marketing as opposed to marketing for the sake of means yeah yeah exactly no I agree and look I think it's at the end of the day like last time I read a book on marketing it was a commercial function yeah and you know there's very many definitions of marketing out there but we invest company money to help businesses grow you know that's the very simple definition of it it's always been our output yeah 100 tell me about one of your pet peeves oh gosh i had a feeling you might have a few something because i'm old and battered in these days so i think uh it's the you know it's the it's the shitless words you know the frictionless sameless like you know or seamless rather, and things that just like, if it's not a word you'll use at the dinner table, please take it away.

27:39I think particularly in B2B marketing, I think we can get back to simplicity and start using normal words. And I think we'll actually find ourselves a lot more interesting in that sort of sense. Can I just build on that real quick? Yeah. I was thinking about this in your previous answer as well. And so I'll call it out now. You know, it's so interesting, the future of the CMO research, even just the whole premise of Rival and Challenger brands and the future of marketing that's here, but not even distributed. You know, the dirty little secret about that is like, it's really the past of marketing.

28:09It is the basic fundamentals just done really well. And it's also interesting if you look at, you know, not sound dramatic, but like brands that have lost their way or, you know, when we're brought in or a new CMO is brought in to like reposition the brand and get, you know, get back to growth and things like that. Often what they do is they strip things back. They go back to the basics. They're not adding new things on. And so, so much of this stuff, and I find it so interesting and in a way ironic that we're having this conversation at South by Southwest. It's all about innovation and creativity and technology and all that.