Marketing Across Uncertainty | Lessons from the Deloitte Global Roundtable with Nestlé, Saucony, Zurich Insurance and

26:00And we talk about the things that we do also. So I talked about the stories before, but Together Makes Progress allows us to talk about how we do it and why the way that we do it is different. Because we do it together with our clients in partnership. We're this master convener of our services, our technology, our ecosystem partners, the technology alliance partners that we work with, universities, data providers, government organizations. We bring it all together for the better good of this organization, company, client. But we do it together with them and with other people. I think that makes it a bit more special.

26:34And we're just leaning into this thing that is different, and that's the human relationships that we build at Deloitte with our clients. It's very non-transactional. They tend to be longer-term personal relationships. That's just been a really pleasant thing to get a chance to put in place.

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28:05Joy, welcome. Did you work at Procter & Gamble ever in your career? No, I did not. So you're diversifying our family. I'm really cool. Scott was the only one until you arrived. We're in it together. So what's the first brand? We're introducing you now. What's the first brand you remember making an impact on you as a young girl? McDonald's. I'm originally from Tennessee. I grew up in Chattanooga. So it's very interesting. Those are very Southern, very homey roots. And I remember being a little girl. My father's Jamaican. So I think when you're an immigrant, your parents are very much like you're going to be a doctor, lawyer, teacher.

28:41And that was like the first unlock for me when I saw like the emotion of like, do you remember the original McDonald's when it's like the families and the moment like dinnertime? And I grew up in a very like, we cook everything. There's no fast food. So that was like the first time I remember being like to ask my parents, can we do something like defy natural norms? And I was very young, but when I was in college and I remember I was pre-med and I was calling my parents to tell them I was going to switch to advertising. Nice call. Yeah. And I was just like, but do you remember this moment when I was like eight and I like, I go, that's what I want to do for other people.

29:18So it was like that moment really crystallized for me, like my purpose without me even knowing it. And then as I grew up and, you know, you do the things that you're supposed to do. I was really good in biology. So it's got to be a doctor. And I was like, this is not my passion. It's really like changing perception and tapping into consumer insight and telling great stories to help drive consumer behavior. And so, yeah, that was the that was the moment for me. Do you still go to McDonald's now and then? No. No? Okay. I'm a Chick-fil-A girl. Oh, yeah. Despite the politics behind that, I still love, I mean, like, we love Chick-fil-A in our house.

29:53Yeah. That's amazing. That's amazing. So what's something that would surprise us about your role right now? Well, Saucony, I don't know if you know, I'm the global CMO of Saucony. Saucony is a 126-year-old brand. It's been known as, like, the original running shoe. and I think it's surprising to people that while it has this great heritage and running and I used it I was a competitive swimmer I swam in college I used Saucony as a as a for all my conditioning my father had a red specialty store so I remember pulling down Saucony putting it up for holiday getting paid like two dollars an hour which is not something we'll talk about today but um Saucony has this great rich heritage and actually the performance of the shoe but it's actually a great.

30:35The last 50 years, we've been known, particularly in EMEA, as a great lifestyle shoe. It's a beautiful, we have, because of our deep history and our deep catalog, it's been a product that has resonated. Even here, I've seen many, many people wearing our lifestyle shoes because it's built on the chassis of great performance, the innovation and the technology is great. And then you have this amazing colorway. So even though right now we're seeing this embrace of, I call it run lifestyle, so many people have on running shoes with their beautiful clothes. Saucony has been doing it for over 50 years.

31:05And so I think it's shocking to people, number one, that we've been in that business. I think number two, I think sometimes it's shocking to how to pronounce it. People still say Cuccony, but it's Saucony. And I think to what you were saying earlier, I think we just launched our great campaign, Run Us One. And it was built on this insight that we know that Gen Z coming out of COVID, they really were looking for a moment to connect. And that's why you see this emergence of running crews, but they were using as a conduit to connect, not just to be physical, but to connect. And I don't know if you have kids in college or high school, but there's this huge movement of non-alph, like they're very much more healthy.

31:38And so they use running as a conduit to connect with each other. Also, the Surgeon General came out and said, like, there's this epidemic of loneliness that's happening after COVID and it equates to like soaking 15 cigarettes a day. So we took that insight and we said, you know, we can obviously talk about our product and all the innovation, but we really want to be bigger than that as a brand and we want to be a connector for community. And so Run Us One is our campaign that we launched in March, which really is not only connecting our performance and lifestyle side of our business, but really speaking to that consumer who we're trying to talk to, who's a little bit younger than our historical consumer, is more 25, 35, and using running, using movement, using physical activity as a way to first feel good about themselves, but also to connect with people, to create relationships, because they came out of this unprecedented moment of COVID where they lost that opportunity to build relationships in high school and college and post, you know, the first few years of work.

32:31And so we're thinking the brand has a bigger purpose. Sound like you're loving your role. It's been 10 months and I love it. Yeah. I want to just get on the panel quickly with one question that we're going to turn to the audience. And that is we talked about clarity of leadership and uncertain times. What's one leadership skill that's on overdrive for you right now, that you're really exercising that muscle? Is it in strategy? Is it in customer closeness? Is it in working with your peers in the C-suite, you know, on one goals? So what is that skill? For me, in Europe is the power of listening, because, you know, Europe is going through a number of challenges.

33:10Actually, in my scope, I have Ukraine, Israel. So it's sometimes we all have bias. And the more you listen, the more you're conscious of your biases and the more you realize as well. And it sounds perhaps super flat, but I really discovered it over and over again, working with so many different cultures in Europe and especially the power of active listening. This is what I was taught, you know but now i discovered the true power of listening which is it's not calling up for action is really getting the empathy exactly just listening to my colleagues to drive better decisions daniel similar for me i would say back to the polarization that i was talking about before it's really opening up your eyes to for even things that you don't like or you don't want to hear which means in some ways also getting inspiration so this week in can is a great opportunity to just listen and more concretely on the business side it means listening in our is to other industries.

34:07There's nothing to do with insurance. So getting examples from other companies. And I would say it goes even deeper in hiring. I'm a bit advocate of hiring people that have diverse experiences. Lots of industries tend to like people who have done similar jobs before. And I see definitely the value in leveraging different experiences. I see even recently, obviously, the caring CEO that comes from Automotive. That's quite a shift. In an industry, luxury, that usually is quite focused on luxury. I think that's something that definitely we need to leverage more across industries. Joy, how about yourself?

34:41I agree with that. I actually, so I came to Saucony Footwear as my first footwear job. I came from luxury and tech and media. And so I think one of the things I'm leaning into is this idea of like, good ideas can come from anywhere and to encourage, particularly like if we want to have 60 % of our consumers are non-white. So I need to make sure that we're very much in the room, talking, strategizing, creating concepts of people that represent our main cohort. So that's number one. I think the second thing for me is I really value this concept of servant leadership and really making sure that my team feels like that they are a team and that I'm part of the team, not just hovering on top, being in the ivory tower dictating.

35:20And that's hard sometimes when you're going back to your executive team, talking to the board and like, you know, the things we have to get done. So I try really hard to practice the skill of intentionality around servant leadership. because I think it inspires the team. I think Gen Z, Gen Alpha, they all respond better to that. And, you know, at 47, sometimes I'm like, just do it. But I have to like relax and be like, okay, this is not going to get the best result. Also, I could probably learn if I listen to them. So I really try very hard every day to like have that mindset when I go into the office.

35:53Scott, last word. I'm going to pick up on the listening, but I'm going to say two parts. It's both listening and education. And on the listening front, it's so important for us to make sure that we're constantly out listening to our clients, to the audiences of potential clients that we serve and make sure that we understand what they want, what they need, where the market is going for them so that we can respond. But on the flip side of that, educating both our marketers and our leaders inside of Deloitte, what the power of our brand is and how to access marketing, because some of the marketers on our team come in from the outside and they don't understand the complicated sales motions that Deloitte has.

36:31And so how can you market well to the public if you don't actually know the product? So educating them is really important, but also educating our leaders because our leaders will say, we want to put this out and we'll say, well, that's not what the audience really wants or what they're looking for. And so there's this listening education back and forth that I find myself in the middle of constantly.

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37:57thank you panel let's go to the audience anything on your mind so as i was preparing for the png alumni speech i came across kind of the concept of vuca the world used to be called vuca but actually the term has changed. In 2020, we're moving to a Bani world, brittle, anxious, non-linear, and unexplainable, because there's a need for more of the psychological aspects. And really, in the old world, strategy and clarity were kind of enough as a leader. But in this new Bani world, it's more of the human skills, which we heard all of you talk about. So I think an interesting point is the role of the CMO as chief culture officer, etc.

38:33I'd love to hear your thoughts a little bit on that one. So the question is, what's the role of this CMO in terms of culture? How do we liaise? Almost be a chief creative culture officer. You know, an HR in some companies is a bit more tactical. So I think in many cases, other people in the C-suite have to step up. And I think sometimes it's a CMO. So who wants to speak about that, their role as chief culture and marketing officer? When I joined Zuri five years ago, one of the key tasks that I was called also by my boss to contribute towards really changing the culture and the mindset into a much more customer-centric organization.

39:10And that's the journey that we've been on so far on really trying to shift colleagues that work and function that have nothing to do with either facing a customer or understanding a customer need into a mindset that is definitely much more open to listening to that. And that, again, in a context of financial services, that is probably not the best example when it comes to customer-centricity and customer service. that that's one aspect but then how to do it it goes back a bit to what i was saying before like when we introduce more programs linked to empathy is not just towards our customers is also internal so trying to figure out what are really the core values and how we even want to work between ourselves that really defines also the culture and the fabric of the of the organization we did a lot on tonal voice as a brand but that's also tonal voice internally so how do we write to ourselves.

39:59Insurance is famous for, you know, having, using a lot of jargon, for example, that you receive a policy letter at home, you don't really understand what you have. We want to change that for customers, but we want to change that also internally. So use less of that jargon. So there's lots of little things that can be done to really make people switch their mindset internally. When COVID happened, I was working in a healthcare company and I think it was very interesting because we couldn't stop working because of the nature of our business, But it also showed us the culture that we had created that was unbeknownst to us.

40:28And I think it was a great time for us to take a step back. And for me personally, to really realize, just because you are an executive team member doesn't mean that you aren't so responsible for the culture. And I think CMOs innately, we're just very communicative. We understand those qualities to pull people in, to engage them. I think many of us, we probably have one-on-ones with people that are not really in our team sometimes because they seek us out because they want to have advice. or it's just like how we're built. And I think you have to embrace that as a CMO. I think the pivot though for me was to understand how to influence my colleagues and not just take it on myself and say like, yes, you are the CTO, you are part of culture.

41:08You create the way in which you lead your team, interact from across disciplines is important because it teaches the other members of our organization how to work. And I think earlier in my career, I probably took it on a lot like, oh yeah, I'm the cool, fun person. somebody they want to hang out with, I have the best off sites. Everybody wants me in marketing because Joy is going to have the best off sites. You're going to have the best thing. For me, it was like, okay, let's use this moment to teach my colleagues because we alone can't do it. We need the culture to be a collective. They need to look to the collective executive team.

41:40And so they can learn how to do it and pull it down. And I think that's so important because particularly while we're trying to get the younger generations back into the office, they don't want to come because there's no culture. And that's really the truth. If you ask all of them, they're like, I can do, I'm much more efficient at home. In their mind, work is about efficiency. And I think back to my earlier years, like that's where I met my husband. That's where I met my friends. If you go and it's a culture and the divide and I'm like, and I understand that they want to do it in other ways too, but there's something about learning and sitting in a room and hearing and observing that you don't get from a Zoom call.

42:16There's something about creating a relationship with your colleague that you don't get from a zoom call working on a project on a whiteboard versus on you know a jackajira board there's just there's it's different and so i always encourage my colleagues to say like can you pull your team in too because i alone can't do it super yes you mentioned about the rapid change we are in can now we you know we are overwhelmed by the change in ai consumer journey creative development all that stuff what i'm interested how you make sure that you fuel your own curiosity, how you stay curious, and how you then take that curiosity and make sure that your organization, your people are curious as well.

42:55So the question is how you stay curious as human beings and how you ensure your organization is exercising that muscle curiosity. I grew up as a marketing person, being the person who is reliable in the sense that I can predict there is no ambiguity. We're going to do that. It will deliver this and this and this. And I think now we need to accept that we test, we pilot, we iterate. And for me, it was a new muscle over the past years. And actually, COVID accelerated it because rightly to what you said, it was new rules. It was a new world. So to stay curious, I don't think it's just about reading being here, even though we have amazing relationships together now, and perhaps we will keep this relationship moving forward.

43:37It's about trying things. and where I see companies thriving into, and we see it, into this environment. It's companies who dare to create things and fail and so on. And that's the big tension in companies like mine, super big multinationals who have been there for 150 years and they are born into this entrepreneurial spirit to try things and fail. But today we're in a different world where everything is visible. So the big tension we have is to stay curious. We need to try because this is what creates conversations. This is when we uncover the unknown. At the same time, it's your name on it. So you need to have the confidence or the humility to be the safety net of your teams and especially young talents because they have hungry, as you said, other expectations.

44:19And we need to leverage this, I would say, bold spirit they have, challenging conventions and so on. And at the moment, this is what I would say what I observed at Nestle. But similarly at Nespresso, because at Nespresso, we were navigating the uncertainty of, you know, the volatility of the coffee prices and so on. And we were working, we still work, with the fair trade to guarantee a minimum living income to farmers. But at some point, we discovered doing more and more pilots for pension funds and so on, that we need a bigger idea. And we said, what about becoming a B Corp? But it started really like this.

44:53Initially, we thought we didn't even know, can we be a B Corp in Switzerland? No, you have to do full B Corp. So we discovered and so on and so forth. And this was triggered even more curiosity. We met so many people. So I would say this may be a big lesson sometimes is you need to jump into the water and you try, even though you work for very rational companies and you accept that it's your name on it and that actually you become the ambassador to your seventh leadership. You know, as CMOs, we should be serving this mindset, I think, even though it's super uncomfortable and especially for rational people like me.

45:25Our last question. I can just say one thing. I love this question because Be Curious, so we just wrote out our new values as a company at Wolverine and Be Curious was like number one. And I think it was like eye-opening for our entire company because we were telling everyone, get out of your comfort zone. Like as marketers, we're always asking questions because that's how we discover consumer behavior. But we were asking our people in sales, our people in tech, our people in product development, our people in accounting. Be curious. What I love is that we put it into action. So for me personally, I give my team a stipend every quarter from the creatives all the way down to the finance team.

46:01You have to leave the country every quarter. for the next year. We're a global team and most of them sit only in the US and they don't go, they're not walking around. And to your point, to come to Canada and be inspired like this is important. So find a conference or find, but you have to leave every quarter because you need to see the product in action. You need to see the competitors in action. You need to see people, regardless of where you sit on the team, because a person in legal or finance, when they understand exactly what we're saying, when we're doing an activation, that's going to help the conversation and go better in the future and it's going to reduce barriers and that's really I feel as my goal is to like reduce the barriers between the teams.

46:37Last question. Thank you. So Melanie you mentioned the word dare a couple of minutes ago and between you all of you have mentioned implicitly or explicitly courage to stand up for what you think is really important. The courage to stand up for why. It's interesting Joy that before you arrived everyone had said why and you brought in the word purpose, but nobody had mentioned the word purpose. And that was a trend. It was a really big trend for like 10 years. And so I'm really curious about the courage that you find or where that comes from to really step up and stand for what you know is the right thing to do.

47:13Even though we're moving towards efficiency, we're moving towards, I think, not going to the office. So how do you find that courage within yourselves to stand up for what you believe is really, really important? For me, it was, so perhaps, you know, Mathilde Lume, she's a mentor for me. She taught me everything I know about marketing, I think. And she's an ex-pengueer. Now she's at LVMH. And I remember when I was a young marketing person at an EBM, at the Pampers, I was not daring to say the same thing. And she said, listen to me because that's an advice for life. Trust your gut. One day you will be up.

47:49Trust your gut. They're going to influence you. They're going to move you in so many directions. and for me this is courage to still trust your gut when all the data against you your boss is against you the social plan is coming and you don't think that's the right thing to do this and that and this is where you know back to what you were saying how do you nourish your gut for me it's like uh you know plant you need to put water and so on and for me this is where it's difficult time but you know where you get your energy from for me it's first from my family and like we're sisters we're gonna have the same week no it's difficult you need to be centered yeah yeah i my father's an immigrant from jamaica who's one of 13 he only had one child that's me he poured everything into me and i think that it starts there for me like i have the confidence of like a football team because every day my dad is like his entire energy is like you can do anything you're you know i we were very poor wasn't supposed to be in can i'm like who do i think i am doing I think it was your joy, Alan Altamari.

48:50So I think it starts from like, and we're very blessed to have it because not many people have that. I think to your point after, I also, I started in advertising and I had the privilege of working with Carole Williams who created the Pillsbury Doughboy. She was the first black woman to ever be like a creative director. And I worked under her for two years and I just saw her go into meetings. So I learned very early, like it takes courage to be the first and it's a lot of responsibility, but you do it because you want others to come behind you. So that in my mind is always like, I have a 10 year old daughter now and I love COVID happened because she saw me work and she saw like daddy works and mommy does too.

49:28And she heard me on calls and she would say things like, are you the boss of all those people? And I was like, why? And she's like, okay, so she's observing. So I think it's like you said, it's not just confidence, it's the courage to go out and be the first. And you're okay with that and know that you're gonna make mistakes, but you're gonna learn from it. The other thing I would watch is company's actions, not their words. So I think people are adjusting their words for legal reasons because the laws, at least in the U S have changed, but look at their behavior. I think they're still living the purpose of the company.

49:57There's still by and large, there are some exceptions, exceptions, of course, they're staying close to their people. They're staying close to the customers. They're sticking true to the principles of DE &I and they're not, everyone's not sort of insourcing. Yeah. Once, you know, so what's the actions? Because I think everyone realizes that we have purpose and principles and values that have been part of our DNA for a long time. We're not going to flop because of one maniac in one country. We're going to stay true to it. Hallelujah. Wonderful panel. Thank you all. Thank you so much. Thank you, Joy, for making this happen.

50:38That was my conversation with Joy, Scott, Danielle, and Melanie. Three takeaways from this one for your business brand and life. The first one, clarity comes from anchoring in purpose and values. That's so incredibly important, especially in these uncertain times. Leaders can't guarantee certainty, but they can reinforce a shared mission and focus. Melanie at Nestle said it well, and I'm quoting, we chose to step back to clarify the way forward, to engage everyone behind that. And it's been for the first time that we've seen more than six months in a row positive share gains. Second takeaway, brands simply must show up as human, more important than ever right now.

51:16The best brands are moving beyond transactional marketing to tell stories of real human impact. This builds pride internally and connection externally. Here's Scott from Deloitte. Again, I'm quoting, there's no better way for us to educate our clients than to tell stories of impact, how we are making a real human impact to the individual that ultimately received the services. And third takeaway, leadership truly does require listening across differences. In a polarized world, openness to diverse perspectives and cross-industry ideas strengthens decision-making and innovation. Danielle from Zurich Insurance said it very well.

51:51It's important to actually have a view that is as neutral as possible. Opening up your mind and listening to opinions that maybe are quite different from what you think is now more important than ever. That's it for this week's episode of the CMO Podcast. As always, I would be grateful if you shared our show with your friends, along with subscribing and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. The CMO Podcast is a Vive original production. The views and opinions expressed by podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of our sponsors or its personnel, nor do our sponsors advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.