Norm de Greve (General Motors) | Driving into the Next Century

0:00Before we dive into today's episode, we would very much appreciate a moment from you to make sure you're subscribed to the show on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Spotify, Spotify, or wherever you listen to watch the show. enjoy it. We wouldn't be here six years later and still going so strong without you all, our community. So thank you for being part of it. Now onto the show. What if the smartest marketing play is not to move forward, but to zoom out? Deloitte believes the most powerful move a CMO can make is to look beyond the next step and see the broader perspective. That's what the Deloitte CMO program is for, a place to gain fresh perspective and connect with leaders who've stood where you stand.

0:59Together, Deloitte will help you see the bigger picture so your next move isn't just fast, but right. Learn more about the CMO program at cmo.deloitte.com. Hi, it's Jim. Joining me is Matt Spiegel, EVP of True Audience Growth Strategy at TransUnion. Matt, we talk a lot on this show about building brands that people love, but that starts with understanding them, right? Jim, absolutely. Every customer ultimately has a story, but most brands are only going to see part of it. At TransUnion, we really focus on helping marketers connect those dots across devices, across channels, across platforms, with the goal of helping marketers see a full person behind the data.

1:35That clarity is gold. That is special. So how do you do it? Ultimately, we put together the pieces of information that help you predict behavior, help you personalize messages, prove the impact of every marketing decision at the end of the day. And our marketing solution suite gives brands the visibility and confidence to invest smarter and ultimately grow faster. So if you want to turn data into understanding and understanding into growth, visit transunion.com slash clarity. Hey, it's Jim. I'm here with Matt Spiegel, EVP of True Audience Growth Strategy at TransUnion. That's quite a job title, Matt.

2:05Yes. Welcome. Thank you. So tell me about your company and why it matters for our audience CMOs. Well, listen, Jim, the challenge of the day is that there's so much information about consumers out there and the challenge is most companies don't have all that information. You have some purchase history, you maybe have some web history, but you don't have a full picture of customers, we're working really hard across on a suite of identity products, of audience products, and measurement products to bring a holistic view of customers to marketers. So when CMOs work with you, what light bulbs go off for them?

2:35So Jim, we help brands bring clarity from chaos. We help them understand a picture of their customers with a 360 degree view in order for marketers to make bigger, more strategic bets. Well said, Matt. Learn more at transunion.com slash clarity. That's transunion.com slash clarity. To be a successful marketer, you do need your head and strategy. But you can never forget that your hands need to be in the kitchen sink. And if you don't do that, when periods of rapid change and transformation show up, you'll be too far removed from it. So keep your hands in the sink. Hi, I'm Jim Stengel. I've helped hundreds of major brands discover and activate their purpose.

3:17Because when a brand's purpose is clear, compelling, and authentic, profit naturally follows. Each week, I welcome the CMOs, the chief marketing officers of your favorite brands, to speak to how their job is so much more than marketing. These leaders share their inspiration and challenges, along with how they try to build a full, healthy, and happy life in and out of the office. And it's that energy that reaches everyone they touch. And we're glad you're here to feel that energy and to learn from these remarkable leaders. So here we go. The auto industry is changing faster than ever, but through all that change, cars have remained something deeply personal, representing freedom, connection, and possibility.

3:57And few companies have fueled that feeling quite like General Motors, a company that's been driving innovation and culture for more than 100 years. My guest today is Norm DeGrev of General Motors. Since this conversation was recorded, Norm has transitioned into the role of Chief Growth Officer at GM. Congratulations, Norm. GM is, of course, home to iconic brands like Chevrolet, Buick, GMC, and Cadillac. My guest Norm joined GM in 2023, bringing a unique mix of creativity, purpose, and business discipline to one of the world's great companies. Before GM, Norm spent nearly a decade as CMO of CBS Health, where he helped transform the company into a purpose-driven healthcare leader.

4:37Norm was on our show during his tenure at CVS. And previous to that, Norm spent a decade on the agency side at Digitas, where he worked closely with GM early in his career. So in many ways, this role brings his journey full circle. We recorded this conversation live at the A &A Masters of Marketing in Orlando. So let's buckle up and tune in with a CMO who aims to lead with high expectations and kindness. Here's Norm. Norm, welcome back to the CMO podcast, which we'll get to in a minute. But I've got to start with, I was here at the A &A meeting yesterday and I was on West Coast time. So I was kind of sleepy getting up.

5:13I turned on my television, CNBC. Your CFO was on. Lovely guy, by the way. He seems super cool, super chill. And fabulous earnings release. So congratulations. And what the heck is going on that's so positive? I mean, it's the day that everybody hopes for, right? You'll release earnings, stock goes up 14%. Holy cow. I mean, I thought it was cool because it really communicated the momentum that is in GM. Despite all of the things happening around the world, we have this momentum. And as people know, why does that happen? It happens because you beat your earnings, but also because you raise expectations, which we did.

5:54And at the core of that is an amazing set of products. Yes, it's marketing and sales and engineering and manufacturing and everybody working together. Of course it is. But the GM of today, you probably haven't seen for 50 years. Wow. Big statement. Yeah. I mean, think about like when we grew up, GM's products, you know, from the 70s, they were less competitive in the marketplace. That's the 70s. It's 2025, right? And now the products are winning in the marketplace, which is partially why we had to go through all the transformation we did. But you can't get there without, at the end of the day, having something your customers love.

6:40And that's what's there now. Well, talk about Paul for a bit. I mean, my impression watching it was, I'd like to hang out with this guy. Yeah, yeah. Paul and I have a very good relationship, which in many CMO roles is not usually the call. I think that Paul is very smart. He was also the CFO of Delta. So he's had these big jobs and he's super smart. When he thinks about marketing, he doesn't need to understand it all, but he needs to feel like there's a disciplined approach. And that's what I've worked with him on. And it's built a really strong relationship. Whereas I think, because when there's not a feeling of a disciplined approach, what's in the CSO's mind?

7:19Could I just cut some more of that? I don't really understand you. So let me see what happens if I just do this. So Paul's been a great partner from the day I started. I mean, I knew that was important to him, so I spent time with him, of course, but really, really great. How did you do that? How did you build the confidence and the conviction in what you're doing? Well, from the very beginning, I put him, well, really his number two, because he does have a big job, but on the steering committee to develop the plan to grow the sales from marketing. and that person participated the whole way through.

7:58And so when we got to the plan, they knew it all. And because they felt confident, he felt confident. Right. Where do you think that person added the most value? Because I did the same thing at P &G when I came in as a new CMO. I asked the CFO if I could have a senior director to be on my team to help us figure this out, how to get better. They help you figure out, well, remember what's most important to that side. Remember that voice. And remember that at the end of the day, we do a lot in marketing, but the way that it matters to a business is generally through more sales and enough more sales that cover the cost of the advertising.

8:41And when there are things that are nice to do's, when you're clear and transparent about them, people will come along. But when you try and make them sound like must-dos, you lose credibility. And so this woman who we had was just a great partner at working through all those issues. I was looking through my files before this interview, and we had a talk about five years ago. Coincidentally, right around the ANA meeting. And that one was virtual because it was 2020. But you had just made a speech at the ANA when you were at CVS about purpose and business growth. Yeah. And I said to my team, after I watched that virtually, that's one of the best talks I've ever seen about purpose and growth.

9:24And I may even have sent you an email of that effect. You did actually. I remember. I guess that was a big moment. Yeah, absolutely. It's a big stage. Well, you're on the big stage again this morning here at the ANA. And I think the title was rebirth. So it's an intimidating stage for any of us. You want to show well for your team and your company. There's what, 2000 people in the audience and it's a lot of thought leaders. So tell us a bit first, were you nervous and how did you handle that? And then what did you share today that you would like to talk about with our audience? So yeah, how could you not be nervous?

9:59Like you said, you want to show up well for your team, for your company, amongst your peers. I was a little bit less nervous than last time. Maybe it's the second time at the rodeo and you feel a little bit more comfortable, but yeah, you know, know, you get the butterflies. And I just try to remember when I get those butterflies, that's energy. So just translate it into positive energy. If they're not there, that's a problem. The story that I told today was a story about the history of marketing and product at GM that gets into what we did over the last couple of years in marketing, but at its core, it's about staying close to the customer.

10:35And you can see in the history of GM when the product was very close to the customer and the sales accelerated. And you can see when it diverged and marketing was asked to cover that up and it doesn't really work. In that era, we lost share and it just marketing didn't have the substance to work on. And so you got to trim your expenses. And marketing was one of those expenses that was trimmed. And so we had lower budgets. And at the same time, we had to launch more new vehicles in one time than probably at any point in the company's history, which are all expensive to launch because you've got to create awareness of these things and desire for these things and demand for these things.

11:14And you got to keep the core business going too at the same time. So that just fundamentally required a different approach. You just can't, you can't say, well, I think we'll just do what we did last year. It's just not, it's not a feasible or reasonable plan. And so that drove a tremendous amount of transformation in essentially every aspect of marketing. But at the core, at the core of it was GM owning more of its marketing activities. What had happened over time through nobody's fault is we had outsourced most of our marketing to our agencies. And that, again, it was nobody's fault. Agencies identified opportunities to grow and then followed up on the work and did it, which was great.

11:54But the problem with that is that it led to an underdevelopment of marketing capabilities within GM. And it made us slower and harder to move in a rapidly transforming world. And so we kind of had this slower to move, kind of more expensive model with less capabilities within GM. And that's what we had to change. And that was like, when you change that, that generates all the other changes because now you own it and you're accountable for it. And that's like a big deal, by the way, as well. I think when your agencies are doing a lot of work, it's easier to say, well, they did it. When you do more of the work, now it's you, but it's also empowering, right?

12:35It's also exciting. It's also like embracing, but it's a change and it's a feeling of risk taking that people had to get comfortable with. And I think everybody is comfortable with it now, but it was a big transformation. I mean, it changed everything. In fact, that took us to, you just stop me if you want, but it took us to the agency model and we had good agencies. There weren't like, there's nothing wrong with these agencies and you know, I know all these leaders and, but the problem was we wanted a new model and to get from the model we had to the model we wanted at speed, the fastest thing to do was the RFP process and to reduce the scopes to hire the people in-house.

13:12Because as you know, no more money shows up when you're doing this, right? And so as we went through that process, one of the things that we identified, which could be true in a holding company too, absolutely. But you really need creative teams that are solely focused on creative, the agency's teams that are solely focused on creative. And, you know, I spent 14 years on the agency side too, right? So I've seen this from both sides and I do see what happens when an agency gets more involved in your operations, it changes their culture. And then it changes the amount of voices in the creative process.

13:45And it's harder. It's the whole thing just becomes a little harder and it's much easier to find an answer that doesn't annoy anyone, right? Which isn't always that distinctive or compelling.

14:02Everyone seems to be chasing the next big thing, the fastest answer, the quickest win. But great CMOs believe the real power isn't in the speed, it's in stepping back to see the bigger picture. That's why everything Deloitte does in their CMO program, from their industry-leading capabilities to their connected network of CMOs, is designed to help you zoom out and gain fresh perspective. Deloitte will help you see the bigger picture together. Learn more about the CMO program at cmo.deloitte.com.

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15:38So I want to go a little deeper into that. So when you say you made changes internally, so you would own it, you built internal capabilities, how'd you attack that? I mean, where'd you start? How did you decide what you wanted to build inside versus outside. And I'll give you a little comment. I've been an analyst in car companies since I've left P &G and I'm often struck that, you know, at P &G, marketing is a career. In some auto companies, it's not. It's more of a job to be done and people are moved in and out from other functions and there is some benefit to that. But in making no mistake, it's definitely a career at P &G with certain skills and capabilities and so on and so forth.

16:16So I'd just like you to go there a little bit. I think there's lots of learning in it. Yeah, it's a discipline that has gotten nothing but much more complex. And in fact, I feel like there's not very much appreciation for how much a top marketer has to leverage both sides of their brain. It is a very hard job. Most jobs are kind of one or the other. But like, you know, you go from technology discussions to creative discussions and you have to be able to be fast in both of them. There were some things that were very clear. Analytics, it was fragmented across the agencies and fragmented across internal groups and mostly used to produce a scorecard that someone could pick a number out and say, well, didn't I do a good job?

16:55And we weren't going to do that. So like that was clear, build out analytics. We're going to change the model there. I really do believe that for a lot of companies, having analytics close to the work is really important. That was clear. That sets the foundation for media and components of media. And so we were like, okay, so we want to do that. It took us a little bit longer to figure out the model on that because I still wanted external agencies because they see more than an internal company does. So, but we have a model on that, that when it got to creative, what I knew we wanted was more capabilities in house.

17:28That's actually where I started. It wasn't, I didn't know how to get there. And then as I thought about what we wanted in our agency partners, I also knew that the reality is that there's like, I don't know, call it 60 % of the work, which is like crank out the donuts, right? Like different versions of this, different sizes of that stuff that's like, just has to get done. And it can bury your creative agency. And I didn't want them buried by that. And also wanted a lower cost way to do a lot of that sort of stuff and faster way. So then we start going down this process. So we had this idea that we would have what we would call a foundational agency kind of down below that would do the 60 % and that we would have creative shops top on a different one on four of our brands, but who they were or how it was going to work out.

18:14I didn't know. What I knew is I had to go through the process to hire the people within GM. And so that, so the first question on that, that I think some people have is okay. So that was your vision, but like, there's the same, there's a lot of people at GM that probably have a voice in that and that have an opinion on that. I'd say that GM was pretty darn open. It was pretty darn open. Or maybe the people who were against it didn't say it to me, but they were pretty darn open. I think in a way it was a gift because you just couldn't do things the way you had, you had to do something. And so it kind of brought everyone along a little bit.

18:45And then you have all the right people participating in the process. We discovered as we got through the process towards the end, that, that it just happened to be that what we had selected were smaller agencies for the creative for each of our brands. And then as we were doing this, that's when the AI thing started taking off. And so we moved from this idea of what would have essentially just been a lower cost production shop to actually should be AI at the core. And that changed what we were looking for on that one. We're still building that out. Yeah, that's pretty profound. And you've made the discipline of marketing at General Motors better.

19:25Oh my God. You know, that's a legacy. This is what I'm proud of. Yeah. And obviously one person doesn't do this on their own. but they set a vision and they set some drive and they tell, they communicate implicitly at least what priorities are. But here was like the thing that I've been most focused on. What outcomes is marketing accountable for? Because usually what happens is sales go up. Marketing must've been awesome. Sales went down. No, it's the marketing that sucked. And it may be true or it may not be true. But the problem that does for marketers is it makes success in their job be, does the person who cares about sales care about their work?

20:08And that is not a good system. You need a much more disciplined system on that. And so our system, it's like not a genius idea. We looked at the consumer journey. We decided, oh, hey, people don't really think about cars until they go into market and they start with four brands in mind and two thirds of the time they buy one of those four brands. So be in that initial consideration set and then win the shopping journey. Okay, pretty straightforward. But once you know that and then you track, how often are you in the initial consideration set? How much should you be in the initial, with whom, by the way, not every truck buyer, premium truck buyers or whatever, right?

20:40And then track the shopping journey. That system, it's another thing about accountability. I think when you get to outcomes, there's also nervousness because in some ways there's a lot of camaraderie within the whole teams of like, oh, we do it together and sales are there. And because we're tight, it'll be good. And when you say, no, no, I want to know what you're accountable for. how you're delivering it, that's a little bit more nervous, nerve wracking. But on the other hand, my experience has been, it breeds, it helps people rise up, it helps them exhale, it helps them have autonomy and direction, and it enables a better creative process.

21:12Because now you're, now you have a learning system that's figuring out what can be great. And you're working on that. And your success isn't based on, does the highest paid person, you know, send you an email saying they like the ad. It's based on, are you getting to the outcomes that you're accountable for? And if not, that actually might still be okay, but what actions are you taking to get there? So you've been here a couple of days, right? What do you think about the meeting this year? I mean, what's the zeitgeist you feel? I know AI is everywhere, but anything else you're feeling here? I think anxiety is connected to AI.

21:48Change, what's out there. I think if you're on the agency side, you're worried about it. I think if you're on the client side, you're worried about it, maybe different reasons. So everybody's talking about it. One of the things we've learned is it's really hard for AI to understand your brand and it's really hard for AI to understand taste. So you really need a creative director involved. And sometimes it's actually faster just to shoot it than it is to figure out the magic prompts to get the thing to do what you want it to do. Cause you're like, I just need to move the table over there. So here's an interesting thing we learned, which maybe some know, but when you ask it to, like we have a car, say in a driveway with a tree and you say, move the tree.

22:27It doesn't just move the tree. It actually has to re-render the entire picture, which means it can now make mistake in the car. And then you're fixing the mistake in the car, but the driveway changed different color. And you're just like, Jesus, this is just like a waste of time, frankly. So it is going to get there. And we do have examples of when it's working really well, but I think we are a little bit in that stage of the excitement might be over the reality. And now, but look, it may be in four months that changes. It could change that rapidly. It's just that there's a lot in this. And on the brand side, the problem is, you know, it's looking for the most likely next answer.

23:02So that's going to take you to the average of your category. And even if you put your stuff in there and you say, no, no, look at my stuff, it can do that. But you're like a pebble compared to the, all the other information it has. And so now you got to weight it right. But then how much do you weight it? And what's the right, It's like, what's the right amount of each ingredient in the recipe? So there's just a lot to figure out, which will be figured out. So I think AI is there. I think it's just, it's a little, we still got more to figure out. In fact, I would say like every company, every company is thinking right now, do I need all these open recs?

23:34What I think, what I see from my seat is right now it's creating more work because you're not confident enough that it's going to give you the answer that you need creatively. So you have to keep the old system moving and you have to do this new thing that you're trying to figure out. So I think 26 will be the more work year. I think 27, you're going to start to see, maybe we figure some things out. Now you are someone who is pretty active in industry work, right? MMA, ANA, Ad Council. Why is that important to you? How do you think it helps you in your role at General Motors and your role as a leader?

24:09Well, I feel like for a long time, I was in my career trying to be better, learn more, do more. I think what's happened in the last, say, 10 years is a desire to elevate the perception of the profession of marketing and to also do better marketing, right? And these two things go together. So that's where I've spent a lot of my time because I think we can all appreciate that in many companies, marketing is not as much at the SLT table as operations are. And most CEOs come from operations or they come from finance. So it's the stuff they feel more comfortable with. And those things are very important.

24:48It's not that they're not. But I do feel like there's, I think both marketers have an obligation to speak a language and to act in a way that's different than marketing when they're at the SLT table. And I think the CEOs and the CFOs have an obligation to better understand and care about this thing that's costing, they're spending a lot of money on. Now you've been at GM 27, 28 months as CMO. Yeah. But you worked for GMM at Digitas. Yes, I did. Years ago. Did that have any role? Yeah, it had a lot of role. Okay. Tell us, say more about it. So I saw it from, well, there's two things. One is that was, let's say call it 15 years ago now.