Brand with Backbone - Matt Sutton

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olensky. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist. I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to, of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest this week is Matt Sutton, SVP and head of marketing at Columbia Sportswear, a leader who thrives on tough challenges and new terrain. With 15 years across agency, brand, and platform-side marketing, Matt's led global teams, owned P &Ls north of$700 million, and driven growth across apparel, jewelry, and home goods.

0:47His superpower? Solving brand problems end-to-end, rethinking everything from CRM and brand identity to channel mix and digital transformation. His work's been featured in Adweek, CNBC, TechCrunch, and the New York Times. and he's advised leaders at American Express, Geico, P &G, Expedia, and Nissan on how to turn marketing into momentum. Wow, I love that's a great line. Anyway, Matt Sutton, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Steve. It's good to see you. It is truly my pleasure, my friend. We had some good conversations off the air and I think this is just going to be an extension of those.

1:25And I want to jump in. You guys, you have not, there's no grass or moss, whatever it is growing under your feet i got three new campaigns or three new uh activations whoever you want to call them um one of which i saw in person but we'll get get to that in a second so there was let's see engineer for whatever the leaked email and extreme mannequins right those are the three most recent campaigns activations now each one is distinct but they really they showcase a brand that's confident enough to have fun, but staying true to kind of your roots, right? And if you're cool, I like to unpack each of those three.

2:04Yeah, it'd be great. And they're all, uh, we're, we're now two weeks, sorry, two months into our global rebrand and repositioning of Columbia. And so all the things you mentioned are just the next step in that process of getting Columbia back on the radar culturally and just in general. Well, as I said off the air right before, and, And Matt will verify this. My 21-year-old son is a fan. So you're hitting the younger demo, that's for sure, at least in one junior college student in Philadelphia. And that is square with, you know, a part of the group that we're trying to reach and re-engage and get excitement in.

2:42So that makes me very happy to hear. He's definitely a fan. Okay. Engineer for whatever. Let's start with that. That's bold, right? That was a bold statement. It's simple. It's confident. It's flexible. But walk us. Actually, let me back up before we get into the thinking of it. Explain for those who are not familiar with the campaign what it is. Yeah. So Columbia, you probably recognize Columbia. You know, Columbia is a brand. We're known for quality. We're trusted, durable. What you might not know is that it is an 87 year old brand and it is the brand that essentially created the outdoor category.

3:18And it's a family owned brand. And so it started in 1938, and shortly after it started, the company lost its – Gert Boyle's husband, who is the grandfather of our current president, Joe Boyle, lost his husband. And Gert's son, Tim and Gert, took the company from$100 ,000 in debt to become a$4 billion global business that operates in 110 countries. Crazy, crazy. And they did that through grit and a lot of smart people advising them. And they also did it through irreverent storytelling for decades where Gert was this icon, the one tough mother. She became known around the country. And they just did really funny advertising that poked the bear, whether it was print or TV.

4:19And as we were scaling in the 2000s and the 2010s, unfortunately, Gert passed away in 2019. But without her as the face of the brand, there wasn't really an anchor point, an edge to distinguish the brand and market. And so we continued to grow, but we grew without reminding people of our why and who Columbia is and the fact that it's a family-owned business and that it has this incredible heritage for technology. And so this quote-unquote rebrand is not a rebrand. It's a return to our roots and what made us famous in the 80s and 90s and this beloved brand. And so it's just taking our propensity to be a maverick and poke the bear and bring it back.

5:06And the three things that you've seen that we're talking about are just three of the first steps on this long-term journey to go back to our roots. It seems like this campaign, Engineer for Whatever, it leans more into an attitude than pure product, right? Is that a shift, a deliberate shift to connect more emotionally while still grounding in performance? Absolutely. We always distinguished ourselves with two things. We just had better technology and better product than the competitive set, but we also spoke about it differently. And our brief going into this was with Adam and Eve, our agency, and the process of doing this a year and a half ago was very simple.

5:51We put six images of our competitors, pasting them up on a wall. and we took little post-it notes and covered up the logos of each of those six competitive sets and they looked like they could all be from the same brand beautiful wide sunny landscapes serious models going up a hill it was all exactly the same and we pointed that and we're like this is our brief we used to do things very differently than the rest of the category but over you know COVID and the past decade of performance marketing at all costs shifted the whole category to just follow each other. And so we're just simply going back to that and bringing the emotion and the humor back to our advertising.

6:41I love that you went kind of that. I'll call it old school, right? Because I've been doing advertising and marketing for quite a few years. And that reminds me of, you know, an old school brainstorming session of someone you come in and just look at whether it's a print ad, whatever, and you purposely take away the brand logo or brand reference. And if you can't tell the difference, there's something wrong. 100%. I love that. I love that you guys did that. I call it old school. I don't know what you call it, but I love that. I mean, I agree with you. I cut my teeth at Capital One and talk about a category that can be bland in financial services.

7:23And yet they use humor to differentiate with what's in your wallet and Jennifer Garner and Samuel L. Jackson and similar approach here around going at it differently and pointing out what is all the same and zigging when they're zagging. So the brand that you mentioned has really been rooted in authenticity, technology, real world testing. But how do you have that balance of that kind of credibility still shines through, but in a more fun, different creative? So I think, you know, the benefit that we have in doing this is a lot of our competitive set can't reach back 30 or 40 years and look at their heritage because they didn't exist, right?

8:11We have this rich multi-decade history of taking a different approach to advertising with this iconic campaign where Gert and Tim, her son was essentially the test subject of Gert's product tests or experiments where she would put him through these crazy situations testing our gear. And so we realized that that formula was repeatable and ownable uniquely to us, which is a reverent demonstration of our product. And so our brief was to go back to that, but to modernize it and make it relevant for the next generation and without having them explicitly a part of every test. Yeah, exactly. It's a balance for sure.

8:59okay the leaked email air quotes for net if anybody missed this we're taping this in the second week of october and i think they ran last month in september correct that's right it ran um it was i i didn't see it when it went live but i did see a copy of it and if you're not familiar with it it's basically a thread of an email from someone named joe to the features editor and this wild, I'll let you tell it, Matt, but this wild, crazy idea that, you know, wasn't supposed to get out, wink, wink, but did. Fill in some blanks for us about that, about that campaign, about that idea. Yeah, so we all know the, you know, the leaked email tactic.

9:42We took it a little bit, we went in with a different approach, which is our campaign is an advertising campaign. It's a series of earned media stunts. It's performance and digital marketing. It's a website refresh. I mean, it's every aspect of Columbia is changing. And we thought it would be really fun to find a different way to launch the next ad in a series of ads this fall. And so I think you've seen it, Steve, but one of our product tests for this fall is we literally pack a stunt person into a giant eight-foot snowball and push her down a black diamond ski slope in Austria. And she comes out, and she's shocked from rolling down a hill, but she's still toasty warm thanks to her OmniHeat jacket.

10:34Hilarious test. and something we actually did. We actually did that test. And that's the second test. And so we thought, what's a way that we could signal to the business community that we are bringing the edge back and also do an exclusive launch? And so our president, Joe Boyle, who's the grandson of Gert, is the brainchild behind this shift and bringing the edge back to Columbia. he's initiated this process of working with Adam and Eve and everything about it. And we thought it would be really funny to leak an email exchange where he was trying to get an editor to actually participate in the product stunt.

11:19And, of course, they declined for insurance and legal reasons. we somehow got our insurance, our legal, and Adam and Eve's insurance and legal okay with doing these actual stunts around the world. And the email exchange ends with some back and forth between him and the editor, who's like, wait a minute, did you actually do this? And then we say, yes, we actually did do this with a QR code linking to the unlisted video on YouTube. and we had over 2 ,000 people scan that QR code from Wall Street Journal, which given the distribution is actually pretty great. It's a very hidden little Easter egg, but just a fun little tactic to reach the business community.

12:08So I have to ask, talk about old school. You guys used print. I can see somebody under like 30. What's print? so that had to be strategic to use print 100 i mean we just just for comparison point like we have folks on my team who have 13 year olds who when you ask them what show they watch they say i what i don't understand what do you mean show i watch tiktok and so the other end of the spectrum from print too but no it was very intentional with the business leader community um as as much Much of this campaign is sort of cutting edge TikTok and vertical video, but every tactic works for different audiences.

12:56And so we're really just focused on attention. And in this case, we knew that this would hit a particular demographic that we wanted to signal that we were changing Columbia. Yeah, if that didn't do it, I don't know what would. I mean, my gosh, talk about, you know, having you need that support from your higher ups. And clearly you have it to do a campaign like that. I mean, it's not like you put up mannequins around New York City. oh wait a minute hold on our next and as i was telling you off off the air i saw one of these i was in new york city and i said why is the guy lying on a taxi cab

13:35so extreme mannequins you're free free mannequins around new york right to prove the tech right i I mean, I'm simplifying, but tell people what it is. Like it literally is what the name is, but tell us how, you know, what you did and how it came about. Yeah. So we had Adam and Eve had this really fun idea, which is again, like, like our brief, just like we pushed it, put the six ads on the wall and saw that they were all the same. We looked at the retail experience and the in-person experience in our category. And it's typically, you know, the standard apparel mannequin, male or female, or in some cases, some of the competitive set has used them for athlete situations like depicting people running or climbing.

14:21But our campaign is about putting people through extreme Mother Nature situations with a bit of fun. And the point of that is that if we demonstrate that our gear is great for the most extreme situation, it's good for your everyday. It's the best for your everyday situation. And we applied to that same lens and thinking to the tired world of mannequins. And so we did a stunt the past two weeks, including during advertising week last week in New York where we had a guerrilla team out with dozens of mannequins all around the city, moving them throughout the day in sometimes six different locations where it's a hiker wrestling with a bear or a female fisher.

15:15wrangling a shark and a skier busting out of a truck or somebody in a warm jacket holding off of a hanging off a cab in New York. Just these. I mean, you saw it, which I was really happy to hear that you actually saw it live. They're all over the city and they had a QR code attached to them. And it was actually a scavenger hunt around the city. So hundreds of locations around the city for two weeks. People, when they scanned the QR code, got an entry to win a trip to an extreme mother nature situation, in this case, Japan. The more mannequins they found, the more entries they got. And so it actually just ended yesterday, but we got thousands of people scanning and entering into the sweepstakes.

16:05And more importantly, just, you know, when you have a mannequin fishermen in the fountain in Washington Square Park or a cab driving down Broadway with a mannequin hanging off of it or a bear and a mannequin wrestling in Stuy Town or in Central Park or Prospect Park. People notice. And so that was just another kind of out of the box way to signal to people, especially in a market, important, very critical market, New York, it's a cold market. Hey, Columbia's back and is doing different fun things. I would imagine it led to a lot of social pictures and tagging. Yes, we got a lot of activity of people tagging our account.

16:56We actually had some local kind of, you know, New York bucket list type accounts pick up on it and say, hey, these things are all around the city, go out and find them. You could win. We had this funny blog on the Upper West Side, just like a little local blog talking about bear attacks and shark spottings all over the city. So it was a fun, fun tactic. That's, that's amazing. Take a step back. How do you, and I mean you, your team, how do you decide what's worth taking that kind of creative risk? where's the line or is there one yeah it's a balance of reach expected earned attention distinctiveness of tactic um and then also just a top-down desire to poke the bear i can't take credit for this because i you know largely in my role i'm i'm a messenger and i'm you know operations focused on getting all the work done.

17:55But the Boyle family initiated this transformation of Columbia two years ago. And a part of that was, hey, look, we have a history of doing this. We want to get back to this. And so anytime these opportunities come up, I think it's an advantage of it's a publicly traded company, but the family is still day to day leading it where they, you

18:22that are different and big and we move and we do them. And so it's, it's a little bit of judgment call on a, on a month to month basis around, you know, what's fun and can, can get some attention with what's effective. And then also, um, going right up to that line, but not crossing the line and being too irreverent or too ridiculous that we lose people. Yeah. I mean, it goes without saying, but you have to stay within the parameters of the brand. And of course, what's the business case? Yes. Can't forget that little part. Yes. Because we both know it always comes down to that. As creative and great and wild an idea might be, what's it going to do for the bottom line?

19:03Exactly. So I want to shift a little bit into your career as in a leadership role, solving problems, like you're saying, driving growth. But you've had a really unique mix of experiences, right, from agency to brand, a platform. When you look across your journey, Odyssey, is there one lesson or two that's really shaped how you lead? Oh, so many. I think any time someone has a lot of different experiences, you learn as much from what goes well as what does not. I learned one of my most valuable people manager lessons when I was 20 years old managing a bunch of lifeguards at a pool.

19:47and I've worked on the agency side where I cut my teeth spending eight hours a day, five days a week for a year and a half, optimizing 25-character ad copy for SEO and SEM. And I worked with some true, brilliant brand leaders at Capital One. and then I had five roles in seven years at Facebook where I was jumping between different departments and that kind of thing. And I think the lessons that I have learned is that the second that you become bored and don't feel like you're learning, change. And that is what I have done. Anytime. And, you know, I had the great fortune of doing that for a long time within Facebook.

20:37And it helped me have different experiences that set me up for leadership roles. And I also did it several times prior to joining Columbia. I was bouncing around leading larger and larger scale businesses because I wanted to bring my big brand experience but also wanted to move at the speed of a startup. And I mean, you learn lessons there because you have to move quickly and you, you, it's not possible to land every execution that you do. But the, the experiences that help define my career are as much those that are lessons that I've learned that are good and lessons of things that I could improve on.

21:18I just love, love, love that you said that. And one, I apply the same logic. And two, I also apply it to people, the leaders I work for. And it's not always the good ones. It's not so good ones, but you learn. Oh, the most formative, maturing, and patience-building experience that I have had in my short career so far has been working for the great leaders, but those one or two really difficult managers and leaders where you have to give everything you have to get them enrolled and get them on board. So I completely agree with that. You've talked about in the past that one of your superpowers is problem solving for brands.

22:10How do you approach that, especially when a problem may not be obvious or like the data is not always clean? I've found consistently, actually working both on the agency side, the platform side and the brand side, that brands, especially when they get to a certain scale, have a tendency to shift problem solving externally to agencies, media or creative, to consultancies. And I have never found better solutions to ongoing day-to-day problems and opportunities than sitting down in a room with people and whiteboarding out a solution. We get so much value from having an AOR and having them push our envelope overall.

23:02But day-to-day, consistently, sometimes I've tried to correct this thinking of, our team can't solve it. We need our partner to tell us what the solution is. No, we have a lot of really gifted, smart people who know this brand better than anyone else. sit in a room and talk about what they think and highlight those opportunities and those ideas. And I think some of the more breakthrough things, even in the past year that we had, came from ideas internally. For example, Extreme Mannequins, the agency pitched us that idea, but our team had an idea of executing it and doing it as a big stunt to New York City in a market that we really want to get attention for.

23:48And so not relying or leveraging the expertise of the team and their skills really helps. So between Columbia and in the past, I know you've consulted with brands like Amex, Nissan, P &G. I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on this. What separates the companies that say they want transformation versus the ones that actually make it happen? Yeah, that is a really good question. I think top-down leadership desire to change and continued follow-through on that. I have worked for, and Columbia is a perfect example of that. In contrast to Columbia, I have worked for leaders who say, I want to change things, but I don't want to own the financial investment or the risk associated with change.

24:39And so they're kind of talking out of two sides, right? Whereas the leaders at Columbia are highly motivated because they built this iconic brand and they want it to continue as it has. So they've put the financial commitment behind, and frankly, the stones it takes to poke and potentially offend and actually do that. And I actually think that's extremely rare. I don't see that happen often, have not seen it happen often. Oh, trust me. I talk to leaders all, it's, it's incredible. It's as rare as seeing a mannequin on top of a taxi. You know, I did that. It just worked. And no, no, that was not scripted, but that's how rare it is.

25:29So I know you, I know you're, you consider yourself blessed and lucky to be in the role with the leadership we have. It is extremely rare because everybody says, I want to be different. I want to be transformative. Okay. This is what it's going to take. Oh, hold on. And when you get that, and when you get the opposite, it's so rare. Yeah. I agree with you. I feel incredibly lucky. I also think these things take a lot of time to build trust. I came into this role and we all know the tendency to come in and have impact immediately. And we waited eight months until we changed anything so that we knew exactly what the parameters were and I could build trust and enrollment with the right people before we started moving.

26:23And I think that's resisting that urge is frankly difficult, but we did it. And I think we bought ourselves the credibility to then start doing things a little bit differently and trying new things. You mentioned the word learning earlier. And I love that. You should never, ever stop. And I know you've described yourself as a lifelong student of marketing. Which, again, love. Always stay curious. Right now, what's something you're learning right now that might be changing how you think about it? Brand leadership? And if it's AI, I'm going to ask you to get more ground. than just AI. But what's something you think you're learning right now?

27:02I'm going to skip the AI one because that's the obvious one, right? I think that I'm really learning the balance of short-term impact and long-term brand investment and outcomes and how much that is a constant balancing act between prioritizing decision-making to drive Q4 outcomes during peak holiday season with longer term brand building. And it is a daily trade-off and it's an equal trade-off. I think you make a mistake if you focus too long term and are not driving those immediate outcomes and vice versa if you're only focused on the short term and you're not pushing towards that. Love it. AI.

27:53Yeah. AI is too easy. We're all learning AI. Yeah. I mean, it is. It makes me wonder what our world looks like in, in five years, but we know that that, you know, I was going to ask you about that, Matt, but I'm going to get, I'm going to save it for part two because there will be a part two. Is that fair? Yeah, for sure. Okay. And we're using it. So of course, you better be put it that way. looking at the time of wrapping up. It's time for the random five. If you've heard any of my shows, I always end every episode. I ask my guests five random kind of get to know you personally questions. So if you're game, here we go.

28:34Number one, you've led a lot of teams. Now, what do you hope people who have worked for you would say about you as a leader? That I support different thinking because that's at the underpinning of both trust and also I think giving people opportunities to like excel and move in their career. Okay. Second question. What do you do to unplug or are you one of those leaders who never really takes off? Be honest. year one of this job has been the latter. Um, but in previous roles and going forward, I think it'll be about, um, you know, I, I, I do, I mean, one of the reasons why I grew up wearing Columbia, um, I grew up going on hikes in Colorado.

29:28Like I actually do love this category. And so, um, Even living here in Portland, my hobby to kind of decompress is skiing. And so I try and get out to Mount Hood like every weekend if I can. Oh, wow. Okay. But yeah, year one has not been a lot of that. We'll have more in year two. Understood. Understood. Next, what's one thing most people would be surprised to learn about you? Culturally, I'm a bit of a mutt. I think I give off kind of a Midwest vibe, but I've lived, you know, in New York City and San Francisco. I've lived 10 minutes down a dirt road in Virginia for most of my life. So I have a very wide range of kind of cultural experience and considerations and just outlook and perhaps less vanilla than I look.

30:31Well, they'll see your picture when I publish the episode so they can judge for themselves. How's that? Okay, next one. What was the first concert you ever went to? And a follow-up, do you still listen to that artist? Oh, man. Come on. No shame.