Curiosity Fuels Leadership - Kimberley Gardiner

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 Kimberly Gardner, the CMO of Tractor Supply Company. Since 2022, she's been leading the change on all things marketing for the country's largest rural lifestyle retailer.

0:38from big national campaigns down to loyalty programs that keep their 30 million plus Neighbors Club members engaged. But here's the thing. Kimberly's career isn't just impressive. It's diverse. She's held senior marketing roles at Volkswagen, Mitsubishi, Kia, Toyota, and even jumped into the tech space as CMO of a digital asset management company. She definitely knows what it takes to connect with people, whether they're shopping for cars, tractors, or anything in between. And on top of that, she's a Mills College grad with an MBA from Indiana University. And she still makes time to shape the future of the field, serving on the Brand Innovators Marketing Leadership Council and helping guide the Pop Tech Advisory Board.

1:22Kimberly Gardner, I would say my new friend, right? Welcome to the show. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. I cannot wait. We had such great conversations off air. And I think it's just going to it's going to fly by. I know it is, but I know we talked about some topics at a time, but I'm going to throw you a little curveball to start off, which I didn't share with you yet. But you said something on, I believe it was called the Beyond Barriers podcast. And you said something and I wrote this quote down again. I have to ask her about this because I'm going to steal it. And the quote is this.

1:52You build business relationships like friendships. Tell a little about yourself. Do you recall saying that? I do. That just touches me. you have no idea how much that touches me to my core and how like when you hear like, oh, B2B needs to be more like B2C and human to human. Like we're all people. We are all people. Elaborate on that. For as long as I can remember, I've always thought about my career and the work that I do as a passion point, as a journey, as something that I'm just meant to do and not in the case of traditional work. And I think that's why I've always felt like just like in your non-work kind of environments, you want to cultivate friendships.

2:32You want to cultivate relationships that have meaning, right? That make work matter, that make people feel like you want to make a genuine connection with them, that you see them as a friend in the sense of I'm here to help you. And I hope that you're here to help me. And we spend so much time in the office or virtually in an office. I think that that consistent mindset around building relationships with people that you work with is really important. It's just, again, I read it. I'm like, this is so simplistic, but that's what makes it so great. And I'm going to repeat it again. You build business relationships like friendships.

3:11Why do people overcome? I'm sorry. I'm sorry to dwell on this, but it's just such a soapbox issue for me. Absolutely. And I think friendships are ones that you care and nurture for and you kind of think about over the course of, you know, long timeframes, too, which is also also a nice way to think about it, too. You know, the world is small for as large as it is. It's quite small. So you always want to you always want to to cultivate kind of relationships that will hopefully good ones will last a very long time. Exactly. Those who are meant to stay will stay. Absolutely. I want to kind of pivot now into the first kind of topic, if you will.

3:47And that's about shifting consumer behavior. And I want to pick your brand on from your industry, but even agnostic of your industry. What are you changes are you seeing in how customers shop and or engage today? I love that question. And I think it's one of the hardest ones that CMOs are trying to navigate right now, not just because of changes in technology. And, of course, it wouldn't be a conversation about marketing if we didn't talk about AI almost right off the bat. how consumers interact with what they expect from brands, I think is dramatically changing, not just because again, of the technology, but because I think brands are being seen more as beacons to help people make decisions, to help them figure out what's the right product or service for them.

4:31What's the right experience that you need to give me so that I will want to do more business with you and I want to come back again and again. And I know we'll talk about trust a little bit later, but I think it's foundational to how we should think about where consumers' mindsets are at right now. We question a lot of things. We are trying to understand a lot of complexities in the world right now. And there's a lot of uncertainty. And not that brands are the ones to solve it, but I certainly think that we can add clarity. I think we can add consistency and we can build good trust over time. I think too that consumers are thinking about purchases in a whole variety of new ways, not only just what ratings and reviews say about things, but also what their friends and family say, what others in social media talk about.

5:14And when it comes down to making the right decision, the time frame is also changing too. We see that as pressure for consumers' wallets are more and more increasing over time, that how people think about what's the right value, how do I think about, is this right for me? Those kinds of things also change. So navigating that's really tough, I think, for marketers to get their heads around. And I think it sounds maybe very basic and almost old school marketing, but obsessing over our customers to me is foundational. Who are they? What makes them tick? What do they care about? And how do you truly help them?

5:47You know, it's listening to you. I'm agreeing, of course. And I can't help but go back to the thought of the more things change, right, the more they really need to stay the same. and especially in this unprecedented time of AI and how it's so easy to get caught up in that line of what's real and what's not. But at the end of the day, it's still about to person on the other end of that cash register. A hundred percent. Yeah, I think that too, for being in the retail space, especially with a retailer that has a significant brick and mortar, a physical presence in the communities that we serve, we have the best of both worlds.

6:26So we can cultivate that trust in that direct face-to-face relationship with customers every single day, every single week. And we see it all the time. Customers come in and our team members, I was just in a store actually this morning doing some, helping out one of our teams there. And it was great to see him say, you know, good morning to every single customer that came in, not because he had to, but because he wanted to. And he asked about their kids. A couple of them came in with some pets, asked about how they're doing. You know, just, he knows who they are. And I think that that really, really matters.

6:56and not that you can't have that with an online retailer. You can certainly build trust, consistency, the things we talked about, but that face-to-face I think is what makes us human. And I think an ever-changing world like AI, I can't control that. I may not understand it all, but it's that connection that is, again, kind of going back to the basics, but super important I think for folks. Exactly, exactly. Now your customer base is very diverse as are a lot of other brands, But I'm curious, how do you as a CMO and your team go about you want to get personalized, but then you still want to do it at scale?

7:33Great question. I do think that we sit and we're very fortunate as a lot of retailers are. We have a lot of transactional data about our customers. We understand what they purchase, when they purchase it. And ergo, we can understand, too, what elements of what we call the life out here lifestyle they lead. So do they have pets? Do they have animals? Do they buy things that help them take care of their land? Do they have certain hobbies? Are they interested in certain brands like Carhartt or an Ariat, that kind of thing? Are they coming in at seasonal moments maybe to buy things for their lawn and their garden or for a holiday like Halloween coming up or Christmas?

8:11Coupling that with technology, and we do like many retailers do, leverage AI in particular around predictive models to help us understand and help us project out certain types of customers who might need certain types of things that they may not even know themselves yet. But I'll give you an example. You buy, we sell live birds at a handful of times throughout the year, right? Chick days, we call them. And for somebody that buys live birds, the next question then is, all right, how do I house these birds? How do I take care of them? What do I feed them? They are very humanistic in terms of wanting toys and things to do.

8:46So there's a whole lifestyle around poultry, backyard poultry. We leverage a lot of our data to help not only map that out for you, but we know when the right time is based off of when you bought those live birds to help you understand now that you're growing your flock. How do you maintain that flock? How do you care for that flock over time? And what are some of those things over the life cycle of those birds that we need to help you better navigate? And we know if you've done it before and we're just adding to the basket, so to speak, or we know that it's brand new and you might need a little bit of extra help or guidance or some other FAQs.

9:18Right. So we do the best of both worlds, you know? Yeah, totally. And it goes without saying, but you're the CRM tool that you use and implement has to be, you know, so important. A hundred percent fundamental. And a lot of things I just talked about, those models are dedicated to email and not only email, but through other digital channels, but primarily through email. We again have you mentioned Neighbors Club up front. We actually have over 41 now million customers in our Neighbors Club program. Wow. And so as part of that, we do have their email to communicate with them. And we are able to provide some really rich content that way to help them make the most of their purchase, help them understand what's coming up next, help them understand what people that buy poultry.

10:04For example, in that the example I just gave about live birds, what are other things that they tend to have as hobbies or pursuits and things like that that we might want to put in front of them? Right, right. We just touched on this a few minutes ago, but I want to elaborate on this a little bit about the, I'll call it the next wave, if you will, of consumer expectations. And with AI, who the heck knows what that's going to look like? But how do you prepare? It's almost like, I know everything's, you know, COVID, if nothing else, COVID made us all realize anything's possible. Anything can change in a second, right?

10:39Prepare for the unexpected. How should brands prepare? We know consumer expectations are always changing, but to me, they're like exacerbated with AI. And if you were coaching counseling or talking to marketers or even your own team, how do you prepare for what's to come when you're not even sure what's coming in the first place? What I tell my team and when other marketers and I talk about this is focus a good chunk of your effort and your resources and your curiosity on what you do know today. Meaning for us, it's what is our core customer care about? Where are they in a season in terms of what are their needs?

11:15What are they reacting positively to? What are they talking about in social media? What feedback are we getting in stores? Those kinds of things to be able to make really good, solid decisions today, which is important. That's what's relatable to customers today, to your point. They know that. And then make sure, and obviously things like ChatGPT, which our organization is all in on, is helping little by little to free up more time for us to project out and try to figure out what these new technologies will mean, not only in store for us online and communities that we serve for future programs that we have, how are customers likely to want to interact with us?

11:57What other expectations might be there? What types of questions could they be asking? And what type of responses are they looking for from a brand in the future? And what's the right way to provide that to them? And I think some of it is learning with your customers as you go. And then, like I said, a lot of it is also always start with the fundamentals of obsessing over that customer keeps saying that, you know, making sure that you don't lose sight of humans or, you know, people are people. And even with technology, I think they still want to have that connection. Yeah. And they still want to know that, you know, me to your point before about personalization, you know, who I am, you know, what I've shopped for.

12:38You know, people that look like me that have the lifestyle that I do that maybe have questions or maybe thinking about that next thing. What's the right thing for me? And the more relevant it is, then the more helpful it is. And hopefully they feel like we're using and leveraging the insights and the data that we have about them in ways that are important and that are meaningful. Not just data for data's sake or too much personalization. I would only add what you just said, that list of, you know, you know what they like to shop for. The converse is, you know what they don't want to shop for. It drives me crazy.

13:14I know you and I can't be objective because we're in this world. But when I get something from a brand that I've shown no interest in and they put it in front of me. And that can happen sometimes, you know, with our recommendation engines that we have within our website, within with an email that occasionally does happen where you have a customer that is all about pets. They buy their dog food, their cat food from us. They buy treats and toys and things like that. Maybe some occasional things around different holidays of the year. and for some reason the model pulls in something based on a search that might have been innocuous around a crate or a kennel or something like that so then it puts them in that oh you have outdoor animals oh then you must have land oh then you must you know this kind of thing right and it shows them something that three-point turn tractor implement that is uh or a three-point sorry implement for a tractor that is completely not relatable or you know i don't have a fence or I don't have that kind of thing.

14:12So that's not for me. And that does happen from time to time. And we do a lot of auditing and assessments just to make sure that we are watching for that because it's the one thing that doesn't fit to your point that sometimes you notice a little bit more than the things that do. Exactly. Exactly. Lifestyle and niche markets. I'm curious how you see like things like rural and suburban lifestyle trends evolving. Yeah. At a macro level, I think what makes it exciting for those of us who serve, again, what we call life out here, that more rural community, that ex-urban community and customers, that COVID clearly created a huge wave of migration of folks that were looking to go outside of suburban and city centers.

14:53What we have seen though since post-COVID is that much of that because of two things, quality of life and affordability that are still with us now in terms of factors, especially for even younger consumers, for that matter, those things are lasting. In other words, we do see continual net new migration of populations going into those areas. I think that that will only, we believe that will only continue. And I think it will continue more so even maybe with younger customers or younger consumers, sorry, that are even more pressured in terms of their wallets feeling like, how do I live, you know, the lifestyle that I want to?

15:31I want some, you know, backyard, kids. And they want more land and affordability is something that tends to be easier the further away you are sometimes from a poor urban center. So there's that. And I think COVID again and post-COVID, we're on our phones, we're on technology, we're obsessed with all things technology and screens all the time. But what we hear from not only our core customers, but those that are new to the brand, if you're in a lifestyle segment like we are, where it's all about getting outdoors, it's about pursuing your hobbies that are going to take you away from maybe the screen all the time and actually get you outside it's a good thing it's a really good thing and it's a good balance right for your well-being yeah and just your kind of perspective on the world that if you do it yourself which a lot of our customers do they're all about self-sufficiency self-reliance all that there's some good threads there that i think are just important to being human today you know if If you remember what was a couple of years ago when the sky was falling, when Google was going to get rid of third-party cookies and you saw this influx of loyalty programs as brands realized like, uh-oh, we're not going to be able to cookie anybody.

16:42So we got to get more first-party data. How do you see loyalty programs? And I think most people hear loyalty and you think discount and perks. Do you see an evolution of loyalty programs and how? To me, today where we are with loyalty programs, they find balance, I think, between, yes, you need to offer tangible rewards for people's business, right? They're giving you their money. They're trusting you to buy things with you. If you continuously do that over time, in light of the fact that you have a lot of choice, rewards and to your point, perks are important. You want to feel valued as a customer and loyalty is all about feeling valued.

17:21I think besides that, and where I see things heading in the future is much more exactly what we spoke about before around rewards and benefits and meaningful things to me. So more choice is one thing. Many loyalty programs that I've either been part of or subscribed to or tried out feels a bit like a one size fits all. And it may be because of how much you spend, you go into certain tiers, that's pretty standard, you get certain more rewards, whether that be airlines or apparel or other things. But it needs to go beyond that. It needs to be more about how do we personalize an experience from start to finish, regardless of even how much you spend with that brand, where you feel like you really are understood and that it's relevant to you.

18:04So we just launched or about to launch, I should say, what we're calling benefits choice. So giving our customers the choice, you know, here are a handful of benefits, which ones are right for you. You get the choice every quarter so that you can decide, do you want the trailer rental? Do you want the shipping benefit? Things like that. So which one would you like to select or ones you want to select depending on your level that's going to be right for you? So I think it's a couple of things. I think personalization offers rewards, et cetera, that are really hyper targeted just for you. And then at the same time, give me choice and also experiences, too, I think are going to be more and more important.

18:38Something that feels like it's going to save me time and give me just a little bit of that extra service. Yeah, I think experiential marketing is going to explode, not just post-COVID, but in AI world. And that back to what you're saying about that human interaction. And it's not going to be right for every brand, but for attractors to supply, it fits like a glove. A hundred percent. And we are known as a very local community focused brand, but at the same time, we have a national scale, which some customers may or may not even realize. And that's the benefit of being a bit of both. you know, we have the national scale for reliability, great supply chain products, everyday low prices, things like that.

19:19But at the same time, we are really known for what people call it. Oh, that's my tractor supply. Oftentimes when I am traveling or out and about, and we often wear our branded logo gear as I am today, it's just, it's an everyday thing here, tractor supply that someone will comment and say, Oh, tractor supply, do you work at tractor supply? Oh, I grew up in a community that had a tractor supplier. Oh man, that brings back memories, tractor supply or my dad loves tractor supply or my uncle loves tractor supply i've rarely heard anyone just say oh tractor supply cool or tractor supply what's that about they tend to say my tractor supply that's pretty unique and special talk about a human kind of connection relationship over time yeah you can't that's really personalized but it's on their terms 100 because they know that tractor the team members at that tractor supply store know them they know their pets and animal names.

20:11They know about their lifestyle, about the things that they do and how they can help them. So I think that's really special. And you're absolutely right. I do see many brands being able to have much more of a resurgence on the experiential side. I think that as consumers continue to just get more and more overwhelmed with technology and screens and all the things, those are relevant and absolutely important and critical. Do not get me wrong. However, I think just having face-to-face time to understand and try something out, you know, well, how to plant a garden. I can show you how to do that on a video, or I can show you how to do that in person.

20:45And I can talk to you about which plant's probably going to do better in your backyard, given your soil conditions, given the climate and things like that. And that allows you to ask real life questions, you know, which one's right for me. And, oh, you know what? I don't do well with live trees. I've killed a few. Help me out here. And it's much better to do that in a face-to-face way. And we find that makes a real difference with some of the communities that we serve, for example, with veterans and first responders and being able to celebrate them on a pretty regular basis. We have many different events that our stores do just at a very local level for them.

21:19Right. That's really neat. It's hard to replicate that in a digital environment. Exactly. But we do live in a digital world, right? So yours is a brand that has both physical and digital, right? So I get asked this all the time. How do you strike that balance, right? And so it's a seamless operative word that everybody wants that same customer experience, whether I'm in-store or digital. Well, and keep in mind too, like we talked about for our customers, we have a lot of that transaction data. We understand where they're interacting. So we know who's interacting with email or who's responding more in terms of SMS texts, who tends to come in and shop just purely in-store only, who shops more of that true omni-channel experience, and they're doing both.

22:05And we can see what they're searching for. And in stores, we get feedback on what they're asking about. So we're able to combine both of those on a foundation of really great data and insights to be able to customize that experience through Neighbors Club. If you are signed in as a Neighbors Club member, you're logged in, we're showing you things that are relevant to you. That's the same logic that our stores have when you walk in and they say, oh, Steve, it's good to see you. So how's that new dog doing that you adopted? So did that food that we worked with, did that work out? I bet you need a toy because I bet he's a chewer.

22:37I bet he really needs this. And so I'll take you back there and show you a couple of things. That's the benefit of being able to build off of those data and insights, both in person and then online. But it's one holistic customer view that we're looking at, combining both those data sets to understand what's the right way to give you a great experience. The challenge, of course, in the digital space is there's so many, and every day, seemingly, there's more and more digital touch points. email, social, and on and on, right? Online. How does a brand like Attractors Supply measure? How do you keep track of, is it last touch attribution?

23:14How do you keep track of that just in the digital world? Sure. We do have a customer data platform, CDP, that we launched a little while ago. That's been enormously helpful in terms of not only understanding where and when and what people are purchasing with us against which digital channels based off of which either digital media, in-store media that we're running, community events that we're running. So to try to get to and understand where that push came from to your question about attribution. For the most part, it's multi-touch, not surprisingly. But we are also then combining that with, like I mentioned before, traffic, transaction, conversion data to understand at which point you individually make that decision.

24:00And is it online or is it, in store. So we look at all that. We look at customer lifetime value over a longer period of time. We look at what categories you're shopping. And is that diversifying as you stay with the brand for longer, which is what our data shows. The longer that you're in Neighbors Club, for example, you're part of our loyalty program. We see more frequency. We see more spend. And we see more categories shopped across it. So in other words, you're migrating more up the life out here lifestyle. You might have been a dabbler before. We call you in our, that's one of our segments is the country dabbler and you maybe have some pets.

24:35So we call you a pet enthusiast and there's the back hair homesteader, hobby farmer, et cetera. And we go up to our big barn owner. And so we leverage data points across all of those to try to figure out where is it that likely that impetus for you to make that decision came from in that moment. So we brought up AI a little earlier and we could spend a whole episode just talking about AI, But I want to get your thoughts on just where's AI being, where are you using it currently? And where do you see it going in terms, and not just even in your own brand, just in general? So I think for our brand in particular, and then more broadly, right now we're using AI in a multitude of ways, but I'll just simplify it.

25:16Generative AI with creatives. I mentioned before all those different customer segments that we have against different seasons of the year, different customer kind of phases, life cycles, needs, etc. Personalization, that requires a lot of assets. Every marketer I talk to, there's always this not enough time to do all the different variants to be able to talk to and have an interaction with a customer at scale. So we are dabbling and have been dabbling a lot more into that area for creative. Also using ChatGPT, I mentioned that earlier, our organization is what we call all in on ChatGPT as a way to save redundancy of time, right?

25:52And be able to streamline our work more, our workflows, our briefing process, our go-to-market campaigns, how we think about seasonal planning. So a lot of functional parts of marketing now, I see that only more and more so going forward. Being able to free up more of our team's time, obviously automating what we can, but leaving that space to be able to iterate, to brainstorm, to talk to customers, to have that extra time, I think is going to be even more critical because regardless of what tools take off with what types of customers, they're always, I think, going to want to know what is it, what's unique about your experience with your brand in particular.