Stop Chasing Celebrity Influencers - Dave Neville

0:00Dave Neville:Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host, Steve Olenski. 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 today is Dave Neville, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Johnny O, where he oversees brand strategy, digital marketing, creative, CRM, and partnerships for one of the fastest growing premium lifestyle apparel brands in the market.

0:42Dave Neville:Dave's career has taken him from serving as a captain in the U.S. Air Force to advising global companies as a strategy consultant at Oliver Wyman and into leadership roles with iconic brands like Callaway Golf and Titleist. Along the way, he's built a reputation for combining sharp strategic thinking with creative brand building and a relentless focus on growth. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame with an MBA from Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, Dave is passionate about developing high-performing teams, building enduring brands, and proving that the best marketing happens when creativity and data work hand-in-hand.

1:20Dave Neville:Dave Nevo, welcome to the show. What an intro. Thanks, Dave. We could just end it now. I'd be pretty happy. Great to talk to you. It's downhill from here. I know. Listen, great off the air conversation. Really looking forward to this. So I want to jump in with Johnny O. It's really become one of those brands. It feels like it's everywhere without feeling like it's trying too hard. That's not an easy thing to do. So how do you think about growing the brand while protecting what made people fall in love with it in the first place? Yeah, well, I love that. I love that you're saying that you're seeing it everywhere because that's one of our goals in marketing is like, We want to connect with a lot of different touch points.

1:57And when I came in, the marketing department wasn't too refined. We didn't have a lot of people in the marketing department really focused on print and direct mail. So like catalogs, we were sending out catalogs every month. And we've really built this modern marketing ecosystem. So we're trying to have a lot of different touch points. So that could be email, the CRM. We're doing it with SMS, text. We've got the website going. We have new retail stores that we're opening this year. We've built a social media following. We've got influencers, tour players. So we're trying to really get people to know the brand because we did a bunch of consumer research.

2:36And what we found out is people love the brand once they've tried it. I mean, the quality of the product is really, really strong. And so if we can just get it in people's hands, we can get people to know about it. They're going to love it. We have a ton of repeat business. It's a big thing for us. So a lot of what we've been doing is about top of funnel and brand awareness.

2:55Dave Neville:Yeah. And it's an interesting, it's a good dynamic. I don't want to say problem, but it's a good challenge to have, right? When you have, I believe the brand is 20 plus years old, correct? Yeah. Yeah. 21 years old. Yep. So you have your loyalists, right? And your devotees, but then you also obviously have to keep growing the brand and attract new customers. So talk to brands who kind of go through that, stay true to what got us here, but build at the same time. Yeah. So, I mean, the brand has been around. It was started in Santa Monica in 2005 by John O'Donnell, Johnny O himself. And his idea around the brand, he grew up kind of in the khaki and blazer world of the North Shore of Chicago.

3:33But then he went to college at UCLA and played golf. So he really wanted to combine kind of this surf culture with the preppiness that he grew up with and really have that combination because really no one was doing that at the time. So over time, we've grown. He's brought in a new CEO. We've built out the team, but we still get a lot of people. So I didn't really know about Johnny O. And I know we'll talk about it later in the show, but one of the biggest ways people find into the brand is our licensing business. So they're an alumni of a school. They went to Michigan or Alabama or Georgia, and they find Johnny O that way.

4:12Others find it through our NFL license, Major League Baseball, NHL. So that's a big way into the brand. And then our biggest way into the brand is really in golf shops. So we're in over 2 ,500 golf shops around the country. So that's a big way that people get to know the Johnny O brand.

4:29Dave Neville:So when you first joined, and I think you kind of alluded to the answer to this next question about the marketing department. But was that the biggest opportunity that you saw when you first started about to grow the internal marketing department? Or what did you see as the biggest opportunity? Well, what I had seen, because I was at Callaway, but I've been a friend of the Johnny O brand for a number of years. Actually, John O'Donnell came to Callaway and visited us a number of years ago. And that's how I got to know him. I've known some people at the brand. And I remember asking them about, I think it was about five or six years ago.

5:01I was like, what does your marketing department look like? And they're like, we don't really have a marketing department. We kind of have e-com. We got a little bit of social media. We don't really have a marketing department. I was like, you got to over 100 million in sales without a marketing department? That is impressive. I mean, it's actually a testament to how good the product is and how good the sales team was in our distribution that we could be that big with really not having a built out marketing

5:25Dave Neville:department. So the opportunity was there. And I loved my time at Callaway. I had 10 years there. But when I saw this opportunity to really kind of build out the Johnny O brand, because like I said, people absolutely love it. They're always talking positively about the brand, build out the marketing department, grow the top of funnel, grow the brand awareness. It was just an opportunity I couldn't turn down. Yeah, totally. So you know this, I mean, every great brand has kind of an obsessive understanding, right? Of its customer. So as you sit here today and say, who was the Johnny O customer? Yeah.

5:56So the Johnny O customer, we're really in kind of that, our sweet spot is the 35 to 55. But what's interesting about Johnny O is we have a huge boys business. So we have a ton of kids who they use it for their swim trunks. They also use it for uniforms going to the school. We just started our women's business about two years ago. So that women's demographic is really growing for us. But we have older people over 60 who love our brand. So we always say four to 94 is our sweet spot. But I would say really like 35 to 55 is kind of in our sweet spot. It's usually someone who likes premium products, but doesn't want it to be precious.

6:40We always say premium, but not precious, you know, so we're not ultra luxury, but we are very high quality, very premium as well. So it's somebody who wants to look good and feel comfortable in what they're wearing.

6:53Dave Neville:Has it evolved a lot since you've been there? The customer, the quote unquote average customer? Yeah. So I think one thing that we've become is a lot more popular with the college kids. And I think part of that is our NCAA license. So we see a lot of college kids wearing our stuff. And so that's been an interesting amount of evolving. And then getting the NFL license last summer and really kind of launching that has been interesting as well. So we brought in the customers who are really into the NFL, but they want to wear something premium. They don't want want to just wear the uniform or a t-shirt or something like that.

7:30So those have been two that are kind of like newer audiences. And then of course the women's audience over the last couple of years, that's been a very fast growing segment for us.

7:39Dave Neville:Yeah. So is there a consumer insight or plural that has surprised you over the past, since you've been there? I think one of the things that surprised me was the percentage of, of women who were in our database, even before we had the women's line. So women who were buying for their husband or significant other or for their, their kids as well. And that we needed to target them and not just the guy at the golf, golf shop, something like that. So that's been, that's been really interesting. And then really understanding how the women's shop versus men have been really interesting. We did kind of a share of closet survey.

8:22And I think on average, men have something like eight to 10 brands in their closet and women have like 35 brands in their closet. And I'm not exaggerating, man, this is what the data is coming back with. So you have to approach that differently. A lot of guys are like, oh, I love the fit of Johnny O. I want everything that I own to be Johnny O. I've got a couple of buddies like that, that are like, I'm just going all Johnny O because I just love it. And it's easy. They don't want to think about it. With women, a lot of it is about the occasions. They want to have a certain dress for certain occasions.

8:53They're going to play golf. They want to wear a different brand for that. For athleisure, they want a different brand for that. So it's really a unique challenge in talking to both of those different types of customers.

9:04Dave Neville:And one of the many unique things about the brand, and it has this kind of East Coast meets West Coast, right? Yes. And that's, you know, easier to say, much harder to consistently execute. And how do you and your role and your team make sure that comes through really across every touch? Glad you brought that up because that's actually our marketing strategy for 2026. Our theme, our marketing theme is East Coast meets West Coast. So we're leaning into that in a number of different ways. I'll just run through them quickly, but starting with product. So we have a lodge collection in the fall and a coastal collection in the spring.

9:37And so we really have this East Coast meets West Coast with the product and kind kind of leaning into that stuff you can wear at the beach, but if you can wear in the winter as well. And then when we were looking to sign new tour players, we looked to this East Coast, West Coast thing. So we signed Jake Knapp, you know, rising star on the PGA Tour. He's from Southern California. He went to UCLA like our founder. He's our West Coast guy. And then we signed J.T. Poston, who's from Hickory, North Carolina. and he's our East Coast guy because we have a big operation here in Raleigh, which I'm broadcasting to you from Raleigh.

10:12So we have a lot of people who are in California, but we have a lot of people in North Carolina as well. So one of the things that we saw that's interesting is that in our e-com business, we're successful across the country. Actually, our number one e-com state last year was Texas. So a lot of people wouldn't think Johnny O doing really well in Texas. North Carolina was number two, Florida and Georgia, number three and four, and then California. So we really had this kind of mix of East Coast and West Coast on the sales as well. And certain other brands, they're really good on the East Coast. You don't see them on the West Coast or they're really strong.

10:45I used to live in San Diego for 15 years. You'd see them out there in California, but you never see them here. So we're trying to kind of lean into both. Even where we have shot all of our catalog and our creative, we're in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina. And we just got back from Pebble Beach, which is a pretty good spot in California as well. So this East Coast meets West Coast for all the photography and creative as well. So you kind of see it laddering up in all these different ways.

11:10Dave Neville:So as the brand grows nationally, right, you have to keep an eye on avoiding becoming so broad that you lose what makes it distinctive, right? Yeah. And what makes us distinct, we really lean into this idea of what we call topspin, which are the little details that make our products unique. So that could be the tweener button, which is the button between the second and third here that gives you just the right amount of coverage on your button downs. That could be the magnetic pockets to hold your scorecard in the back of our shorts, a barchetta slash pocket, cabretta leather that we're using. All these little details really is what helps us make us distinctive as a brand.

11:51And so you can get into with a lot of the golf brands, a lot of sea of sameness. And we're trying to avoid that with the product, the quality and this tops.

12:01Dave Neville:Yeah. Yeah. I know you've talked about creating a modern marketing ecosystem, right? Quote unquote, fixing the media mix. Yeah. Yeah. Which everybody, every market, right. But what does that actually mean inside Johnny? Yeah. So my team hears me say fix the mix a lot and they're probably ready to puke next time they hear me see that. But we were really, really heavy in catalog. I mentioned that earlier, but we were heavy in direct mail, sending out 14 to 15 catalogs a year, spending a lot of our money in that. So and we were sending we were prospecting a lot, which means sending out the people who aren't necessarily your customers.

12:38And, you know, you know, you get catalogs. A lot of people just throw them in the recycling bin. So we have shifted a lot of that funding into this more modern marketing ecosystem. So we're doing a lot of digital. So obviously that's meta, Instagram, Facebook, all of that, what we're doing with the emails as well. So the digital marketing has been huge for us in targeting and segmentation, but then a lot more of the brand marketing and really doing stuff. You know, TV commercials, connected TV, CTV commercials, brand spots to get people to know our brand. And then one of the biggest things is we've really leaned in this idea around the creators and YouTube golf and building out creators who can help push and bring awareness to our brand.

13:21That's both what we call the UGC, the user generated content, but also kind of brand ambassadors and brand creators as well. So it's kind of it's spanning all the way across the whole marketing system. And we've really just kind of shifted the money and fix the mix is kind of what we call it.

13:38Dave Neville:So elaborate a bit how your philosophy around media allocation has changed over the past couple of years. Yeah, yeah. So what we have done is we've implemented a media mix modeling system with our friends at Measured. And basically what it allows us to do is look at the incremental spend of all these different tactics. So which of the tactics are really moving the needle? And we have separated those into top, middle and bottom of funnel. We have certain targets for the return on ad spend that we have for each of the top, middle and bottom of funnel. And we're looking at that weekly and making changes and tweaks to our marketing spend, especially on the digital side, based on the performance.

14:22You know, if Meta is overperforming, we do a lot of testing. We've tested in with NBC Universal, with Disney on CTV type of things, top of funnel. We also lower funnel things. We've tested with Pinterest, TikTok, a lot of different areas. We put that all into this MMM model, and we're evaluating that on a weekly basis and allocating spend appropriately. Yeah.

14:46Dave Neville:Are there channels that you're investing in or thinking about investing that even a year or so ago you wouldn't even consider? Yeah, I think, well, one of the biggest ones is our tour players. So we've had people wearing Johnny O on tour for a number of years, but we call them it was they were more like friends of of Johnny O, you know, or people that we didn't really have a contract with them. We would just send them clothes. They would wear it because they would like it. Well, that's great. But if they win, we didn't have the rights to use their name. We didn't have the rights to use their their picture.

15:17We couldn't even take advantage. We couldn't really even say that they were wearing our stuff, you know, not legally. Some of them were fine with it, but a lot of them weren't, right? So one of the biggest changes we made is like we need a legit PGA Tour team. And so we started to build that out last year, and that's been absolutely massive for us. Jake Knapp got off to a really hot start to this year. He was on the TV all the time, people seeing Johnny O. They love his swing. Some of our top posts on Instagram have been about him. Then JT Poston, our North Carolina guy, goes and wins the Memorial, one of the biggest tournaments on all the tour, three-year exemption, gets into all the majors, wins in a playoff.

15:56I mean, it was super exciting. Tons of exposure for Johnny O. And we blew that up as well. So that's something that we weren't doing. We had tour players, but we couldn't use them. The other thing that we're doing is we're really investing into the college players with the NIL. So we've really leaned into the NIL market. We had the NCAA champion last year, Michael Asasso. He's a professional now from Ole Miss, and he was huge for us. We've invested in a number of other players as well to really help our connection to college golf and really kind of build that pipeline. So that's something that we weren't leaning into before.

16:32Then, of course, the last one, which is huge, is the NFL.

16:36Dave Neville:Yeah. So we we hired gentlemen Heath Hooper. Shout out to Hoop. Our VP of license came from Fanatics. And he said, I think I can get you, this is January last year, the NFL license by the end of April. And we're like, you're full of it. There's no way. We've been working on it for three years. He got it by the end of April. And by August, we had launched the NFL collection. And this has been absolutely massive for us. And then we decided, well, we've got to have a great ambassador to really represent the Johnny O brand. We went right to the top and signed the NFL MVP, Matthew Stafford, from the Los Angeles Rams.

17:07Dave Neville:Yeah, I think that's brilliant to extend beyond, quote unquote, just the PGA players. Right. Because obviously a lot of people play golf, but very few are PGA players. Yes. Yeah, that's true. And we're in baseball as well. So we have a partnership with the New York Yankees, which a lot of people love. Some people don't. But the Yankees, we've got the manager of the Yankees, Aaron Boone. And then on the West Coast side, we're one of the best pitchers and relievers in baseball, Mason Miller, all-star pitcher from the San Diego Padres. closer. So we're always looking for people who are great brand fits.

17:41Typically they're, they love, they love golf on the off season, but are great representatives of Johnny O as well. So obviously we've leaned into golf, but we want to be strong outside of golf as well.

17:52Dave Neville:What advice would you give to CMOs and heads of marketing who are, you know, looking to partner with an ambassador and what's, what are some things they should look and walk away from? Yeah. What's the vetting process? We did a whole scorecarding process. And actually for Matthew Stafford, we worked with an outside firm and we worked on what are all of the criteria that we were looking for. Right. So we wanted somebody who liked golf off of the field so we could connect both the lifestyle and golf together. Matthew's a four handicap. We were looking for somebody who had a great college connection.

18:27He went to the University of Georgia, the number one pick in the draft. Georgia happens to be our number one selling NCAA school. He's obviously the quarterback of Los Angeles, where we're from, of the Los Angeles Rams. So all of those different pieces. But we had a whole criteria. We have that for PGA Tour as well. And we score all these different players. And then it's a lot of work to talk with the agents because the tour players, a lot of them all have different agents and see who's available, see who would be a good fit. So we had this opportunity with JT Poston and Jake Knapp. We're like, these guys are just perfect fits for our brand.

18:59We have to get it done. But I would encourage, don't just like, let me look for the biggest guy I can get, but who's a great fit for the brand? And what are the criteria? What are you really wanting to get out of them? Because some people will sign on, but then you don't get any deliverables out of them. You know, they do the announcement and then you never hear from them again, but you're still cutting them a big check. So we did to make sure that there were people who legitimately liked our brand, who were wearing Johnny O beforehand. hand fortunately we have a lot of those people and we have a lot of agents reaching out to us and saying my my player loves johnny o can we can we do we got a ton of incoming now which is a nice

19:36Dave Neville:position to be in yeah i i've often and you and i are cut from that same cloth if we look at marketing different than non-marketing people and we see i'm not going to name names but we see some you know ambassadors with brands like it's just not it's not the right fit and there's got to be that cultural and the brand mission. And it's got to be way above and beyond what someone's reach is or their celebrity status. Yeah, we're not ever going to be into just getting celebrities and just getting celebrities, you know, to do a one post about Johnny O. Like, that's not how we want to do it. We want to have a real partnership.