Why Smart Marketers Overcomplicate - Philip Auerbach

0:00Hey, welcome to The CMO Whisperer 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 Phil Auerbach, or Auerbach, he'll correct me, I know. Chief Marketing Officer at Duster Mink. Phil has built an impressive career leading marketing and commercial strategy for some incredibly well-known brands.

0:39Now, before joining CustomAid, he led executive leadership roles at Bumble, Dunkin', Linblad Expeditions, and Caesars Entertainment, helping each of them navigate growth, digital transformation, and changing customer expectations. Now, one of the many things I find most interesting about Phil's career is his range. I mean, he's marketed everything from dating apps and donuts to travel experiences, gaming, and now custom apparel. And believe me, there are not many marketing leaders who can say that. I am really looking forward to getting Phil's perspective on what he's learned along the way, what separates good marketing from great marketing, and how the role of the CMO continues to evolve.

1:19Phil, welcome to the show. Thank you, Steve. Great to be here. Very much appreciate the introduction and excited to have a conversation. Yeah, man. Let's just rock and roll, man. I mean, I'm really, we had really good off-air conversations. Okay. I got to start going back a little bit. You spent nearly a decade in consulting, right? Before you kind of realized, wait a minute, I've been doing marketing all along, right? Walk us through that. You know, so I, well, going back even a little bit, a little bit further, I, you know, started off in, so I went to Cornell at the hospitality school and I thought forever, you know what?

1:53I really love hospitality. I want to do hospitality. And when I was at Cornell, I found myself gravitating more towards finance and kind of management and strategy and marketing classes. And at some point I was TAing for a finance professor and they pinged me after class one day and said, hey, there's this consulting firm that's coming to school. They're new. They're really focused on data. I think you should go. And I was like, what's consulting? I had no idea. And I went and it was where I started my career was this place, Novantis. And it was just the hiring manager, as opposed to doing it in some stuffy, you know, conference room at the conference center, rented out the basement of a bar, stood up on a table and just kind of asked everyone to shut up and then told us what consulting was and how it was about working with clients to solve really interesting problems.

2:39And I went with a bunch of friends and they said, this is the thing for you, man. So I started there and, you know, had a great experience in Novantis for about five years, but it was all financial services and I really wanted to get in hospitality. So that's when I started looking at kind of some of the bigger firms. And as I started having conversations and they, these firms would ask me the types of work I did, they were like, oh, you should join our marketing practice. And then it hit me that, yeah, everything I've done up until, up until then was working on CRM strategy, on pricing strategy, on customer segmentation, value proposition, and kind of differentiated service experience delivery.

3:12And lo and behold, those things were all marketing. So that led me to ultimately join the marketing practice at McKinsey and spent another kind of six years there. And then, as you said, I at some point realized this consulting thing is great, but it's time to get a real job. And so I made the move. And with a new baby, I made the very unlikely family-friendly decision to transport my new family to Las Vegas. What one would expect when you're trying to be a more present father. What better environment? What better environment. The first six weeks we lived out there, you know, we were waiting for the clothes on our house.

3:49And so we were kind of rotating through properties, the Caesars properties. And for the most part, we were staying at Rio. And so, yeah, his is at four months old, great pictures of him standing on, you know, walking to the casino floor and standing on booth dancing, you know, dancing booths and podiums and everything. So I love that. You're father of the year. I love that. Father of the year. Yeah. So do you think coming through that path of consulting versus the quote traditional it's giving you a different perspective when you look back yeah look i look first of all there's no i don't think there's any one you know path to you know you know one path to pursue there's great marketers and marketing leaders that have come from you know from from all over whether starting in operations or in frontline roles and moving up or or coming through uh you know more traditional kind of cpg you know brand marketing brand roles to to the path that i've take them.

4:39I think that, you know, I think that one of the strengths of or benefits of coming up through the consulting path was around, you know, maybe two strengths, two advantages and certainly a number of disadvantages. But the two advantages, I'd say, was really the data orientation. And you have to take a pretty structured and analytical approach to problem solving. That is tends to be why, you know, why clients hire consultants to the degree they do. And I think the second piece was around communication. And it's a different type of communication than some of the direct to consumer storytelling. But I think that to be an effective consultant, you really have to think through what is the story that I'm trying to tell and what are the building blocks that I need to that I need to of that story that I need to develop in order to have it hang together and deliver a narrative that's going to have impact.

5:35and kind of drive behavior of change. And so I think those two things are probably the greatest strengths. Maybe the third benefit, I think, coming out of a consulting background is you have to do context switching pretty frequently. You're on a different project, in many cases, different industry, every three to six months. And marketers, even if we are working in the same business, in the same industry for long swaths of time, particularly more recently, it's got a heck of a lot of context. switching in it, right? The types of problems and challenges and opportunities and, you know, initiatives and cross-functional teams that you're working with change, you know, minute to minute.

6:15And so, you know, having that experience and context switching, I found to be pretty helpful. Again, there were a whole lot of downsides and we could talk about those too, but I think some of that, that's, as I think about some of the ways in which it gave me a unique perspective, those are some of the things that coil up. Yeah. I mean, it's the ultimate cliche here, but you think the good with the bad. Right. For sure. I mean, I think some of the, you know, the challenges I went from, you know, people management, right? You, you know, even as a, as a, as a partner, you know, in theory, you're, you're managing teams, but you're not really managing people.

6:46It's a bunch of, you know, 20 something year old, you know, kids who all went to the best schools in the country who were doing their darndest to prove themselves to, to you. And we'll kind of, you point them at something and they'll run through a wall and they'll, you know, do, do everything and they're doing that because they know that for the most part they're doing that for a couple of years and that they're going to go off and do their own thing they're not looking to kind of build their career they're not looking for sustainability that's very different when you have a real team of people that you're looking to support and develop and their whole you know their this is a career for them and so i went from having you know a couple of teams of people who i would you know manage for three to six months at a time to 250 people i think when i started at Caesars.

7:26And, and that was, I learned a lot from them. And I learned, you know, I was fortunate to have a boss who knew what he was getting when he hired me and gave me some, gave me some grace at the beginning as I, as I made the mistakes that I was going to make. But, but there was certainly a learning. Oh yeah. I'm curious, what advice would you give an even to your own team? Like a young marketer asking to build a career? What, what, what would you say to somebody? I think the, probably the number one piece of advice is be curious. I'm a big Ted Lasso fan. And one of the scenes and quotes from the show, which is a tribute to Walt Whitman, is the idea of be curious, not judgmental.

8:06And I think that young marketers, I think young professionals of any kind can come in and think that they know the answer or that they have their perspective as the right perspective. I think this can be particularly true for someone who came out of consulting and feels like, you know, I've been working with CEOs and boards and, you know, trust me, I know things. And no, you don't, right? You may have a perspective and a way of thinking that can be valuable, but you don't really know anything. And so I think my number one piece of advice would be to help your perspective, you know, develop confidence in your perspective and be curious and very open to being wrong and push back and to learn.

8:45So I think that's certainly true of marketers because we have to learn about and from our customers and customers are surprising. You can think you know them and you'll be proven wrong time and time again. You have to learn from your peers as marketers. Fundamentally, what are we doing? We're communicating a product and a customer experience. We need to learn from our colleagues in operations. I mean, to learn from our colleagues in product and technology, because they're ultimately what's delivering the experience that we're communicating to customers. So I think being curious and open-minded is the number one piece of advice.

9:23Yeah. Yeah. And it's okay. You're not supposed to know everything at this age. No. Or this age. Great point. I don't know everything. I don't know everything. I will never know everything. You will never know everything. No, I, my best chance at this point is to, and what I try to do is surround myself with people who know more and are smarter and are more sponge-like than I am and then learn from them and get out of their way. Never be the smartest person in the room. I think it's - I never have a risk of that, so. No, I'm sure your wife reminds you of, and your kids, yeah. So, listen, your career, I told you, I said earlier, it's been, it's been very wide and you've marketed to just about every generation, right?

10:00Yeah, yeah. What's the biggest mistake or mistakes, plural, whatever you want to call it, when marketers think about, quote unquote, generational marketing? I think that, so it's funny, you know, one of the reasons I made certain choices was explicitly to get more experience with different generations, right? So I think as I went to Bumble as an example, it was very much, okay, I've done a lot of marketing to boomers, to millennials, you know, I really want to understand, you know, Gen Z. And I think the greatest mistake marketers can have in thinking about kind of multi-generational marketing is ignoring the similarities that exist in just what poor, ignoring that the fundamentals of good marketing are the same regardless of the generation that you're engaging, right?

10:46fundamentally you need to find a way to connect you need to find a way to tell you know you find a way to differentiate your product in a way that appeals to your customers emotions and and that is pretty consistent whether you're selling a expedition to antarctica you're spent you're selling a slot filled weekend in you know in vegas or you're selling you know the promise of of you know, finding a relationship on a dating app, right? The way in which you engage the different generations may be different, right? Whether it's the channels that are different, the types of creative that are different, but the fundamental approach is the same.

11:25And I think sometimes we as marketers overcomplicate things and try to create, you know, narratives that, no, well, this is a Gen Z or Gen Alpha, you know, they don't care about that, right? And that's a boomer thing. and they confuse or we can confuse distribution channel or marketing medium for the underlying message. You just said, without even knowing, you struck a nerve with me by using a two-word phrase or hyphenated phrase that is so overcomplicating. Oh my God. What is it with marketers? I think humans in general, we take it to another level. The data is right in front of us the answer it can't be that easy we got it i totally agree i think that one of my favorite parts about working for for caesar's was that my office was on the second floor of the the forum tower at at caesar's palace and so in kind of a back of the house you know back of the house area so every day morning afternoon evening i rode to work with our customers more often than not i ate in the food court at Caesar's Palace, right?

12:32And for lunch. And whenever I started to, you know, kind of get too intellectual about like who our customer is and who I think they, you know, who they should be and what the data is telling me, all I had to do was ride in that elevator and go, nope, it brought me back to reality and really grounded me in who the people were, right? And I'm not, it's not, that was a unique opportunity. Most marketers don't get to work in the place where their customers are every day. But I try to take that, the spirit of that with me, you know, I've tried to take the spirit of that with me in all my kind of future endeavors so that I, I'm sure I still go for complicated things sometimes, but I, but I really try to ground my, you know, bring myself back and think about that, that moment.

13:13It's a really interesting point I want to touch on because yeah, you're right. You had that rare opportunity, like you were literally right where your customers were and a brick and mortar, I, you know, theoretically could do the same, go into stores. But now you're at an online-only brand, which there are obviously a ton of. If I'm an online brand CMO listening, it's going, this is great, Phil, but how do you do that in the digital world? I think a couple of thoughts and things that we do. One are voice-to-the-customer programs. I mean, these are hopefully all most companies have something like that, but I can't stress them enough.

13:47And, you know, finding voice to the customer or designing a voice to the customer program that doesn't just rely on kind of quantitative data, but really allows you to listen in on in-depth interviews with different prototypes of customers. Right. And hear directly from them. I think it's one of the wonderful things about about social media is it's not it's a it's a two way street. Right. And so paying close attention to how your audience is engaging with your content, with what people in the world are saying about you. And then I try as much as possible to both talk to our customers and I have become one of our customers.

14:22Right. So one of our big audiences is the K through 12, K through 12 world. Right. We whether we're whether it's coaches that are designing uniforms for their teams or, you know, club organizers who are designing, you know, marching band uniforms or marching band shirts or in particular PTAs that are that are designing merch to sell and fundraise for the school. So I've become, you know, very more involved with some of the PTAs that I belong to and have taken on the role of kind of unofficial role of Merch Share. And it's really helped me understand not just our process and our product, but the kind of challenges that our customers are going through, many of whom, most of whom are not full time Merch buyers.

15:05Right. And so so as we can talk about, you know, that as it relates to customing in particular, but to but to to your question, the more that you can be a customer yourself, the more I think it kind of helps you approximate for me what it was like to ride that elevator. Yeah, exactly. I like that. It's a virtual riding of the elevator. You worked at some legacy brands, that's for sure. And I want to ask you a question specifically about legacy brands. You know, one of the questions every legacy brand eventually has to answer is how do you stay relevant without losing what made people trust you in the first place?

15:41Right. How do you how do you approach something like that? So we think about Caesars as an example. Right. That's few certainly in the world of Vegas. And then I think even in the world of some of the kind of American culture, there are a lot of brands that have more kind of historical cachet of Caesars and kind of the Rat Pack. And, you know, what you envision, you know, Frank and Sammy and Dean kind of, you know, kind of roaming the halls. And so it has that legacy and that mystique to it. And then there's the modern Las Vegas with these big multi-billion dollar gleaming glass, you know, kind of glass casinos that have come up.

16:20So for us, the opportunity, I think, as opposed to the challenge was to say, there's all this great equity that has been built in this brand. Let's not get rid of that. And let's not try and just, you know, shove it down people's, you know, throats and make them care about the Rat Pack where the glamour of the 50s, but try to figure out what was it about that moment that evokes such passion in people back then and translate it into a modern time. And so the entertainment, the kind of escapism, the kind of ability to set aside your daily life and kind of come and just live in a different world and a different persona for that time was something that we tried to to bring forward in a in a modern way you know at caesars and i think did that you know successfully in partnership with you know really investing in in the brand and the property to to kind of have it be able to live up to that promise so i think my advice for legacy brands is is you know pay attention and pay homage to the thing that that built the brand love in the past but don't cling to it so tightly that you're just trying to kind of copy and paste it into the modern construct Yeah.

17:30Yeah. It's like, as you're talking, I'm thinking like respect the past, but acknowledge the future. Yeah, exactly. Right. Exactly. Yeah. Very, very much so. And if you can, it's not easy sometimes because you want to, you want to hold on sometimes too much to the past and don't alienate your, your core customers. Right. But you realize you have to change eventually to get new customers. So anyway, it's an interesting topic and we'll, we'll save more of that for part two. For sure. So, I mean, social first, right? That's become one of those phrases that everybody throws around. In your opinion, what does it actually mean when it's done right?

18:04I think that when it's done right, if you think about the way marketing used to be, it was a bunch of people that would sit in a room, use some varying degrees of data and experience to say, and this is what we're going to do. And this is what we're going to sell to customers. And this is the way we're going to position our brand. I think what Social First has done is allowed marketers and companies more broadly to acknowledge the reality that you only control the definition of your brand a fairly small amount, right? It's the way the customers experience your brand, the way they talk about it, the service interactions, the product interactions like that is fundamentally what defines your brand.

18:48And what I think Social First has allowed marketers to do when they do it right is really harness the conversation that's happening, you know, harness the conversation that's happening about their brand and engage with customers and prospective audiences in a much more organic and one-to-one way. So it's not the, we're going to tell you how to feel. It's we're listening to how you're feeling and what you're saying. And in some ways, you know what? You have some better ideas than we do about how to talk about our brand. And so we're going to co-opt those maybe. And in others, it's your, you know, we see these pockets of conversation that are starting that are really exciting.

19:28How can we, what can we do to start more of those conversations, you know, about our brand? How can we activate our customer base? It was that was one of the things that we did at Bumble. I thought I thought really well was, you know, Bumble is fundamentally about helping people, you know, make meaningful connections. And ultimately, whether you come onto the app to achieve a relationship outcome, that relationship outcome can be widely different. Some people come on, they want to meet the love of their life. Some people come on and they, you know, they want something that is, you know, they're looking for their next boyfriend or girlfriend.

20:01And some people want to come on and they want something more casual. But but they're they're looking to achieve something. And and we would tell very highly produced and scripted stories about a very select group of people that that managed to kind of achieve success on the app. And so even though we were having millions of success stories every year, the case studies would be like eight, nine, 10, you know, highly scripted, highly produced, you know, things. And we were missing out on this huge opportunity to encourage people to tell their story. Right. And so what we started doing was augmenting that.

20:31That's still still a role for the, you know, the more, you know, more produced and kind of more involved storytelling. but we started a program called it started with bumble and just to get people to tell us you know and talk about their success stories again whatever success meant to them and that to me felt like a real moment of of social first where we were taking conversations that were already happening organically in in small in in small ways and and creating avenues and programs to enable them to happen much more at scale yeah i mean i'm going to pivot to some stuff you guys did at custom ink you did some research right around america 250.

21:06yeah it's fascinating and the one thing i kept coming back to was it wasn't about apparel at all right it was this idea that people are looking for more connection a stronger sense of community is that right is that how was i reading that right you are i i think that one of the things about custom ink that i i love is that on the surface you think okay it's it's a custom hat it's a custom t-shirt it's you know the you know it's the mug, right, the Tumblr. But it's really more than that, right? You're almost everybody that is buying something, whether it's from us or anybody in the custom space, is doing it to create community, right?

21:40They are, or connect with the community. I mean, look, you're doing that to ultimately build a community around the CMO Whisperer, right? We, you know, the, you know, as I mentioned, I'm, you know, doing all this PTA work and we had our field day a couple of weeks ago. And that evening, I'm walking around my neighborhood and all I see are kids wearing PS 234 shirts. And it just made, you know, I live in New York City and yet it made me feel like I live in this small little town because everywhere I looked, there was a kid that went to my kid's school. Right. And it just really reinforced how much of a small community we, you know, we are.

22:14And I think we saw that same thing with America 250, which is in general, what people are looking forward to celebrating in a couple of days is is is their community and the way, you know, what 250 years of being a country means to them, not in the kind of grand, you know, national way, but in the in the way in which they kind of live and and, you know, operate every day. And custom merch, you know, and America 250 merch plays a role and it helps them celebrate with their families if it's a family event, with their town if it's a town event, with their company if it's a company event, with their softball teammates if it's softball, you know, if it's a sport, direct sports event.

22:54And we saw that in the America 250 survey. And we see that kind of time and time again, when we survey and talk to our customers about the role that custom merchant apparel plays in their lives, whether it's a school or a company or a family outing. Yeah, but it's it's it's pretty, you know, it was non-intuitive to be when I first started in this role. And then I remember I kind of announced on LinkedIn that I'd taken the job and people came out of the woodwork talking about this love they had from Custom Inc. and how they had saved this shirt from Custom Inc. from, you know, 20 years ago or 15 years ago or this hat that they had made from there that represented this this thing.

23:36Right. And you think about all the things we've thrown away over time. right and the fact that people say these things and it just reinforces this idea that these are kind of the receipts or kind of tangible tangible things of tangible tangible remnants of memories and experiences that you've had and again you get to receiving with the market yeah totally and and listen there's a lot more findings i'd love to touch on but for time's sake i want to talk about one in particular make sure we talk about this because i think it's really interesting and it was that people said they wanted to gather this more than bigger celebrations.

24:08And the question is, as marketers, is there a lesson there about creating meaning instead of simply creating bigger moments? I think so. I mean, I think the – Or what did that finding tell you? Yeah, they wanted – they want togetherness more than bigger celebrations. Yeah, I think that what it told me was that we need to focus on why the moment matters more than just the moment itself, right? and I don't know I I this this this may this may touch a nerve for you but I think about all the pictures and of seeing people celebrate the Knicks win and the the fact that you know I think about these pictures of people in Times Square and pouring to the streets and all wearing kind of you know orange and blue and how different that would have looked if they had all just been wearing their own you know their own street clothes and it was so why does that that moment matter because it represented something.

25:01It wasn't just a finals win, right? And it wasn't even just probably a finals win after 53 years. It meant something different to every single person that was there. And then the merch that they wore kind of united them as a community to kind of connect all those different moments. And so I think what the survey from America 250 or the data from the America 250 survey reinforces to me is that we need to understand the why behind the moment. And that's what we we're engaging with you know with our audience and their customers it's it's really speaking to that why because that's fundamentally why they come to us right it's not they don't really need a custom t-shirt they need a way to raise money for their school they need a way to make new employees feel welcome on their first day of work right you know they need a way to have people kind of understand and and learn about their about their brand and their and their their business.

25:57So, you know, it's, it's, it's really the, the, the why behind them. It's, it's really fascinating just what a Tumblr and a t-shirt and, and otherwise innocuous item can do to somebody. It's really, really interesting. It's, it is. I mean, we, we did a survey around new employee onboarding a couple of months ago, and it was, you know, employee onboarding and kits is a big part of our business. And one of the most surprising things to me was a kind of a two-part, a two-part stat, which is getting a welcome kit, branded welcome kit on the first day of work, double the sense of belonging that an employee has to that company.

26:38And the second part, so that in and of itself was a, was a super fascinating finding. And the second part that was fascinating was getting it any day after day one was basically the same as not getting it at all. Wow. Fascinating. So, right. So you, you've got this, so, and going back to the why behind the moment, like this, this is, it's your first day of work, particularly in a world in which many of us work remotely that, and in a world where it is getting harder and harder to find and getting longer and longer to find roles, right? That, that first day is, is a moment. It's a moment that means something to you.