5 Marketing Lessons from a 125-Year-Old Brand with Dawn Hedgepeth | Ep. 356

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0:22Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the No BS Marketing Podcast. I'm Daniel Murray. And join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. Hey Dawn, welcome to the podcast. I know you're taking time out of a busy shoot right now. So thank you so much for the time today and excited to chat. Hey, Daniel. Thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be here. Appreciate the time. I want to first get into your background, how you got into marketing, so we could set the stage of who you are and all that good stuff.

1:12Well, I guess it's an interesting story. I kind of fell into marketing, truth be told. It was not a direct journey. I always wanted to be a criminal defense attorney, so that was kind of what I had my mindset on from the time I was fairly young, actually, even in high school. So after college, I decided to take some time before taking the LSAT and became an editor for a law journal in Boston for a national law publication and found that people weren't really that satisfied with their job. Lots of people gave me recommendations that made it seem like it might not be the right career. So I pivoted and actually went to school for a master's of public policy, which I determined was kind of getting into the spirit of the law, but what was behind it as opposed to practicing law.

2:01And while there, I started working for a professor in the business school because I could take classes on both sides in the business school and also in the policy school and found that I just really loved business. I really got engaged in the content, marketing, things like that. And that's kind of how it all happened. I started right from business school, began working as an associate brand manager at Unilever. And 20-something years later, here I am. I just found that I really loved the career in brand management, which is really where I started. I loved all the different aspects of marketing, how different every day could be, how many different types of challenges there were.

2:46And over time, marketing just has gotten more and more interesting, it feels like, and it keeps me on my toes every day. So it has certainly continued to hold my interest all that time. That's amazing. It's funny because my wife is in marketing, too. And she always like claimed to fame as she's a law school dropout. She went to law school for like a year and was like, peace out. I don't want to be a lawyer. And then gone into e-commerce. And now she's like a chief growth officer at an agency doing e-commerce stuff. But it's so funny. Like same type of thing. Similar story. Wanted to be a lawyer.

3:23Wanted to be a lawyer and decided that's not my path. Yeah. I want to first go into this because it kind of is fresh in your mind. I know at Hanes, you're in a lot of different retail marketing and you're right now doing some retail media shoot. So what kind of retail marketing does Hanes brands find the most effective? Well, it does differ by retail media network a little bit. You know, we do marketing measurement studies and determine, you know, what worked best for us and what channel. That's both national tactics as well as all of our retail media tactics. I would say one of the ones that has been more successful lately in a couple different network spaces is really OLV, online video, connected TV.

4:18Also, in some cases where you can do it, like Amazon, for example. example. But video content seems to just be reigning king everywhere right now and is very engaging. And we have found that to be, you know, a fairly positive return for us in many cases. I think, you know, there was a time when retail media was really focused mostly on that lower funnel performance type media, where you were really trying to drive the conversion and grab the sale. And, you know, obviously you need to be there for the digital shelf. You need to have presence in search and display, primarily search so that you show up.

4:59But nowadays it's so critical to really make that media work effectively. You really have to cover all phases of that purchase journey. And so enter in things like video content, which is in many cases, much more upper funnel, historically considered upper funnel, more brand marketing, brand messaging, general awareness, driving, making sure you really have enough people at the top of the funnel to kind of get all the way down into conversion and turn it into a sale. So video content definitely working really well in a lot of instances now. I know we started like in kind of in the weeds, but let's back up a little bit.

5:38But what is your approach of building a long-term marketing strategy, especially now that we're in such a fast-moving environment with digital media, now AI, everything's moving so, so fast. So what is your process of building a marketing strategy? That's such a good question. I tend to think of not much is long-term nowadays. And I feel like there's not always a lot of patience even for long-term strategy. I think the primary thing though, is that you have to have long-term goals and objectives and then be open to the fact that you're going to pivot that marketing approach multiple times, probably in order to get to those long-term goals and make sure you achieve them.

6:28Um, but I mean, I think the only thing we guarantee right now is that things change constantly. Right. So I think, um, you, the idea that you might have kind of a long-term playbook in, in marketing tactics, I don't know that I really buy into it right now. I feel that it's just, you know, the assortment of things that we're playing with is changing all the time. If you think about AI, for example, you just raised AI. Obviously, the AI landscape is just changing constantly what it looks like today and how we're using it today. It's going to be very different than even probably in six months. But I think from the standpoint of knowing who your target is, knowing who you want to reach, who your audiences are, what your brand is trying to achieve.

7:11Those form, you know, critical basics about, you know, what your marketing strategy should be long-term. I think we always have an eye towards future-proofing. So I think the other thing is, while you're building a strategy, make sure you're building in plenty of time, energy, and funding to some extent for testing and learning. Because, you know, there's so many different things out there um and they are changing so fast that you want to make sure you're continuing to evaluate your media mix your marketing mix um all of your tactics and making sure that you're reaching um your consumers um in the in the best possible way yeah i mean i also want to go into um which is one of the hardest things to do in marketing for a lot of people is like once you've like thought about that long-term marketing strategy and all the I know it's easy way to pivot out of some of the things, but you have the kind of like foundational pieces.

8:13How do you align now the strategy to like the goals given by the CEO, the board? How are you aligning revenue goals and business goals to that marketing strategy that you're making? Okay. Well, I mean, listen, I think ultimately most marketers would agree that we have marketing plans in service of sales, right? We are all out there. I don't think there's a marketer out there that doesn't believe they are a salesperson too and driving towards revenue. I think that's the ultimate goal. So when we allocate what our goals and objectives are for a marketing plan, for example, we should be allocating where we want to spend dollars behind initiatives that matter towards driving a growth plan.

9:02So I think from, you know, the way we view it, we start any annual planning process or even a long-term planning process with what are the revenue goals, what are the goals of the general managers that I'm supporting, for example, and then we can craft a marketing plan that lays out the building blocks to get to those revenue goals. And in some cases, it's about making sure we have good measurement, especially on things like performance media, where we can measure exact, you know, we can have a pretty good projection of what sort of sales we can drive. But then in other cases, like your brand media investment, it can take a little bit longer.

9:40And we have an eye towards how much we have to build our brand presence in order to kind of reach those revenue goals and objectives. I think a lot of it is about thinking about what your market share goals are as well. You know, one thing is revenue, but another is what's your position in the marketplace and what do we have to do to be competitive and also to drive our market share in the places that we really need to. Obviously, we have some big brands in our portfolios. Our biggest brand is Hanes. It operates in six or seven different categories at this point. So we have men's underwear and socks and women's underwear and kids, scrubs, comfy wear, lots of different businesses.

10:19So there's a lot of different places to focus. And part of our job in marketing is helping to determine based on what our revenue goals are set by the CEO, set by also our general managers of those businesses, where we're going to focus our effort and not try to do everything, but try to make sure we're very surgical about where we want to grow and compete and where marketing can help us do that. Yeah. And I think one thing you, you, you said is like two of the things that you're, you're, you're dealing with is how do I gain like relevance in the market share? And then also I have to hit sales and the sales goals.

10:58So how are you, how do you balance the initiatives of brand building and performance marketing? And what is like, you don't have to give exact numbers, but what is, how do you balance like the budget between like what efforts need to go into brand building stuff and what efforts need to be like strictly straight performance marketing to drive sales? I think you're asking the million dollar question. I also think you're probably bringing to light what is one of the most difficult conversations for CMOs today and marketing teams today. It's like, you know, we have to drive short-term sales. We're living in a world where tariffs are crazy, right?

11:38Like the tariff changes week by week have been throwing wrenches for lots of businesses out there, you know, mine included. So from that perspective, you know that you have business needs that are short-term and you know that performance marketing can return short-term results. There's no doubt about it. And things like retail media plans and efforts are also, they have the benefit of what they drive in terms of immediate sales. But they also, let's just be honest, they're part of joint business plans with customers. And in some cases, they are, you know, leveraged for activity, right, for generating promotional events on the store, support on the floor, support for shipments, things like that.

12:24So that performance media and in some cases the retail media can be really important for delivering your short-term goals. The brand goals, though, I think like I mentioned at the beginning that more and more we are finding too that, you know, with the world shifting into more investment in retail media, I think that that is the trend that I've seen across lots of industries. It certainly has been the trend in ours. You do have to make sure you have enough awareness. And so there comes your brand effort is important, even in making that performance media work harder. So I think big brands do have to continue to spend in brand media and dollars.

13:10finding the balance is tough because especially in an environment where the short-term business plan is challenged with volatile market environment, which is where we are right now. But you can't go too long without brand media investment because you begin to lose your relevance with your consumers. And it impacts the ability of your media to be successful, but also just impacts what people think of you. I mean, we want brands to be top of mind. We want brands to be culturally relevant. But anymore, I don't think it always requires a big television campaign or something like that to drive brand recognition and brand awareness.

13:52That is the value of things too, like influencers, partnerships, collaborations. There's all different ways we can drive brand heat, as we call it, and brand awareness. And it doesn't necessarily have to be that we're just producing a typical ad campaign to do it. Yeah, it's kind of funny because I think like what comes to mind for me for Hanes is like the 90s, like Michael Jordan partnership. Like I still think about that. Yeah, it's really funny. It's like when I think about Hanes and I that's why I when I was like a 90s kid would buy only buy like Hanes underwear because I was like, oh, Michael Jordan.

14:31the michael jordan but now like the way people buy are so different and there's a new new era of like um gen z coming up and gen alpha coming up so i always wanted to ask you like how are you thinking about like with like the new space of like influencers and different retail partners um i know you did a partnership with like urban alpha fitters which is like a younger younger audience could you talk a little bit about like how you thinking about like how to bring hands to like the the younger the younger audience and the younger the new like the new wave of buyers campaigns get stuck 17 strategy drafts feedback and multiple channels approvals and email thread limbo enter loom the ai powered video tool to get your team aligned and your campaign unstuck Loom records your screen, camera, and voice to share video messages async so you can get the clarity to move forward.

15:31Fewer bottlenecks, faster launches, smarter campaigns. Go to loom.com. That's L-O-O-M.com. Sure. Yeah, you're right. We're always, we have been trying to get younger for a number of, I mean, I think brands in general, especially brands like ours, we turn 125 years old next year, Hanes does. So it's certainly a brand that has a long heritage. And your story is similar to so many people that we hear. It's like, oh yeah, I grew up with Hanes and my dad wore Hanes and actually, you know, my grandfather even to some extent. And all that of course is true. but how you make a brand relevant for the next generation and continue to bring in new people, new people continuously, and not just bring them in because they trust it, but also because they really feel for it.

16:21And they really have this, we call it this love for the brand, right? You would like them to become proponents of your brand and to be telling people about it. And I think that's the world that we live in right now too, with influencers, where you really want them to kind of sometimes do your marketing for you, right? I mean, they are big creators are out there talking about your brand sometimes better than you can do and certainly in a more authentic way. So I think we have focused on partnerships. We are focused on influencers of all different levels. I also think we're, you mentioned Urban Outfitters.

16:55That is actually something we were really excited about earlier this year. We launched a bespoke collection with Urban Outfitters. And, you know, we have other collaborations as well, higher tier as well. You know, we've been partnered doing a collaboration with Supreme for 15 years. So it's not necessarily new, but what it is is also finding like where are those places where younger people are and where does our proposition of comfort make a whole lot of sense with that proposition that is maybe even more suited to younger consumers. We had a lot of love for Urban Outfitters and also, you know, for the college age or college minded, that kind of life stage that they attract generally and that they are talking to in their stores and online.

17:43That aligns really well with who we've been trying to reach, but also who resonates with our product right now. We designed into that with Urban Outfitters and, you know, brought it to life there. And I think that's the kind of thing that we're trying to do is find equities like that where we can bring something to the table, like our strong comfort heritage and our durability, our great products, our, you know, comfortable basics are really having the moment right now. I think in time, post-COVID especially, people love their comfortable wear. Fortunately, we make that and we feel like we do it.

18:20We've done it for a long time. And really it's about finding new ways to kind of get it into the hands of new consumers, whether that's, you know, Urban Outfitters or TikTok shop. We launched our TikTok shop just recently, maybe about a month ago for Hanes. Launched Made In Form a little bit earlier this year, a little different story in Intimates. But building those relationships and those types of programs can help us get this brand kind of in culture a bit more than we can do just on our own. i want to know like what is the the thought process internally when you're making the decision to go do for example like a limited partnership with like or a capsule line with a a person like a brand like urban outfitters when you go retail versus launching like into a new category like hey Hanes wants to go into um your I know you launched your athleisure line so like how do you think about like limited time partnerships with retailers versus like making that decision we need to like add a new category to the Hanes um like um SKUs um it's a good question um one part of that is collaborations and partnerships even things like urban outfitters for example like a lot of that it's equally about brand heat and what it's doing for your brand itself and what you're um it's it's almost like the value of the marketing right is is is equal or or even in some cases greater to the volume that they'll actually sell.

20:11I mean, we are a large scale company, right? Haynes is a large scale brand. We're in broad distribution in Walmarts and Targets and dollar stores and department stores. So we have great accessibility. But when we're talking about launching into a new category, for example, that's a much bigger volume opportunity. And we're kind of thinking about where can we push and extend our brand into places where our equity really makes sense, but we don't currently have product there. And it's an opportunity for us to make the brand quite a bit bigger. So I do think that's probably not the only differences, but I think a large portion of it, there are a lot of things that we would do from a partnership and equity standpoint that are really about as much about the marketing value and the brand building aspects of that partnership, even more so than the volume that we would sell.

21:06yeah that totally makes sense i i also want to go i mean i feel like it was i mean a big decision but probably like an easy decision because haynes is known for like comfort wear and athleisure is like the like the new like for the last i would say like the last like cove from covet onward has been seen as like the comfort wear of everybody like people like besides like there's the home staying at home cozy but then there's like going out and i want to wear something that's like comfort but i don't want to i wanted to look at least um yeah so why did that decision come about and like what what are the like the pieces that went into that decision um well i think i mean obviously we do look at trends and our design team looks a lot at trends and what's out there and something like athleisure, for example, that has been trending, right?

22:03So we are pretty good at staying right on top of trends. I wouldn't say we're not going to necessarily be the ones who lead the trend because we are a brand that's about, you know, democratizing value and giving people access on a broad scale. We do have a, you know, a value proposition versus, you know, whatever big name retailer out there, for example, one of the bigger athleisure wear companies. But looking at design trends is one piece of it. I think also, though, it's looking at, again, where we have something that we can add to the proposition. In the case of the athleisure type line that we just launched, Haynes Moves, that is the name of that collection.

22:47we did research with consumers and determined that, you know, there are problems, there are things that they face when they are moving, when they are engaging in movement that are uncomfortable. And we sought to solve issues of discomfort because that is our core brand proposition. So again, like if I look at it through the lens of what is my brand all about, what's that core proposition? And we stand for comfort and we are almost universally known for that. If you ask consumers everywhere, we do all sorts of research, right? But they can all tell you that Hanes is really about comfort. Where are the moments where we can solve a problem that consumers have?

23:27If I take the case of men's underwear, for example, chafing was a huge problem. People are like, I go out there and I move and I have a problem with chafing in my underwear doesn't solve that. For me, I have chafing even when I'm wearing boxer briefs and things like that. So in Hanes Moves, we built underwear with anti-chafe cooling panels built in. And so, so again, you know, it's not just, you know, if we talk about it as athleisure, yeah, of course that's like high level what it's all about, but digging into what we sought to offer in the products, we sought to bring the Hanes value of comfort to things that might be causing them discomfort when they were moving.

24:06I mean, I think you just told me, I didn't know you got the anti-chafe and i can send you a pair living in miami i think that's like a huge problem like you step outside and you start sweating i know that's a little tmi for the the listeners but i do think that's like a problem with a lot of men's stuff is like you step outside there's no tmi when you work in underwear we all know each other's stories also i can tell you all about bras also. You know, I, we, I had this conversation this morning when we were on set, people were like, oh, we were talking about somebody's bra and how it fit. And like, you literally can't face me.

24:45I could, I will talk to you all day long about bra fit if you'd like. We all know each other's bra sizes, but I mean, that's one type of product. We launch a lot of different innovations. And I think the key to determining how we go about it is really starting with those great consumer insights and determining where to go from there. You know, we, we, um, we did a whole marketing program last year around our comfort period product. Again, that's a product that, you know, talk about TMI. I mean, people like we're making period underwear, but like, honestly, there was a, there was, um, there was a question there around like, how do we bring that to market?

25:23What, like, what is the insight around why Hanes should be in period underwear, for example, because there were other competitors there. Um, but, but, um, doing a little bit of research with consumers, uh, and working with our agency and our team, we determined that there was a pretty large gap between people who knew about period underwear and people who are actually using it. So then you ask, well, why do we have that gap? Why is it that over 90 % of women are aware of period underwear, but only 30 something percent of them had ever tried it. And the dugger, the more we dug into it, the more research we did, the more we realized it was because they were really confused.

26:02People were like, I don't understand this. Can I wash it? Is it gross? Do I feel wet? Like, how does this thing actually work? And they weren't getting those answers. I mean, it was just sort of like, okay, I see underwear out there that costs like $20 a pair. It says it's period underwear, but like, I'm kind of scared to try it because I don't really understand a lot about it. So we did a whole campaign and we launched the product, But we also did a whole campaign around answering those questions very directly. Just saying, you know, do you feel wet? No. Can you wash it? Yes. We did digital out-of-home billboards.

26:36We kind of gave out samples. But more importantly, we answered people's questions directly. Didn't try to be cutesy about it. We didn't try to, like, play too much into, you know, naming the period, naming, you know, all that kind of stuff. But we really just went directly at what do people need to know about it. And we really drove some great results. But that is one way that we kind of also look at what products to go into and then how to bring it to the market is different depending on what we're working on. Starts with insights. Yeah, I was going to go ask you about that because it seems that from just like talking to you, Haynes is on the pulse of like knowing what conversations are happening, like the anti-chape conversation and the period underwear conversation.

27:24But like, I want to know how you collect these insights. Like, what are you doing to get insights like this? And so people know, like, because everybody says as marketers, you should talk to customers or you should do social listening or you should do, but like, nobody really knows like the best way to do it. So how do you find these insights as a brand? It's a good question. I do think it's a combination of things. Like there's no one silver bullet to how you find the best insights. And sometimes you find them in unexpected places also. But number one is always be curious and always be listening.

28:06That may sound super basic, but my team has a WhatsApp chat. We're like constantly sending stuff to each other over the weekend around what do we see in social media? What do we notice in the press? Like just what do we see? Like being curious and watching what's out there is one way. We do a lot of research. We do qualitative research. We do focus groups. We do talk to consumers. We also do product research where, you know, we wear test things and we put products, you know, we put those anti-chafe boxers on men and then talk to them about how did it work? How do you like it? Did it, you know, what do you, is it soft?

28:41Is it comfortable? And does it keep you cool? Are you solving the chafing problem? How does it work versus other things out there. And sometimes just listening to how consumers talk about it and the language that they use gives you real insight into how you can frame it up with them and how you can reach them a little bit more. And again, I really do feel that we're trying to solve problems for people, ultimately. I think sometimes marketing gets a bad rap about just trying to sell things, but I really view our job as trying to solve problems for consumers, sometimes that they don't even know that they need.

29:16And they don't even know that they have it. But if we do it right, we can find the right insight. I think social listening is critical, especially nowadays, because that's where people are having the conversations. You know, I mean, we can put people in a room and get behind a two-way, you know, a one-way mirror and have a moderator and ask all sorts of questions. And we do do that. That is good, solid research. That's, you know, a lot of big, you know, a lot of companies will do that. But I think at the end of the day, we're all in different groups. We're all on social media. You know, I have my mom's groups out there and my working mom's groups, my middle-aged mom's groups, whatever, all these different groups that I follow.