5 Marketing Lessons from a 125-Year-Old Brand with Dawn Hedgepeth | Ep. 415

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0:24Welcome 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 Don, 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.

1:14Well, 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, my mindset on, uh, from the time I was fairly young, actually, uh, even in high school, um, after college, I, uh, decided to take some time before taking the LSAT and became an editor, uh, for a law journal in Boston, uh, 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, um, it might not be the right career.

1:51I, 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. And 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.

2:30And 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. And 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's in marketing too, and she always claimed to fame as she's a law school dropout. She went to law school for like a year and was like, peace out.

3:13I 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 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 Haynes, 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 Haynes 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.

4:04That'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. Also, 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.

4:52And, 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. But 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.

5:31So 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. But 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.

6:30Um, 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.

7:13Those 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.

8:15How do you align now the strategy to like the goals given by the CEO, the board, um, how are you aligning revenue goals and business goals to that marketing strategy that you're, you're making? 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. You know, 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.

9:04So I think from 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.

9:42And 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, kids, scrubs, comfy wear, lots of different businesses.

10:21So 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 said is two of the things that you're dealing with is how do I gain relevance in the market share? And then also I have to hit sales and the sales goals. So how do you balance the initiatives of brand building and performance marketing?

11:07And what is like, you don't have to give exact numbers, but how do you balance the budget between what efforts need to go into brand building stuff and what efforts need to be 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? Like the tariff changes week by week have been throwing wrenches for lots of businesses out there, you know, mine included.

11:49So 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, um, plans and, and efforts are also, um, 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. Um, for generating, um, promotional events on the store, support on the floor, support, uh, for shipments, things like that.

12:26So 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 hours, 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.

13:13Finding 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.

13:55That 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 haynes is like the 90s like michael jordan partnership like i still think about like that yeah it's really funny it's like when i think about haynes and i that's why i when i was like a 90s kid would buy only buy like haynes underwear because i was like oh 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 but like how you thinking about like how to bring Hanes to like the, the younger, the younger audience and the younger, the new, like the new wave of buyers.

15:11Sure. Yeah, we, 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.

15:51And 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 where you mentioned Urban Outfitters, That is actually something we were really excited about earlier this year.

16:29We 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.

17:14that 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.

17:51We'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 Haynes, um, launched Maidenform, uh, a little bit earlier this year, a little different story and intimates. Um, but those, um, building those, those relationships and those types of programs, um, can help us, uh, get this brand kind of in culture a bit more, um, 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 haynes wants to go into um your i know you launch athleisure line so So how do you think about limited time partnerships with retailers versus making that decision, we need to add a new category to the Hanes SKUs?

19:15It's a good question. One part of that is collaborations and partnerships, even things like Urban Outfitters, for example. But like a lot of that, it's equally about brand heat and what it's doing for your brand itself. And what you're, it's almost like the value of the marketing, right, is equal or even in some cases greater to the volume that you'll actually sell. I 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.

20:01And 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. um so i i do think that's probably not the only differences but i think a large portion of there there are a lot of things that we would do from a partnership and equity standpoint that are really about um as much about the the marketing value of the of the brand and the brand building aspects of that partnership um even more so than the volume that we would sell yeah 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 COVID 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.

21:15Yeah. So why did that decision come about? And like, what, what are the, like the pieces that went into that decision? 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, and something like athleisure, for example, that has been trending, right? So 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.

21:58But 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, we did research with consumers and determined that 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?

22:43And 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? If 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.

23:16And 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. Question. Is your team slow or is your processes broken? If every campaign feels like it takes twice as long as it should, take a look at Wrike. Wrike is an intelligent work management platform that connects briefs, approvals, and timelines in one place. Wrike also learns your workflows and automates repetitive stuff, and makes smart suggestions to keep getting more efficient.

24:02There's even a workload management so you can make sure nobody's buried and nobody's bored. With total visibility from brainstorm to launch, handoffs stop turning into hiccups. Go to reich.com slash TMM to stop chasing status updates and start doing the work. I mean, I think you just told me, I didn't know you had the anti-chafe. I can send you a pair. Living in Miami, I think that's like a huge problem. You step outside and you start sweating. I know that's a little TMI for 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.

24:48We all know each other's stories. Also, I can tell you all about bras also. 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. Like you literally can't face me. 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 did a whole marketing program last year around our comfort period product.

25:28Again, 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 question there around like, how do we bring that to market? What is the insight around why Hanes should be in period underwear, for example, because there were other competitors there. But doing a little bit of research with consumers 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 were 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.

26:12And the more we dug into it, the more research we did, the more we realized it was because they were really confused. People 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.

26:46Just saying, you know, do you feel wet? No. Can you wash it? Yes. We did digital out-of-home billboards. We kind of did, gave out samples, but more importantly, we answered people's questions directly. We didn't try to be cutesy about it. We didn't try to play too much into naming the period, naming 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.

27:23It starts with insights. yeah i i was gonna 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 having like the anti-chape conversation and the the period underwear conversation but like i want to know how how you collect these insights like what are you doing to get insights like this and um 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 what how do you find these insights as a brand um it's a good question i do think it's it's a combination of things like there's no one silver bullet to how you find the best insights.

28:15And sometimes you find them in unexpected places also. But number one is always be curious and always be listening. That may sound super basic, but my team has a WhatsApp chat. We're constantly sending stuff to each other over the weekend around what do we see in social media? What do we notice in the press? Just what do we see? 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?

28:54How do you like it? Did it, you know, what do you, is it soft? Is 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 and they don't even know that they have it.

29:34But 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 my working mom's groups, my middle aged mom's groups, whatever, all these different groups that I follow.