Brand of the year CMO on Innovation, TED talks and what B2B can learn from B2C - Rebecca Hirst

0:28Welcome back everybody to the Uncensored CMO. turns into therapy in fact so if you're ready for that then you want to listen here it is now i'm talking to the winner of the brand finance strongest brand of the year which is ey and their cmo rebecca hearst welcome to the show thanks for having me well lots of congratulations right so you've you've not only won brand finance rounds of the year last year you were top 100 effective marketer and you've just won campaigns 40 over 40 40 over 40 i'm particularly happy about that because i just think there's it's it's the it's probably the category that as you get older the the the the net widens for you i just love the fact that campaign is celebrating age and experience and wisdom and that it's something that people can look can look up to so a few people ping me afterwards and said i'm so glad that you've done this because we feel like people disappear later in life in this industry and i nearly did that myself but we can come back to that i nearly stepped away from this industry completely when i was doing nutrition i was like it's good to fly the flag for experience and wisdom and age and i'm proud of it i'm proud of the gray hairs and the wrinkles now i know work well it's great i mean more power to you and i'm i'm very pleased to see it got a little plaque on my um my bookshelf behind me at home oh pride of place yes like it now what did the judges particularly like about your entry what was it that caught their eyes so i went for breakfast with one of the judges last week um because we connected anyway we wanted to kind of meet each other in real life and I was asking her how and she she read my submission and the thing that clinched it because I applied a couple years back when I first joined EY and I didn't get it it's one of those things I was like oh whatever it's like it doesn't matter and I was like this year I would apply and it's one thing that you have to apply for it's not just kind of giving out willy-nilly you have to apply and I thought I've got a much stronger story to tell in terms of numbers in terms of results in terms of what I've done at EY it's worth another crack and she said that was that was really that That was good.

2:21But the bit that swung it really was the stuff I do outside of EY, particularly around when I was doing glorious wellness and coaching people in our industry, basically with health, wellness, nutrition, to be better thinkers and better creatives. It was that that was actually the most interesting, engaging bit, like giving back to the industry. And I thought that was like a throwaway line or two, but I said, no, it was that. I wouldn't have even thought of that. It does set you apart, doesn't it? Because I mean, there's lots of very capable CMOs out there delivering good work. But if you've got a side hustle or something extra and all particularly something that gives back as well, it can be quite powerful.

2:57It's partly why I love doing the podcast actually alongside my day job at System 1 because it really energises me and it just creates a bit of value, hopefully, for other people alongside what's expected of me in terms of the job site. my side hustles changed a bit because with glorious i was doing it so when i left coke i got redundancy package i'd been training in nutrition on the side which was a bit of a someone said your cognitive dissonance must have been very strong i was like i don't even know what that means but basically basically selling sugary soft drinks for a living and then studying nutrition at night was yeah left brain and right brain were having a bit of a conflict but anyway I left Coke, I set up Glorious Wellness and for a chunk of time I did nothing but that.

3:40It was my you know 100 % bootstrapped it, built my own website, all of that sort of stuff and then I got kind of sucked back into freelance mode because I mean cash flow or bootstrapping a new business is fairly critical right but I built Glorious Wellness over six years and when I took the job at EY I didn't have enough brain space to devote to clients anymore I had you know EY clients I couldn't cope with like the mental load of having private clients as well so I I've kind of sunsetted it for a little bit it will always be there in the background I'm like it's never going to go away but for now it's not taking up much of my time but my other side hustles have grown like working with EY foundation and mentoring and volunteering there's loads of other stuff I do So it's kind of, I think, getting energy from something other than the day job is really important, whatever shape that takes.

4:33And talking about kind of getting energy as well, around that time, is that when you did your TED talk? I reckon TED was about six, seven years ago when I did a TEDx. I did a TEDx talk and then I got invited back to host TED and be the compare. I mean, the comparing is brilliant because you're just like master of ceremonies. You can have a great day out on stage with a microphone kind of swanning about. and you don't have to memorize 15 minutes of monologue, which is the scary bit of a TEDx talk where you don't have an auto cue, you don't have prompt cards, you have to memorize that thing. So not all TEDx is like 15 minutes.

5:07Sometimes they're seven, sometimes they're 12. Your max is 15. But just the pure fear and adrenaline of standing on that red dot in the middle of the stage thinking I've got to remember all of my words for the next 15 minutes is petrifying. but I am so proud of it I'm so glad I did it I never thought in a million years I'd get it and I got a phone call from one of the when they screen your application I got a phone call from one of the people who were screening tell us about your angle what's in it for the audience what's unique about it you get a bit of a grilling and I had that interview and I thought nothing more of it and then I got a phone call a few days later saying you're in and my first thought was what the I'm not allowed to swear am I what the f have I done I'm so petrified of the thought doing this now so I mean I look back and think well done you for taking a risk for doing it anyway and you know it opened a lot of doors in terms of getting comfortable on stage which has been an interesting avenue so I mean obviously you'd have been doing lots of talks in coke and you know before that as well so you're obviously used to being in front of people you're talking what was different about doing a TED talk was it the fact that you had no notes or autocue and you had to that's a shocker the difference is I think I mean we were talking about our comparative lives at Coke and Pepsi a few minutes ago but when I was at Coke you would be on stage every year at like the big fancy conference when you're unveiling your great plans to all of the kind of bottling partners so I was happy being on stage and quite comfortable presenting with Ted because it is it's a personal story first of all and mine is a really personal story I open up my TEDx by saying I want to tell you about my coke days imagine standing in front of a room of people if room full of people and you get a nosebleed that's how I open my talk and everyone's like what like she's a coke head and then I go on to talk about coca-cola and acne and maracutane and all of that kind of stuff but I learned I learned with Ted the power of an opener I learned about pacing and body language I did have a speaker coach for it because I was petrified of it but I also learned like years later and this is at Samsung when I I was on stage launching the Galaxy Z Flip to 3 ,000 tech journalists I had a speaker coach then who taught me so much more and I was like if I knew this when I did TED I think I would present to TED differently but it kind of doesn't matter because I think you learn what you need to learn in that moment so with TED it was it's different to being on stage at Coke because it's not it's not auto-cued you don't have prompt cards it's a personal story you're really you're really looking at the people in the audience like look them in the eye and they're like then you know like you can see they're willing you to to do well like there's a there's a completely different vibe so it was such an experience i loved it i'd love to know so when you were presenting to 3000 tech journalists that that's quite a scary thing as well isn't it unveiling one of the biggest innovations i assume in samsung's history what did you learn from that experience as well oh that was that was the pinnacle really of my time at Samsung in terms of achieving what I'd set out to achieve.

8:19So we can talk about, you know, like business results. And we talked, we were talking a minute ago about NPS scores and brancher, all of that kind of stuff. But I, I didn't want a job at Samsung to begin with because I'd set up Glorious Wellness. I got a call from a friend who was working there and he said, will you come and help me a few days a week? Like we need some bench strength, come and sort some stuff out for me. I said, as long as it's not full time and as long as it's not permanent, I will come and freelance for you. So I was kind of in a cupboard under the stairs at Samsung doing all the stuff that nobody else wanted to do.

8:49And I got invited to a corporate away day in that first summer that I was there. And it was all the corporate cliches. It was, I was, I found myself on a beanbag in a teepee in a field in Hertfordshire. I'm like, how, like literally how cliche can we get? And on stage was one of the big bosses. He's the VP of the UK business at the time. And he was talking about two things one they were really struggling to attract a younger female kind of crowd like they couldn't understand why samsung wasn't attractive to female millennials and then on the other hand he showed a photograph of a project team and this was when folding phones were kind of just a like glint in their eye he'd come back from a trip to korea and this was the project team and this technology was coming wasn't it amazing and the picture was all men and it was all either they were in their 50s they're all wearing suits and they were either Korean or kind of Western looking and I just felt in that moment like the hairs on my arm stood up and it made me so cross and I was like is it any flipping wonder that you're not attracting a younger crowd when who's making the decisions you're just not you're not in tune with your audience it's so obvious so I hoisted myself out of my beanbag you know at the break when you're trying to like you know most ungainly fashion get out of your beanbag and I grabbed this bloke by the shoulder who did not know who I was because I was a nobody and I said to him is it any wonder you're not attracting the right crowd like look who's making the decisions and he said well come and help me change it then and in that moment it was a bit like the TED talk I was like what have I just gone and done I don't even want a job here I just want the cash flow to fund Glorious and the long story short version of this story is that that man became my boss he has been a mentor and a coach and a guide to me and he knows he knew because I spoke about that experience that my job at Samsung was to open doors for other women and to open doors for a conversation about diversity in our marketing and to tune into the consumers that they wanted to attract that was my job so fast forward three and a half years now in that interim being a woman in an industry like technology and korean tech is pretty full-on like there's all the cliched things that happened to me like being the only woman in the room being talked over being shut down in like mid-conversation you name it happened but by the end of my three and a half years with support of the people around me and i i got through a lot of that and i'd opened doors for other women now when i got a phone call about could you come to San Francisco can you open the show for us to launch Samsung Galaxy Z flipped the world and I was like wait a minute this is what I've worked for um but I also knew that in a year or two's time I was leaving Samsung because my boss and I had conversations about succession planning and I knew that my like future career wasn't wasn't going to be at Samsung for much longer so when I got the call so would he come and do it I phoned him and said I've been invited to open the show I'm packing San Francisco but we know that I'm not going to be here for forever and he's like get on that plane go and do it this is everything that you've worked for if you can go on stage and show everybody else that if you can do it as a western woman and not a Korean bloke which is who would normally open the show your job is done like you've you've you've opened as many doors as you possibly can so to be able to like walk out on stage and I was the first person on stage like the the big music comes on and the lights come on and I'm waiting behind the scenes like the adrenaline rush is extraordinary but I was so trained and so ready and so prepared I'm like I'm just going to enjoy this and I went out there I'm like oh my god I can't believe I'm actually here so it's kind of like it was the it was a nice bookend to like the start of you know a chunk of my career at Samsung that I never thought I would have I never really wanted to be there anyway that's an amazing legacy and and well power to you for having encouraged your convictions as well and sometimes we like tell ourselves we can't do things and and the fact you went up to him and said you want to change how this is is is really powerful i don't think he quite knew what to say but he's yeah he was a he was extraordinary in terms of support mentor yeah door opener for me well finding good mentors really important isn't it and then actually just because you reminded me because because our our careers sort of overlap for quite a time actually because i know you're at coke for a few years i was at pepsi slash britvik i had a similar moment to that not not as profound in terms of equality but um i was on an away day a bit a bit like you're describing on the beanbags and it was this management development thing and um there's a really simple thing that struck me that that someone part of this really simple venn diagram two circles overlap one was what are the big issues the company currently faces right and the other one what do you care about most what are you passionate about and we had to fill in both things and then obviously find the bit that overlaps what's the one thing only you could do in this organization to make a big change and a big difference right a bit like you were doing that for women and um i remember sat there thinking well britvik at that time had been very famous for innovation we'd launched fruit shoot we'd launched j2o we'd launched uh juicy drench we had we had this series of successes in fact i worked out that a hundred percent of our growth had come from brands that never existed 10 years ago sort of thing and um i also looked while i was passionate about and i realized that the thread through my innovation sorry thread through my experience was i loved innovation i love being the challenger i i would rather be on the brand that no one's heard of than the market leader that everyone's trying to take over from right yeah and i just realized oh yeah i get excited when i'm in the challenger position i get i don't get excited when i'm in the brand leader position so um i came up this thing saying i'm going to go and solve britwick's innovation problem and and the solution to the problem is not that it doesn't have good ideas it's it can't execute it because it is so dependent on big brands being in tesco on half price promotion yeah that it's never going to give any time and attention to small brands so same as you i remember like friday friday afternoon on the from the beanbag and then i was in like a cold kind of you know uh office in the middle of a you know industrial park in front of on monday morning eight o 'clock in front of the two of the board members of britwick I'd phone them up on the Friday.

15:09I'd say, I must meet you and tell you my vision. I remember getting the flip charts out in this breakfast meeting going, it doesn't feel the same anymore. You're like so full of conviction on the Friday. I felt like that guy in Gladiator kind of thing. I'll do a big browsing speech. I know what you mean about that Challenger piece though, because I think with Samsung, there was a massive opportunity because the ambition, I worked in the mobile division mostly. I also worked in consumer electronics like tellies and fridges and stuff, but mainly mobile. and like everyone had like in their sights that were going to be iphone that's all that mattered to go from being seen as kind of a slightly in fact when i first joined it is some focus groups and i remember someone saying as one of the kind of younger women in the group samsung is a brand for men with briefcases i was like that i mean this is it right you've got to take a brand that that's the perception and change change it into something different and it was you know on coca cola on the itty bitty brands around the edges that no one really cared about is where you can have the most impact where you can do stuff that's not been done before or they don't really care so much about like yeah do it fine crack on i quite like that too we get a whole lot more freedom don't you yeah i mean this is a debate often happen my colleagues at britbit because i then set up a a team that managed lipton iced tea mountain dew gatorade it basically all those brands in the PepsiCo system globally that have been neglected.

16:32And these were like billion dollar brands, right? These are really, really, really big brands. In any other organization, they're massive, right? But in there, they're the carpet sweeping. Exactly. In any other country, any other market, you'd be like, you know, God level to work on those brands, you know what I mean? And I went and spoke to the people within the Pepsi system that manage those brands. And I went, oh, right, so you're just about to shoot a big campaign with Hugh Jackman. You just got this, you know, this innovation pipeline that goes on for 10 years that's really exciting i suddenly realized there's this world out there that didn't exist so i basically just went to britwick and said let me manage these brands let me loose on them yeah basically and what we did is we created our own um from idea through to in store so the funny thing was actually where most of my money was spent were on van sales it's very unglamorous actually on vans i know it's quite funny they went when we went i ended up becoming a it ended up becoming quite kind of iconic within the pepsi system because what i realized they didn't know how to execute new brands they were great at i think lift and shift they called it they were like the little nurture brands yeah all the new ideas i mean i mean i think um so coke at the time had just bought vitamin water some big four billion deal or something and um we had responded by buying a seven million pound uh you know sort of london-based you know v-water brand so like i mean it's like v-water and vitamin water i know We literally just live parallel lives.

17:53Exactly, exactly. So there was me with my 7 million up against the 40 billion, so 4 billion sort of thing. It's quite funny. But what was interesting about Coke in that period of time was that the vitamin water team would treat it, and that team was run by an amazing woman, where they were not sucked into the mothership. They had a different bit of the building. They did their own thing. So it was actually probably one of the ways to navigate that sort of, the huge enterprise that is Coke is by just carving off. Same with Relentless. Well, this is my study. I obsessed about looking at the data and I did an analysis of 10 years of software innovation.

18:31And what I worked out is that the brands that are successful year one are very rarely the brands that are successful after five years. So the exception was Coke Zero launch. The Coke Zero, because it was anchoring off the mother brand. And even that, so what it worked out is even if you take the most successful soft drink launches, 50 % of them declined in year two, even Coke Zero. And then it kind of had a relaunch and another relaunch and eventually it kind of broke through and became a success. But that was very, very unusual. Most of the biggest brands, once you take a 10-year view, didn't even make the top 20.

19:06So like Relentless were just focused on garages. Red Bull were just focused on pubs. Fevertree were just focused on cocktail bars. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. What they all did uniquely is prove themselves in one market and be absolutely brilliant at that one piece. But that was so counter-cultural for Pepsi and I think for Coke as well. They had the same problem is that they couldn't compute the idea you'd only sell a million cases in a year. I mean, we counted in million unit cases. Yeah. So if you weren't hitting a million unit cases on anything, be like, well, it's not worth getting out of bed for.

19:38So you had to be like in the multiples of that for anyone to even listen to you or to have a conversation with you, which is a really interesting thing when you think about it. And when I was at Coke, I worked on the innovation stuff. Again, we lived parallel lives. Nesty, Aquarius, Oasis. Oh, literally. Literally your polar opposites in a funny little corner of the office in like the weird kind of corner by the toilets. Then I went on to the Coke mothership. And I call it the mothership because it kind of is. I worked on red coke I worked on the Olympics and on FIFA World Cup trophy tour and it's such a different animal because it's really about the magic that goes magic slash marketing could debate that goes on around coke because coke doesn't change right um so it's everything is in what's next what's new what's innovative how do we like you know when emojis were just coming out how do we create a campaign in emojis I mean this is tough now I look back I'm like I mean it's genius because you don't even know what you're getting into, but you're trying to push the boundaries so that people engage and get excited by it.

20:40But it's quite short term. Yeah. You're like, that's this year's thing. Did you remember digital printing on bottles and cans? Yes. Didn't you at that time do, was it the name on your Coke bottle? Share a Coke, yeah. Share a Coke where you could find Rebecca in store would be on there. And you'd have all these people snapping photos of, you know, Rebecca and John together in store with their own bottles kind of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That went nuts. That was a small pilot in year one and then we rolled it out across multiple markets year two. I mean, you can imagine the complexity of that. And then there was a thing where you could order names if you couldn't find it in the store, but to get everyone out looking for their own names and photographing and sharing it, I was like nuts.

21:18It was absolutely nuts. Well, I've got a weird insight into that because when I'd left Britwick and gone and done a private buy-in of a small juice company, so I'd gone to try and make my millions, it didn't work out in the end, but I was attempting to. Hence why I'm here chatting to you, which is great, by the way. And our label supplier, Berkshire Labels, were one of the, I think, 37 approved label printers for Coke, right? 37 of them, yeah, that'd be about right. It was something like that. He came to me and I was moaning about the Pantone of our juice bar. He said, John, this is nothing compared to Coke.

21:51I'm like, what do you mean? He said, we had a conference, all 37 of us, and we compared our labels. Everyone was different. I'm like, oh no. He was saying how they were under strict instructions to try and unify across 37 different printers. There'd be some brand manager having an absolute headache, not me at that point in time. It's slightly different, slightly off, slightly different Pantone. And he went in to explain all the different substrates and printing techniques and whatever else that ends up that what you sign off compared to what actually goes down the line can end up in 37 different ones.

22:20And if it's got Olympic rings on it, it's really hard as well because you haven't got enough Pantone colours to get everything right. So many conversations about Pantone colours on Olympic hands. But he was the printer that did that for the UK. So he was explaining to me that he had to invest in a brand new line to be able to do this and take part in it. And he was explaining to me how he could personalise it. So the reason he was coming to me was, I've invested in this mass personalisation, right? But Coke have now finished it and I've got this ability to personalise the hell out of it. He's like, can you do anything with it?

22:50Marmite did it, Toblerone did it. We're like, oh, everyone's doing it now. We did it years ago. I know, I know. Because the printers were like, come on. How much can we personalise? It's brilliant. Right, I'd love to get into B2B. Yeah, of course. Because how on earth do you end up in B2B? Was it ever on the bingo cars? And how's marketing perceived in a B2B organisation compared to B2C? It's a bit like with Samsung. I didn't really want a job in B2B and I didn't want a job at EY. But I have found the biggest changes in my career, the biggest kind of left turns where I'm thinking I'm not quite sure this is the right thing to do or what part of the game plan is this have been the places and the moments where I've learnt the most.

23:31So like with Samsung, I knew in that moment on that beanbag that I had to do something and therefore I was driven by the purpose of making it more equitable kind of inside and out. With EY, it was similar. So as I left Samsung, I went back to uni to finish my master's in nutrition. I got a bit of time after Samsung to do that. And I got a call about a job at EY and I said to the recruiter, you have got the wrong woman for this job. This is so not me. and I kind of identified in my own kind of ego I was either an FMCG marketeer or I was a tech marketeer I was not I was definitely not professional services I just could I couldn't see myself doing it and she said look just go and have a chat they're good aren't they the kind of just go and have a chat so I did and literally the nanosecond I met my future boss I thought you and I will get on like I know you I've worked with you in a previous life and I could tell that we would just be on the right wavelength, not necessarily the same wavelength, but on the right wavelength.

24:35And what attracted me more than anything was that he said to me, look, we're going to double the size of the business in the next five years. I'm like, wait a minute, we're a two and a half billion business already in the UK. We're going to double the size of the business in five years. That is crazy. That's Korean tech talk. So it's already like, that's the ambition that I'm used to. Oh, and by the way, we want you to completely overhaul everything. I was like, what do you mean? Well, our team structure, how we measure all of our marketing, how we do digital in his words, how we engage with clients, like everything.

25:08We wanted to completely overhaul it all. I was like, well, I could go and do a similar job doing what I've done before in another tech company. I could go back into FMCG and do what I've done, which is like the big conferences and chasing the numbers and big sexy ad campaigns, or I can go and do something completely different. and that was what was most exciting about it now i still don't think i'm very professional services i'm still around pegging a square hole i'm still the one that's going like what about if we did this or can we try something completely different that we've never been like we've never done before the category's never done before but that's what's attractive um and that's why you know three and a half years later i'm still learning still enjoying it it's funny because back to our parallel lives i've i've just coming up to five years in b2b you've nearly five years i know i can't believe it five i've never done a job more than four years whoa so this is really weird for me and the other thing i'm finding actually i'm discovering the power of compounding as well i never i wish i'd learned this a bit earlier but i i typically did two to three years in a job three years three years was my average yeah i did lots of job for three years and then i felt i'd done it all yeah sort of thing but actually having done five years it's like the fourth and fifth year pretty exciting why well just things that just the The cumulative compound effect of what I've been investing in.

26:22Because obviously people forget that marketing is more of a long-term game than short-term game, particularly B2B. I'm going to write that down. Compounding. No, I've just discovered this. It's like I finally stuck around long enough to see the benefit of compound interest. It's been a revelation. That's really interesting from a marketing impact perspective. Yeah, but it's like your marketing builds on itself. And if you're consistent about it, you learn what works and so on. and the return I'm getting on the marketing I did four or five years ago is amazing. You're like, I was right. I made some good decisions.

26:55I get to hang around long enough to be told I'm right as well, which is pretty cool. Rather than always get rid of the same amount of being here two and a half years. Well, I'm usually one that gets turfed out, you see, because, you know, we need an excuse who's out. But the interesting thing with that is, same as you really, is what I found in B2B is that people don't really understand you in the same way. Because in B2C, everyone gets the marketer. Of course, you know, because you do the strategy, you do the brand plans, it's a product, so we're going to launch it on this date, how we're going to support the consumers, how it's going to be in store.

27:22You know, it's very obvious the impact you have. By finding B2B, people don't really know what marketing is there to do in quite the same way as in B2C. So there's a lot more of having to prove how it all works kind of thing and be patient because, you know, I mean, we were talking before, weren't we, about the 95.5 rule. Most people are not thinking about a B2B transaction at the moment. And also they're massive, right? They're big transactions. The same with your contracts with clients. We're talking about hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pounds. So it's not a decision that anyone's going to take lightly or quickly.

27:54So therefore the purchase cycle isn't, I've just seen a phone being presented by an influencer on Instagram, I'm going to buy it in a week or two. It is maybe six, 12, 18 months away from someone thinking, oh, I need something. I'm going to go and talk to EY. The stretch is even longer. So actually the compounding thing is interesting in B2B because you're not going to see anything happen for quite a long time. It's not short term. Totally. What is it? And that's what I've discovered. Because the purchase cycles are much longer, what happens is you get to the year three, four, five, and then it becomes an avalanche.

28:26Because all those sort of, you know, two to three year decision makers are suddenly in the market. And it goes, and this is the weird thing is because people think it's weird at system one because we've gone 100 % long, right? We don't do activation, right? And it's a bit weird. You know, we take the Les Bonet, Peter Field thing. We've gone all in on the long. And the weird thing is before we'd have to like hard sell. We'd have to like, oh, you know, please buy our testing. Do it now, do it now, do it now. Special offer. Exactly. Buy now. But because we've invested in brand, invested long, there's so much demand coming in that our problem now is fulfilling, is fulfillment, not demand generation.

29:07It's a nice problem to have. I know. I know. 100%. It's great. but but i've sort of like because spending kind of first two three years really really really focused on brand and how we build a reputation and how we build a great products and how we do all those kind of things and then realizing because of the compounding effects it then avalanches much later it's really interesting and i've really thought about it in quite that way because of that whole like cmo short-termism which is is not true by the way it's been proven that that's not true most cmos are staying in role for at least four years now so i think there's And I found this at Samsung.

29:38After three years, you sort of know what you're doing. And you can navigate it well enough to be able to influence well. You've got the network. You've got the kudos. You've got the sponsorship and the stakeholders. It's really hard, I think, in any new job to start again and do all of that from scratch and then get your momentum going. So, yeah, that compounding is my new word for today. There we go. Compounding. Yeah, it's true. And I think that's what we don't account for in businesses is the loss of understanding how things work, relationship building. You know, you get rid of somebody just as it's starting to work is often the case, isn't it?

30:14Which is crazy though. Which is a bit mental because you think, well, keep someone, incentivize someone to stay for five years or 10 years. I mean, another example I always quote is Dom Dwight at Yorkshire Tea, for example. He's been there 10 years. He's really been there 10 years. And he said their team, because he came up as, he was a social media handle. I mean, he always jokes about, he was a Twitter handle, right, for a few years. He was a journalist by trade. He didn't forget the Twitter handle, then took over all the social, then event, and then he'd be the CMO. But he would talk about the fact that that management team had been the same for 10 years.

30:46But the compound impact of the fact they've stuck together, they've learned, and they've been through the downs and then the ups. And their business has gone from, I think, where he describes it as 13 % share to 33 % share in a 10-year period. beautiful i love it i was on a judging panel with him for um the marketing society awards um sat next to him and they had some of their work entered into the awards and i think it's exceptional like it's so oh you must have had a look at it through system oh it's great i mean in fact we regularly use that as case study because if you look at some of the sort of core principles of great marketing we talk about you know in terms of like emotion and characters and fluent devices and the fact that they own Yorkshire-ness I mean, it's amazing, isn't it?

31:28And I'm a proud Yorkshire woman so I've got a little soft spot. My only concern for him is like, you know, dude, you must eventually run out of very famous Yorkshire people. I mean, you know, we need Judi Dench on there next or something, you know what I mean? There must be like this shortlist of like, you know. We need to have like an academy of like up and coming Yorkshire famous folk. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we've had the, I don't know. Purely for Dom's like, you know, like advertising campaigns. Help Dom out, you know, kind of thing, campaign gang. But they're a great example of compounding, I think.

31:53because also the consumer gets to know the joke of proper. And so therefore you can tell that joke in more and more ways as they go on. The story gets stronger. Yeah, which is clever. So one question everyone asks, right, when you make the jump to B2B, is B2B really different to B2C and in what ways is it different? How do you think it differs? It's the kind of 50-50 sort of answer, I think, a 50-50 experience. I always say that people are people, right? they make decisions based on trust and values and would you like working with that person so I don't I don't think that's any different whether you're in b2b or b2c particularly like you know talking about services but what is different and I think I hadn't quite wrapped my head around this when I first joined ey because I came from like big budgets big campaigns a lot of kind of media spend and it's not the same in b2b is that the way that you influence is much more one-to-one or one-to-few or rather than one-to-many so without the kind of luxury of having a big ad budget how do i influence the people that are going to make decisions that are like hundreds of thousands of pounds if not millions it's by spending time with them it's by getting people from EY to spend time with them it is much more of the being in a room with them virtual or otherwise in real life and it's understanding what they are worried about and being able to respond to that so a lot of it's quite niche so I think there's a there's a degree of precision required in B2B and it's it that's also a juxtaposition because there's a degree of precision that I found that's needed to really really understand who you're trying to influence um but it's also e-wise a vast organization of 21 000 people in the uk alone so 21 000 people across a multitude of services we think about tax audit consulting strategy mergers and acquisitions like we do all of these things so how do you simplify that for people who are trying to understand what you is about so i think there's a there's a piece of this i always joke my first job at e-y was not cmo it was chief clarity officer so i was trying to make sense of the like the just the this matrix of everything that we did like how am i going to explain that to you what does he do how do i explain that to you so i think there's some similarities it's human to human first and foremost but there's so many differences when it comes to nuance and being really precise and down here not always up here i love the chief clarity officer thing isn't it i think we're having a parallel career when i when i joined system one i had been a client and i'd brought into our what is now our most popular product test your ad but when i joined it wasn't called test your ad and i think it's called predictive market i can't remember what it's called actually maybe predictive markets right but but we had something like 46 different products and i remember on my first day i asked everyone in the sales team to present to me as if i'm a customer yeah and what i got was about an hour of methodology and you know didn't even remotely cover the 46 different products and i sat there i thought i can't even explain it i cannot explain this so because i'm a really simple person i said okay we test people's ads we test people's innovation and we track their brands let's call it that you know so cool he's good at what he does my big contribution was just like really simplified and so let's let's call it those three things and then let's make it really easy rather than overcomplicating it yeah exactly so you just get this online report it just talks you through the results in a way that will be really obvious and this kind of thing but but you're absolutely right is that part of our job is to bridge that gap between just because you know all this and particularly in professional services where there's endless amounts of data and insight and then you have to connect it with what what does the customer need they need the right information really quick in a way they can understand right they need someone to solve their problems for them or help them solve problems they know what their problems are they live and breathe them and they need someone to help navigate those problems and bring together a team of people that are the best experts to solve what's probably a really complicated again nuanced specific to that company problem like how do you convince them how do you show them that you can do that that's the job that we needed to do and so that's what we've got better at is figuring out what is it that's keeping you awake at night what is it that we can help you solve and show that we've done it before but that we really understand your world so it's much less about we're going to put something on tv and it's more about how can we spend time in a room with you to understand more about what's really bugging you and then have a have a way of showing you that we can respond to that and that's the that takes time that is not a there's you know that you can't buy that you can't do it quickly you can't chuck you know loads of performance marketing and I know we hate that term at it like there's this there's a longevity to it in b2b that there wasn't in b2c which was most of the time for me at least chasing a number a big hairy sales number that we needed to hit for that product launch for that month for that you know for that quarter's results there's obviously commercial pressure anyway to hit big chunky numbers but the the burn is a lot slower that's really yeah i i totally recognize that in a way there's good and bad with the number thing isn't it because in fmcg because you're on the hook for a launch the million cases if it was a coke or whatever yeah it's very clear success and failure is very clear and by when yeah and as a marketer you're pretty much on the hook for it so you're basically hero or villain and it's very very black and white isn't it so a lot more nuanced so in a you talked about 21 000 colleagues you i think got 1300 partners in the organization as well equity partners right that's a lot of people to influence how do you go about with your clarity that you've brought to the organization influencing such a large organization where presumably there's multiple people that have a say in what gets done you know like everyone's got an opinion on marketing well it's working a partnership and it's it's that times a million so i had again with the job that i didn't want to i hadn't really wrapped my head around the structure of partnership so when i worked at samsung and at coke really you've got one person who will say yes or no to something ultimately go and take a business case you have a conversation you you know jump through a few hoops and be like yes or no it's not like that when you've got 1300 owners so we've got 1300 equity partners then a load of you know salary partners and then we've got another 20 or thousand people besides so there isn't such a clear decision making kind of tree so what I learned really early on with guidance from my boss the guy that I went to work with is like he's you've got to pick the people who've got the influence and you've got their ear to the ground so who are the people that will influence others that you need to have on your side who are the ones that don't believe that you can do any of what you're saying you'll do and are going to be the mass dissenters go and talk to them who are the people that are going to be like your biggest you know cheerleaders supporters like get in there with you like you have to go in literally one-to-one with all of them so I figured out really early that I needed like a an unofficial board of about 30 people so every decision I'm not saying every decision but team restructure marketing investment model how are you going to measure what we treasure like the there was certain things I would take to them and say tell me like pull it apart tell me what you love tell me what you hate what am I missing who do I need to talk to so the first few years I'd be like I've got to do it I've got to meet all 30 of them but 30 out of a you know out of 1300 I think that's all right and it was probably wasn't that different in Samsung I'd probably go and have at least that many conversations but it wasn't I was I wasn't thinking about it in the same way at EY I'm thinking I need to make sure I've covered them all off because if I go into the exec or I go into um present something I need to make sure I've got enough people in the room who are nodding likes that it's kind of the I used to call it the back channels at Samsung it's like the influence behind the scenes that you need to find a way to work so it's basically that that's how I get decisions made is by having all of the one-to-ones and the one time that I've not done it properly and I'd miss somebody off a list it bit me on the arse so badly I will never miss them again but this this is exactly what they don't teach you don't you think what you've just described is brilliant and I learned it probably 10-15 years into my career I was way too late I mean you were ahead of me in this one because I I was up for the high potential program at Britvik where they they shortlist we had the same thing at Co did you parallel universe This is a weird conversation.

40:32It's like, what was it? So we had this high potential program, fast track to director level, right? Yeah. And you went away, did this three-day assessment. And it was the kind of thing I loved doing. Where was your assessment? Oh, Cranfield Business School? Rio de Janeiro. Oh, check you out. I'm in some, you know, arse end of the Midlands and you're in Rio. We got shipped to Rio. I was like, I love this. yeah we went to Rio for the like assessment center did you pass of course you did I know I know of course you did when you get there and if you don't pass you really a long plane ride home to think about it well two things you didn't I didn't pass actually there are three things so this is going to be therapy now I just want just warning your listeners out there right three things really annoyed me because also all the stuff we're asked to do was stuff I happen to be good at it was like write a business plan present your idea to a customer work on solving a problem I love that stuff so honestly I do really really enjoy it so i was like oh this is great anyway i remember i was sitting outside a room waiting for the next thing and i could hear the assessors talking about me no yes and and my boss at the time was called belinda you got your ear to the wall i literally yeah i was like oh and they were saying oh i'm sure if we spoke to belinda she would she would uh tell us that what he said isn't true i was so angry because i'm like i literally almost got belinda on speed dial was gonna knock on the door and go, well, Belinda's here.

41:58She can tell you about this thing I did. Because they didn't believe in my case study interview the thing that I said I'd done. They didn't believe it. Really? Well, I was working in the international division. Yeah. So what I'd done wasn't known in the main organisation. And it was absolutely true what I'd said, but they hadn't heard it. And therefore, they didn't believe it. I was really underrated. That's the first thing. Second thing, in the psychoassessment, when I sat down with the... Psychoassessment? Yeah, the psychoassessment. Psychoassessment. what's it called a psychological test psychosystem sorry this is why i failed are you psycho yes or no this is why i failed because then i sat next to the the psychologist that had run the whole thing sort of thing and he said according to my profile under extreme pressure i could blow up and be aggressive i thought i said but i've never in my life been aggressive with someone well according to our assessment you could in in a seriously tough situation your personality type would mean you could become aggressive.

42:54That's terrible. Yeah, but I've never had any evidence of that ever. And I've been in some pretty horrible situations, right? You're making me feel like I might want to blow up with you, psychologist. To be fair, that's exactly how I felt. Maybe it's pushing your buttons. Yeah. Maybe that's what it was. And then the third thing that sort of depressed me slightly was when I got that I was a near miss or whatever, or just slipped out below the line of whatever. You could have done slightly better than what it would have been in. They didn't really give me the feedback on why I'd failed. Anyway, but then I had a follow-up session with one of the assessors, right?

43:26And she said the reason I didn't get it was I hadn't managed the stakeholders in advance. Whoa. You didn't even know that you needed to. I'm sat there going, there's a whole game out here I didn't know was being played. And then she said, you need this stakeholder map, which is who are the judges, right? Are they on your side or not? How much influence they have? Map it out on a box and work out who's not on your side but influential. That's your box. Go around and meet them before. Tell them all about the things that you've done and make sure they're aware of your project this and project that and so on.

43:56And it was basically what she described as like an election campaign. I wouldn't have thought about that at that stage in my career, though. No, I didn't. Like, you can call it politics, like political now. It's like how organizations work. I would not have understood that. I didn't get that at all. Now, had I thought about it critically, I should have realized I was in a part of the business where my work and reputation were not that well known. because I'd done stuff outside the UK. 60 % of the business was in the UK. So my star was probably lower than other people's, just simply a virtue of where I was.

44:27I was the unknown, and therefore I probably felt like a risk. So looking back, I probably should have done a bit more merchandising of my success stories. Merchandising of myself. Exactly. But I just found out that I assumed they'd all take me on face value. But also the fact that you're on a high potential program, you think that they know what you're about. anyway thank you thank you thank you for the therapy session but listen to rebecca here because it is important that you bring people with you and in big organization particularly that navigation of who decides you know and are they aligned and have you got no shortcut the best example sorry okay i'll flip it the other way yeah what happened next is quite interesting because i failed to to get through i was so annoyed that i that that was when i was on the beanbags coming up with my idea happened straight after that so i was angry yeah and i wanted leave and I literally was like I was halfway out the door and then went on this management thing with the beanbags and thought okay I'll give it one last shot I was prepared to walk if they said no so therefore the because I wasn't afraid you had nothing to lose I went back in and the irony was I got promoted to the level ahead of where the people that had been on the course were at you're like and there's this funny I know this is funny conversation where in the board meeting so the thing had got approved and i was therefore head of this department a new department sort of thing and the hr director had said to the cmo who was sponsoring me had said um shouldn't we give this job to one of the people that have just been through the assessment and passed and he said send any of them you like and i'll give them the worst interview they've had in their life you can't tell the architect the building he can't build his own his own house you're like genius all right bye i won in the end love it i love it sorry it's that anger moment it's like i'm going to show you what you I'm sure you what you could have had yes anyway bring it back to EY so um brand finance awards yes is insanely amazing isn't it so so proud you've just been announced as UK's strongest brand so how did that happen and what did you do to get that as well so I mean it's such a proud moment for me and the team and something I never really expected but working back when I joined EY three and a half years ago as I said earlier you know chief clarity officer really is what my title should have been to begin with because figuring out what we needed to talk about and stand behind was crucial and what we've done over the past three and a half years and interestingly what you're talking about with compounding we've been really true to talking about the things that matter most to our clients so ask anyone in a big business what are they grappling with and the the answers are quite obvious now right so it's ai it's technology it's the intersection of humans and technology it is decarbonization so it's those plus there's been some others recently like supply chain issues global supply chain but you take the things that keep them awake at night and what we have done consistently over the past three and a half years is show them talk to them about how we can help solve those issues and some of it in a way that is very unexpected EY so for example cementing and building our reputation in the decarbonization kind of services space we were nowhere four years ago it wasn't even a topic that you I was talking about we took a few calculated risks so we for example partnered with Project Everyone a few years back so set up by Richard Curtis and one of the things that they leverage is the world's to-do list and how do you you know how do you help combat global warming through taking action and we agreed to have on the side of our building an enormous post-it note that was 12 meters by 12 meters that was in support of one of the kind of world's to-do list items so make cities sustainable and we put that on our building during london climate action week to make a stand and to say like we we we are behind this we support this but we have people who can help you with this and doing that it was and you can imagine the conversations in the boardroom you want to put a 12 meter post-it note on the side of our london hq like they were just they thought i was insane at that point but like no no, we're going to do it because it is going to make a stand.

48:34It's going to show the world we are in this space. And it got us on a panel with Sadiq Khan. It got us into a room full of, this is a first for EY, there was a dinner and it was with fashion editors and it was all about green supply chains in fashion, which there's so much that needs to be done in that space. We just done a whole load of work for a client who had completely decarbonized their supply chain. so we had one of our partners who's one of sustainability experts in a room full of fashion editors talking about the work that we've done with the supplier and I'm like it's the first time ever that EY's been in that kind of space in that habitat so I think the brand finance accolade came after being really consistent being really clear about what we need to talk about but doing some things like the giant post-it note that got the most most engagement on LinkedIn we have ever had ever ever ever in the history of what i can measure because it was something new and different for eyi so we've we've done something like that each and every year since and it's getting us more attention and eyeballs and conversations with the people that are worrying about these things so that's really i think that's what's done it but in that simple example you've made a serious topic engaging i mean in very simple terms haven't you by and surprising by putting the post in there on the side.