Creativity driven performance, CPG lessons for SaaS and the power of distinctive assets - Michelle Taite, Mailchimp

0:29Welcome back everybody, it's Uncensored CMO. to lead the growth and expansion of the brand. There is so much in this episode, lots of advice about how you market to other marketers and much more besides. I know you're going to enjoy it. Here's my conversation with Michelle. Michelle, welcome to the show. Thank you. Now, I thought we'd start talking about sneakers, if that's all right, because I believe your career began designing sneakers. That sounds like a really fun job. I think if I invented something to do, that would be probably what I'd do. But is it as fun as it sounds? It is. Although I do look at people from the ground up these days.

1:04Oh, do you? I just got used to it and I tend to remember their shoes faster than their names. I'm suddenly having a little bit self-conscious moment thinking, what am I wearing now? Is it rude to ask you how many sneakers you have? I know my nine-year-old asks me all the time why. I have, and this is why I know the number, I have 129 pairs of shoes. A lot of them are sneakers. There's a lot of people out there going, respect. are you still a lord of new balance you've got lots of new balance or you diversified your collection you want to get into trouble it took me uh no kidding it took me five years post new balance to wear nikes oh does it feel do you still feel a little bit naughty sort of buying you know it's hard to get you know i worked for pepsi for um about 12 years and it was quite there were a few years where it felt naughty to get a diet coke i was like i can't do that you know is anyone watching yeah exactly gonna get escorted out of the premises if they see me you know what's the secret to a great uh great trainer i think great insight into the customer right like what are they using you for i worked on lifestyle shoes and i worked on uh cross training shoes and i remember at the time it was women's cross trainers and it was just at the beginning when we realized that you didn't need such a thick soul to truly be a great cross trainer and the reason we got to a thinner sole was because women just said hey i want to look a little sexy i want to look nice in these shoes they don't need to be so bulky and then we started looking at what they're actually doing with them and what we could fit inside so yeah fashion and function then it's got to do both right you know can't be too functional now so from new balance you went to unilever didn't you which is quite a big quite a big move so what was what was unilever culture like because that's one of those companies that everyone admires you know some of the best marketers in the world kind there.

2:50What did you learn at Unilever? I'm so grateful for my time at Unilever. And the culture is phenomenal in that just great people, super smart, looking to move the world with, I would say, some of the most basic consumer goods, right? I learned a ton. I learned that, I learned positioning. My first rotation there was on Magnum Ice Cream, launching Magnum Ice in North America. So, you know, I'd lived in Europe. I never realized that Magnum ice cream was so big. It was the number one ice cream brand in the world, at least at the time. Hadn't been launched here because it was, here ice cream is a value category, right?

3:29It's driven by price, or at least was at the time. And so we were launching what we would call a super premium sticks bar, right? And essentially we ended up launching Chanel on a stick. And to have the ability to like go from here's an ice cream bar to here's the most clever positioning and sell out in the first week just phenomenal but you leave just so well you say it's the same in uk actually it used to be we used to buy like really big tubs of vanilla ice cream i think walls was the brand i think it's owned by unilever now but it's it's like very cheap it's everyone had the same flavor sort of thing and then magnum is like three or four times the price but the flavors the indulgence the design the marketing everything the all the piece they just absolutely nailed didn't they and create a powerful brand.

4:13And what about purpose as well? Because obviously Unilever is quite famous for its purpose. And I think you worked on Dove as well, didn't you? Which is another, you know, legendary brand. Yeah, I spent the last three years of my career there on Dove Body Wash, and it was a phenomenal experience. You know, there's something really energizing, waking up with a purpose that you truly believe in. And what I find interesting, and I so adore and I'm inspired by with Unilever is even when you have a brand that is, that has a master brand essentially, right, with a true purpose, the categories actually have to do a lot of work to define who they are and why they are differentiated.

4:50And so having that duality and not just leaning on the purpose as the foundation for the work, I thought was phenomenal. But yeah, I mean, you just learn a very intense discipline of marketing, right? As it relates to positioning and the connection between functional and emotional, and also just the value of consistency with purpose, right? And innovating on that. What would be your favorite sort of thing that you did in your time that you leave? Does anything stand out, particularly as you're most proud of? It's going to sound crazy, but I think it was two years before I left, we launched a campaign called Dish Soap, where we compared other soaps that women were using in the shower to dish soap, because that's what essentially the ingredients were.

5:38And we were trying to get that stark difference of it might feel similar, but this is really what you're showering with. And we took women into a spa and we said, we're going to have you try a product. And it was real women, right? And we had them try dish soap. And the reactions were just off of that. You know, they got into the shower. It was this beautiful spot. They were like, dish soap? No. Really? Yeah. And it was one of our most stellar and best performing campaigns of all time. A clever reframing, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. And here you go. Take purpose and take the positioning and then take amazing differentiation and category, right?

6:19Yeah. Well, I think your career has almost been my kind of dream one, you know, sneaker design and then through to ice cream and top. I mean, it sounds amazing. You had a lot of fun. And then you moved from the world of CPG, you know, very, very marketing led. I mean, you leave one of the most marketing led organizations, consumer orientated in the world, aren't they? To the world of SaaS, right? That's a big jump, isn't it? Like, you know, what inspired the move and how did you find the change from one to the other? I was afraid at the time that what we then called digital marketing now is called marketing.

6:49boxing right um would just eat up everything that is not data backed um and it's not fair to say that cpg isn't data backed but it just felt like it was moving so much faster outside of cpg and i really wanted to make that move and i'm a continuous learner i just i love learning uh to fault and so yeah that's what made me move i wanted to move to a company that had an inspiring mission i i really got a lot of energy working on dove uh and working in working at into it you really come to work to power prosperity around the world for small businesses, for consumers. I was grateful to have gotten the opportunity to work on QuickBooks as my first role.

7:27My first role was repositioning, rebranding QuickBooks around the world as we went from accounting software to a suite of business tools where small businesses could run their business, essentially. So that was sort of what propelled the move. That's pretty cool, actually, because I mean, you know, I mean, I run a tiny, tiny business, almost not a business with the podcast, but sort of got a little bit of insight into it and it's all the things that you know you want to do what you are good at you want to do the thing that your business is about and then you've got all this other stuff to take care of the accountancy and everything else so making that easy is quite a big deal you know it's quite a you know big value to the world isn't it to the sport because because in big companies you've got huge departments and you're kind of all set up to take care of it and then you're in a small business like oh i've got to do this now and you don't want to right it's not what you started business to do yeah and that's the core insight that we um that we were looking at which is it's so complex and so daunting to run your business it is uh also very rewarding and liberating but it is so unpredictable and at times very lonely and so how do you sort of bring a brand to champion those um who essentially are consumers who decided to work for themselves right yeah and a lot of people a lot of people out there trying to do it as well and it's quite a scary thing to do isn't there.

8:39I mean, particularly if you've come from maybe a corporate job, like the sort of jobs we've done, and then you're suddenly on your own without the infrastructure around you. And probably they're the things you, you know, you get, keep you up at night worrying about how do I invoice? When's the money going to come in and how do I do this tax, you know, tax return that I've now got to do? Yeah. And I think that's what drove me to Intuit. My grandfather was an entrepreneur and he did a bunch of things and probably a bunch of them wrong, but that was, but he always said to me, do what you love right um and he just went on and found the things that he loved but never knew how to do his accounting never knew how to figure out the books but it into it it was sort of the power of many for the prosperity of one and so how do you use that big data to to bring to life and the prosperity and the the wins and the ease right as you run that business yeah well it makes sense and then and let's let's move on to mailchimp of course which is which is where you are now Just give us a sense of what the business is, why it's become so successful.

9:37We've got a lot of customers. So just for anyone who's not currently a MailChimp customer, maybe let them know a bit about it. Yeah. So MailChimp is a 20-year-old business. So we are the number one email and marketing automations platform in the world. It started off as an email platform for solopreneurs and small businesses. as we acquired it about two and a half years ago at Intuit. We've been taking it up market into mid-market and really servicing advanced marketers as we've expanded the roadmap. And it's really a business that fuels or provides radical momentum for any ambition. If in the past it's been sort of the business that empowers the underdog, right now it's about whatever your ambition is, we'll give you the tools to get there.

10:26And I would say I would take it one step further. MailChimp has been really, really successful because it's connected to its customers. And that's on many levels through inspiration and education and the right tools and engagement over time. And that's sort of what's differentiated it in the eyes of its customers and allowed it to grow. And it's funny, we talked to a lot of marketers who started with us and are now sort of reconsidering us, right, as we provided the advanced tools for them. And they've watched us for a really long time. They watched the incredible marketing that the brand has done.

11:02And so they're willing to really have a conversation with us as a result of this respect. And you talked about being close to customer. I remember I once, back to my days when I worked with Pepsi, we used to have like a day a month where we'd all go out in the vans, you know, to store. and we sort of filled the shelves and i remember the the team around was going oh john do we have to like it's a whole day out and this but it was the best day out we ever had because at the end of it everyone's like buzzing with ideas and like oh i've met people that drink our brands and they and i never realized that the um you know the box we put it in doesn't fit the shelf perfectly and you know they'll just discover stuff that was wrong about the packaging you know small details but it really taught me something that kind of that time in my career about how important it is to spend time with customers, really, because you learn so much about what you're selling that you can easily forget in a meeting room, you know, talking about positioning and strategy, and you need to get out there.

11:54But how do you maintain that closeness to customer when you've got so many of them out there and you're now quite a big organization? We spend a lot of time with them. It is the answer. We surely look at data and trends and at scale, but I spend about an hour a week with customers all over the world. And a lot of times you don't even tell them that you're from Ailton, right? Like you just want to hear what's on their mind. What are they thinking about? How are they coping with the challenges that they have? A lot of marketers were trying to understand what else are they connecting to on the business?

12:29Who are the additional players in the game, right? How do you sort of take the onus off of them? What other connections can you make that sort of accelerate their work and make them look like heroes and feel really confident? But really, there is no solution to just spending time with customers. Yeah. I like your phrase there about making them heroes because I think that's a secret. A lot of marketing, isn't it? Particularly B2B marketing is how do you make your customer the hero, help them to achieve what they want to achieve? And I suppose that's what you're doing for millions of people all at once, aren't you?

13:03Yeah. You talked about marketing to marketers. Have you moved from, because you described it before as solopreneurs, didn't you, as the origins of the business. Are you moving in terms of into bigger organizations and enabling larger organizations to succeed as well? Yeah, we are marketing to marketers. It's a skeptical bunch. Like, we know what you're doing here. Like, you know, cynical, aren't they? I've never loved a job so much. I like it. What's the trick to marketing to marketers then? Well, marketers think about two things. they think about a lot of things but yeah big bucket two things one is the business right uh they're highly competitive and they're driven by a lot of fomo me included um in that you just want to get it to a better place you constantly want to optimize you constantly want to get to business results higher roi they because they are doing a lot more with a lot less and every year it just gets harder right and the numbers don't get lower every year a funny thing that yeah yeah and then And the other thing is they really care about creativity.

14:02And so that comes to life in sort of what they do off platform and in their spare time. And that might be music or the creative process or, you know, going to exhibits if you're in London. Right. And so we share a lot of conversation with them or we try to show up naturally where they're at as it relates to creativity. we um recently did a collaboration with bjork on sonic symbolism a podcast series about her creative process as she launched her 10th album um we launched email is dead as you uh you know at the london design museum knowing that uh our customers were essentially going to galleries already right and their spare time and so what a great place to show up and talk about the power the cultural power of email we showed up at new york fashion week so we really think about those two components.

14:55And just to check, email's not dead, right? Just to clear this up for everyone listening. Email is very much not dead. Very much alive and kicking and is still doing the results. You know, it's mind-boggling to me that email has a$42 ROI on the dollar globally. It is the highest ROI channel, except we just don't think about it in that way. Is that because there's so many other things that are being marketed to marketers? You know, AI maybe being the latest thing? Have we forgotten the basics? Is that why? Or just need a better job of marketing email? I think we don't think of email as core marketing.

15:31We often, if you think about marketing teams, they often spend a ton of time on acquisition and not necessarily as much time on engagement, retention, re-engagement, reactivation. It costs 5x to acquire a customer than to actually re-engage them and cross-sell or resell. But we just, that's in fact, a lot of the insight that we've seen with, in speaking to customers and marketers, they just don't necessarily think about it as much as a growth channel. And those who have lifecycle teams, right, who have figured out the growth hack are seeing a lot of great results. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. But it's not dead.

16:10It's not dead. Just to clarify, everyone, it's alive and kicking and MailChimp can help, of course um you started obviously a very interesting time for the business didn't you because you know just taken over um that's quite a challenge right because you're you're coming in and you know Intuit has obviously brought the business how did you approach that challenge of integrating a you know 20 year old successful business into a larger one yeah it's such a huge challenge and I don't think I knew what I was walking into I um because I you think as a business leader, you're walking into a business challenge.

16:42And what I've learned about the acquisition is it's really a people challenge and then a business challenge. And first and foremost, it's about building trust. And you can't do anything until you build that trust. But what was interesting for me was MailChimp was a brand I admired for so many years because of the mix of design and creativity and craft and marketing. It was a brand that I just adored, right? And so walking in, I was equally as scared of screwing it up as the team on the ground was of the acquiring party. And so building trust from a place where you really just want to understand what makes the magic happen here, that people are really afraid to speak at the very get-go, means you have to put everything aside and just focus on people and focus on relationships.

17:33and that's what we did we communicated a ton i really hate awkward silences as my team will tell you and so you know we had a few of those but uh we kiboshed them very quickly but it was really about a ton of communication some shared goals uh figuring out you know what we saw similarly what we saw differently yeah and how do you get the balance between the intuit way of doing things maybe in the mailchimp where do what were the different ways that the businesses approach each other or how sort of Intuit was, you know, did MailChimp have to be? You know, culturally, I think Intuit and MailChimp were very similar.

18:11And they both at the core really, really care about customers. And so from that standpoint, we kind of moved in similar ways. But I think it was a little bit of tell us how you do this. Tell us how you do this, right? And a lot of the beginnings were about help us find the right way to track the business. and help us understand how you track and how you look at it. And then on the brand side is sort of, where is the magic? How does the magic happen? And how do we sort of unleash that? And Intuit is very customer obsessed, but is also known for its sort of customer-backed performance, right? And so bringing some of that to a business that was very much brand-led was a great challenge.

18:54And I remember at the beginning talking a lot to my team about how do we hit this fine line of where creativity meets performance? And the brand isn't afraid to show off all of its new roadmap as you go upmarket, and you really need to show that you've advanced. And we found a way. And again, it was very much based in consumer insight. And even if you look at the campaigns that we launched together, the first campaign that we launched, Guess Less, Sell More was really about that moment of insight that we know when our customers send really complex email campaigns, there's that moment. And you tell me if you have this, right?

19:34But there's that moment you're like, am I really sending this? Is this the best thing that I can do? Are we ready to go? And then you press send and it's like this, oh, I'm kind of second guessing myself um is this the best that i can do and we found that that was a very common sort of feeling within our customers and we based a whole campaign off of you know how are you seeing the world and then uh how does mailtrum see it and then the second was uh the the clustomer and the clustomer is a ball of customers essentially that rolls into a room yeah if you haven't seen it, we'll certainly share it.

20:12But it was based off of this insight as we were speaking to customers that, you know, they were saying, I have a customer problem. And in fact, they had a customer problem because they were treating all of their customers in the same way, rather than thinking about hyper-personalized sort of communication that would really drive their engagement. So at the end of the day, I think a lot of that Intuit ethos around customer was very much shared and it was just unlocking sort of how we do it together you had a lovely phrase where creativity meets performance because there's a constant debate in marketing isn't it we're performance-led business or a creative-led business and i love how you brought the two together because of course it's true isn't it you know that we know creativity is the thing that you know makes it gets a huge you know emotional response in the audience and makes them act but sometimes we can be so performance you know led that we forget that that's the magic you see i liked your phrase as well where the magic happens which is a lovely way of doing it so how do you how do you get that balance between kind of creative and performance and how did you get to that because i think there's something quite rich in there first and foremost based off of uh of customer insight right and then um constant testing of course but i think there's also just a if you know your customer and you know your brand really really well you're able to do things that are more magical and more out there because you know where the guidelines are when i was at new balance.

21:36I really wanted, at some point I realized I wanted to work in marketing or the dark side of marketing as my design friends would say. And I desperately tried to get a marketing job and nobody would give me a marketing job because they said I was too creative. I couldn't prove that I was analytical. Really? You were too creative? Yeah. There was nothing to showcase based off my background that I was analytical. And so I went to get an MBA and I, you know, I proved to the world that I could do spreadsheets. But I just don't believe in this. I just don't believe that it's one or the other. And I showcase that to the team.

22:15And I think coming into MailChimp, there was a real fear that we as an Intuit would take over with full-on performance and the magic of the brand would go away. But it's about how do you utilize that creativity to drive performance? We've actually changed a lot of the brand work to service performance. I'll give you some examples. The email is dead exhibit, and we've established it's not, right? It's not. But it was really in service, not only of thought leadership, of showcasing to the UK, we're the number one email and marketing automations platform, and we can help the market understand the value and the cultural power of email.

22:57and it was very much a talking piece at the time, right? But also collected tens of thousands of marketers' email addresses as part of a very smartly and very thoughtfully crafted exhibit, right? That was very interactive. And so that is first-party data that we then nurture and we have a very, you know, you have to use it very carefully because otherwise people opt out, right? Which is very much very interesting in an email game, different than ads or right. It's not just pushed at you. You get to say whether you want to be in this relationship or not. And so, yeah, we utilize that as first party data.

23:40We did the same with New York Fashion Week. We really think about how do we how do we bring the brand to life? But how does that then bring back first party data that allows us to build that thoughtful journey that compounds and where we get to learn more about the brand. you and you get to tell us what you're interested in or what you need from us so we can better service you yeah and it sounds like from the kind of activation you're talking about you're going higher end in terms of the audience as well aren't you in terms of you know the big bigger teams more senior people maybe yeah as well and they're they're well i'm making an assumption here they're probably the more likely ones to opt out than opt in aren't they when you go the stakes are higher right uh you really need to understand them well you need to find them where it matters It's funny, you were talking a bit before there about being too creative.

24:28I had the opposite of my career. So I did an economics and finance degree and then decided I wanted to get into marketing. And I applied for my first brand manager job and I didn't get it because it was on Pepsi Max and it's like my dream job. Pepsi Max was a bit like Mountain Dew kind of positioning. It was really cool. And they said I was too analytical. And I was like, I've got all these ideas to share. I know what's on the brand. So it took me a while actually to kind of, I did the opposite to you. I had to prove my creativity and the numbers are there in the first place. But you're absolutely right.

24:55Marketing is about the blending. It's measuring and magic, isn't it, together. And the magic is coming up with ideas and solutions and creativity that will solve business problems and deliver the results. But we forget that. We either become so obsessed with data and process or we become so kind of wild and let loose on creativity. But it's pulling the two things together is the key, isn't it? My hope is also that with AI, that'll be the equalizer. you don't necessarily yes right you know you can use it as a buddy for creative concepting you can and we've used it in creative concepting really really well you can use it as a buddy for the analytical crunching right and so we'll see how that pans out did a really interesting experiment actually the other day a guy i work with noah brea um we did this thing called a turing test and we went out to um we got a bunch of art students to kind of design an out-of-home campaign and then we asked AI to design out of home campaign and we were basically measuring on a five star scale we then tested them both with the audience and see how they did the students got 1.8 stars out of five actually no 1.83 stars to be correct AI got 1.8 stars so they got almost an exact match which I thought was quite impressive but there was a little twist we had to exclude one of the students because we found they cheated one group of students got 2.7 because they used AI and their own ideas and of course there's the answer it's like it really that was the answer basically we've suddenly discovered by accident we were like hang on a second these guys have gained the system then we thought well of course you know they were using it to improve and iterate on the ideas they came up with yeah well the so we have an in-house agency wink uh they are our pride and joy and our secret sauce I call them and we do all the concepting in-house.

26:44And so for the Clustomer campaign, they presented the concept to me. And if you've seen the Clustomer, it's really hard to just like create a board from nothing with the Clustomer visual, but they actually created, as they pitched it to me, they created a visual of the Clustomer and we had a really good debate about what the Clustomer would look like, how it would come to life, different iterations of the Clustomer. And so it was a show versus tell, which is really helpful. And I think we went from four concepts to just one in a week. And it really sped up the creative process for us. And then what we were able to do is we took that into testing.

27:22And we had mid-journey to craft some of those visuals for the testing, not the final visuals. But we tested it in multiple countries. And when you do grooves, you either have animatics or you have boards. but it's really hard to change the content in between groups when you have 15 minutes in between. We actually changed the content, utilizing AI and the learnings between groups. And then we ended up producing what we thought would be the best assets. We then tested them with Ipsos. They are at the top 1 % of ads globally in their database. And I really attribute that to, one, our amazing team, But them working with AI and just continuously getting better.

28:09Going back to your sneaker experience, actually, I had a really cool one last year. I don't know if you remember, but Nike did a collaboration with Tiffany. Yeah. I don't know if you remember that. And I looked at the app and I thought, I could design that myself. It looked pretty basic. It basically had the Tiffany unique color of blue, whatever it is, that color on the switch. And anyway, so we put it into an innovation test on the same five-point scale. And it came in at two and a half. And anyway, so I thought I'd go and consult my friend Noah again. And I said, oh, put this into AI. See if AI can design a better collab with Tiffany.

28:43Five star. Because what it did is it created loads of concepts, but it created what you would imagine a Tiffany-designed Nike trainer to look like sort of thing. So it was quite bling. It was like, you know, the blue was everywhere. It was absolutely magical. But we tested a whole load, and we found one that was five star. And that would have been the top 1 % of all tests we've ever done. So it just shows, you know, even Nike, who we admire and think are the best in the world at something, you know, you can take. But I think the interesting thing is that you had to feed it the idea. You had to say, take the best assets of Tiffany, take what, you know, take this Nike Air Force trainer, put them together, and what do you get?

29:21So that's quite cool. Now, talking about brand as well, one of the things I love about MailChimp is how simple and impactful your design is as well. and also with the chimp as well it's brilliant i know i didn't know till today that it was called freddy so that's really good so how important is having a distinctive brand asset having kind of the color palette i know that even the yellow has got its own kind of name as well isn't it so how important is that to building the brand and helping get recognition uh very important right it's one of the things that uh sas can learn from cpg for for sure i talk a lot with my team about we don't want to be the b2b that is boring to boring we want to be breakthrough and brilliant and part of that is really about, you know, it is about being differentiated.

30:07We, for years, and this predates me quite a lot, the brand has always been known as the expert absurdist. So we're really, really crisp and really clear about the business results that we deliver. And when you're in the moment and you're looking for segmentation or automation or whatever it is that you're doing with us, we are very, very in the business with you. But we have this irreverence. We have this sort of, I would say, just absurd feel, right? We don't take ourselves too seriously because we know our customers don't. And at the end of the day, we're talking to humans, right? Regardless if you're B2C or B2B, there is a human there.

30:47And yeah, so that allows us to be a really bold yellow and a sea of blues and greens and really shine out. I also think if you think about and you look at Freddie, I would actually say, look at his wink. His wink is everything. It signals that we get you, we got you. We'll provide any tool in our toolbox to give you the power of, you know, an enterprise marketer. But at the same time, we get that you're a person and we'll give you some comic relief. We'll give you some inspiration, depending on where you're at. One of the things I remember from my first year on the brand is we launched, the team launched a game called Dumpling Delivery.