How Tony’s Chocolonely is breaking the mould with their Dean of Dopeness (CMO) Sadira Furlow

0:28Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored CMO. brand, her experience and her background and where she's come from and how she approaches marketing. It's a lot of fun this episode. I know you'll love it. Sadira, welcome to the show. It's so good to be here. Thank you. I must congratulate you on your outfit as well. Oh, yes. Do you like anyone who touches this? For anyone who's listening, not watching, describe your outfit for people listening. Oh, gosh. How good of a marketer am I now? Well, it is a lovely bubblegum hot pink with lots of layers of chiffon that creates a lot of magnetic desire to be touched.

1:05There you go. With permission. Nice. Let's just say you know when Sadir is in the room. A hundred percent. I'd like to think that my wardrobe also is very much built to be at Tony's. So luckily I've got all of the colors of our bars properly accounted for in my closet. Well, I think the Colors of the Bar is part of the success because you cannot miss Tony's. Like whatever store you go into, it just like jumps out in the sea of sort of bland, pale, you know, pared back colors of chocolate. This is like a bright light in the middle. Yeah. How can you like, to be fair, I did not know what Tony's was before I joined Tony's.

1:43And I remember in an interview, I was Googling it and I was like, oh, I've seen that. And I remember seeing this colorful brand on shelf, had no idea what it was, but was like, I want to try that. Ah, yeah, that looks super interesting. Yeah, so you can't miss us on shelf, which is very much a great advantage. Now, people are wondering in my intro, why did I call you the dean of dopeness? So everyone who starts at Tony's gets their own job title, don't they? They do. So chief brand officer, boring, but that's my official title. Yeah, so like we're Tony's, we always like to bring a twist to things.

2:17and when you join people get to know you a little bit the creative team then takes that interview and inspiration and then comes back with options for you and your tony's title and yeah i got the gift of dean of dopeness because i love brand and marketing but then i also have this saying of protect your magic trust your dopeness and i mean how many people are getting on stage and saying dopeness dopeness i think i think you can pull it off i'm not quite at that level yeah say it again john dopeness yeah dope doesn't it feel good it does feel good i feel it's a word you have to live up to though you're doing it yeah how dope is this yeah i love af well i think i've um i think i've pitched for uh the uh chief choco caster so that's that's what i'm ambition that's my ambition is to get the official you're hired now we'll get into tony's because i want to know all about how the marketing works and how you do what you do because it's one of those brands that's becoming very famous very quickly um tell us about your journey to this point as well because you spent a few years in your pepsico and not too dissimilar time to me actually i was at britwick which the pepsico bottler so saw the world uh in a similar way to you but uh what what were the what the you know great moments that you had at pepsi quick road trip of uh the journey of sadira funny enough i actually wanted to be an orthopedic surgeon like that was the thing i dreamed about doing and had all intentions of doing until I graduated from university and I hadn't finished my science requirements.

3:49So I had to get a job while I was going to do that. And I ended up working at Leo Burnett, working on Marlboro. So like advertising was going to be like the sort of like thing on the side while I got ready for medicine. And then I just fell in love with ideas. I know that sounds cheesy, but I knew nothing about advertising. And it was like stepping into the black box of magic of, oh, this is where brands come from. And oh, there's people behind the ideas that can like get you to feel differently. And so this thing that was going to be a hobby ended up becoming a 16 year career as a mad woman, as I like to call it.

4:27And then I got the itch and I was like, I've got to go to the dark side. I say I found the light by going to the dark side, meaning the client and brand side. And I left advertising and I joined PepsiCo. And my first role at PepsiCo was brought in by Simon Loudon, Greg Lyons, shout out to them, on Mountain Dew, this beloved brand. It was the brand in PepsiCo in New York that everyone wanted to work on. And here I came off the streets of advertising, just like into this cushy Mountain Dew role. And we were at that time when I joined, we were doing a couple really big things. We were launching the relationship with the NBA.

5:06Coca-Cola had just terminated that. So got to really build the platform for how Mountain Dew is going to enter into the world of NBA. One of my favorite projects in my, I was only on the brand nine months before I moved, was a Super Bowl campaign. Again, that's like the nirvana if you're a marketer, at least in the US of like, I'm going to be on the Super Bowl. and we it was a second year of this innovation mountain dew kickstart and like most innovation you're like need to build awareness drive trial so like great you're going to be on super bowl and mountain dew kickstart was do juice and caffeine so those were the product attributes and we had to figure out a way to tell that story on the big stage and our agency at the time bbdo did all this research, looked at all of the ads that broke ad meter and really stood out.

5:56And believe it or not, they either had babies or animals in there. And so they're like, we got it. Puppy, monkey, baby, three awesome things combined. And we made this comparison between the product and this, you have to watch the ad. It's creepily good, but it was a puppy's head on a dog's body with baby feet. And we launched that on, we first tested it. I have to say that because testing will not tell you everything about greatness. We tested that in another concept. The testing said, yeah, don't do that. And we were like, we're absolutely gonna do that. The do consumer is gonna love it. Sold it in, got out the door, launched it on Superbowl, broke the internet.

6:41This has been like trending on Twitter, number one, unpaid was like a big deal. and I'd like to say it still lives on in legacy every Super Bowl year of like a roundup of best of ads. I have to say, anyone watching this thing, do check it out. It's one of those things you have to see to believe. Yes. There's a weirdly bit of science actually. I mean, we've been tracking Super Bowl ads for like six, seven years at System One and one of the best actually was Huggies showing babies born on game day, which is incredible and that did incredibly well. And the other thing is that animals are so popular And there's even some science behind why we feel emotional when we see animals and the connection that captures our attention.

7:19It generates an emotion. So combining the two, weird as it sounds, it is a bit weird, but it's very surprising and it's hard to miss. Yeah. I wonder if we tested it now. Like, what would the testing say? Like, is it the one plus one getting us to three? Babies and animals? Like, who doesn't love that? Maybe? I don't know. And because I was working on Mountain Dew. In fact, I launched Mountain Dew actually in the UK. so I've got a bit of experience of it which is the most wild success I mean it's weird to think that Mountain Dew didn't exist in the UK yeah and then yeah we finally got got with the program like many years later and um yeah we were running out of stock left right and center and uh I remember having a real battle actually with my colleagues at PepsiCo because they're like you can have one flavor John you can have you literally have the green one yeah exactly it's any flavor as long as it's green yeah and I remember I was doing a big negotiation to let me take code red and I did a partnership with Halo, the game, right?

8:15So Halo was coming out. So we called it Game Fuel and we linked it to the, you know, if you buy the game, you get the drink free. And there were queues outside the door. You know, literally at midnight when the game was released, we got these photos of massive queues getting in to get the game and get the Jew as well. And it's incredible. But you're right, for that demographic, that young male demographic, that is quite a brand. They are fanatics. I remember joining and we would look at, you know, you talk about your tribe and consumer and we'd look at photos and there were real people out there that would get the brand tattooed on them or they would take baths in Mountain Dew.

8:50Like when you talk about like brand love and loyalty, that for me was, oh, that's the power of like a strong brand who knows their audience and is consistent in that because the people were doing this on their own and just love sharing about it. And you're right, Mountain Dew, the Green Dew, 20 ounce, fastest turning skew in the portfolio at that time, that if you just double, triple, quadruple face that, like, you're good. Even though there was so much more else in the portfolio, like Code Red, my favorite flavor was Baja Blast. I don't know. That was an exclusive with Taco Bell only. And And like Fountain Baja Blast was like another one that people would go crazy for.

9:36And then we did this campaign where we did a face-off of Pitch Black with Baja Blast to see which one would actually move to becoming a permanent flavor on shelf. Baja Blast. Wow. Yeah. It's funny. I remember one of the debates we had with Pepsi is we realized that due consumers drink a lot because they're gaming late into the night, you know, staying up the whole thing. and we launched a one litre. I'm not sure how many ounces that much. It must be about 30 ounces. A litre would be about 32 ounces, something like that. So we launched it as a sharing pack. Me, myself and I as a sharing. That's the three ones, yeah, exactly.

10:15And we had to convince everybody that it's a sharing pack. But what we knew is that all these kids were like not. It's a big single serve. We were just saving them time having to go back to the fridge and back and get another one. But so that was insanely popular. That one litre flew off the shelves. Yeah, that's like the big Stanley Cup now of water. It is, yeah. Like that's what it is for like due consumers, that one liter. That's their coffee. Like the caffeine and the flavor just gets them through the day. Now, I happen to know from personal experience how good the advertising was because every year we had our Pepsi conference in Barcelona.

10:46So I worked for the bottler. Now, I say the bottler because we hated that word because we're like, we do more than bottle Pepsi. But they called us the bottler. We hated it. So at the Bottle Conference, Simon would fly in and I learned a lesson, actually, here's my lesson. Do not present after Simon. This is basically my lesson. Facts. These are facts, you know, because he'd come in and he'd just present wall to wall, amazing advertising for 45 minutes. And I think I counted there were 13, like, you know, different brands with this, you know, Hollywood level production. You get a celebrity. You get a celebrity.

11:21Exactly. You get an NFL. Yeah, there's a famous, there's Beyonce. There's a famous soundtrack. There's a comedian, there's an athlete, there's Cristiano Ronaldo. It was just like pumping it out like you wouldn't believe. And the thing I found is that I would then go after him and go, here's my new in-store wobbler that we're launching this year. The wobbler's coming for you. Here's the wobbler. This is going to change our lives. But I remember that very well. But the quality of advertising coming out of PepsiCo system was exceptional. Big place of creativity. One of my favorite just places to be like to have the gift of working on like big brands around the world that consumers love.

11:57There's such a responsibility, but also just something so special when you get to have a moment on this thing that everyone loves around the world. And then all of a sudden you're their favorite family friend. And it's like, oh, did you do that work? Did you do that? Can you bring me some of this? And so I had Mountain Dew. I had the gift of launching Life Water, which was really interesting right after Mountain Dew is when the time when water was taking over from CSDs in terms of consumption. And for PepsiCo, like water really hadn't been the thing that was sexy or like the big brands. And it was when the first times of we launched a premium water to compete with smart water.

12:35And again, this is a thing that comes out of the faucet. So asking people to pay more for bottled water, and there's nothing really different about it. It was all in the power of branding. And we established this brand around creativity and really use the bottle as a canvas to talk about things happening in the world or with creativity and like smashed it couldn't have been better but to be able to build brands within a place like PepsiCo that has so many wonderful brands was also a really special thing in a very different category yeah totally no I remember that well and then moving on from PepsiCo you did something quite different next didn't you just to sort of pivot to a completely different industry, different challenge, but a wild ride as well, wasn't it?

13:18So you know what, John? Like when I moved to New York on the agency side, it was the best move that I made that I didn't know I needed to make. And it was incredibly scary. But what that set off was this appetite for, well, what happens if I raise my hand now? What if I do it again? And I got really good at being uncomfortable and a part of change. And there came a moment, even in a place like PepsiCo, which I love and could have spent my entire career of, I saw the world around marketing changing. And I had this irrational fear of, I could become really good at the PepsiCo way of marketing, which is brilliant, but very different as more technology was coming into things, different types of marketing.

14:01And so I had an opportunity to join a financial tech company that was scaling. And what was attractive was a founder reached out to me. This was a brand that had purpose, wanted to help people get out of debt and put them on a path to saving and investing, and really wanted to bring the power of brand into a category that is not known, quite frankly, for brand and emotion and actual consumers. And so I left PepsiCo and I was like, well, even if this goes to crap, I got enough relationships that I think they would take me back. But I knew if I only lasted two years, I would be so much better for it.

14:42So I left PepsiCo and joined Happy Money as their first CMO and was leading all of performance marketing. I mean, working within tech where you don't have a physical product. So going from beloved brand, big budgets, consumer to very lean, lean, lean budget brand. You are not at the center of the spotlight. It's really the product team. So no one really cares or wants to listen to you. So like fighting and clawing your way through that. And then also like working with a founder, how do you build a brand that the founder is the brand and how they see it is so clear to them. and you bring in someone like me as a CMO to also do that, which is like such a gift of a learning experience.

15:25I'm interested actually, so I've done a similar sort of move from FMCG into platform technology and trying to sell B2B. So it's quite, I know exactly what you mean. You're just like, where am I? Because in FMCG, everyone knows the role of the marketer. You're quite close to almost owning the brand because you own the strategy, the execution, you know, the annual plan. Innovation, everything. You sign things off. You usually manage the budget as well. So you touch all the four Ps. And then you go into a sort of tech-based business, and they almost don't know what to do with you. It's kind of like, well, we make this, we sell this.

15:59You can go and do a trade show stand or make the website look pretty. It's kind of like that sort of thing. Tell our story. Yeah, exactly. It's very hard to define. It's harder to define the role of marketing, isn't it, in a kind of tech startup. So how do you overcome that challenge of defining your role and making an impact? Oh, gosh. I think I lost a lot of sleep early on. There was definitely those moments where you're like, did I make the right choice? This is also in the middle of COVID and doing that. I think there are a couple of things that work for me. I have a ton of humility. And so coming into a place where, yes, I have all these credentials and experience, but I'm also a leader in a very new, different category.

16:38And so my willingness to learn and to ask a lot of questions, be curious about it, and not come in like, yeah, I'm the new CMO and brand should be at the center versus, okay, chief product officer, what does brand mean to you? What does marketing look like to you? Do you see the world in the same way I see the world? What do we want to do together? For me, bringing in the humility to redefine what marketing needed to look like, how I needed to show up as a leader, a lot on accountability. You know this in tech. I was overseeing our performance marketing. So really marketing was around the acquisition.

17:17And so I got really good. I was in the Tableau looking at the dashboard. So it wasn't like, oh, there's a group over there and people. No, it's me. I'm in Tableau. I'm pulling the reports. I'm showing them at the leadership meeting and actually seeing, oh, we spent this much. What was the pull through in the funnel? So there's actually something like quite magical in a way of the immediate response of we're doing this and I can follow the impact of A to Z. And with bigger types of brand marketing, you just don't have the gift of that as quickly. So also learning a different way around marketing accountability for performance.

17:58And I think the last one is just becoming a better marketer by learning from your cross-functional partners. and marketing was much more of a support role than the starring role. And I think in that support role, it helped me to become a better marketer in terms of building the relationships and reputation of being a good partner. Yeah, because marketing is both kind of leadership and service, isn't it? And there's a big service element to it to make other people successful. Now, am I right in saying you almost wrote your own redundancy case? I did. I did. And I didn't set out to do that. So I'd been at Happy Money a couple years.

18:36We had gone through some transitions with a founder and new leadership and rewrote the business plan. I also learned a big lesson there. I joined for the mission, but I'd also seen that if you can't operationalize and commercialize the mission, unless you're a nonprofit, you still have to deliver the numbers and you have investors. And that was, it sounds obvious, but when you're in it, you're like, okay, we still have a business to deliver. So we rewrote the business plan, kind of evolved the mission and went from D to C to B to B. And the amount of things that changed in a short period of time, we had turned things around, we had momentum, we had gotten funding, we had achieved the illustrious unicorn status and the billion dollar valuation.

19:20And four months later, within that macro environment, we were talking about layoffs. Wow. And I mean, that's very eye-opening of like, we were winning and now we're here. And so we had to do the exercise as you do with this. And either the smartest move I made or like naive move, I'd like to think smartest move. I had my number and I did the exercise and I came back with scenarios that included me in them. I was in two of the three options I put on the table for what I thought the future could look like for marketing. And we are sharing around the leadership table. and it became really clear I was the only leader that put myself in there.

20:01Everyone else was like, no, this is a different kind of exercise. But for me, that very much fits my brand of if we're going to do something, I take a hefty amount of pride in how I show up as a leader and with people on the team I'd built that if I was going to be okay with having to let go really awesome people, I needed to feel accountable for the value that I was going to bring in service of letting those people go was still needed. And long story short, I'd built an amazing team. The direction of the company didn't meet me, my kind of CMO background and experience. And so I had a great relationship with the CEO at the time, this gentleman, Jeff, and we chatted and together basically found a way for me to exit that was better for the company.

20:47I think that's important because as you become a leader, you take off your functional hat and you put on your company hat, which means that you're going to make choices that are better for the company that might not be the choices you'd make with your functional hat on. And this happened to be a choice that was right for the company, right for the people I brought in, and it was right for Sedira. I found myself on sabbatical for nine months. Wow. Now not many people take nine months off to date and how did it feel to go from the intensity of that kind of role, which is very hard, isn't it? And the pressure you're under and the day-to-day grind to then suddenly have all those months available.

21:26How did that feel? I think the first week, because this is in November, you're just like, oh, finally, finally, I know I can write that book. I'm going to become fluent in Spanish. Like, you know, we've all probably got this list of things of if I only had more time, I would be amazing at all these other things. And then it was January and it still hadn't really touched the list. And I was just like, okay, I just need to take a little, you know, siesta. And then it was February. And I remember this feeling of a couple of things. One, shame of, well, sabbatical is supposed to be amazing. It's going to be fun.

22:02It's going to be that. But I found myself like not feeling as if I was being productive, that I wasn't doing sabbatical in the right way. And what you become so good at as leaders is delivery, right? Every year we got an end of year review, we got a number, we've got objectives. And when I was on sabbatical, I don't have objectives. I don't have productivity measures. So now I feel like I'm not producing. So there's like this feeling of you're being lazy. Like, come on, get on with it, sort it out, furlough and like, go write the book and do the thing. And I had a great coach, Alan Gellum at the time that really helped me unpack this sentiment of, I said to him, I said, Alan, I feel like there's risk in rest, particularly as like a black female.

22:49I didn't see a lot of people around me who actually took rest. And in the US, it's like, if you, if when you're sleeping, someone else is grinding. So rest was not actually a thing that was a positive. And so here I was with tons of time and I didn't know how to rest. And so in that, I actually was able to do a lot of work on like learning how to take rest, the importance of active rest, different types of rest. And going through that helped me get to the other side where I had so much more clarity on what I wanted the future to look like. I was also clear that it wasn't about going back. I was never going to feel like, oh, I want to go back into that chapter that I had been in, which was amazing.

23:33But the price and the cost of that was too high for me in this next chapter. And I said I wanted to build work around the way I wanted to live. I had my short list, my bucket list of all the different things. And that led to the perfect moment when I got a phone call about this small, amazing brand doing wonderful things called Toadies. Now, did you know about the brand before? Or was it a surprise when they called you up? I feel embarrassed to say this now. But we're a transparent brand and I'm a transparent leader. I did not I didn't know I'm not surprised because in America it's not that well known I mean whenever I fly to America I always have to take a little detour to try and find a Whole Foods and get a few bars and pay an extortionate amount by the way just to let you know your sales team in America $12 a bar everyone it's not cheap anyway but I'm not surprised because it's not that well known yet I know it's all changing now but yeah I didn't I hadn't heard of the brand I recruited had reached out, I'd read the spec and it was name aside, everything in the role.

24:34I was like, oh, that's interesting. Oh, that's, you know, okay. And we get on the call and I'm like Googling because I haven't fully read things. And I'm like, oh, is that what that is? I remember seeing that that's a chocolate brand. I had no idea. I'm like, somebody should work on that. Make sure people know it's chocolate. But I remember the brand packaging is so strong that that recall, I was yeah, I know that. And then like got into the details of it. I actually said, no, I was like, this sounds super interesting, but I don't think it's a fit for me. And it was a bit of a change of going from being in tech and what that looks like from a lifestyle and package to something that's going to look very different.

25:17And I was like, I just, that's not going to work for me. And luckily we were able to come back and have another conversation. Shout out to Douglas, my boss, who you talked to, that was like, I think I'd love to have a conversation with her. We can figure out a bridge for the concerns here. And they came back and said, would you be open to having a conversation? I said, yeah. And so I had that first conversation with Douglas and I got to see who the CEO was. And I remember in that interview, we were kind of getting to the end, we'd gone over. And Douglas, I think one of his kids knocked on the door and came in.

25:55He's like, so dear, we're going to have to cut it short because I've got obligations and I need to go, you know, be with my family. And I just remember like, that's such a strong signal of what I want to be a part of. If the CEO is like, hey, I need to stop this because I need to go meet my obligation, my commitment with my family, that was going to be a leader that had appropriate boundaries that was going to service the entire culture. And then I just got to learn more. Mission lock. Here is a company that was saying the mission was so important. We're going to set up a legal entity that says, you can't muck around without, well, talking to us.

26:31And that for me as a marketer was really important, but also as a person. If you remember my experience at Happy Money, we had just rewritten the mission. And I was like, well, how do you just rewrite a mission? Like I came here for that. Like it shouldn't be that easy to do. So I was like, now that's innovation. And like they mean business when they say this is what they care about. they're going to protect it at all costs so that no person can come along and easily change it. And at that point, I was like, I'm in. Just sign me up. Let me just get my bicycle and like, come on over to Amsterdam.

27:03And here you are. Here I am, John, one year later. It's, I absolutely believe I have the best job in the world. And I couldn't, you know, you talk to a lot of leaders and you look in hindsight and like, look how perfectly set up this was. And it feels like that. I had my mad woman era of like agency, big ideas, uber creativity into PepsiCo brand, commercial acumen, scaling, delivering performance, then into like founder world, scaling, you know, a 200 million business, setting the operational practice. And now I'm here and I get to do all three of those things with the most wonderful people in the world, like not even BSing here.

27:50Like this is the lowest ego leadership team I've ever worked with. And it truly is a joy. And what a brand to work on. I mean, definitely one of the, I think, most significant challenger brands of our era, really, in terms of what the brands do. And the authenticity with which it goes about doing it, I think, is so striking. And it's commitment to, as you say, impact first and chocolate comes second, isn't it? Yeah. That was even when you join Tony's and it's a thing you're like, oh, that sounds good. It makes sense. We always talk about we're an impact company that makes chocolate, not the other way around.