Yum! CMO on cultural relevance, being innovative & creative risk taking (Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut) - Ken Muench

23:44It's just sort of one of those laws. And that's another thing I think with, talking about bar and shop a lot, but how brands grow versus behavioral science. But behavioral science is the toolkit to help create the change that then ends up creating mental availability. Yeah, that's right. In the end of it, yeah, which is good. I want to touch on the ease for a second. So you've got relevance, ease, and distinctiveness. And I think the relevance and distinctiveness, I think marketers will debate till the cows come home. They probably spend most of their efforts in the relevance and distinctiveness box.

24:11But I think ease is like this untapped opportunity for most. Because, you know, whenever we sit and think about any other experience we have in our lives, it can be painful. It can be a consumer experience can be really difficult, right? But somehow when we get to our own brand, we just think it's amazing. Yeah. You know, I think when we first set out to sort of understand the state of marketing at Yum and we went to all these different countries and met with all these different marketers, very few marketers had truly understood that ease was their job. They were like, no, no, I'm gonna build this cool brand or I'm gonna make this top of mind brand.

24:46Yeah, but what about, especially now with the digital tools, what about where you're distributed and what about how quickly you make the ordering? All that I believe is on your plate is how do you make that ordering process as quick, as easy, as seamless, the payment process, all that is marketing. Back to the Adam Farrier thing, all that is marketing. And so we realized that we needed to make it officially the part of marketers' jobs. And look, the dirty secret is by far the most powerful thing that you can do in the world of marketing is increase ease. Yeah, that's it. If you can increase ease, it blows away any sort of cultural relevance, any sort of top of mind.

25:31Many people will argue top of mind is ease, but anyways. But physical availability blows away anything else, I would argue. 100%. And this is back to the Dan O 'Connor idea of actually thinking is hard for humans. Exactly. And therefore, you make it easy for someone to make the choice, and then bingo. Yeah, that's right. And so why wouldn't you put in the marketer's toolkit? Yeah. If your job is to increase sales by 10%, you can increase sales by 10 % by beating your head against the wall and creating the coolest advertising campaign in history with the best agency in the world and struggle. and maybe, maybe reach there, or you can make your product 10 % easier to get, and you got there.

26:08It's kind of how Amazon Prime is just insanely. It's 100%, yeah. It's just, you know, if I can avoid getting in the car, going down the road to pick something up from a DIY store, it can be there in a few hours just hitting a button. And the payment process as well, it's spooky. Like you just press on it, and it's like, buy now. You expect to have to enter some details, and it's just done. Whoa. It's a bit too easy, isn't it? Yeah, my chair broke at my home office literally Saturday. I was sitting there and I hit the floor. It broke. And I opened up Amazon, of course, and I clicked buy now. And it was delivered in two hours.

26:45That's insane. Isn't that insane? That is insane. Two hours. Insane. So I don't know. I guess I've seen an ad for Amazon at some point. Who cares? You know what I mean? Like when it's that easy and that present in your life, of course, that's what matters more than anything. I think it was about, maybe about 10 years ago, I had this idea of, and I think Amazon did do it a couple of years later, but the idea of having a panic button. So, you know, when you get home, you open the fridge and you're just not inspired. You preload your favorite pizza from the nearest pizza store and you just hit this button and it flashes and it doesn't stop flashing until the pizza is there.

27:19Oh, that's genius. Especially now with like connected fridges and stuff like that. Like a deal with Samsung that we should make. Like, we do have favorites and those get, especially in the Pizza Hut app, you load your favorites and those get used quite a bit for that exact same reason, which is I literally can't think. Click, let's go, I'm done. And it's almost like choice paralysis as well. There's so many places you could go in, just having the salient one on your fridge when you're in that moment, just boom, hit it, off you go. Yeah, it's brilliant. Pizza Hut is very good, by the way, actually.

27:51Yeah, it is. With a little thing that tells you it's in the oven. It's with the driver. So the Peasite app is great and it's getting even better. The digital and technology at Yum has just gone leaps and bounds. There's now a huge part of Yum is digital and technology. And the stuff that they're doing is just out of this world. It's all ease-based. These are smart people doing ease-based things. That's going to matter more than marketing, the truth is. You make your app easier to use, make it easier to buy, make it quicker to get. It's going to matter more than another$50 million thrown in advertising.

28:26Yeah, 100%. I couldn't agree more on the use point. And the distinctiveness as well, I think, is something that as marketers we sometimes forget is the power of distinctive assets. Because connecting what you see on TV or experience online, what you see in store, is so powerful, isn't it? Because we overload with so many messages that making something that means we connect that brand, I think, can be incredibly important. Yeah, that's another challenging one that we've had, especially at first, we had a lot of marketers in love with the idea of everything had to be started from scratch and doing everything from new.

28:56And, you know, in the end, what's the strongest, best, biggest assets that we have? We have a case of KFC, 11 herbs and spices, the kernel finger licking good, the red and white stripes. That still blows away anything out there. You know, it's top of mind, distinctive brand assets and they matter more than anything. Well, back to Ehrenberg Bassicle. They're the masters of this, aren't they? Yep. And that's also very, very true. So it always becomes a challenge. You know, those two things, the really interesting thing is that they fight and that's where it gets sticky. So you have a brand where it's losing cultural relevance and now your assets feel really tired, right?

29:34And so what do you do with those assets when they automatically recall something that's irrelevant? That's a tough thing. That is a tough thing, yeah. That's a really tough thing to do. And, you know, sometimes you got to pull the plug on it. And we moved away from a great tagline that we had at Taco Bell. We had Think Outside the Bun, which was ranked globally as like the number 24th most recognized tagline in the world, even though it was only U.S. And we moved to Liv Moss. But it was the same issue. Think Outside the Bun connected back to too clearly to a Taco Bell that people thought was only a late night kind of stoner brand.

30:12And Live Moss was a departure. Live Moss allowed people to think of it a little bit in a different way. But it took a lot of money to get that Live Moss up to where Think Outside the Bun already was. So that's a huge, challenging, scary decision. Compound creativity. You've got to keep consistent with that for many years to get to a point where it's then outperforming where you were before. How do you sell that idea? I mean, I love LiveMouse. It's so easy and obvious. But how do you sell that? Well, actually, I was still at the agency and we pitched the idea to, back then it was David Novak was the CEO of Yum.

30:46And he fortunately was a copywriter. He started as a copywriter before going over to Pepsi and before becoming the first CEO of Yum. So fundamentally, he loved creative ideas. And he just sort of got it. I think other people in the room did not get it. They were like, what's with the mace? what's, you know what I mean? But Novak got it right away, right? Of course, and of course, Greg Creed instantaneously, he bled purple like I was Taco Bell, you know, big time. And so they dug it and David Novak, you know, got it right away and got excited. And, you know, that's the thing of yum. Something like that at another company would have taken, I don't know, a year of pitching.

31:31It was 20 minutes. It was 20 minutes max. It was probably 10 minutes of like, hey, here's this cool thing. It's going to move us away from this late night thing. Cool. But wait a second. The other ones are 23rd most recognized tagline in the world. Yeah, but it connects back. What do you think? Let's go for it. All right, done. And so, yeah, it's fun. And also, even if you don't understand masters in terms of the words, it feels energetic. It does. Like more. It's funny. It actually reminded me of I shot an ad in Colombia years and years ago with this very long drive from Bogota to Villa de Leyva up in the mountains where we were shooting.

32:08And we were listening to Colombian radio. And the only bit I understood was the DJ in between would go, mass musica. And then he just stuck in my head. The entire trip, we just, every time we would capture something on camera, we'd go, mass musica is one. It became this kind of like, that's funny. Theme for the whole shoot was just mass musica. Just put the energy about it. So I heard that. I was like, yeah, that brings back the air. That's got energy. It's something about music, right? Yeah, it's something about more music. Yeah, that's right. Well, that's the gist. I mean, obviously, it means more in Spanish.

32:41But yeah, it just became an instantly recognizable tagline. And now it's all over culture, fortunately. And it took us a while to get there. But it's there. And it's exciting and good. And ethos of the brand kind of thing. Now, talking about all your brands, actually, innovation must form an incredibly important part of it. You're changing ranges all the time, introducing new things. You're trying things out. How do you kind of approach innovation? How do you know when you've got something that is going to work? Well, first of all, I think the heads of innovation in the world of YAM are special people.

33:15They really, truly are. They're not what you would expect to find. And you wouldn't find somebody like this at Liz or Taco Bell, you know, at a normal company because they are creative powerhouses. their brain is non-stop production of ideas and i mean i'll sit in a test kitchen with liz and you know she'll put four things on the table my mind's blown and she throws them all in the trash no let's try again let's try this and that what what that was genius oh my god but but it's just like this constant so so first of all innovation you have to have the right mindset and the right mindset is somebody that is insanely creative.

33:58I don't think it's always like that. I think oftentimes you're looking at a consumer insight and somebody that's cautious and somebody that's thoughtful and somebody that's, but in a place like Taco Bell, a place like fast food, I would argue anywhere, to be honest with you. I think creative powerhouses really drive the show. Now, on top of that, especially at Taco Bell, but we've got incredible innovation at Pizza Hut and incredible innovation at KFC Global, my God. But what they do is that they never have one avenue of approach. It's never, hey, we've got, you know, five food experts and they're going to create a new taco or a new chicken sandwich.

34:33No, what they do is they invite in a group of outside chefs. They create a challenge for them. They create a special dinner for them. They make it a whole week-long thing. And these are, you know, famous chefs. And then on the other hand, you're doing innovation with a couple of different innovation houses, or we're bringing in a bunch of, you know, we do these two or three day sessions at Collider where we, each room is a different country of inspiration, you know, that sort of stuff. But they do five, six, or seven different avenues at once. I'm not exaggerating. It is insane. They have something called Chef Ninjas, on and on and on.

35:06They have different programs that are all running at once. And at any given moment, one strategy works and something comes out and everybody goes, ah, there it is. But it's never the same strategy. It's never, oh yeah, it always works with the Chef Ninjas. I'm probably getting that one right. It might be Food Ninja, Chef Ninja, something like that. Sometimes it works with that one. Sometimes it works when we do the session at Collider. Sometimes it works when the internal kitchen. Sometimes it works because they took this incredible trip and they went to wherever. It's always a different thing that fires it out.

35:37So having that wide mindset is critical. And then from a marketing perspective, of course, this is where it gets challenging because we've talked about this, the Maya thing, you can go too far, too easily, too quickly. And when you go too far you lose it or you can go not far enough and it's not interesting so it's a constant struggle balance i think the my thing i only i came across it about a year ago actually um dave kaufman who works at meta was telling me about it when they were developing google glass i think he worked at google before and he's developing the glass and he said it broke the my principle because it was too advanced for people to on board and then And now he's at Meta and now he's developing Ray-Bans.

36:21So using Ray-Bans to make the technology feel familiar. And so, you know, kind of most advanced yet acceptable is the kind of idea. And it's really truism about innovation. And in fact, John Keiran that founded System One has this 80-20 rule, which is quite interesting, where things need to be about 80 % familiar and 20 % new. So, for example, when Uber launched, the idea of getting into a stranger's car is crazy, right? You don't know the person, you know, you could be kidnapped, right? So what they did is they overwent on here's the name, here's how far away the person is, here's the map, here's what the previous person gave as a review, you know.

36:57And all of that, you know, is designed to reduce the, you know. The weird feeling of like, I don't understand what this is. This is too dangerous, but actually by making it familiar and you've got the person's name and they've done X thousands of rides before with an average of 4.9 is all designed to bring that familiarity and make kind of acceptable, which is interesting. But it neatly actually connects back to. So I put some of your new product launches into our kind of system one test to see how they did. Fortunately, it got some pretty good scores. So this conversation could have gone a different way.

37:30All good. But I picked out the top four because I think it really actually lands the kind of 80-20. And interestingly, actually, it kind of picked up on all your three biggest brands. So what came out, number one, KFC, Original Recipe, tenders it's again an interesting one isn't it because the association with kfc so much is the bucket but actually just pivoting very slightly and putting it you know as a tender that smashed it got 5.8 star the second one pizza hut triple treat box i hadn't seen this one actually before but now i see it's so cool yeah it came out of a one of the i can't remember what country it was i want to say it was oh i can't remember if it was taiwan that first created that about five eight years ago.

38:09It's this cool tower of pizza boxes like drawers. And it's so cool. But yeah, what's inside each one of those drawers is a pizza, some breadsticks, you know, and a dessert. It's nothing crazy. It's nothing wild. But it's a home run. It's just like a reframing and just encouraging you to get the three together. The third one, interestingly, actually, which is also an interesting insight about price, with KFC $5 bowls, is actually price can be emotive. I discovered that actually we work with a lot of grocery retailers in the UK. And of course, all the time they're testing price points. And so we actually end up trying to test price points for emotional response.

38:48And sometimes kind of delivering quality and value at the same time actually kind of can be quite a compelling thing. You know what we found the secret with the$5 anything? Well, in our case, it started years and years ago with a KFC, frankly. They had a meal deals and everybody's got meal deal. They're like, oh, there's either you can get the number three or number two or number one. And what they did at KFC a few years ago is like, what if we threw them all in one box and call that a$5 box and everything was all inclusive? So what is that? It is emotional or whatever, but it's primarily it's ease.

39:24Yes. Because you walk in and you go take the$5 box. I'm done. I've got a drink. I've got a thing. $5 box,$5 box,$5. Everybody remembers that. Everybody did. Yeah. You got to be careful not to get too tied to the price point with inflation. But yeah, I think you're right. Do you know, you are right. It's the ease over the price in that situation. The price point is handy to remember because it's a round number, but it's the ease that's actually thinking. That's really interesting. The fourth one, probably my favorite actually, Taco Bell Nacho Fries came in with a 5.4 star as well, which just sounds delicious.

39:53Yeah, you've chosen some of the strongest stuff that we have in, yeah, nacho fries is great. So nacho fries, you know, a bunch of people here at Taco Bell had worked on them for years. Melissa Freeway, who's now CMO, Pizza Hut US, I think was one of the main architects of that. And they had tried fries for years and years and years because, I mean, how could you be fast food and not offer fries? Is that crazy? For 40, whatever, five years, they did not offer fries. And they kept on thinking, God, we need to launch fries. We need to launch fries. Greg Creed was always the guy that said, how does that make sense for Taco Bell?

40:33No, get out of here. He was totally right. Distinctiveness, right? He's totally right. The same thing. Creed, one time they came to him and said, look, ranch. Ranch sells like crazy. It sells like crazy. What do we do? How do we get there? Nope, nope. I'm not buying ranch. This is a Mexican-inspired food. What ranch? And then finally somebody from the innovation team said, what if we put some avocado in it and called it avocado ranch? Done. Sold. Boom. Number one, right? Well, the same thing happened with fries. They wanted to launch fries. and then Melissa, I'm sure, or Liz came in and said, well, what if we call it nacho fries and we use some of the nacho spices and the breading on it is gonna be, not just the typical stuff, but it's great, done.

41:16And it's a huge success, it's wild. And the biggest point, you don't dip it in ketchup, you dip it in nacho cheese and it's delightful. It's so good, it's so good. Back to our 80-20, right? You're taking 80 % familiar. It's the familiarity with the brand, with a little twist. What happens when it goes wrong? I'm sure with the amount of innovations you do, you must have the odd one that goes wrong. Yeah, so here's one that I'm sure it's okay to talk about because I'm trying to think of the – Breaking news. If the responsible parties can track me down and get angry at me. But it was about 10 years ago, and we knew nuggets were a big deal, obviously, in fast food, right?

41:55Right. Taco Bell, what is, you know, it's the same thing as ranch and the same thing as, as, as anything else or as, as fries. Like what does Taco Bell have to do with that? And so what they did is they said, well, nuggets, I know what we can do. Let's, let's squish the nugget down and let's make it flat and let's make it triangular into the shape of a nacho fry. Right. A piece of tortilla that's fried in case your listeners don't know what a nacho fry is. And so it would be a flat piece of chicken that's breaded and fried in a triangle. It was delicious. And it was a complete fail. Because that was 80-20, the wrong way.

42:36Wait, wait, wait, it gets better. Then we called it naked chicken chip. Oh. I thought in my head I didn't. Naked chicken chip. What on earth is a naked chicken chip? So yeah, of course, you swing wildly. There was a creative in Argentina that I used to love. And he said, look, marketing and advertising is a tennis game. and in a tennis game, when you lob it right down the middle of the court, nice and slow, safe plays, nobody's gonna say anything. Nobody's gonna lean in. Nobody's gonna go, ooh, ah. When you hit that ball hard and fast and it goes right on the line, that's when the crowd goes crazy.

43:11And that's your job as a marketer. Your job is to get the crowd to go crazy. But sometimes you're gonna go over the line and you gotta have that safety. It's okay. Nobody got fired for naked chicken chips. It was a lot of money, I'm sure. But there's a lot of innovations that don't work. But that's just the culture that you have to create. Like swing big, swing for the fences, or in this case, hit that ball down as hard and as fast as you can right at that line. It's okay if you go over. If you're not comfortable doing that, you shouldn't be in the world of marketing. Or you shouldn't be in charge of marketing.

43:43Or you shouldn't be a CEO that's commenting on marketing. You need to be able to aim that ball as hard and as fast on that line and sometimes go over. That's a brilliant analogy. Isn't it great? It's absolutely spot on. You're right, because that's where the tension is. That's where the engagement is. Like you say, right on the line. That's really good. You know, a lot of innovations has to obviously, you know, you're working within the brand frame. It's a KFC, right? You know, so much history, so many associations. You know, you can't go too far out the line. But I was really fascinated by KFC source or saucy by KFC.

44:17So that's probably a bit of an innovator's dilemma here. What do you do when you kind of like need to innovate for the brand, but it's taking you possibly outside that line? Yeah. So Saucy is a really interesting one. We have two of those kind of things going on right now. We have more in other countries, but Saucy for KFC and we have a Live Moss Cafe, which is a drink concept for Taco Bell in San Diego, both of those. And that's a little bit of like, look, take the shackles off. Let's pretend there's no rules. You're your own brand manager. You report to nobody. And literally, by the way, that's how we set it up.

44:54People report to nobody. They can do whatever they want. Literally nobody. Literally. Well, they report to David Gibbs, of course. But David Gibbs wants everybody to swing big. So he's not going to stop. Really, he won't stop anything. He's like, look, if it's a big swing, go for it. And in the case of Saucy, it's Christophe Poirier, who used to run KFC France, did a great job. Then he was Pizza Hut Global CMO. CMO. And then they said, why don't you just let's try something crazy. Let's try something wild. And they did this saucy concept out in Orlando. And yeah, you can break the rules. And just to experiment, just to see what happens.

45:30Which way does it go? What happens? How do people react? What does the brand do? And it's a really interesting, we're excited and hopeful for it. But yeah, it's a big departure, right? Because there's pink in there. It says saucy by KFC. So It could be a sub-brand. It's an experiment, and it's a lot of fun. Yeah, and describe it for anyone who hasn't come across it yet. Yeah, so Saucy by KFC, what it is, is a beautiful restaurant. It's just a single concept right now, or a single restaurant. But what it is, is imagine that it's a glass, lots of plants, super cool, pink, feels very Gen Z. It's got a little splash of KFC in there.

46:10It's got some KFC colors. It's got 11 herbs and spices. It's got a few elements of KFC in there, but it's a big departure. As a matter of fact, we said the brief to the creatives was what if the colonel's granddaughter took over? That's exactly how we briefed the creatives. And this is the concept they came up with, which was saucy by KFC. Well, we actually created the name ourselves. But what they sell is chicken strips, tenders, and sandwiches and dips. and the saucy is 11, back to the 11 herbs and spices, it's 11 different sauces. And they're just way out there sauces. Some are close in, some are far out.

46:48To hit that 80-20, that's probably about the ratio, by the way. If I think about the percentage of saucies that are way out there and the percentage of sauces that are way in. So we've got ranch. I think we call it ranch something. But we've also got crazy, you know, lemongrass, whatever. But you need that for the virality, don't you? For people to go, oh my God, I came here and look what I tried. Yeah, and it's also just, just delicious, you know? And so you've got just a very few items. We have saucy soirees, Friday nights get together that we bring in new artists and have really cool events, fills up with new artists and buy colleges.

47:21It's a very cool concept. It's a lot of fun. And what's the plan? Is it tested and then roll out if it works? Or to apply the insights to the brand? I think that everything's on the table right now. Yeah. Everything's on the table. But for now, it really was sort of a brainchild of, you know, David Gibbs of saying, hey, what if we tried something new and tried something different and didn't have any shackles and let's test and learn and see what happens, which I think is an important part of it, isn't it? I don't think a lot of companies do that, but I think it's cool. It's really important cultural insight as well, isn't it?

47:52I mean in terms of inside you, I'm giving permission to go and do that is enormous, isn't it? Because in a normal organization, that would never happen because there'd be 18 months of procedure and process and sign-off and alignment with stakeholders, that kind of thing. I mean, it's classic Innovator's Dilemma, isn't it? The best way to innovate when you're outside the 80-20 is to kind of create a separate team that are given permission to kind of go create. Yeah, so that is, yeah, Innovator's Dilemma, right? And it's exactly right. Innovator's Dilemma, you know, we had a professor, we brought in a professor to talk at Yum.

48:27We had a little event for leaders at Yum that we did in LA over two or three days. Collider, we put these sort of like, we call them rumbles that are two or three day rumbles where we sit down with key people and we bring in speaker after speaker after speaker after speaker, just crazy amount of speakers. Anyways, one of the speakers was a professor from Harvard, Scott Anderson. And he came in and said, look, the main problem in companies is that you have the ghost of the past, ghost of the present and ghost of the future. These three ghosts and they're ghosts because you can't see them, you can't recognize them is they force you to act the way you've always acted.

49:02Well, we tried that in the past is the ghost of the past and it didn't work. or ghost of the present. No, no, no, that's not the way we do things here or ghost of the future. Well, what do you mean? If I don't have this, who will I become? And so these three ghosts control your decisions. Your challenge is to break free from those three ghosts. And how do you do that? Is usually you create a separate structure with what we would call, or at least I call, a cultural rebel. And that has to be somebody that is an out there thinker and is rebellious by nature and is a disruptor by nature and won't follow rules by nature.

49:36And those guys are gold. You can't have too many, I think, in a company or the company implodes, but you need a few. And they can get rid of the ghosts or they can avoid the ghosts. I mean, this won't surprise you given I'm coming from the UK, but when I chatted to Meg Farron a couple of years ago on the podcast about her, in fact, she was just about to take over as general manager, I think, for the UK, having been the CMO. And she talks about the chicken shortage. which is just the most crazy scenario, right? KFC ran out of chicken in the UK. And I think within hours, she'd gone out there with the FCK apology, which, I mean, that's brave, right?

50:15Because I can imagine a lot of people must have looked at that and go, really? Yeah. You know, the funny thing is about, a lot of great stories about Meg. Meg is great. But the interesting part is that she didn't get a single approval. Like she did anything, she did it all herself. And she worked with the agency, Mother London, I'm pretty sure. and they just came up with this idea and they ran with it. And yeah, I think there was a lot of late night calls going, oh, wait a second. What just happened? Wait, I don't know if we should launch. Oh, you already launched it. I see. Oh, okay. Well, that's interesting.

50:49I'd love to repeat that. You know, there was no complaints, interestingly. But they were ready for complaints and, you know, the system was ready for, hey, this is somebody that's brilliant, that's going to take a chance and we're going to back them up. And Meg is now president of Taco Bell US. us well yeah well that says a lot it says a lot that's the point that's the point it's like when you take chances yeah you know you got to have a good hit rate too you know we're also back to your copywriting you know uh that you talked about earlier that was brilliantly copywritten and so when you read that it was very empathetic to the situation it was really really brilliant i mean the headline was obviously there to catch your attention but actually your copy was yeah it was brilliant it was very well done it was an interesting it was just a terrible situation 900 stores, no chicken.

51:32The franchisees must have been out. Oh, my God. I don't think people slept for a solid three months. It was not a fun time in Yum! history. But, man, talk about creating a powerful team, structure, culture, excitement, and fixing a problem. People really came together. It was amazing to watch. Yeah, that's pretty awesome. What would you pick as your kind of favorite moments if you look back? In Yum! history? Yeah, the big, the things that maybe have surprised you all. Certainly the Doritos Locust Taco is great, but I would say where we are right now, both on the Taco Bell and the US side with some big swings and big transitions and this desire that you're part of this whole session right now too, which is we want big bets.

52:19And it just is the, it's electric. You know, it's exciting. It's electric. People are willing to take big swings. And it just feels like there's so much opportunity just floating there in the air. And people, all they're doing is empowering you. That's why sauce, it's no coincidence that in this culture, Saucy is created, Live Moss Cafe is created. Got a bunch of stuff coming out with Taco Bell. Got a bunch of stuff coming out with KFC on the global side, even the US side. Pizza, it's got stuff in the hopper. So it's just a moment of excitement. Yeah. Yeah. It's just fun to be part of it. As a marketing nerd and as a creative and somebody that likes to have exciting times, this is, it just feels like right now it's electric, more electric than it's ever been.

52:59And it's always been kind of fun, you know, seriously fun. Yeah. I mean, they're great brands to work on. Yeah. There's a lot to work with there. But I mean, pivoting just a little bit, because I wanted to talk about what your approach as a CMO is that, because you're leading an enormous organization, global, many, many markets. You know, you've got people making decisions locally versus centrally. So how do you manage the kind of your role as a CMO? Okay, so that's an interesting point. So that's a really interesting point. Each CMO is entirely independent. Back to taking big swings and having things.

53:27So Val on the, Val Kavisniak is leading KFC Global. She reports literally to nobody except the CEO of KFC. We don't have dotted lines. We let people run with their own. because if you are operating an organization this size through a committee, you're gonna end up in a bad, bad place. And so each CMO has their own independence. And each CMO in the country has a lot of independence too. Way more independence than you would at a multinational where they've got to report back to headquarters and headquarters is gonna say no because the copy point B says C. So none of that happens. And so there's a lot of independence in the world.

54:10So more than anything, it comes down to smart heart and courage is what we call it. It's our culture, and it's a belief system within the world of young. Smart, you're making smart strategic choices. Heart, you're doing the right thing for the people, for the planet, for all stakeholders involved. And then courage, you're taking big chances. And so it's about creating the culture and having a loose structure. It is not the other way around. It is not a very tight structure where you've got multiple reporting lines and then there's a little culture splashed in. This is the other way around. It is smart, hard, and courage first.

54:49And then we've got a little bit of a loose structure that, by the way, we can break as necessary. That's really smart. I get that because then you feel ownership, don't you? There's nothing worse than thinking I'm just a pawn in the game here and I just have to do what health says. You're much more likely to care, take the jumps that you've talked about, and also care about the execution. because once you have ownership, once responsibility is pushed down in that sense, you can't mess it up then because it's on you. Whereas when it's been given to you, like, well, it's just head office, what do they know?

55:19Yeah, that's right. That's right. 100 % ownership. You dedicate responsibility. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure that when Meg launched that FCK ad, she launched it and she probably didn't sleep that night and she was, you know, turning to the many gods and the phone on. But it was on her and she felt that responsibility. It wasn't on head office. It was on her. And that was exciting and, you know, career enhancing and personally enhancing. And yeah, that's right. It's ownership. You do have ownership and responsibility. And building on that, what would you say kind of the main, you know, markings of a great CMO?

55:53What are the kind of things that really set apart the successful ones within the organization? Yeah. The truth is if the CMO is not leading through ideas, then it's never going to work. And what do I mean by that? I mean that a true CMO in my book is somebody that doesn't have to author the idea, but can identify a good idea and champions that idea and runs with that idea and breaks down barriers with that idea. It's an idea-driven individual. That's what I think. There are CMOs out there that are political or maybe they are more about organization, more about culture, which I just said culture is important.

56:36But the culture is important in order to empower a CMO to be an independent thinker and to have that vision. If you don't have the vision, don't be a CMO. That's really the key. If you're just going to come in here, political whatever, move, it's not going to work. our best CMOs, Taylor, Taco Bell, you know, I can name every single one right now across the board is gonna be idea-driven. They're gonna, if you have a conversation with them in an elevator, they're gonna shout about their ideas. It's gonna be loud. It's gonna be obnoxious because they're gonna be super excited about an idea that they're championing.

57:14And so that's the primary thing. You have to be idea-driven and not everybody is. And in my book, you shouldn't be a CMO if you're not idea-driven. Maybe it's because I came from creative or maybe this came from the agency side, but it is about idea-driven. Secondly, I think you need to create a culture of courage and driving that courage and pushing that courage and emboldening others. And then third, I would say that there is a left-brain part of this equation. I mean, we just talked about Red and how nerdy that book is, but it is, you know, if you don't know the Byron Sharps and the Douglas Holtz and the Adam Ferriers, and if you haven't read the books, and if you don't study how human mind works and you don't know who Kahneman is, then it's a problem.

57:58Because the answers of how to change people's opinions and convince people are there. So you've got to have that left side of the equation. So it's a weird mixture, right? You're idea-driven, but you're also, hey, you're powered by the smart stuff. Well, that's what makes the ideas work, isn't it? Because the idea is always in the context of changing a consumer behavior and delivering a vision or a goal you have as an organization. It's combining those things together, right? Exactly. And the marketer has to connect those dots. If one of those things isn't working, you're going to go off on that.

58:29You have a great idea that destroys the business, right? Yeah. If it's not rooted in a consumer truth or consumer behavior and aligns the goal of the business. Yeah, 100%. And the marketer's always trying to balance those things out. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And you can be too left-brained. And if you're too left-brained, then it doesn't work. Because you can be like, wait, is this, there was a great, Chad Kinchcliffe right now, He's the CMO of Habit, our fourth brand that we just acquired a few years ago. And I think you probably know Jack. Yeah, I know Jack. Yeah, KFC UK. Jack has a line that I think one of his agencies gave him.

59:01He said, when you evaluate creative, first thing you look at is creative. And it's like, do you feel something? Is it, and you're excited about it? The second thing is, is it on strategy? And then the third thing is, does it matter if it was off? Isn't that smart? I like that. Yeah. We do tie ourselves up, don't we? You do. Well, it didn't precisely meet, you know, the 14th bullet point in the brief, right? Right. But it's bloody good. That's right. Oh, yes. And being in this position, I see a lot of briefs and a lot of post-rationalized stories, which I know are wrong. I know that's not how it actually happened.

59:37Somebody swung big for the fences with a creative idea that they fell in love with or a crazy concept that they fell in love with or a crazy product that they fell in love with. Was it on strategy? No. Yeah. It wasn't on strategy, but it didn't matter. They took that. So that's why I'm saying you can be too controlled by the left. Then later, of course, then they wrote the FE or wrote the case study or told their boss about it. Suddenly it was on strategy. We're all genius in retrospect. Yeah, yeah, in retrospect. But the truth is, yeah, I think you can be – that's probably my main complaint, if you will, or my main thing that I'm cautious of is people that are too far on the left side of the equation when it comes to marketing.

1:00:13Actually, you triggered something. there because I think there's a pragmatism about being a CMO as well that can hold lightly I guess the bat in a way yeah that's stretch the analogy a little bit there because you could be theoretically slightly wrong but absolutely right from a business sense yeah you need to know when to let go of the sort of the right answer yeah a little bit for the sake of a brilliant idea rather than stick to the right answer and end up with an average idea that's not going to yeah that's right and that judgment is is is super important i see people getting really anxious and tied up the basis not totally aligned with the theory yeah and then you realize you know the pragmatism about just you know the instinct to put it all together is is is key yeah well you i mean you don't even have to go very far to find cases you know post-it notes that's that was supposed to be a glue right that didn't work and it was a failure and it'd be i mean endless stories of these that that you had set out to do X and then you realize that you discovered Y or you had created a strategy that had to be, you know, connect with the consumer at this level, but then suddenly you discovered a much bigger idea.

1:01:17I think if you're too, too far left brain controlled, you'll kill it and you'll go back to this and you'll end up in that, you know, boring mid. But if you've got a little bit of, you know, courageous in you, a little bit of rebellious in you, you'll say, you know what, that's a better idea let's go i'll rewrite the case later the other thing i learned actually along the way linked to that is you're better off getting the idea out the door quickly seeing how it does learning from that and and if you need to tweak tweak it right or doubling down next it's working whereas i've seen so many organizations where they're in search of perfection that they spend so long on it the competitors out there way ahead of them and then they end up losing just because they're waiting forever to get the perfect answer yeah so back uh i i won't say the name of the client, but we had a frozen food client reach out to us and say, hey, would you guys like to work?

1:02:07Sure, sure, sure. They had a really big brand that was, it was a lower calorie option. And so they said, help us kind of position it. And we said, well, you know, the culture around women and eating, it's really turning into more about strength and not so much about skinny. Anyways, it took them several years to get that out the door. Not that they had to change the product, just the campaign. And by the time they launched it, that was kind of on the way out. So yeah, we absolutely agree with that. The best of our marketers will swing big and swing fast and get it out there. And guess what? If it fails, do it again.

1:02:44That's the nice thing about QSR, by the way, which I admit is easier than packaged goods. QSR, you have 10 swings a year or 12 swings. These are our windows, our advertising windows. You have 10 swings. It didn't work in January? Okay, don't worry. Mid-February, you're going to have another swing. Oh, it didn't work? Don't worry. You have another one in March. Oh, home run. Great. Now you found your gist. And so that's the nice thing about QSR is that we do get multiple swings. I know that if you're packaged goods, most likely. But even packaged goods, you can find a way to rapid prototype, test it in a small market.

1:03:15I mean, in the UK, we often use like Northern Ireland, for example, go and launch it in a local retailer there, see if it works and roll it out. Yeah, that's true. And we do, by the way, we do exactly the same thing. We've got tens of thousands of restaurants around the world. We're constantly testing every kind of crazy idea that you could possibly imagine in one or two or 10 or 15 of those restaurants. So yeah, we do that as well. Anytime you can be testing. But I mean, even with full marketing effort, full campaign, spending a chunk of your money, we still have 10 swings a year. So that's kind of the unique thing is that, okay, well, I'm gonna go big and I'm gonna try it in February with the whole thing with I'm gonna do TV, I'm going to do social.

1:03:52I'm going to do out of home. I'm going to do product. I'm going to do store. Oh, hmm. That was okay. It didn't quite work. Let's try something else for February. You know, that's kind of cool. I think I have to call this podcast, Hold It Lightly and Swing Big. There you go. That's the kind of theme for this, isn't it? That's right. Ken, it's been amazing to talk, mate. Thank you so much for sharing so much wisdom in there, you know, from your time. And big call out for your book as well. Oh, thank you. It's brilliant. So yeah, go and order it on Amazon Prime. Get it in a few hours. Well, thank you for coming.

1:04:20Thank you for doing this podcast. I love the podcast, by the way. I think you're brilliant. I think it's fun, funny, entertaining. It's always like, goes by so quickly when you're in these conversations. Oh, thanks, man. I really appreciate it. That's what I try and do. So cool. Thank you, mate. All right. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much for listening or watching Uncensored CMO. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, please do hit the subscribe button wherever you get your podcast. If you're watching, hit subscribe there as well. I'd also love to get a review. Reviews make a big difference on other people discovering the show so please do leave a review wherever you get your podcasts.

1:04:57If you want to contact me you can do. I'm over on x at Uncensored CMO or on LinkedIn where I'm under my own name John Evans. Thanks for listening and watching I'll see you next time.