The coffee category is a competitive one—but it’s also packed with potential for brand loyalty.

According to Peet’s Coffee brand research, 76 percent of consumers can tell the difference between a good and a bad cup of coffee. Plus, many are looking for a brand to defend high-quality coffee, craft and culture.

In this, Peet’s saw an opportunity. While other folks in the coffee category were creating dessert-like drinks and outlandish flavors, it sought to win over this discerning bunch by keeping is simple. Enter its new brand platform and first-ever 360 marketing campaign, “Coffee for Coffee People.” The 12-week initiative includes a series of spots taking aim at the coffee industry’s propensity for complicated drink orders, as well as a cheeky “Disloyalty Program” on National Coffee Day that honors competitors’ loyalty points as currency for a cup of Peet’s.

“As a small player in a very large and loud category with these mega brands, we knew if we just came out and told our story, which was ultimately a very simple one about quality, that we wouldn’t break through the clutter,” said Peet’s Coffee VP of Brand Jessica Buttimer. “So we decided to focus on what we aren’t in the beginning, and push off of these outlandish trends.”

Here’s our chat with Buttimer about the campaign’s strategy, core objectives, distribution channels, technical feats and challenges, as well as the brand’s ideas for next year.

Chief Marketer: What was the impetus behind launching the campaign?

Jessica Buttimer, VP of Brand at Peet’s Coffe: We did about six months of research with coffee consumers. The brand’s been around for a long time—57 years—and we’ve been a quiet, humble brand, where word of mouth, our cafés and the quality of our product created our reputation. But we haven’t really told our story broadly.

A lot of the folks in the industry had lost the plot, as we like to say. They were offering these outlandish flavors, complex dessert-like drinks, tech gimmicks—and they pushed coffee to the background. That was very different from our belief system and what we felt was important in the category. We were hearing that consumers were actually craving the same thing that we were, which was someone who would defend coffee quality, the craft, the culture.

The campaign is framed the way it is because as a small player in a very large and loud category with these mega brands, we knew if we just came out and told our story, which was ultimately about quality and a very simple one, that we wouldn’t break through the clutter. So we decided to focus on what we aren’t in the beginning and push off of these outlandish trends that we were seeing. We thought that we would get more attention that way.

CM: What are your strategic marketing goals with this? What are the KPIs?

JB: Our goal is to be a strong number two premium brand in the category. You can probably guess who number one is. It’s Starbucks. We admire a lot of the things that Starbucks does, but we think we are for a different consumer and have a different approach. The way we’ll measure that is, in the beginning we’re looking for familiarity growth. Not just awareness. We’re actually pretty strong on awareness, but when you get down to it, people don’t really understand who we are and what we do that’s different from the big guys. So, telling that story and building familiarity feels like a better way to measure than just pure awareness or impressions. That’s our key metric.

We are also getting amazing early results on traffic and orders on our website, and we expect to see retail traffic pick up as a result of “Disloyalty” this week. We’re looking for it to be a full funnel approach, where it all starts with familiarity, getting that story out there. But then we are also looking at the traffic and the orders side of things, and giving ourselves some time for that to build.

CM: What are some other highlights from your consumer research?

JB: Seventy-six percent of those consumers feel like they’re discerning and can tell the difference between a good and a bad cup of coffee. Another one was that consumers identify with their coffee brand. I spent 15 years in packaged goods and did mainly cleaning products and more functionally-driven categories. And then I moved into footwear and technology. The reason why I’m giving this background: there I learned this importance of identifying with your brand. Obviously in footwear, it’s super important.

I got intrigued—to come back out of retirement, actually—to work on coffee because it’s one of the few packaged goods products where people do identify with the brand. Part of that is the café side of the business: you carry the cup around with you. It’s this very complex category where the quality of the product you’re using says something about you. A pretty high percentage of this audience feels like they identify with their coffee brand and that it significantly tells you something about who they are.

CM: What does your target market look like? Are you looking to appeal to a specific generation?

JB: The passionate coffee enthusiast is much more diverse than our current user group in a couple ways. They are younger than the current Peet’s consumer. They’re all ages, but they average in the millennial group and a little bit of Gen X, and there’s certainly Gen Z and baby boomers as well. The Peet’s consumer is older than that group, so we’re “younging-up” the brand. We’ve got three core objectives. The first is to tell our story. The second is to young-up the brand, and the third is to modernize our assortment and our experience. That’s more on the product and the retail side of things.

The other demographic diversity is geography. Our brand is concentrated in the West Coast. We tend to be an urban brand. We have distribution nationally in grocery stores, but most of our cafes are on the West Coast. And then we’ve got pockets in D.C., Boston and Chicago. But because we have a national CPG presence, it’s important that we have a national campaign and familiarity. We have a big opportunity in the center of the country and the East Coast cities.

CM: How is the campaign being distributed? Are you experimenting with other channels in addition to video?

JB: We’ve got six spots with various cutdowns, and those are going on connected TV, OTT. We’ve got Hulu, YouTube… Then we’ve got Spotify for audio. That’s a channel that is underutilized by the category, so that was a good place for us to invest. It gets you into different dayparts and different occasions. Another part is out-of-home, which is also underutilized in the category. And when you have a café business, it just makes a lot of sense to hit people near the cafés geographically. The last piece is social, where we have been pleasantly surprised with the level of engagement that we’re seeing on Instagram, and in particular, TikTok. It’s hard to get people to comment on ads, and we’re seeing a lot of positive sentiment on TikTok as well as Instagram.

CM: Let’s talk about your “Disloyalty Program.” Why did you decide to go that route and deliberately target competitors’ loyalty programs?

JB: It’s breaking through the clutter, but it’s also this willingness to challenge norms. We’re an underdog brand. Even though we are sometimes perceived as a chain, there’s very few things about us that are like a chain. We take a more local approach to things, and scaling our smallness is one of our cross-functional strategies. So we wanted to highlight our non-corporate approach and our willingness to challenge the way the broader category works, and couldn’t think of a better way to get people to try Peet’s than to say, “Hey, it’s not just free, it’s actually using your points.” And by the way, those points don’t actually transfer so they can still use the points elsewhere.

CM: I assume you’re not working with Starbucks on this.

JB: Yeah, no. We legally couldn’t have done that. But that’s the brilliance of it. We could have just gone out and said, “Have a free drink on us,” but we wanted to do it in a more buzzy and competitive way.

CM: Were there any challenges to the program legally? Or in putting it together?

JB: We thought legal would be a big challenge. At the end of the day, our whole company likes to do things differently, and they were very open-minded to it. We had to be creative in the way we worded it and depicted it. But legal ended up not actually being a challenge. The bigger challenge was technology. We have an app, we’ve got an IT team that knows how to do things like this, but this was probably the most complex technology-driven promotion that we’ve ever done. There was quite an investment in making it easy for the consumer. We didn’t want people standing in line trying to upload something and having it fail, so we did a lot of QA work to make sure it was seamless for the consumer.

The other challenge: We’ll find out on [National Coffee Day] what traffic looks like in our stores. We value our baristas and we don’t want to put them under any undue stress. They want traffic just as much as we do. But they also want to give a really good customer experience and not have people waiting in line for a long time.

CM: What are your plans for growth beyond this campaign?

JB: This is a 12-week campaign in just four markets—San Francisco, LA, D.C. and Boston. We did that intentionally because we wanted to get our foot in the door and learn what it did. The plan from here would be to expand to more markets to keep telling the story, but keep it fresh. You’ll see us continuing to challenge norms in the category, but we’ll do it differently next year.

CM: What’s up next for the brand?

JB: Getting the experience right. We will make sure that the consumer experience is top notch before we start opening more stores, for example, or getting much bigger than we are today in terms of our footprint. The biggest opportunity is to continue to tell our story and to find those people that share our values, and to become a bigger brand as a result of that familiarity—not necessarily trying to be on every street corner.

You will see us differentiating. There’s some places in our menu where it’s hard to tell how a Peet’s drink is different than maybe a Starbucks drink. And you’re going to see us more clearly differentiating on flavors, and on the kinds of products we sell. We want to make sure we’re being true to the strategy of being “coffee for coffee people.” You’ll see some changes to the package, perhaps. We’re not ready to fully commit to what that looks like, but we’re definitely looking at the fundamentals.

The post Peet’s Coffee Brand VP on Leveraging Consumer ‘Disloyalty’ and an Appreciation for Craft appeared first on Chief Marketer.

As new AI tools continue to launch in the marketplace, opportunities arise for marketing and PR to collaborate on data sharing, analytics, gauging public sentiment, brand awareness efforts, and more. Here are three ways marketing and PR can work together on integrated, AI-driven strategies, according to a piece in PRNEWS.

The post Three Ways Marketing and PR Pros Can Collaborate on AI-Driven Communication appeared first on Chief Marketer.

According to UScellular marketing chief Eric Jagher, going up against your direct competitors may not be the best way to break through. “Sometimes the right thing to do is challenge something bigger than the category,” he said. For Jagher, that meant spearheading the brand’s multi-phased “Let’s Find US” campaign earlier this year, which explores the relationship between consumers and technology by addressing the issue of cell phone overuse.

So, it encourages consumers not to use the service… sort of. “As we were looking at the research, one of the things that popped up, ironically, was that people are struggling with the relationship that they have with their devices,” Jagher told Chief Marketer. “They love the technology. The problem is when the technology gets out of place and it starts to dominate people’s lives. So, if we’re a carrier that’s going to connect people to what matters most, how can we help them to manage that relationship with technology in a better way?”

The campaign initially tapped AI technology during Super Bowl playoff games to detect approximately how many people in the stadiums were missing major plays while they were face-down in their phones. The next component included a “Phones Down for 5” pledge that encouraged people to put their devices down for five days, hours or even minutes, as well as messaging to help users control the technology by pausing notifications or phone calls.

It also included a partnership with nonprofit Screen Sanity, which guides parents and children on developing a better relationship with digital technology in general. And most recently, the brand launched a Smarter Start Toolkit to help parents facilitate a discussion about better managing the technology.

We spoke with Jagher—our Marketers on Fire pick this month—about the program’s origins, startling stats about cell phone usage in America, strategies for setting the brand apart within a hyper-competitive category and the campaign’s positive results surrounding brand consideration and Net Promoter Scores.

Chief Marketer: Why did you feel the need to create a campaign that’s about using your cell phone less?

Eric Jagher, CMO and SVP at UScellular: We are all about connecting people to what matters most. And obviously, cell phones would be a big part of that. As we were looking at research, one of the things that popped up, ironically, was that people are struggling with the relationship that they have with their devices. They love the technology. The problem is when the technology gets out of place and it starts to dominate people’s lives. And so if we’re a carrier that’s going to connect people to what matters most, how can we help people to manage that relationship with technology in a better way? That might mean putting the phone down sometimes, or setting the phone to limit distractions, notifications.

CM: In what ways does the brand facilitate that specifically?

EJ: It started with the Super Bowl. For the first campaign that we did, “Missing the Big Game,” we used AI during the Super Bowl to show people in the stadium so connected to that technology that they were missing big plays. Something like 16,000 fans missed touchdowns during the game, 6,000 fans were watching the phones or the halftime show by Rihanna, 4,000 people-plus missed the winning field goal. That was a way to create awareness.

The first important thing we did from a marketing perspective was, “Phones Down for Five.” I did it, our CEO did it. We had celebrities doing it, like Ashley Tisdale. Put your phone down for five days, hours, even five minutes, just to get a sense of what it feels like to put the phone aside. The second step was, how are we going to help you solve it? Ninety-five percent of people never change the default settings in their devices, but there’s a lot of great capabilities in those devices, including modes you can use to shut off things like notifications during certain hours of the day. So the second phase was to help people to control the technology, what we call “US mode,” which is using technology native to the device.

The next phase came in our Screen Sanity partnership, an international nonprofit focused on helping parents and kids have a better relationship with digital technology in general. Recently we’ve launched a Smarter Start Toolkit around back-to-school so parents can talk to kids about how to manage technology better, because it’s not a conversation that parents enjoy having. This is a way to help them facilitate that discussion.

CM: How did the AI work exactly?

EJ: We tested the AI over a few of the playoff games before the Super Bowl, the division rounds and the conference championships. We used a Microsoft AI to look around the stadium and catch people looking down into their phones. That’s how we were able to get those stats. When there was a big touchdown, we could then see how many people had their heads buried in their phones as opposed to watching the game.

CM: What other research stats informed the campaign?

EJ: The average person spends more than five hours a day staring at their phone. Most Americans reach for their device between three and 400 times a day. Forty-seven percent of Americans say they’re addicted to their phone. Parents say that the number one battleground with their kids is these devices, and how to get off them. A more humorous one, but still very serious: It’s the number two thing people give up for Lent after chocolate.

CM: What are your strategic marketing goals with the campaign, and how are you measuring its success?

EJ: First and foremost, we’re trying to drive reappraisal of the UScellular brand. In some markets in our footprint we’ve had a little bit of market share deterioration. So we want people to have another reason to look at our brand and say, I see them differently and I want to come back. Love for the brand is our number one goal. And then, getting people to take action off of seeing this. Through June, we have some really interesting stats: a third of UScellular customers say they’re aware of us promoting healthy relationships with technology, and 34 percent of those customers state it improved their opinion of us.

So we’re seeing some really nice lift with existing customers, and even non-customers who were aware of the campaign felt that it improved their opinion of us by 18 percent. We’ve had over 358 million brand impressions to date since the launch of the campaign. Over the last two months in a row now, our Net Promoter Score is number one in our footprint ahead of all the other big three carriers. And we’re really proud of that because that’s been something we’ve been working on for a while. A year ago we were last by a decent margin, and then in the last two months we’ve been first since we’ve launched this campaign.

CM: In general, what is your strategy when it comes to setting your brand apart from your main competitors?

EJ: Our competitors seem content to fight each other constantly about wireless. One of the key insights we had during the development of this was that we wanted to talk about something bigger than the category. How do we help people to connect better? Let’s not fight against each other. Let’s fight about the technology getting out of place. When we think about building brand value and loyalty, we want to focus on something customers care about. That’s where the shift came in. We’re focused on setting the brand apart by having a strong value proposition. We’re always going to have competitive promotional offers in the marketplace, but really building that brand around a strong value prop and competitive offers.

CM: What are your brand’s greatest challenges, and how are you tackling them from a marketing perspective?

EJ: This is a hyper-competitive industry. You can’t go a set of commercials, whether it’s streaming content or linear TV, where you’re not seeing a wireless commercial. So that makes it challenging in the sense that the pull is to always do a transactional or performance marketing spot that’s focused on the device you’re selling today, how much off, and what’s the price plan. We’re certainly always going to do our fair share of that. But my role as a CMO is to make sure we’re continuing to develop the brand, and make sure people understand what UScellular is all about and what we stand for. And that’s where developing this healthy relationship with technology is really important. And then all the offers and everything else sits below that. The pull is to use all of the media to focus on the transactional or the performance, but you have to keep some of the focus on the brand and the equity.

The other thing is, and it’s probably very obvious to most, is that we are—depending on the day—the fourth or fifth largest carrier. It’s a David-versus-Goliath-type situation. AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile are always going to have a lot more to spend on advertising and media than we are. So we have to be nimble, to react. I’m very proud of my team and what we do in terms of how we structure hyper-local offers. Maybe it’s different in this state versus that state. The execution and the operational excellence of the team has to be top-notch, and it is. We’re constantly trying, testing different things to make sure we’re optimizing our offers in the marketplace.

CM: Lastly, in your view, what should modern marketers be focusing on to advance their careers?

EJ: Obviously the digital landscape has become more and more important over the years. A lot of marketers are figuring out how to address this notion of a cookie-less future. We’re certainly talking about it internally. My advice is to not lose focus on the quantitative aspects of marketing and how important financial analysis is to becoming a really strong marketer. It’s an important skillset, and the people I see who are most successful around me have that skillset set as well.

In marketing it’s easy to want to challenge the other person in your category. One thing we’ve learned in this process is that sometimes the right thing to do is challenge something bigger than the category. There are other great examples. Dove didn’t go challenge Irish Spring, or other soaps. They challenged this notion of toxic beauty. Chipotle doesn’t go against Taco Bell. They go challenge GMOs and freshness, and make that their stance. We’ve learned a lot through some of those examples: that sometimes the best thing to challenge is something bigger.

The post Marketers on Fire: UScellular CMO and SVP Eric Jagher appeared first on Chief Marketer.

BEHR Paint Company chose the neutral, moody shade of Cracked Pepper as its 2024 Color of the Year earlier this month. The annual selection, informed by consumer research, lifestyle trends and feedback from design experts, has evolved into a full-blown brand campaign with a retail media marketing partnership with The Home Depot, social media campaigns and experiential components, resulting in a dramatic increase in sales.

We spoke with BEHR Paint Company and The Home Depot CMOs on how the Color of the Year reveal has evolved over the years; the role that retail media plays in the partnership; trends in marketing home improvement to younger generations, and the intersection of content and commerce.

Chief Marketer: How do you go about choosing the Color of the Year? And why Cracked Pepper for 2024?

Jodi Allen, Global CMO, BEHR Paint Company: What’s great about the color is it’s very usable whether you’re painting inside—if you’re painting cabinets, your interior walls, furniture—but it’s also a great exterior color as well. We focused on making sure there was a color that was usable for DIYers, for designers and professionals.

We’ve created more of an experience to launch our color of the year. At the property that we’re on now in Napa, all the buildings’ exteriors are painted in a Cracked Pepper-like color, which provided the perfect backdrop for our 2024 Color of the Year announcement. We partner closely with The Home Depot, everything from picking the color to looking at the big trends that are out there around décor, and tying color and decor together to make a big statement. And with our partnership, help consumers as they’re looking to create the same experience at their homes.

Molly Battin, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at The Home Depot: Our partnership goes back 45 years. Our teams have worked closely together to bring this to life for our customers, and take everything that we know about The Home Depot customer and work with Jody’s team to bring a color palette that we know will resonate with them.

CM: You’ve been unveiling the Color of the Year for several years now. What’s different about the partnership this year?

JA: We continue to evolve a little bit. The color is an important part, so we look at lifestyle trends and ensure we have a color that’s very usable—interior and exterior. The other thing is the experience, and creating this big moment to launch here at in Napa. We have a vignette where we brought the color to life here on the property, including a kitchen, a dining room and a living room, to show how the color and the decor items from The Home Depot worked together.

The other piece is a big consumer activation. We’re making sure we get this color in front of consumers so they can get it on their walls and see how it can changes the feeling of their room and their space.

We’re leveraging social media, specifically Instagram and TikTok, where we know consumers are looking for color and inspiration. We have a sweepstakes that we’re running on Instagram, where five winners will receive $10,000 to help them transform and elevate their space with Cracked Pepper.

CM: How is The Home Depot specifically involved in the partnership?

MB: We have a retail media network where we leverage our first-party data so that we can understand where our audiences are, specifically where BEHR’s audiences are. We know where they are in their project. Are they looking for inspiration? Are they in the middle of doing it? Are they completing? So that we can put the right message in front of them. This is a perfect moment in time for us to come together, leverage our data and lean into both on homedepot.com as well as partner off-channel sites. We do a lot with Google and Pinterest to deepen engagement. We’ve done a lot in that retail media space, and as we go into this fall, and even with College Game Day coming up, BEHR is a big partner in that.

CM: How is The Home Depot’s retail media network evolving?

MB: It’s a big growth engine for us. One of the core things that we look at is, how can we partner with all of our vendors to help them grow their business? We know our customer better than anyone, whether it’s the do-it-yourself-er or whether it’s the pro. We can leverage and understand where they are in the course of their project, what problem they are trying to solve. And we can help our suppliers come in and get in front of those customers with solutions. BEHR has been on the leading end of it, and one of the key partners as we continue to grow.

CM: Why go with such a dark shade for Color of the Year? What informed the decision?

JA: We had some great research, which is one of the places we started. We talked with over a thousand consumers to see [what they thought] of these darker tones. A couple things: one, consumers were very interested in these colors. As an example, 57 percent of Americans we surveyed said that painting a wall a darker color would give the room a designer aesthetic and make it feel more elevated. We also talked to millennials, because they’re such an important strategic audience for us, and they felt that looking at a black tone similar to Cracked Pepper instantly gave the home a fresh look. [We looked] at all kinds of fashion and lifestyle trends.

CM: What are some key trends in the home improvement space?

JA: About 52 percent of millennials own homes today. That group continues to be an important strategic audience for us. Also we think about Gen Z, which is very quickly coming into buying their first home, their first space. We’re making sure that we are where they are looking for inspiration.

One of the big things that we see with people from a DIY standpoint is that they need just a little bit of confidence. So we’ve extended our brand into some new categories. We launched our spray paint in the very recent past. It’s getting in early and helping, especially for younger consumers. We had our “To DIY For” TikTok campaign—we just launched our second year of that.

MB: I would echo that we’re looking at the millennials, the Gen Zs. And we know, similar to what Jody said, whether it’s that confidence or they just don’t know where to start. They want to get into a project, they’re excited about it, but they’re a bit stuck. We’re thinking about that intersection of content and commerce in an interesting way. And how do we use platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Pinterest to get them “unstuck,” if you will, and to give them the tools and the confidence to think about, how do I tackle this project? Those content plays are really important for us as we think about how we help this next generation along, whether it’s inspiring them, whether it’s giving them the tools that they need to get all the way through—whether the pre-planning process, the middle, the end of the project, or how do I get to the next one.

We’ve also thought about leaning into other audiences. Obviously our pro customers are essential and a key piece of what our strategy is moving forward, but we launched a campaign earlier this spring all around female doers, based on the insight that we know sometimes women don’t always feel as welcome in home improvement stores. So, how can we invite them in to feel empowered, and start them at a young age? It’s reaching out to find new audiences and make them feel included and confident when they come to The Home Depot.

CM: What other insights are you leveraging to market to younger consumers?

JA: From a home ownership standpoint, we see that Gen Z is at a faster pace than millennials. So being able to connect authentically with that audience is going to be really important as we go forward. We’ll continue to keep an eye on social media and how it’s evolving.

MB: Gen Z and millennials are digital natives, so they think about the media landscape very differently than Boomers, or even Gen X. So we think about how we lean into innovative media platforms, whether it’s shoppable ads, whether it’s regionalizing our message so we can be authentic when we talk to them.

Spring is a big time for us at The Home Depot. Weather matters where you are; it depends on the season, the warmth. I’m in the North, so I’m going to start my spring a little later than in the South. We think about the channels, the new ways we can innovate and bring that digital-first experience. As I mentioned, we lean into that connection between content and commerce, but also, it’s not one-size-fits-all anymore. We have to be really thoughtful about the uses of each channel and also segmentation across the geographies.

Image credits: BEHR Paint Company

The post BEHR Paint Company and The Home Depot Marketing Chiefs Talk Color of the Year Campaign appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Sixty-four percent of marketers surveyed said they are somewhat or very prepared for a third-party cookie phase-out, according to CM’s Industry Pulse survey on data privacy. Similarly, 55 percent are prepared for new and evolving privacy policies. Most marketers say they are addressing compliance by using in-house teams and investing in technology.

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Looking to leverage first-party data for long-term success? We’ve got you covered. In this expert-led webinar, you’ll learn how to deliver personalized experiences while respecting user preferences and being privacy-compliant.

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The results of Chief Marketer’s latest Pulse Survey are in: 48% of marketers said their martech budgets have increased in the last six months. But only 36% feel confident they have the budget to achieve their marketing goals. Presenting our latest Pulse Survey infographic.

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MetLife’s annual Employee Benefit Trends Study, now in its 21^st year, is a thought leadership piece initially designed to demonstrate the brand’s expertise in the benefits product space through providing observations, trends and key research. But in the last couple of years, the conversation has shifted more toward the future of work and how benefits contribute to the employee value proposition over time.

This new perspective requires a broader approach to marketing the report’s insights, according to MetLife Global CMO Michael Roberts. “Our view of EBTS as a thought leadership piece has evolved as the world of work has evolved,” he said. “Now we think about it in a much more holistic way than we did in the beginning.”

That expansion of scope is a function of an evolving buyer journey and shifts in audience targeting, Roberts explained. “While a lot of thought leadership of a decade or two ago was focused on a very narrow audience or a buyer persona, the complexities of purchasing in the B2B space have increased. It’s no longer individuals buying, as people looked at thought leadership years ago, but it’s buying groups—and the influences are coming from many different places in the organization.”

We spoke with Roberts about the marketing strategy behind the report and its insights; the evolution of the buyer journey; how previous roles at TIAA and Vanguard have informed his perspective at MetLife; and the marketing trends he thinks B2B2C companies should be watching.

Chief Marketer: How have the insights in the EBTS report evolved over the past few years, given that the way we live and work has changed significantly?

Michael Roberts, MetLife Global CMO: The report been around for a long time. In the early years, it was about demonstrating that we were a leader in the benefits product space and thinking about the landscape and employee needs. Through 2018 to 2021, we started to see how benefits were essential to navigating uncertain times and were becoming a more important part of the employee experience. Then as we got to the 2021/2022 timeframe, the conversations shifted to the future of work and how benefits fit into the future of work and the overall employee value proposition.

As we moved into last year and this year, the themes became more holistic and encompassing. Our view of EBTS as a thought leadership piece has evolved as the world of work has evolved. Now we think about it in a much more holistic way than we did in the beginning, partially due to [the fact that] the role benefits played in the employee experience was very different a long time ago, but also partially because benefits are inextricably linked to so many different parts of the employee experience. That’s been recognized and acknowledged by the interested parties in the research that we do.

CM: What’s the key takeaway from the report this year?

MR: In last year’s report we, we focused on how holistic health was a driver of both employer and employee outcomes. This year we took that same theme and expanded it to look at the entirety of the employee experience. So, while holistic health is still an important part of the equation for both driving employer and employee outcomes, we have to look at it in the context of the entire employee experience.

The report this year expanded the scope and looked at six aspects of the employee experience, intrinsic and extrinsic. The extrinsic aspects are compensation and pay, flexibility and work-life balance, and benefits and wellness programs, and the intrinsic ones are social and supportive cultures, purposeful work, and professional growth and development. We wanted to understand what was important to employees, and what was important for employers to focus on in order to maximize all aspects of the employee experience. The question we were asking: is there a hierarchy? Do people care more about one thing or another?

CM: Did anything surprise you?

MR: One of the most interesting things for me in the report was the insight around employee experience priorities. When asked, employees say compensation is the most important thing by far. But the stated priorities don’t match the derived priorities. We found that an employer must focus on all six areas of the employee experience and put a genuine effort in it in order to get the best results from the employees, for the employer outcomes as well as the employee outcomes.

It’s a little bit counterintuitive. There are lots of businesses that feel like if you just pay people, they’ll do what you want, and that’ll make them happy at work. But that’s not the case. What makes people happy at work is a balanced experience, and knowing that your employer is putting a genuine effort into making all parts of that experience work for you or me as an employee. For me, that was a really important insight, because that requires us to think differently about the holistic nature of the employee experience.

CM: You’ve held previous CMO and executive marketing roles at Bank of America, Vanguard, Citigroup and others. What insights from those gigs are you applying to your current position?

MR: I spent time at both TIAA and Vanguard, and at TIAA we were providing an employee benefit. Although different from the benefits we provide at MetLife, it was still dealing with employees. We provided a variety of retirement plans to the relevant institutions. And there, I learned a lot about the complexities of working with employee groups as part of companies, as well as being in a somewhat low-engagement category and trying to engage with the end user of the product and how challenging that would be.

That taught me a tremendous amount that is directly applicable. Healthcare, retirement and group benefits are all part of the same ecosystem, although they focus on very different aspects of what employees need. But the thing in common is that we’re trying to improve the lives of employees on behalf of the employer who’s working with us.

At Vanguard, we started to look at thought leadership that could help influence behavior. While I was there, we launched “How America Invests.” It was a spinoff of the “How America Saves” series, which also has a 20-plus-year lifespan at Vanguard and was very influential in driving and supporting ideas that were in the best interests of the end investor. That purpose-driven approach at Vanguard, that the teams took to the retirement business and that we started to take with “How America Invests” in the retail business, was an inspiration for me as I got to MetLife. With EBTS, in the future we think we have an opportunity to influence the perspective on the employee experience.

CM: B2B marketers, particularly within the industries you’re speaking of, often rely on thought leadership and content marketing do get their messages across. How are you marketing this kind of thing to both customers and the public?

MR: Our audiences have expanded over time, and I think that’s actually what has been happening with thought leadership over time. While a lot of thought leadership of a decade or two ago was focused on a very narrow audience or a buyer persona, the complexities of purchasing in the B2B space have increased. It’s no longer individuals buying, as people looked at thought leadership years ago, but it’s buying groups, and the influences are coming from many different places in the organization. So by the very nature of the complexity of the buying stakeholder group in companies, thought leadership has had to be a lot broader.

The other piece of it is that we now understand a lot more about the buyer’s journey—not our sales funnel, but the actual journey of the buyer, which are two very different things. We understand that a significant amount of that buyer journey doesn’t happen with a salesperson in front of the buying group at all. So it’s incumbent on us to be influential in the discovery and learning processes that lead up to the sales interactions in the buying journey.

CM: How has the marketing of thought leadership evolved?

MR: A couple things look really different. One is that in thought leadership, while there may be an anchor set of ideas or research or a report like EBTS, syndication of that content by audience and channel, which then changes format, is absolutely critical. So we are doing podcast. We publish on social. We turn it into materials for our sales force to go out and have conversations with existing clients. We build it into new business pitches in order to show perspective on whatever the ask is for a solution. It becomes part of the storytelling that our sales people do.

The multitude of uses of a solid set of ideas that is customer-focused and that drives a solution to a problem or opportunity they have is broad. So we are thinking about that differently in terms of the uses of thought leadership. And it reflects both things. It reflects the greater complexity in the buying decisions, and it reflects the evolution of the buying journey that our customers go to.

The other piece, which is unique to a few other places, is that the thought leadership has to reflect the business model that we are in, and that’s a B2B2C business model. So with thought leadership, it’s no longer enough to help the buyer do their job better. You have to get down to what the impact—the function represented in the buying group—is having on the outcomes for their company and the constituents that they’re serving. Thought leadership now has to be a lot more holistic, and focused on not just the outcomes for the buyer, but the outcomes for the company overall.

CM: Within the B2B2C sector specifically, what marketing trends should the industry should be keeping an eye on?

MR: You can’t get out of a trends discussion without mentioning AI. Fundamentally, AI is going to transform customer experiences. We’re already at that point. To be really specific: The tools that we use to engage our B2B customers as well as our B2C customers—but I’ll focus on B2B for a second—across channels, whether it’s the sales force directly with one in person or on the phone, or whether it’s digital channels, will all have some degree of AI instrumented within the platforms. If they don’t already, [they will] in the very near future. [It’s] leveraging AI in the platforms we use to engage with customers and then linking the AI from platform to platform and experience to experience to make a differentiated customer experience or prospect experience in the future.

But I think that’s going to be hard to achieve. AI relies on data, so data has to be a priority for marketers going forward. The platforms that we have chosen may or may not be on the front edge of embedding AI into the platforms, so we’ll have to wrestle with legacy technology or “bolt on.” There may be a new era of aggregated, best-of-breed [platforms]—even after we’ve all consolidated into these marketing cloud platforms like Adobe and Salesforce.

So the need to address data and legacy would be the second trend. The third trend would be navigating the marketing cloud platforms versus best-of-breed solutions. This was a problem 10 years ago, and we thought we’d solved it. Now AI has come, and we’ve gone right back to the beginning again.

The post Marketers on Fire: MetLife Global CMO Michael Roberts on the Evolution of Thought Leadership appeared first on Chief Marketer.

Peer-to-peer car-sharing company Turo relies on customer behaviors and preferences of users on its platform to identify patterns and make specific product recommendations. Here’s what the company has learned about consumer behavior on digital platforms, according to an article in AdExchanger, and how it’s strategizing to “stop the scroll” with ad content that cuts through the clutter.

The post How Car Sharing Company Turo Uses Personalization Tools for its App Experience appeared first on Chief Marketer.