The one with Google CMO Lorraine Twohill about product marketing and chocolate chip cookies

Summary

Podcast Summary: The CEO’s Guide to Marketing – Featuring Google CMO Lorraine Twohill

Episode Title: The One with Google CMO Lorraine Twohill About Product Marketing and Chocolate Chip Cookies
Hosted by: Seth Matlins, Managing Director of the Forbes CMO Network
Release Date: November 21, 2024

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Introduction

In this insightful episode of The CEO’s Guide to Marketing, Seth Matlins engages in a comprehensive conversation with Lorraine Twohill, the esteemed Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) at Google. Lorraine brings a wealth of experience in product marketing and brand management, overseeing global marketing efforts for flagship products such as Google Search, Android, Pixel, YouTube, Google Cloud, and Google's expanding suite of AI tools. Inducted into the Forbes CMO Hall of Fame in 2022, Lorraine offers valuable perspectives on elevating marketing strategies within the C-suite.

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Lightning Round: Quick Insights

At the outset, Lorraine participates in a lightning round, swiftly addressing ten rapid-fire questions that reveal her fundamental views on marketing and leadership.

1. Marketing is a HUMAN CONNECTION.
   Lorraine (04:10): "It's a human connection between a company and your customer."

2. A BRAND is a PROMISE.
   Lorraine (04:25): "You have to keep it."

3. When a Brand Promise is Broken.
   Lorraine (04:32): "If you damage, you break that promise, it affects trust, and it affects your user trust."

4. Hardest Part of Being a CMO.
   Lorraine (06:21): "Learning how and when to say no."

5. Hardest Part of Being a CEO.
   Lorraine (06:59): "Driving change while keeping morale and culture strong."

6. When Brands and Businesses Grow.
   Lorraine (08:31): "When you innovate, take risks, and have a culture of experimentation."

7. When Brands and Businesses Die.
   Lorraine (09:06): "When you stop listening to your customers and become complacent."

8. Competitive Advantage Comes From.
   Lorraine (09:34): "Differentiated product and a strong, trusted brand."

9. Measuring True Incrementality.
   Lorraine (10:00): "By experimentation and testing—A/B testing, regression, and control groups."

10. C-Suite Misunderstandings About Marketing.
    Lorraine (10:30): "Marketing is a long-term strategic investment that drives real business impact."

Notable Quote:
"Marketing is a human connection between a company and your customer." – Lorraine Twohill [04:10]

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In-Depth Discussion

1. The Role of Marketing in the C-Suite

Lorraine emphasizes the critical need for C-suite executives, especially CEOs and CFOs, to possess a robust understanding of marketing. Highlighting that only 10% of CEOs have a marketing background, she argues that greater marketing literacy can significantly enhance stakeholder value and drive enterprise growth.

Notable Quote:
"Marketing is a really important, not nice to have, but essential long-term strategic investment that drives real business impact versus a short-term quick win." – Lorraine Twohill [10:30]

2. Integrating Product Marketing at Google

Lorraine delves into Google's approach to product marketing, underscoring the symbiotic relationship between product development and branding. She advocates for product marketers to be involved from the inception of a product—right from its codename—ensuring that marketing insights shape the product's evolution.

Notable Quote:
"Our role is to know the user, know the customer, know the magic that your company builds products, and connect the two in a way that drives that human connection." – Lorraine Twohill [32:50]

3. Building a Unified Brand and Product Strategy

The conversation explores how Google ensures that every product and marketing effort supports the overarching brand. Lorraine asserts that product differentiation and a strong, trusted brand are both indispensable and must be pursued concurrently to avoid resource dilution.

Notable Quote:
"Every piece of work that's in service of a product should also be in service of the brand." – Lorraine Twohill [22:19]

4. Measurement and Incrementality in Marketing

Addressing the challenge of proving marketing's ROI, Lorraine discusses Google's rigorous methodologies for measuring incrementality. She highlights the use of control groups, A/B testing, and ablation studies to accurately assess the impact of marketing initiatives.

Notable Quote:
"We have an in-house measurement team dedicated to that. You need experts who are really good, especially in an engineering culture, data-led culture of having that robust measurement structure in place before you even start." – Lorraine Twohill [28:37]

5. Balancing Short-Term and Long-Term Marketing Goals

Lorraine shares her framework for harmonizing immediate marketing needs with long-term strategic objectives. She explains that short-term efforts, such as nailing a product launch, should serve the broader, sustained growth goals of the company.

Notable Quote:
"You have to see the short term as just the start. You have to nail the launch, stick the landing, and then keep going. It's a continuous journey." – Lorraine Twohill [25:40]

6. Overcoming C-Suite Skepticism Towards Marketing

Lorraine addresses the common skepticism among C-suite members regarding marketing's role and efficacy. She suggests reframing discussions around how brand perceptions influence consumer behavior and leveraging data to demonstrate marketing's tangible contributions.

Notable Quote:
"Ask questions about how people feel about your company, how they feel about your products, how they feel about your brand. Those are important conversations to have internally." – Lorraine Twohill [30:48]

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Concluding Insights

Throughout the episode, Lorraine Twohill reinforces the integral role of marketing in building meaningful human connections, driving product success, and sustaining brand trust. Her strategies at Google exemplify how deeply integrated marketing can lead to comprehensive business growth and enhanced stakeholder value.

Final Notable Quote:
"Great work should not just make people do something. They need to think and feel as well. That's how you build a truly deep human connection." – Lorraine Twohill [32:50]

Lorraine and Seth also reminisce about their initial meeting in 2011, highlighting the long-standing professional respect and friendship that underpins their engaging dialogue.

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Key Takeaways

• Marketing Literacy in Leadership: Encouraging C-suite executives to deepen their understanding of marketing to better allocate resources and drive growth.

• Early Integration of Product Marketing: Involving marketing teams from the earliest stages of product development to ensure alignment and enhance product-market fit.

• Unified Brand and Product Efforts: Maintaining a seamless integration between product features and brand messaging to strengthen overall market presence.

• Robust Measurement Frameworks: Implementing rigorous testing and measurement methodologies to quantify marketing impact and inform strategic decisions.

• Harmonizing Short and Long-Term Goals: Balancing immediate marketing actions with long-term objectives to sustain continuous growth and brand evolution.

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This episode serves as a master class for CEOs and other C-suite members aiming to elevate their marketing strategies and foster a more cohesive and impactful approach within their organizations.

Transcript

[Seth Matlins]

Today's show has been brought to you by rokt. Today's customers are overwhelmed by choice, and when people are overwhelmed, they freeze and you miss out on the opportunity to drive more revenue. That's where Rokt R steps in. Trusted by over 17,000 of the world's leading brands and advertisers, Rock enables companies to unlock value by transforming the e commerce experience, helping drive incremental sales and boosting profits up to 40%. ROKT makes each and every transaction relevant at the moment that matters most when customers are buying. Go to rokt.comforbes to learn more about Rokt where Relevance rules welcome to the CEO's Guide to Marketing. I'm Seth Matlins. I've spent my career in marketing both in and advising the C Suite, and I'm now the Managing Director of the Forbe CMO Network. So look, there's data showing that if I were taller, I'd have a much better shot at being CEO of a major company. Which makes me wonder how different things might be if my mom hadn't been 5:2. More relevantly, there's also data showing that if I were the CEO of a major company, I'd be one of only 10% with any marketing background whatsoever. Fully 90% of the chief executives of the world's largest companies have none, which in turn makes me wonder how much more stakeholder value could be created and enterprise growth driven if more did. If more understood how marketing works, how it doesn't, what to expect, what not to, and on what timeline, but because they don't have the experience and often don't understand, despite sometimes thinking that they do too often, too many of today's CEOs and CFOs are suboptimal stewards of the resources given to their chief marketing officers in order to drive sustainable, profitable growth. Obviously this serves no one and no company, but it does create the opportunity and obligation to increase the C Suite's marketing literacy. Which brings me to this podcast. In service of creating more growth and stakeholder value through a series of candid and connected conversations, we're hoping to raise the C Suite's marketing IQ and ensure CMOs are best positioned to do their jobs. Which is to create and capture the demand that drives growth and value. With that, let's get into it. I'm old enough that I remember when in a predominantly CPG world, product and brand were inextricably linked parts of the marketers remit. And I've been thinking a lot about how in a tech driven world, they become increasingly separated organizationally, engineers and product developers here, marketers over there. So wanted to talk to someone who understands product marketing arguably as well as anyone ever and better than almost anyone ever. For this episode, I'm talking with Lorraine2Hill, the longtime CMO at Google, where she manages a global team responsible for telling the story of Google's brand and bringing to life how its many tools, products, and services both help millions of businesses grow. Her teams oversee global marketing for some of the most used brands in the world, including Google search, Android, Pixel, YouTube, Google Cloud, and the company's expanding suite of AI AI tools. Lorraine's a native of Carlow, Ireland, and among a long list of accolades, was inducted into the Forbes CMO hall of fame in 2022. I should also note that I first met Lorraine in 2011 when I interviewed with her for the CMO job at YouTube, which, as any casual review of my own LinkedIn profile will make clear, was a job I did not get. I wanted to talk to Lorraine anyway, not just because she's an industry legend, but because there are a few who understand product marketing and marketing at a product first better than she does. Let's get into it.

[Lorraine Tuhill]

All right, Lorraine. As you know, part of. Part of what we do, every one of our CEOs guide to marketing episodes is we ask our guests to give us fill in the blank answers to 10 questions in less than five minutes. So this is the lightning round, and we just start it right up front. Okay. You ready?

Yes, sir.

I mean, I'm not really gonna time you, but I am gonna. I do have high pressure now, Seth.

I'm feeling a little under pressure now. Seth, I need to have my coffee.

All right, let's go. You ready? Marketing is a human connection. Oh, I love that. I love that. A human connection between what and what?

Well, it's in service of the value you create and communicate to your customers.

Yeah.

But it's a human connection between a company and your customer.

Love that. A brand is a promise, the promise.

You have to keep.

Yeah. Now, what happens when you don't keep it? Because inevitably, sometimes it's hard to keep it. Yeah.

It's in fact, probably the hardest thing of all because you've got to deliver it through your product, through your customer experience. You've got to deliver through your team. So if you damage, you know, break that promise, it affects trust, effects your user trust.

You know, I think it's so interesting, and I'm going to not count this time against your five minutes.

Okay? Thank you.

But, you know, you make Such a good point that I think so many marketers miss, which is it is delivered through your team, through customer service, through every touch point anyone has with brand product.

And it's not even just telling marketers. And again, this is not counting against my time, but it's the.

I'll be the judge.

You're the boss. You're the boss. Today it's the whole company. You know, it's part of your internal job. It's to tell the whole company, listen, no matter what we do over here, if we screw up over here, this really is breaking the promise that we've made.

Well, that's one of the things. You and I have talked about this over time, but what was once in a CMO's quote unquote control is no longer right as marketing's become democratized, decentralized, oftentimes siloed, which we'll get into. Everybody is a marketer in some respect and fashion, or everybody has responsibility for brand. I think that's a better way to say it.

Everyone has responsibility for brand. I do think that everyone thinks they're the marketer. Yes, always important distinction whenever you're presenting to the management team of the company. Any other presentation would get quite deep into the presentation, but in marketing, they're interrupting by the agenda. Yeah, you know, it's like I went to school, so I have an opinion in education. So, you know, everyone, everyone has an opinion on marketing, but they've seen ads.

I use this line. Just because you've seen Blue Ivy dance at a Beyonce show doesn't mean you can dance.

Doesn't mean you can dance.

All right, so what's the. Actually, I think we're kind of touching on the next two questions. What's the hardest part of being a cmo?

I think for me, you know, it's learning how and when to say no. And that might mean to a product manager, no, you can't have your 17 features in one spot. Or it might mean saying no to all of the crazy asks coming in the door so that you can focus on the bigger wins. Or it might be saying no to the short term pressure versus the long term benefit. But you have to learn how to say no.

Yeah, you do. Especially in a world of unlimited opportunity, massive noise, but scarce resources. Those resources are capital, time or human.

Couldn't agree more.

What, from your perspective, is the hardest part of being a CEO?

I think driving change, trying to change a company. I think trying to change strategy while simultaneously keeping morale high and keeping the mojo strong. Keeping the culture Strong in a company. And keeping the culture while driving change.

Yeah.

Is very hard.

Yeah. I mean, because culture should be part of the change. Agent Ding.

Yes.

Right.

Humans don't like change.

No.

And no matter how much you tell them you're joining a company that's a high performance company that has tremendous agility and tremendous change, humans like to know the plan. Well.

But there's a difference between not liking change and wanting to know the plan. Right. Because it's, of course, the leadership's responsibility to make sure everybody understands, if not the plan, then the reason why. But one of the things that I talk a lot and think a lot about is kind of the architecture of the brain hasn't changed in thousands of years. Right. We're still primed to survive. And I kind of have come up with this, to call it a thesis, overstates it, but I think the reason we don't like change, the reason we adhere to the status quo, speaking broadly, even when we know it doesn't serve us, is because it didn't kill us. And it's literally like we're walking down the plains wearing a loincloth. And if that lion, you know, we knew to be afraid of that lion, but if that, you know, kitten was there, like, it didn't kill me. Right. The status quo didn't kill us.

The folks who took the risk didn't come back.

That's right.

Yeah.

Oftentimes.

Yes. Yeah, yes.

Okay, next question. Question number six. We're halfway through. Brands and businesses grow when.

When you innovate, when you take risks, experiment. Have a culture of experimentation, make mistakes, learn, have a learning agenda. We're all students.

Back to the status quo. Starting to be a killer. A category. Not a category killer, but a brand of business.

Well, certainly complacency is.

Yeah, yeah. By the way, that's a great distinction between the status quo.

Because sometimes your status quo might be very good and it's about maintaining it in a healthy way.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

Rather than changing everything.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Well, let me ask you. I. I think it's the inverse. Brands and businesses die when.

When you stop listening, when you stop listening to your customers, when you lose trust, when you stop caring about learning, having a learning agenda. When you get complacent.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Complacency is a killer, of course. Well, actually, so good. Segue to the next question. Knowing that this is a very broad question. The answer depends on a million variables. Competitive advantage comes from, in my view.

Because of where I've Grown up in marketing, I think it's differentiated product. I think you have to start with the offering. So from, from I think differentiated product comes first and then I think a strong brand that people trust. I think you need both of those things. I think you can't get there with just one of them.

Yeah. How do you measure for true incrementality? So to put it in the context of this, you measure for true incrementality.

By experimentation and testing A, B, testing regression, control groups.

Right.

Eliminating cities, countries so you can truly understand the lift.

So it's on and off, on and.

Off, different variables, testing, testing and testing.

Okay, so speaking across the landscape and not of course about Google, if you could wake wave a magic wand and immediately address one C suite misunderstanding about marketing and marketers, what would it be?

Well, I think this probably sounds obvious but that marketing is a really important, not nice to have, but essential long term strategic investment that drives real business impact versus a short term quick win, quick fix expense.

How do you think we've gotten to a place where that even needs to be said? Because I agree it absolutely needs to be said and that it does just blows my freaking mind.

Well, I think it's back to your previous question about incrementality and measurement. You know, that's always been a challenge for us is we're taking on a lot of companies investment and we have to prove the impact. And so that's a big part of the job and continue to demonstrate that. And I do think you need to have enough power in a company to convince the company to back your thinking for enough time to be able to build a rigorous and robust measurement framework. It doesn't happen in the, in a quarter. It's over time that you build in the learning, the knowledge, the models, the framework to actually be able to predict and improve the real business impact you're driving. It just takes a few years to get that in place and it gets better each year. Like it gets better over time. So it's optimization is a critical part of it. And so you need the permission to go and get that hard work done so you can really demonstrate the real impact you're driving.

I also think there's something so super important what you said, which is, you know, with optimization being kind of sop. Right. If you're not optimizing back to your point about complacency in the status quo. Right. And I wonder if it also requires a reframing by marketers internally of when things don't work, when things go awry because while it may not serve the moment, it can absolutely serve the learning for optimization.

I'm a big believer in under promising and over delivering. Yeah, I think sometimes we are our own worst enemies because we're big believers in the highlights and here's why. It's going to be great and we're trying to sell hard. You actually do need to manage expectations and bring people with you.

Yeah, that was how I got my wife. I under promised and barely over delivered.

We need to ask her. Yeah, fair.

All right, last question before we get into it, but it's the perfect question for getting segueing into the conversation. The relationship between a product or a service and a brand is.

Between a product and a brand is symbiotic. I don't think you can have one without the other.

Okay, great. So that takes me to a quote that I think is perhaps Bill Bernbauch's. I'll fix it if I got it wrong in the notes to the podcast. But he said every brand can have a product at its core. Not every product has a brand at its core. For somebody who has been marketing inside Google, one of the great product companies in the history of companies, how do you ensure and how do you work with your product teams and a culture of innovation to ensure that a brand is getting carried through and baked in, not just dependent, when engineering throws it over a proverbial transom?

It's a great question, something we work hard at every single day. And in our company, and I think in many, especially tech companies, you have a part of marketing that I consider to be almost the most important part of marketing, which is product marketing. And that is the team who sit day in, day out with the product managers and the engineers. They're in all of their core meetings involved from the moment an idea gets a code name, a project name, bringing insights and research, bringing points.

What are the odds that the next product innovation at Google could be code named Seth?

Well, no one will know. That's the key thing.

I will know. Sorry, I interrupted. Please.

No problem. I'll give them that feedback. That would be my 1 contribution in the next product meeting. Sometimes that is the contribution is, you know, what are we naming the project? But you know, they care deeply about that. By the way, a lot of thought went into it. So. But I think it's being in those meetings, being in the room where it happens all the way through, long before launch. Certainly when I first joined, typically marketing were pulled in like a week before launch. Hi, we need a name for this thing. We need A blog post, we need a video, ideally with the product manager in it telling you what this thing does. And that's just not, that is not a recipe for success. So you've got to get involved way, way earlier. Be in the room, add value in the room, bring in insights, bring in research, champion the customer, champion the user. Have a deep, deep, deep knowledge of the product so that you have a feel for what new features would be successful, what use cases will drive more usage, what scenarios and features and use cases that matter the most to your customers so that you can really inform in those sessions, in those meetings and really add value.

I have two questions coming out of that. I'm going to ask the second one first, because it's most direct, which is if marketing needs product marketing needs to be sitting with them from the moment it's codenamed. What role do the product team. Does the product team play the engineer, the technologist, whomever in campaign development? Do they get to sit in too and kind of say, that doesn't actually feel like what we're trying to communicate? Or is their job done on the engineering side and then it's up to the professionals, as it were?

Well, they certainly have a strong point of view and they know their product best. So I like having them not sit in through the whole process, but I like checking in with them at the beginning of the processing, we believe. And again, this is really what product marketing's job is. The product management team trusts the product marketers to actually work with, go to market teams and the brand teams to nail the product. But I do like to bring them in at the beginning and say, hey, we're going to focus on these features, these use cases, these types of scenarios. Does that make, does that resonate?

Right, right.

And then I want to, I want, at the end, what I say to my team is, look, I want them to be proud. Yeah, Like, I want to do work. So the product teams, the engineering teams want to show their families want to go home and say, hey, look, this is my, my, my, my baby come to life. This is, this is the world getting excited about something that I've killed myself on for weeks or months. And, and so for me, ultimately, if I can, I often think of a lot of our external work is actually internal work in that if I can show it internally to all of our engineers and product teams and they are so excited about it, then I feel like, okay, we've nailed this, let's go show the world something.

I just want to like reinforce is what you Just said a lot of our external work is internal work. And I think. I think that is lost by so many.

Your toughest audience is internal, by the way.

Yeah, and actually I'm going to still get back to that other question, but it raises for me exactly what you just said. They're the toughest audience, I think, again, because of what we were chat. I mean, tell me if you disagree, because what we were chatting about before, which is they think they know marketing, but they don't really know marketing. And while they might know the product best, they don't know the customer best. They don't know how to communicate the essence of what matters most so that people will buy, use and, or buy and. Or share.

I agree in all of that. But they're also the most invested. They care so much. They really.

It is their baby.

And they want the company to be successful and they want work out there that they're proud of and they want, having done all the hard work to build these features. They want them to be successful. They want. There's no point doing all this hard work if nobody uses or wants or buys the product. So they're very invested in its success. So they want to know that we're going to nail it. We're going to get out there and get the world excited about this thing, whatever that thing is. So they have a strong point of view.

So one of the things you said a moment ago was that when you first got there, there was a real divide. A divorce, if you will, or certainly an absence of integration from a process perspective as to when product marketing got involved.

Yeah.

What did it take you and maybe even how long did it take you to begin to change that expectation and process? Because obviously you have, and obviously it's been a sea change for one of the most important companies in the world.

Well, first of all, I don't know that it was that there was a sort of division. It was more that a misunderstanding of the role marketing could play or a belief that marketing's role was defined in a certain way. And I was lucky that when I joined, I joined in Europe and it was at a time when we had basically just search and then we had Google Maps coming and Gmail, and none of these products were rolled out outside of the US and so what I learned very early on, very quickly, is that if you lean in on the product side of the house, if you help them get the products to a better place. For example, there were a bunch of features needed to be successful in European countries that I was they were obvious to me. I could give that feedback to them. You know, I hired folks who could sit with them literally at the computer and say, listen, you need these features, these features, these features. So I put, you know, junior product marketers sat in with engineers saying to be successful outside of the us here's what it's going to take. And it was building that product trust at the product level with the product teams, helping them be successful with their products so that we actually ship something that's fit for market. Before you even get into any conversations about what's marketing's role or what should we go do or what campaign should we run or what should we invest, it was literally just hands on, person with person, building great products and you build trust that way. And since then, any senior person I've hired in who's come from other marketing organizations, I have said to them, no matter how great a leader you are, no matter how great you are going out in the world and telling extraordinary stories and driving tremendous impact, if you in the room as an individual cannot add value with the product team on their product which they deeply care about in that room in those meetings, you're not going to be successful here.

Yeah, there has to be a value exchange or you're just taking up space and time.

[Seth Matlins]

The following segment features paid content from Rokt. Doug, From Rokt's perspective, what's the C suite need to better understand about what's right and wrong today?

[Doug]

Yeah, the most important thing to think about getting right is the customer experience. It's a golden opportunity to meet the consumer's expectation. And nowhere is this more important than at checkout, capitalizing on consumer desires. The checkout moment, the transaction moment, offers a chance to blend time efficiency with contextual awareness, to really bring things together in a more personalized and relevant way.

[Seth Matlins]

And that diminishes card abandonment, I'm assuming.

[Doug]

Absolutely. In fact, 73% of consumers say that they often experience some form of frustration or barrier at checkout. And so when you think about leveraging rocks technology, it really helps you to unlock the moment that matters most when customers are buying.

[Seth Matlins]

To learn more about how to unlock the transaction moment, go to rokt rokt.com that's rokt rokt.com Forbes now back to our program.

[Lorraine Tuhill]

What do you think? A chief executive, cfo, a board, anyone for that matter, who doesn't really understand and it's because of an absence of experience, the difference between product driven growth and brand driven growth because they are in fact different across categories, Right. CPG Might speaking broadly, painting with a big brush be more brand driven though, you and I actually, I know you disagree.

I disagree.

You're going to talk about the chocolate chip cookies.

Well, you know, I just think you need both. I think that there I worry and I get this question a lot. You know, how do you decide between a product campaign and a brand campaign? I think that they great work can be in service of both.

Has to be.

Has to be.

You don't have the resources for it not to be.

Yeah. And you're dividing and every single piece of product work. And I do agree that, you know, you're a product first company. Every piece of work that's in service of a product should also be in service of the brand. Just like we spoke about earlier, every touch point in the company is in service of the brand. So is every piece of work we put out in the world, which is effectively ultimately all you see is the work we do.

Yeah.

And each piece of it needs to be in service of the brand. And so that's the chocolate. You know, you and I would have a strong point of view about which chocolate chip cookie we prefer. They're not all the same. So, you know, there's the product piece and product differentiation. You can actually make better cookies and then there's the brand piece and the story you want to tell around it.

So in fact, chocolate chip cookies are a good example because there, there's a real tangible difference. Right. Which is tastes good, doesn't taste good to me. But in a lot of, a lot of categories, service and, and product, we're, we're living at a time of good enough products and services.

Good enough. Yeah.

Right. Which is the difference between X and Y. It's just not meaningful to me, which is why I, I think it's something like. My data is a little old, but 80% of searches on Amazon for products are by category, not by brand. So in a world of good enough products and services, what is the role of brand from your perspective? Obviously, the product needs to be as good as it can be and the best that it is. But a lot of people may not understand the true distinction. It may not matter what's the role of brand.

Also, I agree with you. I think also in some spaces and some businesses, it's easier switch. Like it's just moving across and picking a different product. In other cases, whether it's switching a bank account, switching, phone switching, switching costs.

Can be super high, super high.

So it's, it's just good. And there's good enough Then there's. Switching costs are high in a lot of categories and then there's just the power of the habit.

And I would, I would have switched. I'm not even kidding. I had the most frustrating customer experience with my cell provider where it took an hour and a half to get a shipping label.

Yeah.

And like, it was ridiculous. I would have dropped them like a hot potato. Except for the switching costs.

It's very.

It was just too. It was, it was just going to cost me more time and so. But I digress. Yeah. Keep going.

But we do have to. I mean, part of the job is to fight the, the power of habit and the inertia. Yeah, that's part of the job. I mean, that's how you have to demonstrate value to consumers and try and create a sense of urgency. Urgency. Try and find a reason to switch, a reason to, to, to make the move. And also, there will always be some people, you know, your typical early adopters. There'll be folks ready. They like to be different. Different anyway, and maybe are ready to try your product. But that's the job.

Yeah. So I wonder if something you said a moment ago about, you know, work has to be supportive of both brand and product, because if it's not, it's dilutive of one, or at best it's neutral, and that's a bad use of resources. And you also talked about this at the top when we were going through the questions. But, but how do you. I mean, you have such a broad purview and actually, I don't want to make it about what you do, but how you see the world and how you see marketing. How would you advise people based on your breadth of experience and remit to balance the short and long term? How do you. I mean, I suppose it's situational. Right. Which is some days it's X and other days it's Y. But how do you think about that? Do you have a framework for approaching it?

I think first for sure, it's situational. So in our world, for example, you know, Sunday ticket subscriptions, there's a few months before the season starts and you can't miss it. When you launch a new phone, those first six weeks really matter. So this, when you launch a new.

Feature, the short term is the long.

Yeah. So you need. Clearly, it's situational. You have to, you have to nail the short term. There's no, there's no avoiding that. You have to nail the short term. But the short term can be in service of the long haul. And I think that's really important. Like a lot of short turns add up to a long haul and so you can't have them be separate things. You have to know that it's not a start stop. So you can get, you can nail the launch, you can stick the landing, you can get the first six, eight weeks of that window. Right. But then you have to keep going and it's just the start. You have to see the short term as just the start.

Right.

And that's really. And you have to, everyone has to understand that, that you know, especially if you're getting given funds internally to go do something. I'll be very clear with people. Look, this is a five year plan or it's a three year plan. It's a minimum three. We're going to commit, we're going to go do this, we're going to iterate and get better at it and we're going to give it a strong start. But it's just a start.

I wonder if there's a distinction between kind of product launch, short term, right. Where you got to nail it up front because if you don't, it's over. And kind of just for people who are, for businesses that is, who are kind of selling the same chocolate chip cookies day in and day out. Right. The recipe is, it's a hundred year old recipe. It's magnificent. You know, one of the things that our community, the marketing community has been, you know, faced with is, is this BIFSE narrative and bifurcation of brand and performance. So if we think of, you know, bottom of the funnel marketing as the short term. A conversation I'm hearing from a lot of marketers lately is, yes, we've been so focused on demand capture, we've forgotten about demand creation, which means that our market is not growing. We may be taking a bigger piece of the pie, but we're not growing the pie. And of course, that's where growth comes from. How, how for those folks might you think about balancing. Let me reframe it from short and long with bottom of the funnel and top of the funnel.

Again, a question I think that you and I both get a lot. I think it's incredibly important to do both and to not create this division between performance and brand. In my view, brand is performance, it's all performance. So well run brand campaigns drive extraordinary performance. And I think there's a language change we need to make here in terms of creating this division. I have proven time and time again that when I layer in brand work, it drives greater performance across all the direct response and all the other work. So it needs to be integrated and.

I'm sorry to interrupt, but. And you going back to something you answered when I asked about how you measure for incrementality, can you just share with our listeners a little bit about how methodologically, how you've proven that?

Well, we will have control groups and we'll run, for example digital only or direct response only, then layer in brand and when we see stuff working and so you'll see the difference, we'll also have control locations, control countries, control cities, depending on where it is, because we have to do this globally. So I will ab test a lot. So we have a lot of really robust and rigorous testing and measurement methodologies in place and we have an in house measurement team dedicated to that. I think that's very important. You need experts who are really good, especially in an engineering culture, data led culture of having that robust measurement structure in place before you even start. So you're set up to prove out the value. And it won't always, you know, there will be wins and there'll be, you know, definitely room for improvement. But over time you start to create a picture that's very, very clear.

I interviewed Kristen Cavallo, who, you know, longtime CEO at MullenLow Global, a few months ago right before she left the industry. And she said something that just, you know, landed super hard with me, which is that she says data has robbed a lot of CMOs of courage coming from, I don't know if you're not the most data driven company in the world. You're at the top coming from that environment. What do you think? And thinking about marketers, again, broadly, not just your own experience in your own company. What do you think about what she said?

I think depends how you define data. So you can sit with anybody in any company and say, look, do you care if I ask people does this brand matter to me? And they say no. And everybody, any senior exec, including the CFO will say yes, of course I care about that. And so, okay, then you care about that. You care about our customers saying I couldn't care less about this brand or this brand matters to me. And then we need to invest in that brand. So that is a data point that you can measure. And so it's really about changing the conversation to be about questions like that and bringing in data to show how people feel about your company, how they feel about your products, how they feel about your brand, whether you matter in their lives. Those are important conversations to have internally.

I Love that question. And nobody has framed it that way. And it is kind of proving the positive by asking what the reaction would be to the negative. And it makes me think of something. I think you and I might have talked about this when we were together last week, which is for the chief executive, the cfo, the board member, whomever who doesn't have a marketing experience and who again, painting with a broad brush, is questioning the role of marketing, questioning the role, the contribution of the cmo, the role of brand. One of the things I can't figure out is how they consistently, because these are very competent people, deny their own living to experience the shoes they're wearing, the clothes they're wearing, the watch they wear, the bag they carry, the car they drive, the neighborhood they live in, where they go on vacation, blah, blah, blah, as if all those things just happen to be.

I know. But I do think you can also use that as a powerful weapon. I have sat in rooms when I've discussed, for example, the budget I need to establish a premium phone like Pixel, very tough space, and said, listen, what's the car you drive and why do you drive that car and why do you pay that versus perfectly good car that will do the same things? And you can use that as an opportunity with people to say, look, this is what it takes. Because people care deeply about the brands they associate with, especially when you're a very high priced product. So you have to invest in that I think you can use. So you can use it as an opportunity, I think, which is, I think.

A great, a great way into what's going to be our last question unless we continue to digress, which is good. And it ties to actually your very first answer, which is, you know, when I asked you what marketing was, you said it was. You'd find it as a human connection. What's the process by which you think marketers and what as corollaries, chief executives need to understand about how you figure out what is compelling to human beings and what really matters.

Well, I always think of it very simply as our role is to know the user, know the customer, like inside out. Then know the magic that your company builds products, whether they're cookies or a phone or a search product or subscription, know them inside out and connect the two in a way that drives that human connection I spoke about, which is why I really care about all work being a service of the brand. Because great work should not just make people do something. Which is why I believe all companies need more than just for example, direct response, which is really about do something, take an action. They need work that makes you think and makes you feel. And if you do work that makes people do something, think something, and feel something well, over a period of time, then you're going to drive tremendous business impact, make your product successful, and build a truly deep human connection. That's all in service of a strong, trusted brand in the world.

Lorraine Tuhill, thank you so much. That should absolutely be the final word.

Thanks, Seth. Thanks for having me. As you know, I love these conversations with you.

Yeah. And, you know, I was going to say it up front, but now that we're done with the formal part, I would just want our listeners to know how Lorraine and I first met. Oh, God.

I got so far.

So it's 20. 2011, I think, right? Yeah, it's 2011. Gary Briggs, who was. Was working for you at the time, had been a client of mine, and he introduced us and I interviewed for what maybe would have been the first CMO at YouTube. Right?

Yeah.

Yeah. Needless to say, for anybody who's looked at my LinkedIn, I did not get that job, which, in fairness, I couldn't have been less qualified for. But I always say that Lorraine sent me. You sent me the nicest, absolutely no note I've ever gotten.

Out of that came a great friendship.

Yes.

So I think I won.

We both won. You would have fired me months later had I gotten the job. Thank you again.

Thanks, Seth. Again, thank you for everything you do for all of us.

I appreciate it.

Inspiring.

[Seth Matlins]

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