← Uncensored CMO
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- [00:00]
A
Hey, everyone. Now, if you want to know the secret to more impactful creator ads, then this is good news. Stop obsessing over engagement rates and start pulling the three levers that really make a difference to your brand. Now, what are they? They are creative quality, creator fame and brand fit. And they're revealed in a brand new report From WPP Media, System 1 and TikTok called the Creator Effectiveness Playbook. This is your guide to making fantastic creator advertising that works for your brand. Now, to get hold of it, all you have to do is go over to systemonegroup.com and download the report today. All right, without further ado, let's go on with the show. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to Uncensored cmo. Now this week we have got Vodafone and their CMO Beck Darley talking about how she is challenging the brand leader Telstra in in the Australian market. This is an amazing conversation. There's so many lessons in here about how to be a big challenger and also how to lead as well. This is a great conversation. You'll enjoy this one. Beck Darley, welcome to the show.
- [01:10]
B
Hi John, thanks for having me.
- [01:12]
A
Yeah, it's great to be here. And I love the fact you've turned up in brand colours as well. So anyone watching this will know notice how on brand you are today.
- [01:20]
B
Yes, I have. We talk about brand codes and brand cues. I am living it.
- [01:24]
A
You absolutely are. Even down to the trainers. Now, of course, not even people on camera will be able to see the trainers but you've gone all the way up.
- [01:30]
B
I won't put my feet up on the table, but yes, they are red too.
- [01:32]
A
Exactly. It's good to see that commitments to brand coming through. Just to introduce yourself, you've worked in many different categories, you know what brands have you worked on and maybe tell us what have you learned in experiencing so many different parts of parts of the marketing world?
- [01:47]
B
It's a really interesting place to start actually because I've intentionally built a career across categories and it's most simply because I love learning businesses and coupled with that marketing in my mind is a toolkit and it's about knowing which levers in that toolkit to drive performance. And so that's the part that I've loved the most across the experience. I, I started out through the ranks of brand and advertising actually. So the first 10 years of my career were in brand building, understanding brand positioning, customer insight and also acquisition and really understanding demand generation and building future demand. So that stood me in really good stead and the storytelling that comes with that is so powerful. I then spent the next 15 years of my career in really data, tech and digital. And what that's really given me is that full marketing exposure, that toolkit. And so that has really allowed me to know which levers are going to drive performance and where. But what it's also given me, and it's what many marketers struggled with. If I go back kind of early parts of my career, the understanding of performance and measurability. One of the things that always frustrated me was we knew brand and acquisition was working, but how did we actually prove it? And I think the beauty of what we do is the art and science. And so some of those brands and categories that I've worked across. I spent some time at Vodafone 20 years ago. We'll come back and talk about that. I worked for Sony in Japan, Ikea, I spent a lot of time in Europe and in Sweden. I worked for BMW for a time and I spent a large proportion of my career in banking here in Australia working for the number one and number two, CBA and Westpac. And so it's been a little bit of a homecoming coming back to TPG Telecom, a parent company, a portfolio of brands of which Photophone is a part. And so I suppose what I've loved and learnt the most is what I've touched on, just that breadth and the ability to understand different businesses and really utilize those learnings to power and empower the business that I'm in.
- [04:13]
A
Yeah, something will come on and talk about. Actually one thing I noticed in my career, when you're working in the big companies, you tend to have quite a narrow role, don't you? You're in charge of comms or you're in charge of PR or you're in charge of products or something like this. I remember my learning massively accelerated when I left kind of the big corporate world, went into a PE backed business and suddenly I'm running everything.
- [04:32]
B
Yes.
- [04:33]
A
You know, down to like the staff uniforms and I was answering the, you know, the Twitter handle and this kind of thing. And it's so sometimes changing context as well.
- [04:43]
B
Yeah.
- [04:43]
A
You know, where it can give you much more depth of responsibility, which is very helpful early on, isn't it? And then you suddenly realize that marketing has to make a difference to the business. You can't get away with, oh, you know, we shifted our brand, you know, awareness score by 2%. You've got to go, is this going to materially impact the business?
- [04:59]
B
I've intentionally worked for, as you say, those big, large scale multinationals. I've worked for privately owned businesses, I've worked for market leaders, I've worked for challenger brands. The thing I love the most about marketing, the impact it can have on all of them, but in very different ways and in very different contexts. It's the power of what we do and the part that keeps us getting out of bed every day.
- [05:22]
A
And then you realize as well, you change one thing and you see the effect on another thing or you can make. I remember when I was in sort of private equity about business, we'd have to make trade offs between. If we launch this new product, it means we're going to have to change the lineover. It means our customer service might drop business, but we're trying to meet demand for a new trend and this sort of thing. So suddenly you see the impact that marketing has on a whole business in a way that when you're sheltered from it in a big business, you go, oh, I'll change this. I don't have to worry about the consequences all the way through the supply chain and that kind of thing.
- [05:50]
B
Yeah, I'm a generalist and that's the part that I love the most. I have intentionally worked within all of the key marketing disciplines. They're all like my children, I love them all. But I am an absolute generalist and I can go deep enough in most areas, but I also have specialists who can go really deep and it's the trust and reliability on those people within your team and within the business that actually is what's so powerful.
- [06:19]
A
Yeah, yeah, that makes so much sense. Now we must talk about Vodafone because, and I'd love you to give it a context this, because anyone in the UK listening, I mean, I'm a Vodafone customer myself, number one network. Everyone's heard of Vodafone, you know, dominant in the marketplace. It's not the same here, is it?
- [06:34]
B
It's very different.
- [06:35]
A
Yeah, Just describe the market position and the backgrounds of the market. Australia.
- [06:39]
B
Yeah, it's really important context for your global audience. So to your point, Vodafone is number one in the uk. We hold a very different position in this market. We are a laggard number three. So we have a very dominant number one player in Telstra has between 50 and 60% market share. We have a number two player in the market, Optus sitting early 20s market share and Vodafone sits as a number three at around 17 market share. So for the global audience expecting Vodafone to be number one. We're far from it and there's been some structural issues in this market that we've now overcome, but were real barriers for us. And I might even take a step further back and just give you the Australian context for your global audience, which is Australia historically has been a market of duopolies. We have two supermarkets here in Australia, Coles and Woolworths. We have two airlines here in Australia, Qantas and Was Ansett and now Virgin in this market. And we've had a monopoly in this market on Telco, which is Telstra. And going back, we also had government ownership here in Australia until the 80s of our number one bank being Commonwealth bank, of our airline Qantas and of our Telco, which was called Telecom Australia at the time and rebranded as Telstra during the late 1980s. And I'm really not going back that far. When you think about the late 80s, the deregulation by the government meant that they were privatised and what that really did was open up competition in this market. So it was only the early 90s that Australia got its second telco brand, which was Optus, and that was followed by Vodafone being granted the third network license in this country. So really, when you think about it, what's that, you know, 30 odd years since we've had open competition in the market. And that I think is a really interesting point and, and I'll double down on that. By virtue of the government ownership, Telstra, our number one telco in this country, still receives over a billion dollars of funding from the government every year. So it's not a level playing field.
- [09:08]
A
That's incredibilion dollars. That's incredible.
- [09:12]
B
Yeah, it is. So to that end, being a third player in a highly commoditized, deeply penetrated, highly competitive market is really tough. And we're not going to win by being the same as every other competitor in our space, 100%.
- [09:35]
A
So as a challenger and as number three, what are the key principles to take on the giants? I mean, a lot of people listening will be in that position. You know, a lot of people aren't the dominant player, aren't the number ones have got less resource at their disposal, whether it's people or money or time or brand awareness, all those things. So it's a tough place to be. So what do you do?
- [09:56]
B
You know what, it's a tough place to be, but it's also such an interesting place to be. And so when I think about where we are at the moment, I would describe it as the reawakening. The sleeping giant would probably be the summary of it. And that has taken both confidence and patience as an organization. That confidence has come from a multi year level of transformation. And maybe I start talking a little bit about what's going on in the business. The business has gone through a number of merger and acquisition activities. So we are a portfolio of brands. We've got six brands in the staple. Vodafone, obviously being the key mainstream brand. That has led to a lot of work internally to really get the operational, financial and commercial efficiencies. So really the business is focused internally on being fit for future, getting all of the internal structures right. What that has now meant is that the business has the confidence to go to market. But that confidence has come from two things. Firstly, we sold our fixed fibre network last year, so it's made us much leaner and stronger. It's also given us a very, very healthy balance sheet. The second thing is we doubled the size of our network last year. So we did a network sharing deal with Optus, which means that we are now on par with Optus for network coverage in this country. And that has always been the structural issue for Vodafone. What it's also meant is that by population we are now 1% behind Telstra and Telstra has always owned network coverage in this country. So it's really the confidence now to boldly go out and talk about the fact that we are a credible alternative to the big two players in the market. The thing that we often forget though, is as much as we're talking to the external customer and consumer, we're also talking to our internal customer and consumer. And so that confidence is so important for our people. And that's part of where we've doubled down. We know, and I certainly know from my career, the riskiest place for any brand, let alone a challenger brand right now is to be safe and boring. And we are striving to be anything than that. And that is really about shaking up the long held category conventions and really calling out to consumers that there's a completely different way to think about things and not being afraid to do that.
- [12:42]
A
It's really interesting how you, because you might have assumed that you talk back, we're going to be really close to our customer. And I know you are right, but you got the internal job first, which I think is quite revealing, isn't it? Like what has to be true to be successful often means looking in and sorting out the internal things first and getting the infrastructure in place to then compete and give you confidence. I like that.
- [13:04]
B
Absolutely.
- [13:05]
A
It's a very good point. A lot of people skip that step in how do we make ourselves ready to win in a sustainable way.
- [13:12]
B
It's a hollow promise otherwise. And it was part of what attracted me back to the business a year ago. The business has done the work, will continue doing the work. We're now ready. And that's the point around patience in a business. This is a business and a group that has been very clear on what they need to do to set themselves up for that future success. And now's the time.
- [13:37]
A
There's a phrase the team at Mischief use which reminded me of something you said there, which is how can you use your competitors weight against them? You talked about the advantage that Telstra have, the billion dollars and the amazing network coverage, but you've lent into that in quite a surprising way. So just explain to everyone listening how you've lent into. What might be perceived as your disadvantage
- [13:59]
B
where challengers struggle is that they start playing the same game as the category leader and all you're doing is reinforcing the category leader. Actually, we've flipped the script so we don't have the biggest network coverage in this country. We're behind by 1.5%. But let's own the truth around that. We've got coverage of 98.5% of the population. If that 1.5% in very rural regional Australia is what you need, then we're not for you, and that's okay. So this is really about being clear on who we are and what we stand for and really having the confidence to stand behind that. And that's precisely what we've done. So to that end, we knew we wanted to talk to the market about that. We knew that we wanted to really give the market a shake. And what has been really powerful is finding the that brand Persona who could really give the market that we the jolt that we needed in a very real and very true way. And so we intentionally partnered with the American comedian Ali Wong, who has a very similar brand personality to ours. Straight talking, fearless, bold and disruptive. And really the work that we've created with her is really questioning those category norms. Actually, we don't have coverage in the middle of the outback. We have coverage where most of you live. So we're owning that. And to your point, we're flipping the script and being very clear on who we are. And we're also being very clear on value and what it represents for people at A time when they need it the most. I almost describe it as a Venn diagram where being very clear on what the business offers and what consumers need. Right now, the sweet spot sits in the middle. And that's precisely what we're doing here in Australia at the moment. We've got the lowest consumer confidence since 1973. We've got fuel prices going through the roof. Our cost of living is rising as it is in many markets around the world. Our housing prices are challenged. The cost of living is a real challenge for people. So actually, what is it that Vodafone does? Well, we have great value, mobile, but it's at a better price than the leading competitor. That's the sweet spot for us right now. And it's grounded in a real consumer insight and a cultural tension that exists. And we're really wrapping that functional need in a very strong and emotional brand promise.
- [16:44]
A
Now, just for anyone who hasn't seen it yet, just talk through the two ads you're talking about. They're both very funny and she's a great front woman as well. She does an amazing job of communicating both the lack of coverage I say in quotes and the price advantage. But just describe the two commercials you created because they're very good.
- [17:02]
B
Yeah. So the first spot sees Ali Wong standing in the outback, and she has a very unusual animal standing next to her that she's not seen before, which she calls a massive chicken. In fact, it's an emu. And she's calling out the fact that emus don't need coverage and there's nothing here in the outback. And then we cut to see Ali in a regional backyard, talking about the fact that Vodafone has coverage where 98.5% of Aussies live. We haven't built towers in the middle of the outback and charge customers for it. That's at a direct, just a position to our major competitor. And you wouldn't expect that.
- [17:44]
A
You wouldn't expect that. It's very unique, challenging behavior. It's to take your weakness and turn it into an advantage.
- [17:49]
B
Yeah, we're taking those perceived negatives and really translating them into those customer. Customer promises or customer values. The second ad is really pointed at our major competitor. We open seeing Ali walking through a suburban park, and she literally says to camera, vodafone is cheaper than Telstra. Now we beep the Telstra, but you hear enough to know that it's Telstra. Okay, so Vodafone, they give you that big fancy pants, telco experience kind of Like Telstra, only it's cheaper. We then cut.
- [18:25]
A
I didn't even notice the beep. That's interesting.
- [18:27]
B
Yeah, well, that's good. We have a beep. We beep the Telstra.
- [18:31]
A
Well done. Because I just assumed it was Telstra.
- [18:33]
B
Good. You hear enough. And we then cut to an office and we see two lawyers sitting there wearing the colours that are very clearly our major competitor. And we hear the lawyers say, did she just say Vodafone is cheaper than Telstra? You can't say that.
- [18:51]
A
Does she just say they're cheaper than Telstra?
- [18:53]
B
I'm just saying, why would you pay more? She can't say that.
- [18:57]
A
You can't say that.
- [18:58]
B
And then what ensues is a chase. The lawyers rush out of the office. They're chasing Ally. She's shouting into camera, I will not be silenced. Tell my story. The lawyers are chasing her, saying, there is no story. And we end with Ali calling out that Vodafone is cheaper than Telstra. So it's pretty bold. It's bold work.
- [19:19]
A
Now, what I want to know is what your actual lawyers in your business thought of this idea.
- [19:25]
B
Yeah. You know, this is such an important and interesting point. We talk a lot about the role that the CFO plays in marketing. There is also a really important role that legal teams play. And certainly with this work, our legal teams never once said no. In fact, they have been the safe keepers of the idea in partnership with us, bolstering the idea and really pushing us to make it as strong as we possibly could. That is the opposite of many legal teams that I've experienced. And part of that is inherent trust, transparency and engaging early, actually. And so we sat down, took them through the scripts, and as I say, instead of saying no, they helped us make it stronger. They talked to us about, well, what if you phrase it this way, what if you change this line to this? And so they. They have, in every sense, helped create this work. It's not without risk, but it's calculated risk and it's born out of a very clear strategy and a very clear vision. And then partnering throughout that process and the meticulous execution of that is where you start to see it build all the way from strategy through to what you see in market.
- [20:47]
A
I love that because you can imagine most marketers are going, oh, I don't want to show legal, because if I show legal, they're going to tell me not to do it. That's your fear, isn't it? But actually, legal are there to help you and make it better and that they'll see the world in a different way.
- [20:59]
B
It speaks to the growing confidence in the brand and in the organization and to the fact that we know we can stand behind it. It's not a hollow promise. And this harks back to the work that the organization has done over the last few years in building the network, getting all of the functional capabilities internally. Right. And being ready. And that is what attracted me to the role, knowing that I also had the partnering across finance, legal, the backing of my CEO to do this. And I very clearly sat in the interview with my CEO for this role saying to him, I'm a builder, not a maintainer. If you want someone to come in who's going to shift the dial one or two points, I'm not your person. But if you want to be brave and drive wholesale change, let's do it. And we're doing it now.
- [21:51]
A
Talking legal and sticking on the legal theme. The other campaign we started talking about as well didn't go as smoothly, did it, as you might expect. It attracted a few complaints. I thought it was a surprising, actually. I mean, it makes sense when you think about it. But not everybody was impressed, were they?
- [22:07]
B
No. And, you know, this is the thing about calculated risk in marketing and bold work. You have to be very clear on where those risks sit and be okay with that. We have really become, as marketers, in my opinion, quite safe and sanitised, certainly as a challenger. And number three, you have to take those risks and they have to be in partnership with your internal teams. We knew we would get backlash. We'd planned for it, in fact. So it's something that we stare into. It's something that I actually feel very comfortable with because embracing the discomfort is when you know that you're actually onto something. And that's what I think is really powerful about what we're doing. There was a really wonderful speech recently from Amy Ken, a social psychologist who really spoke about, spoke about the age of boring. We had to move. We've got to move beyond it
- [23:14]
A
to quote Greg for a second time already. But they've got another, quote, mischief, which is you don't have the budget to be boring.
- [23:20]
B
Correct.
- [23:21]
A
If you've got the number one position, you can afford to just blanket the entire country with your communication eventually kind of get through. If you're the challenger on a quarter of the budget, you cannot afford to be boring. No, it's not going to work.
- [23:33]
B
No. I'm outspent 3 1/2 to 1 by my major competitor. Amount spent 2 to 1 by my nearest competitor. Doing the same thing's not going to get me there. So I have to find ways to cut through and it has to be relatable, it has to be meaningful and it has to stand out. And that's precisely what we're doing. It's been really interesting since launching the work two months ago. The amount of messages and phone calls I've had from people saying, wow, that's brave. That's ballsy. Actually, it isn't. It's the right thing for us.
- [24:07]
A
The brave thing would be to be the boring thing.
- [24:09]
B
Absolutely. Absolutely. The riskiest thing you can do is be safe.
- [24:13]
A
100%. Did it get banned? Yes, it did get banned.
- [24:17]
B
It did, yeah.
- [24:18]
A
So what happened when I first ad campaigned?
- [24:21]
B
Well, we had actually concluded the campaign and it was banned at the same time. The reason it was banned by ad standards, and this is the ironic part, was for health and safety reasons and that was because we were calling out that we didn't have coverage in rural areas and remote Australia. I would go the opposite way. We're operating here in Australia in the least trusted category. We're being honest about where our coverage is and where it isn't. So that in itself has been rather intriguing.
- [24:54]
A
That's so interesting because you're absolutely right, you should be applauded for having absolute honesty and transparency about what you're not, you know, that's so interesting.
- [25:04]
B
Yeah, wow. It's a really interesting category. I've talked about the fact that it is so commoditised, it's fragmented, prices are raced to the bottom, it's deeply penetrated and so reappraisal and switching is really where your growth is going to come from. What we're doing, though, is starting to move away from pricing gigs to really find an emotional positioning, positioning with our customers, recognizing the fact that not everyone's in the market right now, but we have to cut through and find ways to achieve that mental space for people when it's so limited and so compromised. So we're doing that in an interesting irreverent way, so that when you do actually think about Telco and where you might go, we're on that consideration set. We don't have an awareness problem, we have a consideration and conversion problem.
- [26:05]
A
And what I like about what you've done with price is price communication doesn't have to be boring. There's a supermarket in the UK called Audi. It's a German supermarket, very famous for being low priced. And one of their ads is called like brands where they Kind of show you the brand. They show you the brand and they pull the Audi equivalent out from behind and you've got the price tags and it's like, like this, but like a quarter of the price.
- [26:29]
B
Yeah.
- [26:29]
A
And the amazing thing about that is when we tested it on System One, it actually got a five star reaction. So it actually beat a lot of very famous brand campaigns because it was landing an emotional point for people. It's like, oh, wow, what you mean I can get that for less. We forget because we think of price as functional and rational, but price can be delivered in a very emotional way.
- [26:49]
B
Absolutely. It always has its place. But what we've really created here in Australia is we've trained consumers on price. Actually, we're not standing for more as a category. And I'll applaud Telstra for the work that they've done over recent years to really start to shift that. And we are doing the same thing, but we are adding the zag to their zig and doing it in a very rich competitor way, which is really resonating it, isn't it?
- [27:24]
A
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- [28:30]
B
Absolutely. I really dislike the term performance marketing. All marketing is performance, actually. It's just doing it over different horizons and to different objectives. We have to, and this is the art and science I talk about, we have to give ideas the breathing space and not optimizing them in a spreadsheet. And unfortunately, that's where some of the understanding of marketing in business has fallen down. The shift towards science and numbers should not be at the expense of brand building and great ideas. The great marketers are finding that balance because we have to deliver that dual objective of building future demand and driving current demand. The thing I talk a lot about in our business is driving the business for now and building the business for the future. The two are both incredibly important. And that's where the role of my finance partners plays a really crucial part, Particularly when I'm operating in a portfolio environment.
- [29:38]
A
Totally. It's the old phrase, not everything you measure matters, not everything that matters can be measured, which is a key conversation, isn't it, to have with finance? But bringing finance into your thinking, I think is a really smart move. I remember having Jen Chase on the podcast. She's the CMO at SaaS, and she actually got the finance team to present her marketing strategy. I thought, that's a Jedi move, isn't it? You know, like, get the finance. And of course, they're now really enthusiastic kind of proponents of the marketing plan. I'm like, that's such a good one.
- [30:08]
B
Yeah, it's great. I am putting my entire marketing team at the moment through the mini mba, the Mark Richmond program. I've invited finance to do that program with us. And, you know, we, we talk as CMOs a lot about marketers needing to understand the language of the business and the language of the boardroom. I'm such a proponent for that, but it has to come the other way. And so this is helping the business understand what we do as marketers. There is a lot more strategy to what we do than what I think many of our, our peers in the business might realize. I also have finance attend our off sites, so we're deeply partnering with them to help them understand what we do and in turn help drive the business. One of the most critically important things that I did when I started in the role was really unpack what drives growth for the business, what drives the revenue. And so I unpacked the unit economics across all of our portfolios, every product in every brand, to understand what was the margin, what was the customer lifetime value and ultimately the tenure of those customers. The importance of that is, and every marketer will understand this, we have a finite budget and we have limited resource. We have to make the select and strategic decisions around where we're investing. And to that end, the fact base helped me make those decisions in partnership with my product teams, with my finance teams to ultimately drive both the short term and the Long term, but the long term is very much around those revenue gains over time. And so what we've done is completely flip our investment portfolio strategy. We are now very, very clear on certain portfolios that were underinvested, that now are receiving more investment. And we're also very clear on portfolios that were over invested and we needed to reduce investment. That has been a fundamental game changer for not only the marketing team to give us the focus that we need, but to also support the conversations with our partners, really grounding it in driving both the short and the long term goals and objectives of the business.
- [32:36]
A
Yeah, I love your engagement with finance and I love the fact you're thinking about it in two ways. We often say we've got to get to know the language of the board and language of finance more. But like, flipping it the other way around works just as well. And I love the long term thing as well. And we forget because a lot of people's interaction with finance is like getting their budgets cut or updating their expenses. You know what I mean? That's their interface. Right. But actually the CFO cares about returns to shareholders, long term, health, the business, increasing margin, increasing average realized price per deal or whatever. All those things are more affected by marketing than anything else in the company.
- [33:11]
B
Absolutely.
- [33:12]
A
And so why wouldn't they want to have a conversation with the marketing team about how we can grow those things in the long term?
- [33:18]
B
I am now able to quantify that true return on marketing investment. So I can tell you for every $1 I spend, where it will be returned and when. And not every dollar is equal to the point on portfolio strategy. So that's the level of partnering that I now have with my product team and my finance team. I talk internally about the fact that I don't own the marketing budget. We own it together and we make those decisions together based on what are those short and long term ambitions driving the outcome for the shareholders and importantly, the duality of driving the outcome for the customers. It's very easy to drive a financial outcome, but we have to be driving it for the customer.
- [34:01]
A
I love something you just said there, explaining the when that's so important, because very often when I've been in that situation, it's like, you're not worried, John. You know how to return. Like they asked me a week later, I said, this was always meant to be a six month return. Come back and ask me in six months. The other thing I've done as well, which I've noticed works, is when you have a Particularly good quarter. And you haven't necessarily pulled the price lever, I remind people. Do you know why we're having a good quarter? You know the decision we took 18 months ago where we sat in a room and no one agreed with this idea I came up with and it's just driven all these inbound inquiries of the maximum number of customers. That's why. So you also have to do the retrospective.
- [34:41]
B
Absolutely.
- [34:41]
A
This is why we're in a good position.
- [34:43]
B
Yeah.
- [34:43]
A
And the reason I found that so important is that success gets banked into the everyday very quickly in an organization and then what happens is you start to lose momentum because, oh, we just assume that our customer numbers are going to grow every year. Well, they don't. Unless you keep on doubling and tripling what you're doing to do that, you can't expect the same things that they can keep delivering.
- [35:04]
B
We've got an incredible case study in our business. We have a brand called Felix Mobile. It's five years old, completely digital, end to end. It's the only carbon neutral brand in this country. For every month the customer is with us, we plant a tree. We're almost at 5 million trees to celebrate their fifth birthday. The interesting part though, talking about the investment strategy, we're spending less year on year. We are outperforming every single target and it's exactly what you speak about. We are so clear on the value proposition to market, who we're talking to, where to invest and over what period we'll deliver that return. It's been an incredible case study for our organization and a case study that builds trust. And my point earlier about knowing what marketing levers to pull, it's one that is absolutely becoming the benchmark.
- [35:59]
A
Maybe the flip of that situation is how you manage the portfolio because you've got what, five or six different brands? We've got six brands, hundreds of different plans for all sorts of different customers. How do you decide where to put the resource, which ones to back, what you tell the team when they're not going to become this month's focus?
- [36:18]
B
Yeah, it really does come back to that investment strategy and that has been what has underpinned every decision that we've made. We have now operationalized that into a full year view of marketing spend, contribution to short term and long term targets. We sit down and we review that every single month with our finance and product teams. What's important in this though is the market doesn't stay the same, competitors don't stay the same, the operating environment doesn't stay the Same. So we sit there together and we're making the changes that we need to, to dial up or down performance. We're shifting funds between product lines, we're shifting funds between brand lines. That's the operational level. But what is the overarching principle on that is that we are very, very clear on, on the brand positioning for each of those brands. We know exactly where they'll play and where that customer is. The value of that is we're complementing, not cannibalizing. And that was a very different place to where the business was just over 12 months ago when I started. And that is the strength that we have as a large portfolio of brands. We can play offense and defense and we're covering all ends of the market in our ability to do that.
- [37:42]
A
Yeah, no, I can see that. It's kind of playing chess, isn't it? Putting different pieces in different positions on the chessboard to take the competition. I wanted to ask you as well about customer first. So reading your annual report as well, you talk a lot about being customer first and you also talk a lot about making it easy for the customer. How do you create competitive advantage by being close to your customer compared to your big rivals?
- [38:06]
B
The first thing I would say is like any other business, we're on our way. We are not perfect, no business is. But what we are very clear on is what the customer needs from us right now. What's going on in the category more broadly, what's going on in culture, and what is it that we can deliver against that? And that then flows through each of our brands and it flows through every single touch point. Customer experience, product development, our retail stores, our digital end to end experience, and of course the brand. We're on our way. But that level of clarity is really starting to drive where we go and
- [38:52]
A
how we show up and do you. So you presume you don't control all those things in your role, but you influence all those things. I think this is a really big point for most senior marketers is you come up being good at marketing, but what makes you successful at the top is being good at influencing everything and setting direction and doing that. So what are the kind of skill sets required to have the business wide impact versus a marketing impact?
- [39:18]
B
You know, I think every good CMO is operating at an enterprise level. I, yes, I have marketing in my title, but that's actually not my job. My job is making sure that the business understands our brands, our customers and how we show up for them and doing that very differently to make sure that we are complementary, as I said earlier, that is everything from the playbooks that we have available for the teams, joining different teams in different forums to help them devise product roadmaps, propositions, employee value propositions, and everything in between. So it is, it's the part that I'm really enjoying the most, is moving beyond just that core marketing function to really drive the red thread for Vodafone through the organization, the purple thread for tpg, et cetera, et cetera, across all of our brands and doing it in a really different way to how it's been done before.
- [40:23]
A
I got a rude awakening to this point. I gone from a kind of corporate, fairly large corporate role to private equity backed. And I was on the board for the first time. And I remember being really shocked at the first board meeting that the marketing conversation was in the aob. And I remember saying like, why am I here? And they said, if, if you, if we had hired you for marketing, you wouldn't be on the board. You're primarily a board member that just happens to be responsible for the marketing function. And I was like, oh, completely changed how I thought, you know, I'm here to do strategy, I'm here to do people, I'm here to do planning, I'm here to do M and A, I'm here to do all these other things. And suddenly it changed. I was kind of sat quietly, not interacting for like the six hours of the board meeting and then waiting so I could show them my new label design, you know what I mean? And it just suddenly realized, oh, I'm here to change the business. And I just happened to do marketing as part. I think I worked out, I spent 10% of my time on marketing in the end. And people forget this as well. What gets you here won't get you there.
- [41:21]
B
Absolutely.
- [41:22]
A
And getting you there is a whole new skill set that doesn't involve a lot of marketing.
- [41:26]
B
Absolutely. I've got a team of marketers. Yeah, they're doing the marketing.
- [41:29]
A
No point. You do the marketing. Is that because you just sit on top of them and they'll get really annoyed?
- [41:33]
B
No. And this is where my role is. The generalist is the part that I value the most. Yes, I'm a marketing generalist, but I also play a role in product, in customer experience, in finance, in legal. The part a lot of people don't realize is the strategic value of marketing within a business in driving the growth.
- [41:55]
A
Totally, totally. And what advice would you give to somebody who wants to go on that journey in terms of creating Change in an organization, because a big part of this is it's easy to come up with the idea. The idea is usually the easy bit. Right. Creating the change in organization is quite hard. What advice would you give someone who wants to kind of create the sort of change that you're bringing to Vodafone?
- [42:14]
B
It's such a good question. I think the number one thing has to be your allies. Find the coalition of the willing. So many marketers think that they can just push the idea through and keep pushing on it. Actually, you need all of those partners that I've described working with you to land the idea. The other thing I would say is don't be afraid. The courage, the bravery is exactly where you need to be playing right now. The riskiest thing that you can do is be safe and boring.
- [42:52]
A
I totally agree with you. Very early in my career, the first sort of big change I led ever. I remember going to the CEO and asking for some advice, because first time in a boardroom, first time putting a business proposal together. I was fairly junior, you know, I was kind of like, in doing something brave, very brave at the time, I was prepared to leave the company if they didn't say yes. I'd kind of put everything into this, into this proposal. And I said. I went to the CEO and I said, what advice do you have for me before I go to the board? And it's a really odd response in one sense. He said, remove every reason for the board to say no. I was like, oh, that wasn't what I expected. I thought you're going to say, have a great P and L, or like, create a vision or something. He said, remove every reason. Anyway, so I took him on it. I took him on it and I went round to every board meeting, sorry, every board member, not board meeting, sat down with them. I said, tell me why you'd say no to this proposal. And then they gave me all the blocks and all the reasons, and a lot of things weren't things I expected. They were like, oh, the same idea has been presented seven times in the last seven years. So there's fatigue around the idea. No one's actually presented the solution. They've always presented the problem and this sort of thing. And so I learned everything about the politics of getting something through an organization. What the supply chain director cared about, what the HR director cared about, what the finance director cared about. And I remember it was really funny. So I got to the board meeting and I decided this was maybe a bit brave. I put up all the reasons why they said no. Love it in one slide. And then the CEO turned around to me and he said, given that John has already answered all these questions, I'm going to make an assumption that everyone here is about to say yes. And it was the shortest board meeting I've ever been in my life because I'm like, but hang on a minute. I'm really prepared to kind of argue all down and like force my way through and by force of personality, get this thing. Agreed. It was a massive lesson for me because you need to understand where are people in the organization, what influence they have, what position they in today, where do you need to get them to. And you're much better doing that outside of a meeting. If you do it in the meeting, you're almost certainly dead.
- [44:55]
B
You have just described the level of understanding and influence that you have to have at these senior levels. The conversation and the decisions are often made outside the room.
- [45:08]
A
The meeting is never the actual meeting. Yeah, I learned this way too late, by the way, my career. It's true though, isn't it?
- [45:14]
B
The other thing I'd say is embrace the discomfort. You've got to be uncomfortable. I have to feel uncomfortable. I want to feel uncomfortable. I challenged my team and my agencies to make me feel uncomfortable. My team shared some work with me yesterday for an upcoming campaign and I said to them, push it even harder, push it out another 10%. We might need to bring it in five, but we're pushing it out. And with that, the other thing I said to them is fail fast on this. It's a big bold idea. Let's push it hard, but if it's not working, let's fail fast. That's the other ingredient.
- [45:55]
A
And people underestimate quite how much you learn in failure. Success teaches you a bit. Failure teaches you a lot. And what you often learn in failure sets you up for massive success. I did a years ago, so I got my first CMO job. It's quite a funny situation. I just joined the company and the HR director had this wonderful idea which was basically the. The CEO. Sorry. The C suite was seen as out of touch with the team, right. We got our employee opinion survey. Big gap between how we are perceived and how everyone else is perceived. So her idea was really simple. We are going to become the people that do the training. So the finance training, the marketing training, the sales training. So we had to deliver the training right? And therefore everyone would get to know us and get to learn from us. That was the idea I just started. And so she gave me an open scope said, okay, well, you can do whatever you want because you've just started. Will give you a free break what you want to talk about. And I just read this book called Black Box Thinking and it's amazing book by a guy called Matthew Side.
- [46:54]
B
It's a great book.
- [46:55]
A
And have you read it? Yeah. It's good, isn't it? And I love the fact that learning from failure teaches everybody in the industry how to be better. And airlines are a great case study. Airline crashes are fortunately a lot lower than they used to be because of this. So I'm like, oh, this is brilliant. I'm going to tell everyone about my five biggest failures. And it was amazing. Yeah, it was incredible. And the twist in the presentation I did, I probably do again, I'd dig it out. But the twist was I spent 50 minutes telling everyone these five epic failures. No one could believe the new CMO was so honest about all the things he got wrong. Right. But the twist at the end was I then showed them what happened exactly after those failures. And all my five great successes came straight after the failures because it taught me everything I needed to know about the product, the category, the market competition, all those things.
- [47:43]
B
Yeah.
- [47:43]
A
You know, were learned in that. So I love your failure fail fast point because the quicker you can get those learnings, the quicker you can get to success and the better you'll be.
- [47:52]
B
Absolutely.
- [47:52]
A
That's amazing. Maybe to round off. You've given us so much, really amazing advice there. If you picked one thing looking back at your career, so go back and tell your younger self from your seat here today, what would you be telling her back?
- [48:08]
B
Your instinct. I am an instinctive marketer. And you want to hold onto that, but you want to balance that with all of the science, but not in a way that the science and the data leads. It will only ever help you build out that insight and build out the understanding, but back your instincts.
- [48:37]
A
I love that a lot. And we need to repeat that because there's an assumption in business that the left brain is more important than the right brain, isn't it? That facts and figures and certainty, we're all about risk mitigation, but actually it's instinct, creativity, relationships that make all the big things happen that we can then count the results on later. And so we've got to have a, you know, a whole brain approach, I suppose, to use that analogy. Yeah. To it. Bring the two things together. Love it. That's a great bit of advice, Beck. Thank you.
- [49:04]
B
Thanks for having me.
- [49:06]
A
So I hope you enjoyed that episode of Uncensored CMO as much as I enjoyed making it. Now, by the way, I've got a new newsletter, so if you'd like to get my thoughts on the One Thing that I take out from each episode every week, then do subscribe to the One Thing newsletter. I'd really appreciate it. Also, I have another podcast just launched, Uncensored Renegades with the fabulous Corey Marchisoto. She is one of the world's best CMOS. She's an absolute rock star. Every week we pick one topic, spend 20 minutes trying to fix it. So check out that it's in your feed. Uncensored Renegades. And finally, I want to give a huge thank you to my sponsor, System One. They generously provide so much support for this podcast, it would not happen without them. So big thanks and lots of love to System One. I'll see you next time.