Stop the Presses: TV Still Works

The presenter spoke with a certainty of a televangelist offering a laundry list of directives to his flock. “Times have changed” he intoned and “marketers must change with it.”  “You can’t control the conversation, you have to discover the context, not try to dictate it,” he shouted. “Context is more important than content” was followed by “You are competing for attention against everything.”  Heads in the audience were nodding dutifully while I started reaching for my Buzzword Bingo playing card just in case he had more. And he did. But then he said two things that made me laugh out loud, “Only Bozos buy eyeballs” which was followed by “You don’t want to be at the airport when your ship comes in!”  Evidently, “TV is dead” and “we’re never going back.”

I laughed because it reminded me of the “Bring Out Your Dead” scene in Monty Python and the Hold Grail when an old man protests “I’m not dead yet” and John Cleese replies, “Oh yes you are, don’t be such a baby.”  Truth be told, TV spending at $42B in 2015 still represented 42% of all ad dollars. Yes, digital spending especially mobile is rapidly gaining ground but it is lunacy to suggest that TV should be thrown on the trash heap when many brands are still deploying it effectively.  Which brings me to my interview below with Tad Kittredge, who at the time was the Associate Director of Global Marketing at Burt’s Bees.

Now about to become the Director of Marketing for Clorox’s Brita juggernaut, Tad was once a strategic planner at Renegade, and one of the brightest minds to pass through our doors. He left Renegade to go to business school and has been rising through the ranks at Clorox ever since.  Read our interview below and you’ll see why.  Placing a big bet on TV for Burt’s Bees, Tad and his team saw sales triple, not just at brick and mortar stores but also online. Of course, it wasn’t just about the media, he also made sure the strategy was sound and the execution fresh. Although Tad is no evangelist, he certainly offers an inspiring yet clear-eyed perspective on real-world problem solving.

Drew: Can you give me a little bit of background on the challenge you faced with Burt’s Bees prior to your recent campaign?  

Burt’s Bees has been pioneering natural personal care for over 30 years. Our Original Beeswax Lip Balm with peppermint oil is the #1 selling sku in the category and has really become synonymous with the brand. The flip side of being a trusted icon to millions of passionate consumers, however, is that you can appear old and boring to the next generation and that’s a dangerous place to find your brand. A disruptive, new competitor entered our category and quickly attracted younger consumers. We suddenly started losing households and market share for the first time in our history. We realized that this was the wake-up call we needed to redefine our brand’s future.

Drew: You and I talked about making sure you identify the right problem before you go about solving it. For example, you mentioned that “increasing sales” is not the right starting point.  Can you talk a little bit about the process (how, why) you and your team went through to make sure you were focused on the right challenge?

A great strategy or idea always starts with asking the right question. In a world where there is so much data at our fingertips and a demand for immediate answers, I find inspiration in a quote from Albert Einstein: “If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” Design thinking has some great tools for properly defining the problem. One of my favorites is repeatedly asking “Why?” or “How?” to ensure we’ve struck the right balance in defining a problem that it’s specific enough to focus a team but ambiguous enough to allow in creativity. In our case we had to translate “Why are we losing market share?” into “How can we drive more impulse purchases with younger consumers?”. We then found a simple insight, most consumer only know our peppermint flavored balm, that led us to our strategy and campaign idea of “Uncap Flavor”

Drew: We also talked about how product development and marketing should be in lock step.  Can you describe how product development for your lip balm line was an essential prerequisite for the new campaign?

Marketing begins and ends with the product. You can spend as much money as you want on an ad campaign but your core product or service is what the consumer builds his or her relationship around. We took the insights behind our marketing strategy and instead of just applying them to our marketing campaign, we looked at how to infuse them into our products, our packaging and even where and how we distributed our products in store and online. This led us to develop new lip balm flavors, a different naming architecture on packaging and a new sales strategy. They might be old school, but with the growth of social media, it’s even more important to ensure that you get your “4 Ps” right before driving talk and relevance online.

Drew: So now you have a new line of lip balms and this being 2015, one might assume that you put all of your marketing dollars into digital, right?  But you didn’t.  Can you talk about your media mix for this campaign?  

Again, it goes back to asking the right question and ensuring you are answering the question versus chasing a solution. Beware the marketer who starts the conversation with “We need a new digital campaign” or “We need to be on Snapchat”- you’ve already missed the most important part of that decision process. In our case the media objective became how to drive rapid awareness of our flavor variety with a seasonal product. As sexy as social media is, TV is still the best hammer to hit that nail so we started building our toolbox around it.  Of course we supported it with a full marketing mix but that became our big bet.

Drew: Wasn’t that a risky bet putting so much emphasis on TV?  Was there any evidence that TV would work or was it more a leap of faith?  

Risk is an often misunderstood concept. As any good investor knows, risk and return are often correlated. So when your growth aspirations change you need to ensure that your acceptance of risk is adequate to support those. In our case, we looked at our potential options and identified the smartest bets to best address our problem and hit our growth goals. TV was simply the smartest bet to make.

Drew: If this hadn’t worked, it might have had a negative impact on your career at least in the short term.  What emboldened you to take this risk?

There are three approaches I’ve found helpful for addressing risk. The first is to really asses the risk of doing nothing. All too often we assume the status quo looks like today, when in reality competitors will keep pushing and consumer preferences will keep shifting so the do nothing scenario is really negative or often an accelerated negative option. I call this the burning platform. Sometimes you need to look down and see your feet on fire to make jumping look a little less scary.

Second is to define a “no regrets bet”. I like to think of business choices in terms of an investment strategy. If you can make enough safe choices that act like bonds for your business, that frees you up to make a bigger bet on a risky stock. Start by identifying how much loss your business can afford to absorb in pursuit of a new growth vector and that’s probably a good starting budget.

Lastly and most importantly is to win the battle before it’s fought. Marketers need to get out of their bubble and partner with their sales counterparts to leverage bold marketing choices and secure incremental displays, distribution and merchandising programs. Meeting with a retailer and saying, “We are turning on TV for the first time in our 30 year history. How can we help you disproportionately win over those consumers in your store?” is a really compelling conversation that leads to better integration across online and offline, in-store and out-of-store execution. Ultimately that kind of Marketing-Sales collaboration helped us put a lot of incremental revenue on the board before the first ad ever aired.

Drew:  How did it all work out?  Did sales meet or exceed expectations? Did the TV impact both online and offline sales?  

We’ve been thrilled with the success of our integrated program. We’ve seen our sales growth triple in the year following the launch and Burt’s Bees is again the fastest growing lip balm in the US. Interestingly we saw our biggest lift happen online despite the heavy investment in TV. Seeing more than triple digit growth in those online channels was a very nice surprise.

Drew: Looking back on this campaign, what are the key lessons you’d share with your fellow marketers?  

First of all, a good marketing idea can become a great one when it’s integrated across all consumer touchpoints. That means looking at how to influence the product, the package, the retailer and then the marketing campaign, all behind a common, consumer-driven insight. Second, the biggest risk is often the risk of doing nothing. So don’t be afraid to swing for the fences when the right pitch comes at you. And lastly, an insatiable curiosity is a marketer’s greatest asset. Never stop asking that extra question which can unlock the answer for the team.