In part one of my interview with Rich Smith, CMO of Ditech Financial, we focused on Ditech’s sponsorship of NASCAR and how that helped build broad awareness for the brand. In part two, we’ll broaden the lens and explore the brand’s overall strategic approach, internal training to improve the customer experience and a program that aimed at improving brand loyalty (offering another great…
Category: Interviews
Is Mark Hanna the Tom Brady of CSR?
Mark Hanna, CMO at Richline Group, is a diehard New England Patriots fan and like all of his brethren is in a good mood as the Pats rack up more post season victories. I try not to hold this kind of fanaticism or misplaced loyalty against Mark — I mean you can’t really blame a guy for where they were born, right? And…
CMO Insights: How Marketing Can Take the Lead
As this is my first blog post of the year, I’d like to focus your attention on the power of positivity. Don’t gag! Seriously, the first step to getting something big (or little) accomplished is believing that you can. Conversely, if you harbor negative thoughts about a particular challenge chances are you will outright fail and then fall back on the…
Revlon’s Lovely “Love is On” Campaign
Admittedly, I’m a biased blogger. I love big ideas. And I am more than happy to celebrate big ideas even if my agency had no hand in creating them. Think of it as a form of largesse. Or jealousy. Either way, Revlon’s “Love is On” campaign meets all of my criteria for a big idea: 1) It’s emotional. What’s more emotional…
CMO Insights: Drilling into Content Marketing
Hu-Friedy is a mouthful of a brand name which may or may not have been on the mind of Hugo Friedman when he founded his dental instrument company back in 1908. More than a century later, Hu-Friedy is a global leader in its category and yet, quite remarkably still completes 80% of the manufacturing process by hand. According to their website, “they meticulously…
CMO Insights: How to Score with Content Marketing
Content marketing is one of those things that is easy to talk about yet extremely hard to get right. It’s not enough to have a clear strategy although that is essential. It’s not enough to tell compelling stories across a wide range of platforms. Even with paid media driving views and influencers adding their audiences, there is no guarantee that your…
CMO Insights: Focusing on a Superior Customer Experience
Todd Merry is the CMO of Delaware North, a gigantic company that you many not have heard of but have probably interacted with. How is that possible? Well, first here are a couple of key facts–Delaware North is privately held yet has revenues of more than $2.6 billion and has 55,000 employees worldwide. Those employees work around the globe at venues like the…
CMO Insights: Bringing Passion to NASA Social Media
Putting aside TV’s Big Bang Theory, America is not exactly into science. We celebrate sports stars over scientists, rock ‘n rollers over researchers and movie starts over mathematicians. It shouldn’t be a surprise therefore that our teenagers rank #36 in the world in their understanding of math and science. One could link this to a broader trend towards anti-intellectualism and the…
Cause Funding + Prepaid (+ Social?) = WeCareCard
Next week at the Social Media Shake-Up, I have the privilege of moderating a panel called Why CMOs Won’t Invest More in Social Media. Based on our pre-panel discussions, it should be a lively conversation featuring three terrific CMOs: Katharine Mobley of WeCareCard, Scot Safon formerly of The Weather Channel and Bill Koleszar of American Family Care. Why this panel? From…
CMO Insights: Building Loyalty Through Sampling
This is part 2 of my interview with Daniel Lubetzky, founder and CEO of KIND Snacks and author of Do the KIND Thing, a book I’d recommend to anyone, especially those intrigued by the notion of doing well in business while doing good. In this post, we dive deeply into the evolution of KIND’s loyalty building activities. Several items of…