POV Thursdays: Q&A with Carol Phillips, President of Brand Amplitude

Carol Phillips, President of Brand Amplitude, is one of the people I most admire in marketing. Her instincts for helping brands better define their audiences and craft powerful brands through insights-based research have helped countless brands win in their respective categories. She sees things in data and consumer feedback that other miss entirely. As we enter an era where marketing dollars may well be less abundant for a while, it’s more important than ever that we unearth the facts and perceptions that will help our brands win. With that in mind, I asked Carol to give her thoughts on branding and segmentation in our dynamic digital marketing environment.

1. Can you tell us a little about your professional history?

Now that I am teaching college marketing, I realize how much of my career happened before time began. I started at Leo Burnett in the late 70’s, before Millennials were even born.

Hey! No fair. I’m the oldest living digital marketer. It’s my trademark! Anyway, you were saying…

So much has changed. What did we DO all day without a computer? (I am really not sure). I am very proud of the fact that I am still here practicing marketing. I advise my students that the job you will end up doing hasn’t been invented yet, so go study Theology or Theatre, not what BMW did 5 years ago. The elevator version of my career is market research (what we called Planning before there was Planning), Account Management for 5 mega-sized agencies, a brief dot com venture, Director of Communications for Whirlpool, and now President of Brand Amplitude. It is all going so fast.

2. What excites you about what you do for brands?

What I do for brands is help them understand who their best customers are, what they love about the brand, and how to use that insight to get more customers like them. Increasingly, this means I get to think about brands in the context of culture. The best brands don’t even seem like brands, they are a type of cultural ‘short hand’. The marketers may or may not have followed a strategy, sometimes the customer makes a brand their own without marketers even trying. Buzz marketing, viral marketing and product placement make it harder to tell what is an ad -- does it even really matter? Many of the best books on branding these days are not written by brand marketers, but by journalists and those in other disciplines. I am especially enjoying Buying In (Rob Walker) and The Culting of Brands (Douglas Atkins). The consumer has always ‘owned’ the brand, now they have more tools to claim that ownership. It is more challenging than the one-way conversation of years ago, but a lot more exciting and relevant.

3. What do digital marketers and traditional marketers have to learn from each other?

I really don’t like the underlying premise of this question. There shouldn't BE two camps. Digital marketers need to be grounded in marketing principles; they paint on a different canvas but human behavior hasn’t changed all that much. Traditional marketers know that the world has changed enormously; they have to be familiar with what consumers are doing now or they will become irrelevant.

4. What level of segmentation is useful for a brand?

Segmentation is one of those ideas that needs to be considered very carefully. It hasn’t reached the end of its useful life at all, but you need to take a fairly analytical approach. You can’t just guesstimate and divide the audience into three supposedly relevant groups and off you go.

Some have tried to ring its death bell, but there needs to be something between mass, which largely doesn’t exist anymore, and true 1:1, which still isn’t realistic for most situations. You need to be very careful -- most segmentation isn’t based on what’s really important, it’s based on superficial things we can easily measure and then translate into a media buy. The definition of a segment is a group of people who will respond differently to marketing. That’s always been a tough thing to translate into a media buy. I am beginning to think it makes more sense to market to the ways we are alike – commonalities are more meaningful to our purchase decisions than differences. There are still segments of discrete behavior, but the critical thing in digital is to recognize and strive for a sense of brand unity, while customizing messages in a cost effective manner. How’s that for a Millennial point of view?

5. What advice can you offer marketers that now have literally billions of data points available for examination?

Data is our friend, but it can only take us so far. Data is more useful in executing programs -- delivering the right message at the right time to the right person and measuring the result -- than designing them. I started out my career in qualitative research, where we used the rule of n=40. Assuming you have done the recruiting job right, after 40 people, you can be pretty sure you won’t hear anything new. That is still true in our decision-making research, 40 per segment. When setting strategy, I don’t think you have to deal with every bit and byte – go for insight. Then use data to make sure your execution is as effective as it can possibly be.

6. What are the digital platforms that will most impact peoples’ perceptions of brands in the future, like TV did in the past?

TV was (and is) a great medium for branding. Captive audience, full sight, sound and motion. High production value. Trusted source. How does it get better than that? I don’t think we will find anything to equal TV as a branding medium for a long time. That said, customer service may be on the way to becoming the big idea in branding. My friend, Lynn Holmgren, is charged with all customer service for Whirlpool. Whirlpool is approaching customer service as an investment in brand building communications. Zappos also spends deeply to provide differentiated customer service. I think these two companies have the right idea.

7. Why is there a disconnect between digital media investments and the time consumers spend with digital media?

See number 6. Seriously, I don’t think that digital media has the impact or reach yet to command TV-size budgets. Search is accepted as a ‘must’ have, as witnessed by Google's amazing cash reserves (why don’t they just go ahead and fund the bailout? They are sitting on $12Billion). But beyond that, everything else feels ‘experimental’. Social media isn’t really media yet, it’s just social.

8. Who is doing a good job of using digital media to build brands?

I think Red Bull is doing a great job. Also Victoria’s Secret PINK. There aren’t that many that stand out, and I am paying attention.

9. What advice can you offer to marketers anxious to build stronger brands through digital media?

My advice is to focus on getting the messaging right. If the message is relevant and likeable, it should not be that hard to find digital platforms that will connect with the audience. If the message is weak or not that compelling, you have a bigger problem than digital media. This has always been true; strategy and execution matter. I am reading Pat Fallon’s “Juicing the Orange: How to Turn Creativity Into a Powerful Business Advantage”. Every single one of the cases depends on an insight and brilliant creative execution. The BMW Films idea came out of an insight about the target, not a desire to leverage digital media. Sometimes it makes more sense to create a real world experience than a digital one. Marketers need to remain platform agnostic. It’s all about connecting with the audience.

Many thanks, Carol! I really appreciate it.