How CEOs Can Align with CMOs on Data with Mark Friedman

Intro: Welcome to the Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real- world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Mark Friedman. Mark is a data- driven CMO who has worked for some of the most storied brands out there over the years from Brooks Brothers, to Eddie Bauer, to Steve Madden, and a bunch of others. And I'm excited to have Mark on today to talk about data, one of my favorite subjects. Mark, welcome to the Daily Bolster.

Mark Friedman: Thanks for having me. Good to see you again.

Matt Blumberg: So one of the biggest challenges that any organization has, any multichannel, retail, E- commerce organization, quite frankly, any organization these days has is getting their arms around a single source of truth when it comes to data. There's customer data sitting in disparate systems, and it can be difficult to get your arms around that. So my question to you as a CMO is, what are a few questions that CEOs need to be able to ask their marketing leaders with respect to this topic? It can't be as simple as, is there a single source of data? How do you advise a CEO who maybe has never managed marketing closely before to really get to the answer on that question?

Mark Friedman: I think they need to first ask, why do we need this? There's lots of different answers depending upon the vertical you're in and the business you're in. But if you are like me and have grown up in multichannel retailing, the reason that you need this single source of data is because you have got customers nowadays that are buying not only through digital. They may be buying in stores. They may also be buying across multiple devices, checking out a site first on desktop or on mobile and vice versa, and then completing an order. So being able to identify Mark Friedman across all these channels is super important. So that's kind of the first thing. The second thing is asking your CMO, " Well, all right, you're going to spend all this money and you're going to build this single source of truth. What are you now going to do with all of this data?" And that's a really long answer if you're a good CMO, because there is a lot of things that you can do. I think it starts off with, from a digital perspective, your customer comes to the site, you know them because they've bought from you previously. And for most part today we're all being fed the same content, the same products, the same promotion and messaging whether you are a first- time customer or you're a repeat customer. The single source of truth, because you've now assembled all this data across multiple channels, should allow you to do that. The second thing, and it's still part of the second question, but this other thing is around activation of audiences. Whether it be in Meta, whether it be in Facebook, having this information with this identity resolution, so you're confident that you've got everything around Mark Friedman being able to populate these audiences to suppress against new customer acquisition channels or to go more aggressively to get people that are already your customers to come back to the site. All really important. And then I guess the third thing, which is almost similar to number two, why do you need it and what will you do with it, is what, from an economics perspective, will you need to support this? And what kind of an org will you need to support this? One of the things that I think people forget when they have a single source of truth, they are smart enough to build some kind of tool on top of it to extract data. It's now going to give people a lot more things to do in the business. And oftentimes the CEOs, they ask the CMO, what are you going to do? And they both forget that I'm going to have more capabilities, and brands sometimes think that these tools will allow them to save headcount. In some cases, I actually think it requires more headcount because now you have more capability. And the area where you see it a lot is in creative, the need for more content, because as I mentioned, you're going to talk differently to first- time customers versus repeat customers, and you just need more content to talk to people in a different way.

Matt Blumberg: It's interesting if you think about, here's the bonus question. Over the arc of your career, you have probably had to become a technologist where maybe you weren't when you were working in the early days in the catalog business. You had to be familiar with some technology, but it feels like that's just kind of exploded and the need to understand the ROI on technology investments if you're a marketer has just gone through the roof.

Mark Friedman: When I started, to your point, when you and I first met it was still digital, but we also had a catalog business at Brooks Brothers, you needed to know your operating systems. You needed to use some third- party technology for merge- purge so that we're mailing the same person multiple times a catalog. But today, you certainly need to understand the tech stack, your E- commerce platform, your email provider, your payments. And that's why, frankly, you've got this role, the Chief Digital Officer. In some respects, sometimes that's a marketer, and sometimes it's more of a technologist. And finding somebody that's got enough of both to really add value to the business is a challenge.

Matt Blumberg: All right. Mark Friedman, chief Marketing Officer, Extraordinaire, thank you for joining me today.

Mark Friedman: Good to see you, Matt.