Zoe CMO Bob Sherwin

BOB SHERWIN: Framing things as a test... The test is that you're going to either win and find something new, or you're going to learn. It's a very helpful way to get people that are really analytical — and those are the type of people I tend to hire a lot of — to be bold and do new things. As long as you set up as a test and you're going to learn something, it's a win no matter what. Because we're going to either be way smarter about something or we're going to find a new breakthrough.

GREG STUART: Bob Sherwin, welcome to Building Better CMOs.

BOB: Thanks for having me, Greg. Great to be here.

GREG: Yeah, yeah, this is exciting. So listen, now you are chief marketing and commercial officer of a company called Zoe. So assuming that maybe the listener doesn't know, why don't we just take a quick moment here and just introduce Zoe to everybody because it's a pretty fascinating, very science-oriented company. So exciting.

BOB: Yeah, that's great. I'd love to do that. So Zoe was started in the UK about eight years ago, and we have run the world's largest nutrition study. And off of the backs of that, we produce a ton of free content to help people make more informed food decisions by making our science and all of our research accessible to everyone. With that, the main paid product includes a series of metabolic tests that you can self-administer at home, which informs our app in ways to help guide your food choices based on your specific metabolic health and the health of your gut microbiome. So at our core it is a nutrition app, really just meant to help guide people to make the best food decisions for them every single day.

GREG: Let me ask you the dumb question. What's the advantage of finding out your metabolic orientation and then orienting your diet to that?

BOB: All of our biology is different. So my ability to metabolize and process fat is different than yours, and your ability to metabolize and process sugars is different than mine. Our gut biomes are all extremely diverse and unique. The mix of good, healthy gut bacteria and bad vary, and then the specific ones vary. So the idea being that if you're really interested in improving your nutrition, you do want to understand your individual biology and sensitivities. Even just taking a generic approach to nutrition, even if you didn't do that, Zoe offers a ton of help. I should have started with. So the difference between you and I both eating a cheeseburger and a lot of ultra-processed foods is far worse for both of us than if we were to eat a plant-heavy meal with maybe a piece of lean protein on the side. We know which one's going to be better for us. We both know that, but the difference for us between how bad a cheeseburger is for us versus how bad an extra slice of cake is could vary. And for a lot of people it's quite motivating to know that, to know the things to most specifically steer away from based on their body's ability to process that.

GREG: Your founder's a real research specialist in this. I mean he's dedicated his life, I think, to understanding some of these issues. You want to give a little background to that? I think it's a pretty interesting story.

BOB: Yeah. Well, we have two founders. One is named Jonathan Wolf. He's the host of our podcast. And he has a background in physics and data science and has been in the tech space for the majority of his career, but doing a lot of work in the data science space. So he's a big believer in the power of data. And then Tim Spector, professor Tim Spector, he's the other founder. He has spent his entire career basically as a medical doctor and doing a lot of deep research on the gut microbiome. He came to that thesis over time by studying over 10,000 sets of twins, and a lot of what they discovered is a big factor in what contributes to people's different health outcomes is actually the health of your gut microbiome. So that put him down a path of doing a lot of work and research on nutrition and how to really nourish and feed your gut because that is the center of a lot of our health outcomes that we have.

And so they were introduced to each other many years ago, and they decided that there was an angle here to help people make better informed food decisions, just more broadly. And then specifically to help people who have really weak gut microbiomes, what are the foods that they can eat to particularly nourish that and get it on a better track, because it is something you can change and influence. Genetics play a role, environmental factors play a role. If you've been recently on antibiotics, that absolutely plays a role because that's going to set it backwards, but you can improve it and you can heal it. And so that's a core part of what they decided to build a company around. And that's where we're at today.

GREG: This sounds a lot like the MMA, we're just trying to bring a little science into the world of marketing. You had our attention with that, but it's right. Especially those of you who get to be of a certain age, you start to watch the government put out health and nutrition regulations or at least advice, and I don't know about you, but it feels to me like they're just kind of making it up sometimes. They always come up with some new thing that I must do. Then it turns out that, well, no. Then some years later I didn't really need to do that, I needed to do this.

BOB: And I think we try to be very careful in the advice we give, we make sure it is grounded in scientific research and controlled tests. So the core product we have, we've conducted a proper RCT — so a randomized control test — which we had peer reviewed and published to make sure that the product we're putting out there hits the same standard as any type of medical device or pharmaceutical that's putting out there to prove its efficacy.

GREG: Right. That RCT is absolutely the way to do something like that, and I love the twin research. That's very interesting. So Bob, you and I got introduced from Kellyn Kenny, CMO over now at AT&T. She may have been at Hilton at the time that you and I first met. But, yeah, I think you and I are both big fans... We're a fan club there, right? For Kellyn.

BOB: Oh, of course. She is fantastic.

GREG: Yeah, really one of my favorites. She was board chair here for about two... She was supposed to be board chair for two years. We made her stick around for two and a half, which she ribs me about every once in a while, but I wasn't too anxious to let her move on. She was really awesome and still is obviously.

BOB: Yeah, you're a wise man for keeping her around for a bit longer.

GREG: Hey Bob, we were talking a little bit earlier. Before we get into our core topics here at Building Better CMOs, you have a real interest around what's happening in consumers changing media habits. I was just interested in some of what you were saying about that. You want to kind give a perspective there to start, and we'll chat about that some?

BOB: Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I think for me it was a natural interest because I spent the first 10 years of my career as a strategy consultant, so I was not a marketer at the beginning.

GREG: Yeah, you were a McKinsey guy for four or five years, right?

BOB: Yeah, that's right. And prior to that was business school and prior to that was consulting before business school, too. And so I jumped into—

GREG: And don't you have a master's in engineering management? I think that's you, right?

BOB: Yeah, that's right. That is me.

GREG: Yeah, pretty interesting. Yeah, very unusual background.

BOB: Yeah, I think I was just more of like a business guy, cared about every part of running a business. And operations is one where I did a lot of work right after undergrad. So it was an area of keen interest, and I've tried to apply a lot of that to actually the marketing discipline as well.

But this topic of consumer trends, I think for me, was almost obvious when I joined Wayfair. I joined in 2013 when it was in its infancy stage, and we had a huge advantage because we kind of built the initial part of the company around search marketing and paid and SEO. Very data-driven, very bottom of the funnel. But we had a big head start because a lot of the incumbent furniture players were not online and they weren't playing in the space.

So it gave us a big advantage, and I came in and got to keep pushing on those channels. And then the question was always, what's next? What are the next channels that our consumers are in? And at that point, social media was becoming a thing and that felt like a logical place to start dabbling in and testing and learning and figure out how we could make that work for us in an efficient manner. So when I came into the marketing space, it was just obvious that you need to be paying attention to changing consumer behavior. So that has been part of my playbook from the get-go. It wasn't "Well, we buy this much in TV, we buy this much in direct mail, and we spend this much in search." And adjusting budgets is something that requires a lot of discussion and debate. It was almost something that we naturally did from when I first joined and started really building the marketing approach.

GREG: What was your underlying thesis, though, to going after new media or next media? I think is kind of how you're saying it if I got that right.

BOB: That's right. Yeah. The way we thought about new channels, we had a bit of a framework where we'd say, do we believe this is a good fit for our audience in some form or fashion? And do we believe it's worth spending the time, money, and energy in figuring it out?

GREG: Is it going to have scale?

BOB: That's right. Is it a good fit and do we believe this could be scalable and worth our effort? That was the main thing. And so we just had a low bar for starting to test and learn into things because we were pretty scrappy, and we'd want to just prove it out. Is there something here? And if there was, then we'd lean in and do a lot more.

GREG: Smart.

BOB: And I think what I've discovered is over the 10 years I was there, the consumption patterns almost changed even more and more rapidly, and that has continued since then. Where consumers or where the average American, in this case, are actually consuming content — moving away from linear TV, more towards streaming services.

GREG: Absolutely.

BOB: Moving from search on Google or Bing to doing more of their searches on AI tools or just on social platforms.

GREG: Totally.

BOB: Audio, we were just talking about podcasts because we're recording one right now, but also that's one of the biggest channels for us at Zoe. We have our own podcast channel. Ten years ago, only about 12 or 15 percent of Americans that were over 10 years old listened to a podcast monthly. Now that's over 15 percent, sorry, 55 percent of Americans over that age are listening to a podcast at least once a month. So another example of just really rapid changes in consumer media consumption patterns.

I think marketers have to be on top of that and not necessarily always chase the shiny new object, the new emerging thing, but be paying attention and be willing to adjust so that they're not just using the old playbook.

GREG: Yeah. I, like you, have a little bit of suspicion about chasing shiny objects. I think marketing does that a little bit too much. However, I'll actually give you the economic background to what you're doing. I'll give you my experience. So I co-founded multi-touch attribution back in 2001 with a guy named Rex Briggs. We didn't call it that then. In fact, we didn't call it MTA for probably another 10 years, quite honestly. But over the course of five years as the head of the IAB focused on internet online advertising, I needed to validate if internet had a role in the marketing mix and what was that level that should be had. I spent $7 million over five years with 24 brands doing studies and experiments using this newfangled thing called multi-touch attribution, different than media mix modeling, and we basically validated that internet should be somewhere around — at the time I stopped doing the studies — probably 25 to 30 percent of our marketing mix.

So at the time when I started, it was 3 percent of marketing mix. Here's what I spent $7 million doing, Bob. My background is an economist. I basically proved that high supply and middling demand makes you the deal of the century. That's all I did. That was really all it was, and that's what was happening. Internet was the deal of the century, now whether or not internet remains should still be 25 percent. I don't know. I've not done industry-level studies in probably six, seven years. But basically it just validates that, yes, if consumers are using more, there's a high supply, then it's the place to go just because it will be priced cheap. It's the law of gravity almost, right? Isn't that crazy?

BOB: Yeah, absolutely. That definitely resonates, right? You want to go where the eyeballs are, but also it depends on where the other money's flowing, too. It can get crowded very quickly, which I think I experience on search marketing on Google. It became very crowded very quickly.

GREG: Yeah, exactly. And now, so it may have priced itself — and I don't want to comment on Google's business — but it may have priced itself in sort of a way, a dynamic that doesn't maybe make sense to the degree it maybe used to, right?

BOB: That's right, that's right.

GREG: Yeah. You want to hear another funny side to this? This might really kind of shock you. You mentioned earlier that question about whether or not there's cord cutting going on. I did a series of studies when I came here to the MMA, similar to this. I think we did 13 studies I remember, and they were big brands: Unilever, a bunch of other big companies. We were out to validate what a modern marketing mix looked like now with mobile in the mix, and we eventually got that mobile could be as high as 34 percent of the marketing mix. Same dynamic: high demand — I mean, good god, nothing took off as fast as mobile did — but high demand from consumers, high supply, and marketers sort of slower. It was, again, sort of the deal of the century. We published it. You know what linear television's mix should have been? And this is in the mid-2010s. What would you think? What would be the percent of linear that would be appropriate to have just on an optimized basis in a marketing mix?

BOB: On a mass brand? Maybe, I don't know, 30 to 40 percent.

GREG: Forty-five to 65 percent.

BOB: Okay, alright.

GREG: So what that's basically saying... It's funny because the news you and I would get from Adweek or Ad Age is, "Television pricing is going up, cord cutting is continuing, consumers are leaving." But the pricing going up argument in the trades was just the buyers trying to negotiate publicly with the TV companies. If it was 45 to 65 percent, what that meant is that linear television was the deal of the century. Isn't that funny? I don't know if that'd be true anymore. I've not redone the studies. I'd like to understand what's happening now around CTV, but I don't find very many marketers who buy media with a background in economics like you were saying. That's what really caught my attention.

BOB: Yeah, I think we definitely tried to buy media through an analytical lens. I was econ and finance major in undergrad, and I think a lot of the people buying media on our team we're similar. Engineers, math majors, and all that. We had a lot of more traditional brand marketers as well and creatives, but we definitely thought about all of our budget or buying decisions through the lens of ROI and sometimes would zig. One of the funny things when you're talking about cord cutting, we thought for a while that was definitely more hype than reality. When we looked at our demographics, people weren't cutting cords—

GREG: For furniture, in that case. Right? High-end purchases.

BOB: Another funny one for us was direct mail. That was one where we were a digital company and a couple of years into when I was there, we started really pushing into direct mail. We were finding we could get an incredible ROI. It was a very rich media channel. You get something in your mail, it's hard to ignore it, and the CPMs were not that bad. People thought we were crazy when they heard this e-commerce company was going into direct mail, but it was actually one of the most efficient channels we had.

GREG: When everybody else is zigging, I like to zag. It's been a whole thesis of my entire career around marketing in a big, big way. Yeah, I love that.

GREG: Hey, let me ask you this: like a lot of us, Kellyn, the rest of us, we all sort of draw a lot of inspiration and insight and knowledge from those around us, those we've worked with, worked for and so on. What's the best advice you've ever been given? If you want to make it even personal, by the way, I don't mind that. It's all good, but what's the best advice you think you've been given as you look back over your career?

BOB: Yeah, maybe I'll try to make this relevant for people that are either CMOs or aspiring CMOs.

GREG: Yeah, great.

BOB: I'll give three. I was kind of thinking about this before. I'll give three quick ones. One was from my former boss who was head of product and the CMO before I took that role. So I worked with him for several years, and he was fantastic. We're very different but also very similar in some ways. And he always just talked about the role of the CMO. To be successful in it, you have to have the mindset of a CEO. Like your job is ultimately to grow the business. You have many direct levers, but also you need to really partner deeply with the product team. You need to provide insights. What are the customers saying? What are they doing? You need to sometimes really help drive change in terms of strategic priorities of the company that expand beyond just buying media or creative. And you obviously have to do that with a lens on the P&L, and how do you make sure that you're doing this in an efficient manner. So I definitely took that to heart. I think partly because it aligned with my general management background in general, but also because I think it's the right way CMOs need to view themselves. You're basically a mini CEO. How would the CEO think about the problems and the decisions you're trying to make? How can you help the CEO just run the business better by providing those insights?

GREG: I love that. Who told you that, by the way? It was your former boss at Wayfair?

BOB: Yeah, Ed Macri. He was at Wayfair for a long time, and I worked for him for a long time. He brought me in. Great guy. He's now mostly retired and dabbling in a lot of fun hobbies down in Cape Cod.

That was one. I think the other two quick ones were for marketers who are maybe either very comfortable chasing shiny objects, let's say, or being innovative, or ones that are maybe more risk averse, which I think is generally my profile. Framing things as a test, having the mindset of the test is that you're going to either win and find something new or you're going to learn. It's a very helpful way to get people that are really analytical — and those are the type of people I tend to hire a lot of — to be bold and do new things. As long as you set up as a test and you're going to learn something, it's a win no matter what. Because we're going to either be way smarter about something or we're going to find a new breakthrough. So that was another—

GREG: What's the thing there, though? Listen, I hear your point. I totally agree, but just to be clear, what you're in essence saying is that rather than say, "Hey, I've created a big new idea," you're like, "Hey, we got this test we want to do." Is that what you're saying? Is that how you're going at the challenge?

BOB: That's exactly right.

GREG: And I love that notion. You're right, even if we fail, we win. Absolutely. By the way, you know those studies I mentioned to do internet? You know what the funniest study was? We spent $600,000 to do a study for, I'm pretty sure it was... Was it Panasonic? No, it'll come back to me. $600,000 on this study. And you know what we proved? Internet didn't matter. I mean, really, nobody likes to spend $600,000 on a study like that when you're supposed to validate the role of internet in the marketing mix. But you know what we learned from it? When you ran internet too late in the cycle, messages have been communicated and you missed the opportunity to really create value from internet. So as much as I don't know that that was worth $600,000, by the way, we still learned something that was incredibly valuable to our understanding about how to play this new media.

BOB: That's incredible. You learned something. It was an expensive learning, but you got—

GREG: Expensive learning, but you still got learning. Right. Okay, what else? You got a third one? Go ahead.

BOB: Yeah, I guess the third one is one more for general career advice for anyone, where it's really prioritizing acquisition of skills and responsibilities in your roles versus chasing titles or chasing a small pay bump by jumping around. If a new role or the existing role doesn't provide you with skill acquisition, challenging yourself, increased responsibility, then you really should start getting antsy. And I always like that framing, one, for coaching people, but also I think it's right. And I think part of my success in my career is that I guess I get impatient or bored quickly, so I'm always looking for a new challenge. I always want to have something that's making me uncomfortable because I'm not currently the best person at doing that thing, but I want to figure it out and learn and become great at it. So it's always having that next thing you're trying to learn.

GREG: I love that. I had a guy tell me one time, he was kind of a mentor to me. He said, "Don't take a job unless it makes you shake in your boots just a little bit."

BOB: Yeah, that's a great, more pithy way of describing it.

GREG: Same concept on that one. Okay, really good. I love that, Bob. Those are actually really good. I think I should probably talk to the producer here. Eric, we should categorize all these sort of little insights for people because we put a compendium of what I really learned in getting to the C-suite.

GREG: Hey Bob, let's do this, though. Let's shift gears here a little bit. Let's talk about the focus of Building Better CMOs. And the question is — which we've set you up for it — what do you think marketing, the marketing industry, marketers, what do you think that they could be missing the mark on? What could they be doing better? Where do you think we've not really nailed something or that it's critical for us as marketers to understand? Can you riff on that a little bit about what you really think marketing needs to be better at? That's the whole point of the podcast.

BOB: Yeah. I'll take a spin on that. I think everyone knows, everyone that's playing the CMO role or in marketing knows how broad the role can be, right? You're wearing many, many hats as a marketer. You're the brand steward, you're a storyteller, you're a financial analyst. You need to be technical to keep up with the changing landscapes. You need to be a strategic partner to all the different general managers or business units you may be supporting within your company. You need to partner deeply with the CFO. There's a lot of things you need to be able to do or at least be aware of and find ways to augment yourself. I think that's obvious to a lot of people that have been in the role for a long time or maybe at different companies. I think one of the challenges a lot of CMOs face or aspiring CMOs face is aligning expectations with the C-suite and your peers and the CEO of what the CMO means to them.

Because oftentimes they think of it much more narrowly or they may think of it really broad. And in either case, you need to make sure that what you think success looks like and what you think you need to prioritize and be great at is the same thing that they value. And that can vary based on, again, the size of the company, the makeup of the company, how early stage it is. I was thinking about what are the different lenses that people think of marketing. Some companies would view it as it's the growth driver, so it's all about your job as the marketing team is to own revenue and growth. In some other companies, it's more about you really need to own the customer. So growing them, but really retaining them and making sure it's a fantastic customer experience end to end.

And then in others, it's maybe a little bit different. It's really, it's about the external presentation of the brand. It's the narrative, the storytelling, and our reputation. In each of these, where I think about it, you can envision concentric circles of these three things. Some are very internal facing where your alignment with the product team or even ownership of some parts of the product experience should sit with the CMO, depending on how that company views the role of the marketing organization.

And if it's really about the customer, you may need to own some of the product, but you definitely should have a lot of skin in the game as it relates to the customer communications and customer service and policies around that because it's hard to retain a great customer base and own that if that's not something that falls in your remit. And then in others, it's all about the brand and storytelling. How much do you use that to shape and align the whole organization on what you're all about as a company? So maybe the levers that the marketer owns in the brand space is more about the external storytelling. And then the question really is how much does that shape the priorities internally, too? How much do we use that to serve as our North Star for what matters and how other functions might make some decisions on their policies or what they're building?

But I think the point here is that it's wide, and it can vary a lot. My experience has been if you ask 10 CEOs or 10 people across the C-suite and maybe even 10 CMOs, what is the role of marketing at your organization? You're going to get a different answer every single time.

GREG: So Bob, I will validate your point. About nine years ago, I kicked off a bunch of what is now our marketing organizational research with a guy named Dr. Omar Rodriguez from Emory University. We were having a closed-door one-hour session with 10, 11, 12 CMOs, and just to give framing to that, I can name names at this point. It was the CMO of GM, CMO of Allstate. They've all moved on. CMO of Dunkin, CMO of Chobani was there, CMO of T-Mobile. I mean, these are heavy-hitter CMOs. And we asked them, we wanted to have a 10-minute warmup because we were going to get to another topic. We had a bunch of other stuff to cover. We want 10 minutes, just a 10-minute warmup. We didn't tell them it was 10 minutes. We just knew in our heads. We said, what's the role of the marketing? What's the role of the CMO? One hour later, Bob, we never got to the second question because we realized nobody in the room agreed to question number one. So how the hell do we expect CEOs, if we can't define our job with some consistency, then how do we expect them to know how to manage us or even hire us sometimes?

BOB: I mean, it's a great question. I think the role of the CMO before they take that job or before they take that promotion — or it's never too late, really — is to have that hard discussion, to talk to the CEO and say, what is your expectation? Because they may have someone that's fantastic that is the head of growth, and they're a great salesperson and they're driving the product agenda. And so your role may be actually, don't worry about that. Care about it, worry about it a bit, but your job is fully external facing on driving traffic to the site and storytelling and doing that in a very efficient manner. But it could be a different answer. The expectation could be that no, you own all the growth levers and I want you to help shape actually what the product experience is by bringing in insights and conducting surveys and research and all that.

GREG: Yeah, yeah. But your point is get it on the table and then come to agreement and alignment. It's alignment at some point.

BOB: That's right. That's right.

GREG: Absolutely. Yeah. It's interesting.

GREG: There's a whole group of professionals now around our marketing org work, and I was talking to one of them earlier. And he was telling me that there's a huge misstep in that, typically, CEOs don't often understand marketing, so therefore they don't really know what they're hiring for, which is some complexity then. And I want to be respectful of CEOs, they have a lot of things on their mind to do. They count on their search firm to get it right. I don't know if search firms get it right. And the professor said something else interesting. He said that CMOs sometimes don't have the hard conversation upfront to what you just said, which is, what are we focused on here? Where are we going? What are we doing with it?

BOB: Yeah, that's right. And maybe they need to guide it, too. Maybe they've had the conversation, but the CEO doesn't understand why they're asking that or why not having alignment there could cause issues down the line. Either different peers stepping on each other's toes or frustrating each other, or just the CMO not delivering on what the CEO expected them to.

GREG: I'll tell you what came out of that research. You'll probably appreciate this having been at Wayfair. Because Wayfair was a disruptor brand, right? It was taking a new tack to a marketplace, a very old-line business — furniture — and saying, we're going to do it completely differently, right?

BOB: That's right.

GREG: And I've listened to you enough here, and I know you long enough, Bob, I understand you're different. You have the orientation of somebody who was at Wayfair very much, and I think it plays really well for Zoe. So you've figured out how to do that either just intuitively or otherwise. But here's what came out of that.

GREG: So that first conversation with the CMOs, nobody agrees. So the first thing we did, we had to go back and say, well, what is the role of marketing? What are the marketing strategies? And we got the whole entire global board, the MMA, to agree there's only three marketing strategies. Stop making crazy bullshit up out there. There's only three. And those three are brand, which is a go-to-market strategy; transaction, D2C, the transactional; and customer experience. That's it. Now, you could pick two, you can't pick three because that's not a strategy.

But you could pick two out of the three, but you needed to pick one of those three and then get alignment to the company. And all those are go-to-market and there's no science. I mean, I'm sure there's business case you could make for each, but there's no science that somebody has to make the decision that that's the go-to-market strategy. And the best example we had is that you have Harry's razors and Gillette. Exactly the same product, distributed completely differently. And if you're doing transactions like Harry's, then you want data science people, fewer brand people. When you're doing Gillette, it's a brand play at retail. And so you might not have those same skill sets in a marketer. It was really some of the most illuminating research I think the MMA has done. What it like felt to me was, "Wow, we hadn't really figured this out after all these years? We're just getting to that now?" But this is what you just said.

BOB: Yeah, yeah. No, that's right. Yeah, it's very similar framework to what I was laying out. You guys put a lot more thought into it, but I love it.

GREG: I had a team of academics who worked on it, really smart people. But yes, I've been working on it for 20 years. Yeah, isn't that crazy?

GREG: So what is the strategy at Zoe then? Is a transactional play, a brand play? It's harder when you're a small company trying to establish yourself. How do you look at the challenge there in what you're trying to do as a CMO?

BOB: Yeah, I was excited about this challenge. It was very different than at Wayfair, right? Wayfair was D2C, kind of bottom of the funnel, and we moved up and built a brand too, right? We actually did all three of those over time: built, very measured way, direct response, great customer experience, insight experience, and then built a household name brand.

GREG: Correct, and you can move between them, but you need to be clear about the skill sets and capabilities that are required as you move to a new strategy, right?

BOB: Right. Yeah. And I didn't start owning all three of them. I moved up and then took on the upper funnel stuff over time and the brand component of that over time. So I think it plays into—

GREG: So you come into Zoe, then where do you start? What do you do? How do you look at marketing strategy and the focus where you need to be?

BOB: There it's opposite. The starting point was the opposite. Where we started with brand, we started with a ton of great earned media and PR because we had so much amazing science to share with the world. And in the UK market, that was just getting picked up really well. We started with one of our founders being basically a celebrity. Tim Spector is extremely well known there, he's published great books. He's really good on media. So he was in the news a lot already. So we started with a lot of brand elements and then almost the product and customer experience followed that. We didn't have our first commercialized product for several years. So Zoe was already famous before we came out with something.

GREG: Wait, wait, how do you make a business famous and not have a business to it? Is that what you just said?

BOB: Well, the brand was famous, and we had a lot of people consuming our content, but the first commercialized product came later. So we were very famous and well known, and then we came out with our commercial product and people were clamoring for it. We sold out, we had stockouts, we had waiting lists for long periods. So it was this really fun and exciting problem to have that you are so loved that people are just waiting at your door to get your product. But then you go through that first wave of actual sales growth and then it's, alright, how do we repeat this? How do we keep this momentum going? And then it required us to start really building much more repeatable marketing motions and really start doing more to understand what did drive that demand and that brand buildup? Leaning in on what was working, what we knew was working well, podcasts being one of them. Our PR and how we have campaigns come out to showcase our science. We continue to do that, but then building muscles around buying podcast media, buying media on Meta, how do we do that in a way that's highly measured and we can rationalize putting spend behind it?

That came later, whereas at Wayfair, that came first and then we built a brand from that.

GREG: Hey Bob, I have a funny question for you. Wayfair has been such a big... I don't need you to go back and maybe comment on that. But maybe go back to your McKinsey experience. You can do it without names. So were you involved with CMOs and marketers when you were at McKinsey? Were you working with that part of the company? Okay. Do you have examples of where that misalignment kind of showed up? It's kind of a random question to sort of throw at you here for, I don't know, 12 years later. I don't know if you remember. Is that what kind of formulated your thinking? I'm wondering.

BOB: I'm not sure how much that shaped it. I think at the time it was more in hindsight. The companies we served were very large ones, Fortune 50 or Fortune 100. And I think in that era, I think marketers and the CMOs were still viewed as running campaigns. They were the ones working with agencies and running big TV-based campaigns.

And they were less tied into actual sales outcomes. They were held less accountable for that. They were less tied into the core product. That was my observation then. I think a lot of those companies now have evolved a lot, and they have changed the profile of what they're looking for in their CMOs to be much more data driven, right? Much more linked to understanding what a CAC is and how that ties to LTV and all of that. Whereas when I was at McKinsey, it was different. They weren't looking for those profiles because no one even knew what those words meant.

GREG: Yeah, yeah. That's interesting. I think that there's a lot of maybe conventional wisdom in the media and so on that the CMO job is becoming either less important or not as valuable. Kind of in the comment you just made that you might almost be suggesting that it wasn't really valuable back then because of this misalignment in some of these other dynamics. Whereas now, CMOs/marketers have to be much more focused and structured in thinking about the business in a way that they didn't before. Is that the statement? You haven't done a survey of all marketers. I'm just—

BOB: I think it just varies tremendously based on what the other C-suite roles are, right? If there's a really strong chief commercial officer, and they're more like leader of GMs and they're thinking quite holistically, the role of the head marketer may be quite different. You may not need a peer at that level. It could be more about the branded storytelling campaigns. But in an organization where you don't have that role and you have a chief operating officer and a head of sales and someone leading product, having a marketer that can stitch together those different peer functions and how we're showing up in the market and owning the customer through that entire journey, I think then the role is needed. And it probably does need to be a peer to those other C-suite members.

GREG: Yeah. Obviously MMA does a ton of research. We talk to CMOs all the time, obviously, and we do a lot of research amongst them. And I do hear a lot of the challenge in how the CMO interacts with other peers in the C-suite in particular... A very open-ended question. Do you have any sort of insight or perspective? What are your learned lessons around how to do that well?

BOB: Yeah, I mean I think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. I think the table stakes of that, it's really ensuring there's alignment on what the role of the CMO is and where they can help — what they need to own versus where they're just providing an assist role or they're playing a copilot role.

GREG: Where the CMO is playing a copilot role or where, say, the CIO relative to the CMO is playing a copilot role? How did you just state that?

BOB: It depends on the organization. It could go either way. I don't have a prescribed answer.

GREG: Okay. It was both. Okay.

BOB: Yeah, I think it depends on the company and what the CEO's vision is. It depends on the strength of those other players and it depends on the capabilities of the CMO, right? I think it just depends. I think the best CMOs in any environment are going to be good utility players. They can own the core marketing things, like the media buying and the creative and how the brand is showing up, for sure. But if they're a great utility player, maybe they are driving the marketing technology agenda. Maybe they are doing a big role around how we structure the data and how it's leveraged to personalized customer experiences and touch points with the service and sales teams. But if that's not within their skill set and that's not why they were hired, then that doesn't need to live with them. There's other functions that can drive that.

GREG: So I get that you made that sort of capability based or experience based at some level, but do you have a general thought if the CMO should own customer experience? It's kind of a big question that comes up a lot. And I'm going to give you a little insight to the question: we happen to know from research the MMA has done is that when the CMO does own customer experience, the company does financially better. But I think there's a lot of... I mean, no opposition to CDOs obviously, but sometimes CDOs own it. Sometimes it feels like customer experience doesn't sit with the CMO.

BOB: My perspective is a strong CMO should have a lot of skin in the game there. They need to care and they should be able to influence it, whether it sits with them or not.

GREG: Why is it important they have that role? I'm sorry, just go one more step on why you make that statement. I think maybe it's obvious, but go ahead.

BOB: Yeah, I mean, this could be circular because I guess it depends on the definition of what the CMO role is. And upfront we said everyone has a different definition. So if you align on that, and my definition would be they not only own growing the company and getting new customers in, but they are one of the owners and should care as much or more than anyone about how do you retain and get the most out of those customers that you've already brought in? How do you retain them and how do you get more share of wallet and all of that? So if they don't have any ability to influence the customer experience, once they've brought them in the door, they are not set up for success because they're getting those customers in based on an assumption of a lifetime value that they're going to hopefully get or be able to drive.

And if the customer experience is owned by someone who is very cost oriented only and is doing things that make customers leave, then it's going to be very hard to support that acquisition cost that they were assuming would be supported by a specific LTV. So I guess the CMO, a great one would really be paying close attention to how much it costs to get different audiences in the door and sign up. And also thinking about how do we maximize the share of wallet we're getting from them.

So both of those things can... one can come down, ideally, and one can go up, and you can grow the business that way. And customer experience is a huge part of that second part, that LTV component.

GREG: And then you get to the long term, what is the lifetime value of that customer or a long-term value of that customer. It's surprising to me the number of CMOs I think that aren't oriented towards that kind of metric. It does feel like... And you would've especially had that in Wayfair, I imagine, right? That was critical. I'm sure you guys lived or died by LTV, correct?

BOB: Yeah. It's not a subscription model. It's transactional at the end of the day. So we put a lot of effort—

GREG: Lifetime would be long, in some cases. You don't buy furniture every other day, right?

BOB: But it's a massive lever of if we can do a better... Once we get them in to purchase from us, we have their email, we have their address, we have their digital footprint. That is the best customer to continue to market towards, to have them think about buying from us for future purchase occasions because we can do it through free channels. We don't have to spend money to continue to market to them at this point.

GREG: Correct.

BOB: So we did spend a lot of time. And we do the same thing at Zoe, right? We only have two product lines right now, but we have a lot of people that are in our ecosystem who have not yet purchased from us but are avid listeners of our podcast, consume every newsletter we put out every week when we're putting out our email newsletter. They just love the content. They love Zoe. So we think about what are the moments to talk to them about our paid products? How do we get them to convert? And those that have converted, the question is what are the moments and how do we frame up the other products that we sell that we can get them into as well? The job's not done once you get them into the ecosystem.

GREG: If everybody in the C-suite, in particular the CEO and the board and everybody else, gets their bonuses based on growth — which I think is how almost every company operates. You've seen all the compensation structures for that. And if the one person who's most responsible for growth is the CMO, why isn't the CMO the most respected person in the company? I mean, I don't know. You can choose not to answer that one at some level, but it does feel like that's what we're up against sometimes. I had a board member say the other day in a board meeting, I love this. She goes, "Marketing can't be both irrelevant and the problem with the business." In other words, if we miss our numbers, you can't blame marketing when you also say that marketing doesn't have any impact. And she goes, "I get those conversations in my company all the time from different parts of it." And we're in a funny place as CMOs, aren't we?

BOB: Yeah, no, I think so. I think when things are growing and revenue numbers were looking great, it's because of everything everyone's doing, right? Everyone contributed to that. But yeah, if it's different, it's all it must be the marketing. Yeah, I think it's a weird conundrum. I don't know the root cause of that or why that is, but it's something you hear from every CMO out there.

GREG: Every CMO. Yeah. I listen to them at the board meeting and they say it a lot, right? So listen, it's kind of the challenge. It's what an industry body like an MMA is supposed to go fix, right? In some regards. If we are responsible for something as important as growth... Dr. Neil Morgan and Dr. Kim Whitler did some interesting research a number of years ago. They looked at boards of directors, and when there was a CMO or marketer on the board of directors, that company's financial results were 3 percent better than companies who did not have a CMO. And what was going on there was sort of obvious, right? Because boards are generally made up of either finance people or lawyers. These are people who assess risk, and that's all they really do. They don't really have a growth strategy. But you bring in a CMO at the board, then they bring it back to a growth strategy sometimes. I think that was the thesis of research. So we know it has impact, but somehow we as an industry, we as a profession have not sort of nailed that relationship to the rest of the C-suite. I don't know, do we just need a marketing campaign to tell them that's why we're here? I think it's more fundamental than that. I don't know. Do you have the answer, Bob? I could use it.

BOB: I don't have the answer, but I do have a bit of a thesis where I think maybe it does tie back to really being clear on what the agenda of the CMO is and what they're doing and really communicating on the outcomes they think it will achieve. So you can tie the inputs to the actual outputs that it drove. And I think, historically, it's been a discipline. You got into the measurement side of things. That was only 20 years ago, right?

GREG: Twenty years ago.

BOB: And you had a lot of breakthroughs, where for the 50 years before that, I don't think marketing was held accountable to outcomes.

GREG: It wasn't held accountable, no.

BOB: And so now we can be, and so there's the good of that and the bad of that, but I don't think every marketer is always doing a great job connecting what their inputs are to the outcomes they're trying to drive and they're expecting to drive, and owning both parts of that.

GREG: Yeah.

GREG: What's really disappointing to me, too, because MMA monitors this and has for the last, probably, 10-plus years. What's the percentage of companies that have multi-touch attribution? It was a very magical solution. In 2001, when Rex and I got together on that, you couldn't measure small media and you couldn't measure new media, right? Because media mix modeling was the... I mean, what a fail then that is, too. And your earlier point about how, one, there is new media and there's certainly brand-new consumer habits that are moving really fast. So if we don't have an ability to pay close attention to that, to find those signals and opportunities, that's a pretty big missed opportunity. So here's my point: MTA is still — and this is large-scale marketing, would be paid media markets just for those who are listening, really just for paid media — only 52 percent of companies use MTA. Ouch.

BOB: Yeah. No, it's shocking to me. It's been shocking. I came in, I was fortunate at Wayfair, we were willing to invest a lot into that, into measurement and attribution. And as I've advised in other companies, and I've been shocked that in 2025, how many still are doing some form of single-touch or no attribution at all. It's wild.

GREG: Yeah. Well, you'll love this then. One of your retail... Wasn't a competitor to Wayfair, but a retailer, right? Came to me. A CMO called me. It was about two and a half years ago, called me and said, "Hey, Greg, is there a standard for quality marketing measurement?" And I thought, wow. I said, "That's a great idea. Why do you ask?" He goes, "My CFO and my chief merchandising officer are demanding I use last-click attribution." I said, "Frank, I can't even be begin to tell you how stupid that is." I mean, there's no relationship between click and sales. I mean, in a tightly controlled e-commerce environment, there might be more of that, but as a general rule, there's no relationship between the two. So that's nuts that you guys would be doing that, they would be demanding that for a retailer, for in-store retailer. It doesn't make any sense at all.

You want to tie it to in-store traffic, that's a different issue, but not last-click attribution. Yeah, it was crazy. But this is kind of the state of the business that we got to go fix, right?

BOB: That's right. Yep. That's right.

GREG: Yeah. Listen, Bob, this has really been interesting. As I told you before we started there, I was super excited to talk to you. Like I said, you came with the greatest street credit in the world to have Kellyn say, "Hey, Greg, Bob's a guy you really should know." So I can't thank you enough for doing this. I really appreciate it.

BOB: Yeah, of course. Happy to do it. Great to connect again, and I'm glad we made this happen.

GREG: Good. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Thanks.

BOB: Thank you.

GREG: Thanks again to Bob Sherwin from Zoe for coming on Building Better CMOs. Check the description of this episode for links to connect with Bob. And if you want to know more about MMA's work to make marketing matter more, visit mmaglobal.com, or you can attend any one of our 64 conferences in 16 countries where MMA operates. Or just write me, greg@mmaglobal.com. Thank you so much for listening. If you've made it this far, then I'd like to ask for a quick favor: follow Building Better CMOs on YouTube. We have full video versions of every interview from 2025, as well as highlights from this show and my other podcast, Decoding AI for Marketing. Our YouTube username is MMA Global Marketing, or you can just go to bettercmos.com/youtube. Our producer and podcast consultant is Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm. Artwork is by Jason Chase. And a special thanks to Angela Gray and Dan Whiting. This is Greg Stuart. I'll see you in two weeks.