Jaguar Land Rover North America CMO Charlotte Blank

GREG: Charlotte Blank, welcome to Building Better CMOs today.

CHARLOTTE: Thanks, Greg. Happy to be here. Looking forward to our conversation.

GREG: Yeah, so now just for the listener – in case, for whatever reason, they didn't look at the cover art or something — you are the US CMO of Jaguar Land Rover. It's called JLR Inc. Is that right?

CHARLOTTE: Correct. Well, that's new. The rebranding from Jaguar Land Rover to JLR is a hint at one of our topics probably today, our House of Brands strategy.

GREG: Oh, okay. Okay, very good.

GREG: You pointed out when we were talking there previously, since Land Rover tends to be... I mean we're going to get into more around sort of how you execute that, but you caught my attention. Land Rover really sits with entrepreneurs for some reason. There's a high propensity of entrepreneurs within Land Rover ownership. Is that what you said?

CHARLOTTE: Range Rover. Yeah, so part of our House of Brands strategy is that we actually no longer go to market as Land Rover, but that's now sort of like the parent company. Range Rover and Defender, in particular, each have been flourishing and growing distinctly so that they are luxury brands in their own right, which has opened up a lot of interesting discussions and research about what really differentiates a buyer of a Range Rover versus a Defender. So you have to get a lot deeper than the traditional demographics that we're all familiar with, and that's where we unearthed this great insight that specific to the full-size Range Rover buyer is this wildly over index toward entrepreneurialism.

GREG: Yeah. Listen, I owned a Range Rover at one point and would consider myself an entrepreneur, so it caught my attention.

CHARLOTTE: Really. We see it everywhere.

GREG: But listen, here's the funny thing, though. Let's kind of give the listener here sort of more background. So you describe yourself as a professional nerd, obsessed with experiments, an evangelist of scientific leadership.

CHARLOTTE: Those are all things I would say.

GREG: I have done dozens of podcasts. I have dozens, many dozens of board members who are CMOs, and I've not yet had one use that as a descriptive. And I'm super excited, but tell the listener more about why.

CHARLOTTE: I love a catchphrase. There's a few: lead like a scientist, psychology by way of marketing, or the reverse. Yeah, yeah, that's kind of my story. I've always sort of been in marketing but by way of psychology, and for as long as I can remember, I have just been so moved and interested in what makes people tick. And that started forever ago. I studied it in undergrad, majored in neuroscience, and then since then have woven in between more academic-oriented roles and more applied, traditional advertising or brand building, global marketing roles. But always with one foot in that space of keeping up with the research on what motivates people, what drives them, what differentiates them.

And I still think there's so much untapped potential to bridge those two worlds and encourage marketers and leaders, in general, to lead like scientists — meaning run experiments, build data-driven hypotheses, et cetera.

GREG: So I don't have your street cred on that, although I would've gotten into marketing for a very similar reason: because I like the idea of persuading consumers or moving people in a direction. But MMA has done a lot of neuroscience research, funny enough, as a nonprofit association. We actually, a number of years ago, put headsets on people's heads and then watched for brain activity. And what those experiments got me, which I thought was so interesting, is that we think we're asking consumers for what they think is going on, but consumers have no idea really what they're doing or what's happening.

CHARLOTTE: It is so true, and once you know that and you start going down that rabbit hole... Lately I've been obsessed with the nature of consciousness and what is reality, and you just start pulling that thread and nothing, no one knows anything about what's true. But from a marketing standpoint, we find that all the time. We just did some really interesting research on just lower funnel performance marketing assets — which features should we highlight in these Meta ads, for example. We could talk about 50 different elements of the Defender, which are the things that are most motivating. And this simple experiment showed these wild differences in when you just ask people to self-report which of this list of, say, 25 things do you find most compelling versus when you statistically analyze when shown certain features, which ones actually predict behavior? Night and day difference.

GREG: It is kind of crazy, and there's a whole bunch of neuroscience elements, too, in design. In fact, I've seen a project by a professor, I think she was at Harvard if I remember... No, University of Washington. I actually remember now. And she has gone through and tried to analyze how design... So what design moves people to persuasion and elements of design is what she's really looking at. And what caught my attention about that, there's no way the consumer is consciously making those decisions. There's something inherent, maybe as far back as the Neanderthal, that's driving some of that behavior with people or sort of that action, activity, or orientation. Very interesting.

CHARLOTTE: And there's no such thing as a neutral design. The placement of every button, the framing of things, the sizing of things, every single element of it influences consideration and decision-making.

GREG: Yeah, it's so interesting. And I know the industry. The ARF, the Advertising Research Foundation, is trying to do some work around neuroscience. Actually, you're involved in the ARF, aren't you?

CHARLOTTE: I'm on the board of, yep.

GREG: Okay, good, good. Yeah. So I know that Scott McDonald there has been spending some time to try to further develop neuroscience. MMA would love to work more on that. We had some additional research. We just didn't get a lot of pickup from people. I just think the marketplace at some level wasn't ready for it. But it's incredibly interesting. In fact, you actually got some insights.

GREG: You did some work with The Atlantic, the media company, and focused on leadership. Can you talk a little bit more about what that project was, what your outcome of it was, and what the insight was that led you to work on that?

CHARLOTTE: The Atlantic piece is live now. It's actually the start of a major platform we're developing for Range Rover, which goes back to the insight we were discussing at the top of the call about entrepreneurialism and this insight that Range Rover owners are 6.5 times likelier than any other luxury auto brand to be founders or owners of a company. And we see that just anecdotally when we speak to our owners, we have Range Rover House events and we host dinner conversations with them. And there's a common psychology and sort of self-identity around being sort of self-made, a bit of a scrappiness to them. They're incredibly successful people, sort of by nature of the brand and product, but they're not typically your corporate climbers, your CFO of the company, or your banker. They founded something original, or they maybe took over a business and grew it.

They're incredibly intellectually humble and like to learn from other like-minded individuals, and they're really drawn to this sort of space of that distinct flavor of leadership. So we've been really playing with that idea and wanting to elevate that. So we started with a really beautiful custom content campaign with The Atlantic where we featured Will Guidara, who's a partner of ours, someone we all admire. I mean everyone loves... First of all, he's the loveliest guy you'll ever talk to. But he's really unique in the success he's built as a hospitality entrepreneur and the success he saw in Eleven Madison Park and growing that restaurant to the number one in the world, all through this unique idea of unreasonable hospitality. And that was like his brainchild. He grew that into something incredibly differentiated and successful. So it was his way of being an entrepreneur was the lens we wanted to kind of capture. And so we filmed this piece in the Tennessee region and captured some really cinematic photography and video in the vehicle. But it's early. The campaign has only recently launched, but it's already breaking records, actually, in terms of engagement, video completion rates. Things that you can immediately measure, it's working really well. Social sentiment, people just love him. His book is so popular and the connection to the brand is resonating with people. So we're really encouraged by that.

GREG: It's a total piece of film. Absolutely.

CHARLOTTE: Cinematic is a word we're always looking for, yeah.

GREG: Yeah. I love that. It's really beautiful and, I think, also additionally inspiring, just as you said before. Just quickly for the listener, if they were to find that, just give them a couple of keywords they can search in Google to be able to locate that.

CHARLOTTE: Range Rover, Will Guidara, The Atlantic. Yeah.

GREG: Okay, good. Yeah, I encourage you to go look at that, everybody. It's just a beautiful piece. It's the kind of work we'd all want to do is how I'd put that. Okay, listen, let's jump in here a little bit because we're going to get into a lot more, we're going to come back to the whole neuroscience dynamic. By the way, let me ask a funny question. Having children who have just finished their schooling, so watched them go through the picking, having picked degrees that they then completed. How in God's name did you decide to do neuroscience? There must be 10 of you in the world at 18 who thought that was a good idea.

CHARLOTTE: Not at all. Actually, I went to Emory in Atlanta and that degree, neuroscience and behavioral biology is actually their most popular major. So it's wildly popular because everyone is interested in people. And this was an interdisciplinary degree that let you borrow from lots of different fields — from more hard sciences, the biologies of the world, to more anthropology, sociology, even religion and philosophy — any lens through which you could consider what makes people do what they do all ladders into this interdisciplinary process of understanding people. So it's a really popular field of study, and now that I've built a career in marketing, I think that's even more the case. Everyone in marketing is a psychologist at heart. I think that's everyone's favorite part of the job or many people.

GREG: I think so.

GREG: But I will say, and in fact I wasn't sure I would mention this, but we are kicking off the Possible event next week in Miami. So this will happen after that event. But my opening talk is basically saying that I don't think marketing/marketers respect science enough. They don't appreciate it, they don't learn enough. And listen, that's a very complicated question. What am I doing, telling everybody to go back to school? I mean, I don't know that necessarily. But to realize that whether you know it or not, there is science underlying what you do. And some of the decisions that you might be making them on intuition, you'd be better off if you pushed a little bit more for the science dynamic.

CHARLOTTE: And it reminds me of my favorite quote from a behavioral scientist I worked with at a previous company. She said that "behavioral science is a verb, not a noun." It's not about the theory that you might know or the textbook conversation you might have about psychology, but it's the practice of running experiments, basically. The scientific method and how scientists go about making new discoveries or determining little bits of the truth one piece at a time. It's the process. And that applies to any field of decision-making, certainly in marketing. Many of us are already doing that just by running campaigns in digital media, for example. We're AB testing, we're constantly seeing what works better. And I think there's room to make that more interesting by digging more into the why. Why does the, say, red one work better than the blue one? So that you can start to get those generalizable insights. But just the practice of designing a proper experiment that's randomized with a control group so that you can isolate the impact is table stakes but, in many cases, absent. So to your point about marketers not embracing the science or whatever, if you're not running proper experiments, that's really the place to start and what I mean when I say lead like a scientist.

GREG: Yeah, well I had the CMO of Campbell's on here. She had a degree, her undergrad. And by the way, undergrad degrees inform so much of how people come at the world. It's funny. So her background was chemical engineering. Okay.

CHARLOTTE: Yeah.

GREG: So her point was, it was very funny. She goes, "I see marketers too often when given an assignment, they say, 'How big is my budget and how many people do I get?' Rather than saying, 'What is the hypothesis, and then how do we validate or invalidate that hypothesis?'"

CHARLOTTE: Exactly.

GREG: Because the latter is what an engineer scientist asks.

CHARLOTTE: And what is the problem we're really trying to solve? Yeah.

GREG: So interesting. Okay, so listen, let's jump into a couple of things here.

GREG: So great universities, great opportunities, interesting science oriented, and lots of experience. You were at GM before and so on. What's the best advice that somebody's ever given you? As you look back and say, wow, that really still sits with you today, maybe you continue to pass along. What is that?

CHARLOTTE: I think you primed me, but I really think the best advice I've ever gotten, and I've thought of this for the rest of my life, was when my dad dropped me off at school. When we talked about that process you just described with your children about choosing where to focus and all that, and he just said, don't major in business, just major in whatever you think is interesting, but you'll learn business later. You have your whole life to learn business on the job. Take a class or two in financial accounting so you know the language, and now you could do that just online, you don't even need that. But he's like, just whatever you think is most interesting is what's going to keep you engaged and you're going to actually want to read and want to write and want to lean into it. And that's the point of school. This might sound out of touch now, I know that now college has gotten to be so unaffordable and we have this AI taking over, and there's so many different dynamics than when I was going to school. But I just really believe that... Maybe it's a cheesy way of saying follow your passion, but that was the advice: just see what interests you and that the rest will take care of itself. And in my case, that's played out.

GREG: Listen, as a father of daughters, I'm struck by a story of a daughter actually listening to her father. That's when it gets my attention. That's not going to be my main point. I'll tell you what I told my kids, and it's very similar. I said, listen very carefully. Somebody, a professor likely, is going to say something to you that's going to totally transform the direction of your life. I think that's inevitable. College is that opportunity. I went to university a number of years ago. I still remember some of the stuff I heard that sort of informed some of my thinking today and changed the direction of where I was headed. And I think it's such a pivotal time, and there were openness to new ideas that aren't just brought up by their father, mother, whatever. It's very interesting, right.

CHARLOTTE: So true.

GREG: Was there a moment in that experience at university that kind of transformed how you looked at the world? And then how did you actually get to neuroscience, behavioral sciences?

CHARLOTTE: I think I was interested in it before school because I remember that being part of the decision to choose Emory was the strength of their psychology program.

But there were a few professors that had that indelible mark on me. There's one who comes to mind, a philosophy professor who studied the origins of religion and how it is that human beings evolved to develop religion, et cetera. But he taught this really popular course on logic and reasoning that was a really attractive course to people across disciplines because it just sort of taught you how to think and reason and make arguments, and what we were saying earlier about isolating the problem to be solved or the issue. And that was a really foundational, I think, stepping stone for me. And I've kept in touch with him. I still know that guy.

GREG: I love that. This is a dumb question, but I'll see if it's interesting, you can make it more interesting than what I'll ask. Was there a particular learning from neuroscience that has really educated how you look at the world now? Given the obsession I have with this, having not done it in your obsession with having done it. Is there something about neuroscience you look back that really you went, "Oh my god, I never realized that totally transformed my thinking"?

CHARLOTTE: It's hard to isolate one insight, but I think the popular application of it now, just to use the notion of System 1 and 2 thinking that Daniel Kahneman popularized or when it started to bleed into behavioral economics, that there was this sort of step change in thinking about human beings from primarily rational, economic calculators to social animals that are making decisions subconsciously. I mean, that's a huge area of thinking, but that's still... I think the most direct application to marketing, for example, that the way you influence decision is not through rational persuasion. It's through those subconscious design choices you mentioned earlier, or it's through social proof and leveraging. Influencers and celebrities is essentially tapping into a 30,000-year-old mechanism in our brain. So I think that key distinction of what Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, made accessible and really embedded in the culture, I think is kind of the most important takeaway.

GREG: Charlotte, this is very bizarre. I am actually in the process of revising my opening talk for Possible next week, and I'm including System 1, System 2.

CHARLOTTE: You have to.

GREG: There's a point that I'm making there that that's the right way to go at it. And I just literally figured that out last night, and I was working on it earlier today. It's very funny. I'll tell you one thing I learned from neuroscience, you'll maybe laugh at this a little bit. So we did a bunch of studies a number years ago to understand the brain's reaction to ads. And one of the things that we found is that consumers will tune out ads in less than seven-tenths of a second. The brain will make the decision, it has nothing to do with your attitudes, your opinions, or anything else going on. I mean it can be influenced by some of what you believe about a brand. But that said, the brain is making the decision for you. It's filtering out information before it can get there. And so in doing these studies, one of the big analyses... I don't remember how many we did — 75, 100 — putting things on people's heads and monitoring actual brain waves. And I wanted the big analysis... And you can look at me and understand why I'm saying this. I wanted to know how slow old brains were to young brains. That was my question. I wanted to understand, is there really degradation of what's going on? And I then happened to meet a neuroscientist separate from this project, and I mentioned I was so interested to see what happened with it. She goes, the good thing about neuroscience... brains, our wiring, doesn't change speed.

And I thought, oh, that's kind of interesting. I didn't realize that. I don't know why I feel like I can't pull up information like I used to. That's another factor, but I loved that. Okay, good. It's not the wiring getting old.

CHARLOTTE: Well, yeah, it reminds me of one of my favorite kind of comforting things I like about behavioral science is it highlights how much more similar we are as human beings versus how different we are. When you hear generational stereotypes, or men are this or women are that...

Maybe there's some tiny differences at the margin, but at the deepest root of how we make decisions and what really moves us, those sort of levers of System 1 and 2 or the social decision-making, those are so foundational that we all share them and those transcend culture. So in an advertising context... And we have some really great recent examples in research on how important it is to localize and optimize for those cultural differences. But at the very core of it, you have to get those basics right. That truism you mentioned about the brain sort of tuning out if you don't catch them in the first mini second or whatever it is, that applies regardless of which country or age or name your demographic differentiator.

GREG: Yeah, I guess that's what international travel does for you. It teaches you at the end of the day, sure there's some bad people in the world, but there's not bad civilizations. There's just people. Right. Interesting. Okay, well listen, let's get to the big question here for Building Better CMOs.

GREG: Okay, so as you look in your experience as a marketer and been at a couple of different companies, your experience in that as you listen to either your peers or those who work with you, what do you think that marketing or marketers maybe don't fully appreciate or understand? And again, I think we know where you're going. What do you think that they don't get? And then a little bit on why is it so important that they start to think differently? So let's start with where you think the missing opportunity is and then delve into that.

CHARLOTTE: Well, I mean, yeah, we've talked about it from a few different angles, but I still see so much opportunity to bridge that gap between science and marketing applications. So I wish I could see your talk next week. That sounds like we've got a lot in common. And I'm sure this varies by company. We, at JLR, actually are very strong with the experimentation mindset, at least locally. We're always running experiments. Where marketers have a lot to gain is continuing to do that. But I think imbuing some sense of meaning to what it is that you're testing and where are you getting your hypotheses from in the first place and are they coming from a psychological insight? That's where a lot of our most interesting work recently has come about, like with the House of Brands strategy, for example, in trying to see where there are differences between our brands and which resonate with the different audiences.

That's where another angle of psychology has really been interesting for us to see. There are hundreds of academically validated dimensions of psychological metrics, be it the Big Five personality traits, or locomotion versus assessment, or even traits that can be predicted based on geography and where you live. This organization we work with highlighted one that said mountainous regions actually predict your level of openness, one of the Big Five personality traits, or all of these fascinating things that do differentiate us to some degree. And we're able to test people for those and then correlate them with likelihood to purchase each of our brands to identify some differentiators, little nuggets of insight that might make us go, oh, either that could inform a test and then that test could inform a hypothesis. So I guess where I'm going with this is it's common practice to run AB tests and to see what happened if I put an important button at the top of the page versus the bottom of the page, or what if I swap these two images? But if you're just doing that each time without a really meaningful insight driving the hypothesis, you're not really getting something generalizable that you can then apply to the next and kind of keep growing on it. So I guess that's sort of the 2.0 version of leading like a scientist. If you're running experiments, great. Now where are you getting your ideas from? I think is the next frontier of where we could get really interesting insight.

GREG: So Charlotte, maybe for the listener, why don't you talk a little bit on what's your process, what are the kinds of... I realize it's maybe non-standard or if there's a standard approach that you sort of look at. Like when you kick off trying to understand whether it be the House of Brands strategy for the company, or getting to individual models, or any of the past companies and products you've worked with, how do you do it? Walk us through some of that. If you were to instruct people.

CHARLOTTE: Depends on the question at hand.

GREG: I was teeing off as sort of this idea of consumer insights and understanding the underlying motivations of how people look at the world, at least from that standpoint. You want to go another direction, that's fine, too. I think it's all interesting, but yeah.

CHARLOTTE: Well I guess I'll plug a company we've been working with recently called Hive Science. This was founded by someone I've known from the behavioral science world for some time. So they're behind that methodology I just described where they're able to apply at scale a whole host of hundreds of these academically validated psychological traits and test for those and then correlate them to our different brands. So that's been a really useful tool for us. But I think the process that you asked about is, again, just going back to the basic plumbing. Really isolating the challenge and the problem that we're trying to solve and breaking that down into testable questions is basically the process. And the intuition and the culture that we've tried to build around that of approaching things scientifically is really what matters. And then the rest kind of unfolds from there.

GREG: Okay. So it's been a while since I've been inside an agency developing ad campaigns, but it used to be like we'd hold a series of focus groups that would hopefully just give us insights. We then go run some quantitative research of some kind, maybe survey base, and then we would write a brief and ads would be created. Okay, so that's old school. So how are you starting to modify that now? What is Hive doing? What's going on there? Maybe go another level on that.

CHARLOTTE: Well our creative is largely developed centrally by the global headquarters in the UK. So I think the role that we play in the US marketing team is to optimize that creative for our market.

So we would take a combination of insights we've learned over time based on those generalizable insights we've gleaned through experimentation and qualitative/quantitative research and then continue testing different versions. And that's been a big mission of mine over the last couple of years is to encourage lots of versions of things. Don't just put all our eggs in one shoot-to-brief, shoot-to-script asset, but create multiple versions or at least have lots of extra footage that we could use to tinker. Because we find that even just a half-second adjustment here or there makes a huge difference on everything from short-term engagement — like some of those biometric indicators you've mentioned — to actual long-term effectiveness, which we measure at least, maybe it's more midterm, but we measure how an ad is driving our organic search activity, which we know is strongly correlated with future market share.

So if we run a TV campaign, we can optimize the creative or media placement based on the likelihood or the rate at which people are going to put our brand into their search engine after. So we have all kinds of ways of determining success and the one that we focus on the most depends on the goal of the campaign. But anyway, that whole process helps us to identify what works best in the US, and my role and mission is to encourage us as a creative community to think about effectiveness and localization and make those tweaks. So it's an art and science when it comes to persuasion and all of that whole process, but the data is there. If we just are willing to put the inputs into the system and try different versions, we can find these really unexpected, outsized improvements.

So a recent example is the campaign we have live now for Range Rover Sport with Theo James. This is called the Velocity Blue based on the dazzling electric blue color of the vehicle in the spot. And it's doing really well. Theo is incredibly popular. He really is an archetype of the brand, and the spot was designed to evoke a sense of modern luxury, but with that really dynamic, charismatic personality of the Ranger Rover Sport in particular. And the original version, as it does today, shows Theo kind of racing around the English countryside in a beautiful, classic British estate and showing the capability of the car by racing up the stairs and over these sort of challenging environments, which is a staple of how we show the product. But the original version had a couple of extra scenes that showed him interacting with other people watching him or even animals kind of turning their heads and looking at him. There were a couple of extra scenes that, to our American eye, felt distracting. We said, is there a little too much going on here? And that was not an observation of our UK colleagues.

Thanks to the vendors that we have and the technology and the tools that we can use, we are able to try what happens if we cut a few of those scenes. Just simplify it, dumb it down for lack of a better word, so that you have more car, less distraction. And we found this enormous leap in engagement and brand recall and recognition, but only for US audiences. In the UK, the reverse was true.

So it provided data for what had been previously sort of a stereotype-driven, subjective debate about UK versus US audiences. But it really showed that the expectations and experience that people have with advertising can differ by market, and that the US needed to hit the nail on the head and get the message in and get out quickly. So that testing is so worth it and that extra work upfront can make a big measurable difference on the brand.

GREG: What was the kind of testing you were doing there? This is a dial research in a room kind of thing that you're trying to look at that parsing? How do you measure? How do you evaluate second by second if that's how I heard that?

CHARLOTTE: Well, you don't need to do second by second. We do that sometimes, but in that case we had two versions. What happens if we keep this extra scene versus what happens if we don't keep the extra scene? And we did a simple AB test against a traditional ad testing audience that was a Kantar thing. But we've also done some of that second-by-second, more biometrically oriented work with a recent Defender spot. And that was really interesting. That tracked sort of a mix of cognitive engagement versus emotional attention metrics. I take some of that sort of biometric work with a major grain of salt. I think it's much more important to look at the end results and the outcome. Are people remembering the brand at least or then, once it's live, are they searching for us or otherwise engaging or ideally are they purchasing the product? It's so difficult with the long purchase cycle. But the second-by-second work is really helpful because, as I mentioned, the cutting a half a second here or there does make a big difference. So sometimes the bio indicators can give you a sense of why. And I have a question that we always teeter it with Defender because it's such an adventurous, heroic brand that's always in these epic locations and...

GREG: The Sahara Desert, I suspect, is where most of the shoots are, right?

CHARLOTTE: We were in South Africa recently. Yeah, it's all over the world, Namibia. But it's like is it a good idea to scare people is a question I always put out there. We have a recent out-of-home campaign with a big crocodile right next to the car and it's like, well it definitely grabs your attention. Is that good or bad? So that's a really interesting space to be studied.

GREG: It's so important. I had the opportunity to co-found multitouch attribution about 20 years ago. I was trying to solve a problem for internet advertising and understand it's the mix, and media mix modeling didn't do that. So we created MTA. What we found, though, is a lot of digital ads were failing. So it's very hard to do cross media optimization when the damn ads fail. Like what's the point? The one I remember — I don't know if they could be mad at me for this — I think it was Colgate, I think. But they had created something for toothpaste and they had put the actors in white lab coats in order to make it sound more scientific. It was so unbelievably off-putting to consumers that it was almost like it was a horror movie. They looked away because, I'm assuming, it had something to do with either dentistry or some variation of that, but it was like the imagery that you thought would communicate was the worst thing you could have done. And so we actually pointed it out to them, they ended up revising the ads. All that really matters, it meant so much.

CHARLOTTE: I just met the CMO of Pfizer who told a really great similar story about working with System 1 to optimize, again, like 50 different versions of that incredible Super Bowl ad they ran this year. And their challenge was wanting to create an emotional connection with people and communicate their platform around cancer research. And it's such a sensitive...

GREG: That's a noble cause.

CHARLOTTE: ... life-changing, deep topic that you have to tread so carefully between building association with the Pfizer brand but not seeming like you're trying to take credit or overly commercialize. And she, again, found just this fraction of a second depending on how long they lingered on the guy in the lab coat with the Pfizer logo made a huge difference in terms of how people... They wanted to remember it but remember it positively. They tinkered and tinkered and tinkered until they got it perfect, and it really paid off with all of their accolades and brand impact.

GREG: What do you think, though... There's been a big thesis in advertising in particular that we should really depend on intuition, that the research can't get us to the big idea... You know kind of where my general comments are going there. I don't know how much it still exists, but we shouldn't be testing ads. You've even heard people kind of go in that sort of stake in a position. How do you look at some of that?

CHARLOTTE: Yeah, I think it's lazy. I mean, I think it's a false choice to say there's art versus science or creative versus data. The whole creative process is inherently scientific and any creative will tell you that a good tight brief, with tight boundaries is helpful for the creative process. And the question is, what are those boundaries? What are you asking the creatives to do and what problem are you giving them to solve? And if you just say, go out and make our car look cool, that's not helpful to them either. That's not where good ideas come from.

But if you come in and say, we have this insight that Range Rover and entrepreneurialism or Defender and moment of inflection, people are in this state of transformation or change or becoming, which is something that we've learned about Defender audiences. That gives you something to work with and it gives you a platform to say, yeah, of course we want to show the vehicle looking awesome and doing cool stuff outdoors. That's table stakes. But we have competitors that are doing that, too. What makes it uniquely Defender is to bring to life that human insight. So I think that's all part of the creative process. There's science and psychology at the core of it.

GREG: Yeah, I often like to say, gravity exists whether you believe in it or not, science exists. It's in the background whether you believe it or not. In fact, last year... You and I might be very similar, I just don't have the advanced knowledge you do. Last year, my opening talk for my CEO & CMO Summit was basically there's science even in magic, all the things that they're doing, and I rattled off all the sciences that exist. Now, whether or not the magician knows all of those or not, she or he is acting against them, you as the audience are responding based on that. There's always science. Doesn't mean that's only the answer and we present it differently, but we need to respect that gravity exists whether we want to choose to believe it or not.

CHARLOTTE: Actually, yeah, magicians are a great example. When you study neuroscience and learn how optical illusions work, for example, they're tapping directly into those processing mechanisms.

GREG: They're all sorts of that kind of stuff. Right. You said earlier that organic search, you can tie organic search activity to actually future market share. Is that how you said that?

CHARLOTTE: That's a widely reported stat. Gosh, what's his name? He's one of the big heavy hitters in the marketing academic world. It'll come to me. But he identified that the strongest correlated KPI that's sort of within marketers' toolkit is organic search activity. If people are going in and actively searching for your brand, then that has an incredibly strong predictive... that it predicts future market share. So it's a useful KPI for us because it's too far apart for us to just go straight to sales and say, which of our campaigns or even what role did marketing play in driving sales?

GREG: I think Range Rover, Jaguar, we can call them luxury products. Is that, yes? Okay. Just making sure. Just making sure.

CHARLOTTE: If Range Rover's not a luxury product, I envy you.

GREG: Okay. Well, let me tell you where my point was going. My wife was in fashion, so I've looked at a lot of different industries over the years in different capacities and listen, I think that luxury, they really do... There's a pretty well-known fashion designer that still approves every single ad that they produce and what she's doing in that case, sort of obviously having talked more about it, is she's saying, "I have the best judgment of how to present this brand to the consumer." And I'm like, I hear you on that, but marketing's a significantly more complicated issue than just that, and I want to be somewhat respectful. Like pretty pictures of things.

It is just, it's how you place it, how you optimize it, how you perfect that. It's just what you just talked about here, and this is a major, very well-known fashion brand. And I was like, oh my god, they're just so living in the dark ages. In fact, I felt bad for the CMO I was talking to because I thought your hands are tied at the behest of a founder. And I'm not saying founders aren't important to a business. So I mean, I'm a founder in essence here, but it doesn't feel like the right thing to do. And luxury has always depended on the vision of one creative expert.

CHARLOTTE: Yes, so true. That is the standard approach for luxury brands, which is why the mantra I've kind been pushing is, "Effectiveness not only aesthetics." Aesthetics are important, but it's got to work.

GREG: I'm going to get really off track here, and this is part of what I'm going to talk about next week, but we actually have a thesis now that all targeting segmentation has been done wrong, that it's been wrong for decades. And in fact, what we're doing is we're saying you need to look at brain science to make the segmentation decision, not do this sort of what we tend to do, which is this match consumer kind of, 'They bought before, we go find these people again.' Or they meet some other sort of dynamics or whatever that we've made up in our minds. So what's interesting about that is that I have a feeling that then the way that we're placing media is taking otherwise campaigns that could have had extreme effect in us and crushing their value before that campaign even has a chance to respond.

CHARLOTTE: Yeah. I think that the research is really clear on that, that we've gone past the point of diminishing returns and into the point of squeezing the life out of effective campaigns by overdoing the targeting and the performance marketing through media selection.

GREG: I think it's from the wrong media selection, by the way, is really what... But go ahead.

CHARLOTTE: Even if you were able to perfectly isolate, I mean, we have this problem with our brands just given the high household income of all four of them, frankly, but particularly Range Rover. There aren't enough people out there to capture an optimal mix. So it actually makes it easier for us to make what the science is showing is the right decision, which is to be a little bit more general than you'd think based on the trends and the culture of marketing, which is to be hyper targeted, one on one, blah, blah, blah. Actually, we need to take a giant step back and remember how brands grow and how this all works and how advertising works is to build those memory structures with as broad a group as could possibly be relevant to slightly increase the odds over time that when they're in market, they'll purchase from you, which is really antithetical to particularly luxury brands and how they want to go to market. So that's been a big part, but my team is... we still do a lot of TV. Connected TV kind of gives you the best of both worlds and enables us to be as targeted as possible, but we're very comfortable casting a bit wider of a net than perhaps those who look like they could afford the product today.

GREG: Right. Okay. So we might, Charlotte, and this is a terrible place to leave the listener. We might actually be saying different things, by the way. I think that means at some point we're going to have to have further conversations. A little bit on that one. I think here's where I'm going to wrap this up.

We both agree there needs to be more science in the marketing business, whether we know it or not. It's there. We need to respect that, apply it, understand it, and move forward. In fact, I opened up last year's Possible with saying that I believe the marketing profession is not much further along than the medical profession was in the mid-1800s when they thought bloodletting was a good idea to cure all that ails us. So I think that we're on a journey here. It's going to take time, but the good news is we have a lot of room to really improve the business and the impact that our business has. Right?

CHARLOTTE: Of course.

GREG: Yeah. There it is. Charlotte, thank you. This is probably the most stimulating, science-based conversation I've had in all of these, so I can't thank you enough for doing this. You're really appreciated. Thank you.

CHARLOTTE: So good to meet you. Thank you.

GREG: Thanks again to Charlotte Blank from JLR for coming on Building Better CMOs. Check the description of this episode for links to connect with Charlotte. If you liked this episode, you might also enjoy my conversation with Lyft CMO Brian Irving, Nissan Global CMO Allyson Witherspoon, and Campbell CMO of meals and beverages Linda Lee. Now you can find those episodes on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you are hearing me now. At MMA, we're working to make marketing matter more through conferences, research, and education. If you want to know more about MMA, just visit mmaglobal.com. You can also email me directly, greg@mmaglobal.com. Don't forget, Building Better CMOs is now on YouTube. Just go to bettercmos.com/youtube to start watching. Our producer and podcast consultant is Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm. Artwork is by Jason Chase. A special thanks to Angela Gray, Dan Whiting, and Rob Floyd. This is Greg Stuart. I'll see you in two weeks.