Brunswick CMO Lauren Beckstedt

LAUREN BECKSTEDT: I talk a lot about hand raisers. They build networks faster. They get put up for more opportunities because they're naturally curious. They're hungry. Who wants to convince someone to engage with them or work on something? You want the hand raiser who's like, "I'm dying to get involved with that. Let me just do something on that project." That has really opened many of my doors in my career.

GREG STUART: Lauren Beckstedt, welcome to Building Better CMOs.

LAUREN: Thank you.

GREG: So you and I've known each other for a little while because you've been on the board, is it four years on the board of the MMA?

LAUREN: Yes. Four years. I think that's right.

GREG: Yeah, that's great. I still remember the day, I think it was Deb Wahl who got us connected. And I don't even remember how she said, I think it was some variation of, "I know this really smart woman who's really interested in playing more of an industry role. Talk to her." I think that's kind of the direction I got. She was very... big accolades.

LAUREN: That's a pretty good endorsement.

GREG: Totally, totally.

GREG: Now, you're at Brunswick, which is a marine recreation company. Maybe kind of introduce the company. I'm not sure everybody would know the modern Brunswick, right?

LAUREN: Right. Yeah. So we are the largest recreational marine company, so think of it as kind of luxury consumer durables, boats, engines, electronics, and services like Freedom Boat Club, which is a membership model. We are a global organization, and on the boat side we make boats from 2,000 up to 2 million boats. We've got six of the top 10 brands in the industry like Mercury Marine, Boston Whaler, Sea Ray, Lund, I mentioned Freedom Boat Club, Simrad, Lowrance. Those are just some of our examples.

GREG: Yeah. If you have any orientation to marine, the big brands, the important brands are with Brunswick, no question about it. And that's a big change. The company used to be much more diversified and then it concentrated on marine some number of years ago. Is that what happened?

LAUREN: Yes, yes. We were effectively a holding company where we had other verticals like bowling, fitness. We sold the fitness business in, I'm trying to think, in around '18. And we really started to focus our portfolio on recreational marine, and we made the transition to an operating company.

GREG: So I guess the question for some of the listeners, how many boat shows do you actually attend a year?

LAUREN: Oh gosh. Like 2,000. Me personally or our brand?

GREG: You personally. You personally.

LAUREN: I would say, I don't know, probably 50, but our brands are at 2,000. Yeah.

GREG: Yeah. Do you feel like you spend most of your time on sort of wobbly docks, I guess, or something? It probably feels like that.

LAUREN: Oh, docks, I don't even notice, but I am traveling every week. I actually love it, though. I feel like it's such a privilege. I mean, my job is to go get out on the water and get out on boats. How much better does it get?

GREG: Totally, totally. And boaters, I mean, I don't know if I know a ton of boaters, but they're fanatics, right?

LAUREN: Yes. It's a lifestyle.

GREG: Yes. Lifestyle is the way to put it. I think it's a variation of the bumper sticker you probably see most: "I'd rather be fishing, I'd rather be boating." It's like all in that same sort of context, right?

LAUREN: Totally. And before that, I was in fitness, and the two had similarities in that they were kind of passionate lifestyles. It's business, it's not altruism, but it can feel altruistic sometimes when you get out on the water and your head is clear, and it's just such a great feeling. Yeah.

GREG: I totally agree. I've been lucky to have owned homes that sit on water. It's always the best option. If you can look at water, I think somehow the world is just made better.

LAUREN: Yeah, yeah. You realize how much bigger the world really is than you, and sometimes that's kind of exciting, isn't it?

GREG: Absolutely.

GREG: Now you were brought in, though, not originally a CMO. I think you were brought in the marketing department, but then you've had to, as you've risen to CMO, you've had to do a transformation of how Brunswick looks at marketing. Is that the right way to put that?

LAUREN: Yeah, so I've always started my career in marketing generally. And then at Brunswick, I actually started on the CMO side through talent management, talent strategy. I was working in our corporate office on talent strategy specific to guiding our operating model changes. And as I was doing that work partnering with our now CEO David Foulkes, we saw some need for focused attention on the marketing function. It was very fragmented, and it was kind of a marketer in each brand working with many different agencies. So we had to establish what were the core competencies, and how do we really leverage our scale across the portfolio to bring brands to market in a way that was efficient and stronger than it had been previously.

GREG: I don't know if I realized that you had come from sort of more general. I mean, I know you've got an MBA from Northwestern, so you're smart, good student, you know what you're doing. You figured out the world, general management, finance, and then to lead at... Let me ask you a funny question. Were you excited to go to the marketing function or you said, "Well, let me just do this for a little bit and I'll get it spruced up and then turn it over to somebody else"?

LAUREN: Well, actually, HR and talent was the bigger reach for me because I started my career in marketing and marketing agencies. It was doing the stint in talent where I really kind of felt like an imposter. But I had always done a lot of work in strategy. And honestly, if you think about it — and it was our CHRO at the time who noticed the similarities — engaging with your talent and bringing a talent strategy to life is not a whole lot different than engaging with consumers and bringing a marketing strategy to life.

GREG: Oh, okay. Oh, interesting.

LAUREN: And in fact, the skills were very transferable. But for me, too, it was like a masterclass in leadership behaviors and how to build high-performance teams and effective organizations. So I got as much out of that role as I gave.

GREG: Got it.

GREG: Hey, also, I'm kind of curious. You went through a process of coming up with a new tagline I saw: "Next never rests." So you want to talk little bit about that? I don't know if I would've known that that was obvious for Brunswick when I first saw it. So give us some background to that.

LAUREN: I think that's the point. Interestingly, we talk a lot about the science and the art of marketing, and that was a moment where it didn't, honestly, the data wouldn't have mattered. It just so well embodied our company culture. But we went through a process of rebranding over the last year and a half. Brunswick has been around for more than 175 years. And interestingly, there are only five companies in the US that have been... I'm sorry, there's less than 50 companies in the US that have been around that long.

GREG: Oh, I wouldn't even think that close. I mean, there's a couple, GM, I think, is up there in a hundred some odd number of years. So there's real stalwarts, but wow, that's interesting.

LAUREN: Very few. But actually Brunswick as a brand was kind of an empty vessel. And we had done so much transformation to focus on marine, technology, our innovation profile, that it was a little bit... We were kind of mismatched. So we spent some time on a rebrand, which I've talked to you about before, but "never rests" was one of the concepts that came through. And it was like the second we heard it, there was just nothing that better embodied our culture, I would say.

GREG: And what does the tagline mean? What was the insight? What sort of got you to that? That's what kind of caught my attention. How did you actually figure that out besides the obvious, it made sense when you heard it, but you had to get there first.

LAUREN: Yeah. Well, I think it's just a creative iteration process, but as the leader in the industry, we really hold ourselves to a high standard of pushing boundaries and setting the pace of change. Not just on the innovation profile, but also the consumers we're reaching. We really hold ourselves accountable for democratization of voting and making it accessible to all. So if you think about the role that you may play, if you're in that leadership position, you're not looking at somebody else to give you... There's no pace car, you're the pace car. So you really have to get off the X and push yourself. And honestly, that's how we chase down all of our day to day. But I think that was the thought leadership behind it.

GREG: What percentage of American households have a boat, do you know offhand?

LAUREN: Oh, good question. I don't know offhand, but it's a small percentage.

GREG: There's tons of room for growth. I think as lifestyles change, I'm surprised even... And I don't know, I'm assuming COVID was good, the pandemic was maybe good for a business like this, right? As people reevaluated their lives, I assume.

LAUREN: Yeah, COVID was great. I mean, the other thing is there's lots of ways to participate in voting besides owning a boat. So 140 million Americans go boating each year and mid to high 50 million go fishing each year. And there's some kind of overlap of that. And they don't all own a boat. In fact, of the 140, many of those are children, but we also have Freedom Boat Club, so you can be part of a club model. We own Flite, which is an eFoil kind of surfboard product, which is really awesome if you haven't ever seen one of those or tried those. So when I talk about making it accessible, I mean recreational marine more generally, not just owning a boat. But in terms of true ownership, it's a much smaller population.

GREG: Listen, some of my own favorite memories as a child were going fishing with my dad.

LAUREN: That is a very common story, and honestly, I hope it continues to be common. My boys just were fishing with their dad this weekend. I got the weekend off. We have a nice...

GREG: Everybody wins.

LAUREN: Yeah, everybody wins. We've got a Lund. But that is actually the most common introduction to marine is it being introduced by a close friend or relationship, often dad, brother, grandfather, long-term lifestyle. And what I really think about is how do we maintain that relevance? Are children still growing up with those experiences, and if not, how do we encourage them and make sure they're happening?

GREG: Yeah, no kidding. Yeah. Great. I get it.

GREG: And you actually sort of built a whole boating community, too, within Brunswick they didn't have before, is that right?

LAUREN: Oh, Ripl, yes. And that's not necessarily just Brunswick. Ripl is our consumer advisory board, which is 15,000 boating enthusiasts across many different brands. And we use those folks to help guide us on what their needs are, what are their interests. They even get sneak peeks on things like innovation, even color palettes, trends. They're just kind of our always-on consumer arm that gives us real-time feedback.

GREG: I love it. I love it, Lauren. I've talked to you a bunch about the business over the years, and you know I'm sort of enamored with boats, but not a boat owner yet. I haven't made that commitment.

LAUREN: "Yet" is the keyword there.

GREG: Yeah, yet. Exactly. No, I can see, for not being a boat owner, I spend a lot of time looking at boat videos on YouTube, going to boat shows. So one of these days. I do get the orientation to, I don't know, water just being a better place to be sometimes.

LAUREN: But isn't that so interesting that you've gone to boat shows, and I don't know how actively you were in thinking about buying, but have you ever just wandered around on a weekend at the housewares show? I mean, boat shows and the industry in general is just one of those places that crosses over between professional and just your personal interest so easily.

GREG: Correct. One of these days. Like you said, "yet."

GREG: Speaking of the Ripl community that's giving you advice, Building Better CMOs always likes to ask, what's the best advice you've been given? It could be personal, it could be professional, you can go in any direction you want, but I often find when I talk to other board members like you, Lauren, that there's a couple of pivotal moments in their lives where somebody's said something that made a big difference to them.

LAUREN: Yeah. For me, there were two. There was a woman on our board a number of years ago who—

GREG: On the Brunswick board, you mean, right?

LAUREN: On our Brunswick board, yeah, who said to me... And actually she said this to kind of a leadership group of our top female executives. Someone asked a question about, you've done a lot of moves, you've run a lot of businesses, how did you get yourself going?

And she said, "There's very few things in life that you can't get yourself out of." And sometimes you hear things and they just land so squarely. And for me, it was just such incredible permission to take risks and just go for it. It's like, how badly can I really make a decision and not be able to unwind it? I mean, really when you pressure test it, it just is kind of go for it, just jump in. And honestly, somewhat related, I adopted that really thoroughly in my career. And I would say, though my career path does look like a straight line, I really just chased my interests in whatever is the next opportunity. It's not like I said, oh, I'm going to be a CMO. And I remember telling my dad that one time, "I'm not even sure what path I'm really on, I'm just going with it. I'm following the momentum."

And we were talking through kind of how to be more purposeful. And I was saying, my network is not that purposeful. It's just kind of created organically. And he said, "One, keep going," but two, he said, "It's so interesting because you're sitting here thinking, 'Where are you going with this?'" And he said, "Growing up as a boy, obviously, I was always kind of nurtured to just go for the next thing. And I was trained at a very early age to be told no and keep going for it." This is my father's advice to me, he said, "Men are just primed to keep asking the girl out until they say, yes, prom, whatever it is. Keep going after that sale, go for the next job." It's almost like inherent in the way he was, at the time, brought up. "Don't worry about the no, just keep going for it." Where he was saying differently, women at the time are really more primed to be the prettiest, be the smartest, be really proper. Stay in your box.

GREG: A hundred percent, Lauren.

LAUREN: And he was like, "Don't stay in the box. When you engage with people in your professional network, ask them for help." And the other thing he said to me is men will say, 'Hey, let's go get a drink. Let's go play golf or whatever.' He's like, "Men always do it. They follow through. Women half the time are like, 'I don't think he really meant, let's go get a drink,' or 'We're not going to really go get golf.' And they don't follow through." Now when he told me that, I was like, well, listen, I can follow through. And actually very soon after, I reconnected with my guidance counselor at Kellogg through the MBA program, and I said, "Hey, I haven't been that purposeful about my network. I need to rebuild this. Can you introduce me to one person that would be relevant?" And she said, "Oh, yeah, I went to school with the CMO at GM, Deb Wahl."

GREG: Deb Wahl.

LAUREN: "And let me introduce you to her." And I was like, well, wait. This is my first step. Do I really want to start at the top here?

GREG: And Deb's a looming presence, I think, in the world. Yes, I agree. Yes.

LAUREN: But I did, I talked, and it was very relevant. Part of what GM was working through was some channel transformation. They were doing a lot with the Cadillac brand. There was a lot of similarities to what we were doing. So I did my homework. I didn't just call her and say, "Hey, can you help me?" I did my homework. And one of the things I saw was she was engaged with the MMA.

GREG: She was my board chair at the time.

LAUREN: Yeah. So when I closed my call with her, I said, "Hey, I saw you're engaged with MMA, I'd love to learn more if you could just introduce me to anyone who could help me get engaged." And she said, "Oh, I'm going to introduce you to Greg. I'll connect him. I know they're looking for more members." And I know now you're probably beating people away with a stick. MMA has become such an explosion, but at the time, I think you called me the next day.

GREG: Oh, is that right? That's funny. Yeah.

LAUREN: It was within a couple days, and I felt like, wow, what immediate feedback loop in terms of something so effective in terms of building your network.

GREG: Yeah. Listen, I'm a big believer. And I remember what Deb said to me because I'm a big believer... and I'll even give you sort of another perspective, given I'm a little bit older on things at this stage, but anybody who sees either opportunity or responsibility, however you want to look at that to get involved at the industry level, I'm obviously a strong encourager of that, having now run two nonprofit trade associations.

But I also think, Lauren, it's funny, and I'll say this too with a little bit of a gender tinge to it, so apologies to any of the listeners if they don't like that. But I've watched a lot of men grow up in particular in their career. And if they don't have a strong network, and it would go for anybody, but I've seen it there a lot. If you don't have a network, there's a point in time, I would say somewhere around 50 and beyond, you don't get hired unless they know you or can triangulate to you in a personal way. My point is that network and having that network valuable at any stage of your career, essential when you get into the latter part of your career, and I'm suprised that people don't do that.

LAUREN: I'm sure, I agree. I obviously don't know what it's like to be a man without a network, but generally, one, I think especially in our field, it will become incredibly lonely. And you just need people who speak your language. You need your peer set. But then in terms of opportunities, marketers know how to market themselves. And for other organizations, it can be hard to cut through the noise. One of the ways you can cut through the noise is by tapping your network. And if you aren't part of a network, you're in trouble.

GREG: Yep. I love that.

GREG: Hey, I want to go back, though, to your point around this element of risk. I just saw Reshma Saujani who founded and ran Girls Who Code. I've actually gotten to know her and she did a TED Talk. She goes, "Why do we teach boys to be brave and girls to be perfect?"

LAUREN: Exactly.

GREG: And by the way, that's what you just said, too. That really struck me when I heard that.

LAUREN: Yes. It struck me, too.

GREG: And especially as a father of daughters, I in particular thought, wow, that's so interesting that we introduce that kind of bias into the world probably without even realizing at some level. But I think it's true.

LAUREN: Well, demystifying that is one of my personal passions. I don't think many people that work very closely with me would accuse me of being perfect. I kind of shatter that.

GREG: You make a point they don't see that.

LAUREN: And you can see I've got young sons, but I actually worry more for people coming up looking at leaders. If there is a perception that they're perfect and to get there, you have to be perfect, they just won't go for it. So I think it's just as important, in terms of our responsibilities as leaders, to be really clear, put your game face on for sure and show up with intention. But behind the scenes, yeah, it's not perfect. It can be a mess sometimes. We're making trade-offs all over the place.

GREG: And I think your career point is good, too. I'm a very big believer in have a goal, have something you're aiming for. I often will ask people that. I can almost be clear, you could have never charted the path to have gotten there, and you might end up in a totally different goal. I didn't plan to run trade associations. Now I've turned around two of the darn things, and it really has become the thing that really excites me. I don't know, would I still be working if I wasn't doing this work? I'm not a hundred percent sure. It's so mission based, and I love working with people like you and Deb and the rest of the board. It's very funny.

LAUREN: It must be tapping into some of your personal motivations. I spent a lot of time thinking about my personal motivations too, to make sure they line up. Otherwise you just get burnt out. But yeah, they have a goal point. I always tell teams, you have to have an objective. You have to have a goal. You can change your mind. You can change your mind a hundred times.

GREG: Totally. And you won't see it coming.

GREG: I also am a big believer of shut up and show up. Listen, if you're offered an opportunity or you're offered something, I'm not saying be totally indiscriminate about it, but go, you know what? Let me just see where that goes. You're never going to know.

LAUREN: Yeah. I talk a lot about hand raisers. They build networks faster. They get put up for more opportunities because they're naturally curious. They're hungry. Who wants to convince someone to engage with them or work on something? You want the hand raiser who's like, "I'm dying to get involved with that. Let me just do something on that project." That has really opened many of my doors in my career.

GREG: Is that right? Just by volunteering to say, "I'd like to take a run at that if I could." Is that what you mean by that?

LAUREN: Almost every time.

GREG: Do you have an example of that, Lauren?

LAUREN: All of my last five roles, I would say actually.

GREG: So it's pattern. Now. I got it. It's pattern. I got it.

LAUREN: It's a pattern. Yes, yes. As you have heard, I'm not great in a very tight box, but I definitely can play by the rules. My favorite quote, by the way, is a Picasso quote. It's, "Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist."

GREG: Oh, wow. I had not heard that. That's a great quote.

LAUREN: Oh, that's my favorite one. That is definitely my mantra. But maybe I'll start with the talent strategy role, which I mentioned. Talent management is a very common role. And I did play a role in talent management, which is part of it, but it's unusual to go tap a marketing strategist or marketer to come and get engaged with talent. But I said, let me define what this might look like. And actually, at the time, a big part of the role was to better position Brunswick as an employer of choice.

GREG: Totally.

LAUREN: We've really just been on a great run. I think we're on our fourth consecutive year as Forbes' best large employers to work for.

GREG: I saw that. Really high regard from a number of different sources for best employer, right?

LAUREN: Yeah. We started making the Times list a couple of years ago. But there was a need from the business, and I said, let me just try something. And again, there's very few things you can't get yourself out of. And that role led to, our CEO at the time, he was our CTO previous to that, and he ran a number of our businesses. But in terms of corporate infrastructure, he didn't have a lot of strategy support. And so I said, okay, well, I've done that and we're going to have to address the talent side of this anyways. So I started supporting him, and that really led to the work and the introduction to the CMO opportunity, which we had not ever had before.

GREG: Yeah. Yeah. You know what's funny, I love to tell this story. My kids have heard this story too many times. What happened to me too, for my career, was the best thing ever. I was at an agency, it was an ad agency of the year. I'll try and make it a short story. It was an ad agency of the year, best creative agency of the year. This is back in the '90s. And I joined this agency to lead the Frito-Lay business. Then Frito-Lay, Roger Enrico came in and fired us just literally months after I'd been there. Like, oh my god, what a disaster.

Now I'm not really sure I have anything to do. Right? I'm kind of just loitering around. And the agency's biggest client was under review. In fact, there was a whole book written about this experience what happened called Where The Suckers Moon by Randall Rothenberg, the later CEO of the IAB. So long story, I didn't have anything to do. I really literally had nothing to do, Lauren. I was just waiting to see if we either got new business or kept the business that we were in the process of potentially losing with Subaru. And I wrote a paper around single source measurement.

And that was basically combining... It was just an interest area. I called a bunch of people and interviewed. I don't know what I was doing with the paper. It wasn't like I was presenting anywhere. It was just sort of silly. And it gave me this much information about technology and marketing, which was that much more information than everybody else in New York City had at the time. And I got a call from YNR to come run their interactive group. And it was not because I had anything particularly special, but it was because I had written that white paper and I demonstrated an interest around that they said, this might be... I mean, really just by the sheerest margins.

And it was after six months in that job that then Mosaic was announced, which was the beginning of the World Wide Web. And that's what got me. And you know me, I have a very strong digital orientation, and I got it very early on, but it's just because I told myself to keep myself busy and write that paper that gave me enough knowledge that led to the next. You just don't know.

LAUREN: Well, you had that deep-seated curiosity. It's so funny you tell me this story because now I think, you know, we always end up in dinners next to each other. We're always swapping stories. But I think about my earlier career days, my white paper days very fondly. I used to do the same thing. I would feel like there's this meaty topic that I wanted to just sort my thoughts and dig into. And I remember a mentor at one point making a joke like, "Oh, here's another white paper from Lauren." But honestly, it was entertaining for me and it's helpful for the company, especially if you're trying to drive change on a topic that people don't know a lot about.

GREG: Correct. Yeah.

GREG: And I don't even remember why I picked that as a topic. I'm a measurement-oriented guy. I sort of always have been. Very funny.

LAUREN: Is that how you started getting engaged with Rex on SIRF?

GREG: Kind of. Actually, I found Rex, so that was another side story there. So just for the listener, basically, Rex Briggs founded, created multitouch attribution. He'd started the work on it, but then I came in as head of the IAB, and I needed a measurement system to measure internet. So internet advertising, if anybody can remember back this far, it was only 3 percent of our marketing mix. And media mix modeling couldn't measure it, so we needed something else.

Rex was creating this new thing. We didn't call it MTA at the time, but over the course of the next five years, I spent $7 million of IAB money and member money in order to do what was two dozen MTA studies that validate that as a methodology. But more importantly, it told us that the high water mark was that you should be spending 25 percent of your budgets in digital marketing.

And I mean, that was a revolution. At the time we did that, it was a big study for Ford that really changed everything. It was dramatic. And Bill Ford was behind it. In fact, I'll tell you a funny aside to that. We never lied about any results we ever released. I mean, I held the board off, and the board every once in a while was sort of like, "Well, shouldn't you?" And I'm like, no, no, no. We're going to tell the truth all the time. Which is kind of my mantra here now at the MMA. The only time we didn't tell full facts is that we didn't tell everybody that Ford sold $2.3 billion more in trucks. We lowered the number a little bit because they didn't want the competition to know. And we thought, you know what? We're still making the point about the sales impact. We just didn't make it as dramatic as it was. It was game changing. It was 10 percent of sales increase just by having internet in the mix early on.

LAUREN: Wow.

GREG: It was crazy.

LAUREN: Yeah, I'm sure it's a lower clutter channel at the time. And so they were really able to make a mark.

GREG: Correct. And listen, had consumers really adopting internet, which was producing more ads, which created a high supply, but then this middling demand by marketers is what made it obviously the deal of the century. Basically, we created a very complicated measurement technique to do that. I knew Rex even before that, but that's where he and I really bonded and then wrote the book, What Sticks.

Okay, listen, but we have more fun. We have more fun here. We've got to get into the big topic. Right. This is just like dinner, right? Exactly. You and I go on and on. I saw it coming, I knew this is what was going to happen. Okay. Okay.

GREG: But listen, so you know the purpose of Building Better CMOs, which is all oriented... It's not meant to be just the usual, dare I say, CMO worship which a lot of podcasts are going to do.

It's really just to look frankly at what are the challenges that marketing and marketers have. I mean, sometimes that's just fodder for me to create new initiatives, and I'm getting a big long list of the things that we in marketing still need to fix, which is the purpose, obviously, of the trade association. But as you look out and in your experience, especially in having diversity of roles, what do you think marketing or marketers either don't fully understand, don't appreciate, should be better at, maybe can work harder at? What do you think? Where's the best room for improvement, I guess, putting on your HR hat, I guess at some level. What do you think?

LAUREN: Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously I have an opinion and I've done a lot of work in this space over the last five years, but I'm not sure how much it matters what my opinion alone is if no one buys into it, if no one believes it. So I like to always start with who are the key stakeholders who really matter? So I asked a number of CEOs and CFOs in our network the same question. So these are predominantly like consumer durable enterprises, multi-brand portfolios majority. And I just said, "Hey, what do you think marketing could be doing better?" And I didn't even think about it at the time, but this is kind of a cheat sheet too for what should I do next with my organization.

GREG: No kidding. No kidding. Yeah. Yeah. Like a good marketer, you're asking the customer's input. Exactly. Yeah. And peers are customers at some level, right?

LAUREN: I think, too, yeah, it was kind of what matters most to you. And actually it was pretty... I saw a lot of consistency around two themes. The first was there was strong alignment around focus on what's measurable, focus on the ROI. Those are your CFOs, a little of your CEOs, but more the CFOs. "Just connect the dots for me to sales, and I'll follow along."

The other was really strong alignment, in at least my network, around marketers have got to play a role in educating our organization and how to think about modern marketing. And that was actually a very strong and consistent theme. And I've seen that over the last few years. And in some ways, still a surprise and in other ways, not a surprise. But just this very hungry, strong pull signal from other leadership on, "Teach me what I need to know about this space before I can have a strong opinion on what role it plays in our go-to market strategy."

GREG: Okay. I'm going to set aside measurement for a second, just for a minute or two here because that's like perennial. I was saying to somebody the other day, the fact that we still haven't solved measurement as a function, it just really bemoans our, I don't know, maturity, I guess, as an industry.

LAUREN: I feel like we've done a lot of progress. Rex helped us with a lot of our progress.

GREG: Did he?

LAUREN: Which is why I asked about him, and if he came back and saw us now, he'd be so proud. But we'll talk about that another time.

GREG: Okay. Well, we'll do a revisiting tour. Okay. But talk about this, and just so I heard it right, Lauren, this is educating the rest of the C-suite, educating the company? Talk a little bit more about... Or is it just being voice of the customer? What did you kind of hear from people that they were advising us to do?

LAUREN: Well, a couple things. I would say, depending on what type of organization you're at, one of the quotes someone gave me — which was a different, not our company, but an adjacency...

GREG: Yeah. Let's make sure the listener's aware. This is not just direct from Brunswick management. You diversified the input. Yeah, good. Okay.

LAUREN: We tapped other similar companies, but one person said, there are still folks who feel like marketing is just fluff. It's just make things pretty, and you need to help redefine what marketing really is.

GREG: Okay. So we're not just educating about consumers or outside the company, the unique perspective and insights we may have, but it's also just educating what is the role of marketing?

LAUREN: And it's uniquely different than other functions because like finance, how often does finance have a new playbook? I mean, even IT, there's new tools and digital transformation all the time, but still how you introduce those, bring them to life, the playbook can be fairly consistent. Marketing has completely changed all of the underlying capabilities it has to bring to life to compete and win.

GREG: Every two years, in part because consumers' patterns have changed so much. In some regards, and this is maybe a bit of old news, TikTok to me kind of came out of nowhere, sort of.

LAUREN: And we just needed another channel, didn't we?

GREG: Yeah, yeah. Well, consumers apparently thought they did. I mean, that's what's funny about it. They chose to make that. And I've said this a bunch, I'm pretty sure that TikTok's probably, on a per unit, I think TikTok is probably my number one media channel now.

LAUREN: Oh, is it? It's one of the top search engines, especially for Gen Z.

GREG: And it's a search engine now, too. Exactly. Which has changed its role dramatically too. Right? Sorry, go ahead, though.

LAUREN: I actually use Instagram quite a bit for my search engine. I like when it learns me and then shows me new brands and things to buy. But anyways.

GREG: Yeah, I think there's a bifurcation. Yeah, I just, for whatever reason, never became an Instagram person. I don't really have any reason why.

LAUREN: Oh, you skipped that.

GREG: Yeah. Well, I don't know if I skipped it. I just never, whereas my kids are very Instagram. Okay. So consumers keep changing. That's part of what we need, and we do have a dramatically changing business and orientation.

LAUREN: So the capability's totally different. It's kind of the define it, but then it's so technical.

GREG: Yes, very.

LAUREN: Especially if you're doing it well, it is just going to be a very technical competency. It is the art and the science. But especially on the ROI and attribution side, it can be very quantifiable, very data backed. And one of the things that we've talked a lot about and has struck a lot of people in my network is that is a big relearning: what all the KPIs are, how do they all relate, the different roles in the consumer journey. That's a bit of a learning curve to bring people along to understand how do you interpret all the KPIs, how do these work together?

GREG: Yeah. Well, and listen, I had a CMO say the oddest thing. I've repeated this a lot recently. Not oddest. Caught my attention maybe is a better way to do it. I didn't think it was such an odd thought. As you know, and for the listener, maybe if they're not aware, we're good at the think tank kind of stuff. We come up with a new thesis or hypothesis. We run a series of experiments. We explore areas that are sort of new. Here's the CMO. They go, "Have you done any measurement on the value difference between authentic advertising with an influencer versus inauthentic like I do now?" And I went, wow, since when did we call our ads inauthentic? I thought, oh my god. I'm like, oh, geez. Now, there's a whole nother complexity. But influencer is a whole nother strategy in the world that didn't exist at this kind of scale and the way that it's being done today. I guess celebrity has always been around, but not influencer strategy, right?

LAUREN: Yeah.

LAUREN: Well, kind of related, where I thought you were going to go is the relationship between brand and performance, which is a little bit of that bent. But in terms of the educational topics, after we did a lot of work on understanding the KPIs and attribution, I have spent a lot of my time, especially recently, on the relationship between brand and performance especially when the market's really dynamic or tight. Everyone's going through a lot of change. So budgets for everyone, every industry are tight. There's this propensity to do all performance, all ROI. There are no numbers. People get the numbers.

GREG: There's a giant sucking that sound there. I totally agree that it's a pat answer. And we know from the research we've done, it's missing the boat.

LAUREN: Right. Well, for us, all of our brands had this kind of pull towards only performance and more the sales driven, or — well I won't use the other CMO's quote — but less organic, more just buy something. And the problem is you don't give consumers enough information to form an opinion. They're not building a relationship with your brand and your product because you're just running around being like, "Buy this, buy this, buy this." There's no depth. And I've supported a lot of your studies that you guys have done on those relationships because they're quantifiable. And I didn't have our own data at the time.

GREG: And listen, even take Boston Whaler. Boston Whaler is yours, right? Okay. I mean, there's maybe one or two other very premium boat brands, but Boston Whaler's one of them. Congratulations. Well done, everybody, whoever did that originally. It's a premium price product. Absolutely. But yeah, you don't want to just sort promo offers and direct to consumer just transaction for that, I don't think, and yet you don't want to miss the market.

LAUREN: Well, yeah. Especially if it's a lifestyle or I was listening to you, you interviewed Charlotte Blank at Range Rover. I have a Range Rover, by the way.

GREG: One of my favorites. Right, exactly. There we go. Yes. And she said, entrepreneurs buy Range Rovers. Did you hear that point in there, too? That was very funny.

LAUREN: Yeah, I did. But nothing kills a brand like just a heavy sales discount message, especially a premium brand. Someone said this to me once and I loved it. They said advertising is like a tax on weak brands.

GREG: I will say, though, Silicon Valley got very, very full of themselves at one point when they were funding, when the VCs were funding all those direct-to-consumer brands. And they were funding performance, transaction-oriented marketing. And many of those brands, except for a few like Peloton and a few others, most of them got crushed because I don't think they had a strong foundation.

LAUREN: It's a very short-term strategy. It's very transactional. And the relationship, if you can build it the right way, can endure a lot. But it takes a lot of time to build.

GREG: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why I liked your idea, too. I like that Ripl community. I thought how strong to kind of do that, to bring boaters together. I mean, they're either doing it at the dock or they're doing it within your digital forum.

Okay, so let's come back. So here you and I are going to get on this series of tangents. Listeners, just try to keep up.

GREG: Let's come back to this idea of helping people to understand marketing. So they do need to understand the brand performance dynamic. They do need to understand the fundamental... Well, what do you tell people for the role of marketing within a company like Brunswick? These are longer term. Nobody's buying a boat every week. It's not like soap. So yeah, how do you go at that?

LAUREN: I try not to overthink it. I think there's probably many different ways to define it, but I think the way that matters the most is one that people can remember and say back to anyone. So I talk about building strong brands and generating demand, especially in a consumer space. And we play in consumer product space. Marketing is now your sales engine.

GREG: Oh, okay. And do people accept that marketing is a sales engine?

LAUREN: Yeah. I mean, we have a strong B2B business as well. So we also have a sales team, and there's a role for sales, but that's probably the space that's changing the fastest of any competency, at least in our kind of value chain.

GREG: Okay. And what else does marketing do as you talk to the company, to employees internally to help them understand or your fellow C-suite executives.

LAUREN: To help understand?

GREG: Yeah. I might be curious, too, Lauren, if it makes sense to go there at a sort of, how do you operationalize — that dumb word — but how do you bring that? Is there a process you use? How do you train people? How do you share? Actually, now I'm going to ask you five questions and not finish one of them. Let me try this. Do you think that other people in the company understand the customer mindset? I would think that would be a bit of a challenge for some people.

LAUREN: Well, I think that's a tricky one. I would say there's probably a lot of room to grow. And we are, at Brunswick, we have a lot of boaters who are also the customer and consumer. However, there's a difference between knowing what you as the consumer wants and understanding your interest and how they influence your behaviors and how brands can take advantage of those to generate demand, which I know you talked about in one of your sessions, too. I think that is what, there's still a world of understanding that needs to be had and the role of how all of this connects to the customer experience. And how impactful is that for brands?

GREG: Do you own customer experience there? Does marketing own customer experience?

LAUREN: No, not exclusively. There are service teams. I certainly influence the agenda quite a bit. I'm one of the stronger voices at the table advocating for the customer experience. And frankly, I think it's just going to get louder and louder with AI. Because if AI tools can make some things just more accessible, easier, faster, like information transparency, which is part of what marketers are spending money on, is educating consumers. I think where brands will start to compete is closer to the consumer, more on experience attributes. And I think it'll become table stakes, and it's probably going to be the next big frontier change that we're all going to have to face. It feels similar to me, like digital transformation or e-commerce. I still remember the days I was sitting in rooms and we were talking about, "Well, if you don't have a website yet, you should get a website for your business." I feel like that's kind of where we're at next.

GREG: Haven't you also been there leading the digital transformation of the Brunswick business? What does that mean?

LAUREN: On the customer experience side, yeah.

GREG: What does that mean for you all? What is that?

LAUREN: For us, it's about putting a digital backbone in place. So as consumers go through our ecosystem, which is complex, we're giving them a seamless experience. There's handoffs between, I call it our value chain. If you work with either OEMs or dealers or even cross shop between our brands, we've got a digital thread that helps you navigate through our ecosystem. And for us, it gives us the privileged position of having the most robust set of consumer data in the industry, which you can imagine how powerful it is in the world of AI.

GREG: Oh, a hundred billion percent.

LAUREN: But even that right there in terms of a value proposition and that systems thinking would be... would need a lot of education internally and at many companies. What's the value of data? How should we be thinking about it? That's another topic that, as marketers, we need to really put it in context and translate it to business value so that people can invest behind the idea.

GREG: Yeah, a hundred percent. Hey, so when you did your little mini research project to understand reflections on marketing from other C-suite, was there anything else that really caught your attention that you thought? Anything that surprised you in that?

LAUREN: The emphasis on education did surprise me. I feel like I went through the whole SARAH curve of reaction to it. I think at first there's this, my brain is thinking, "So you want me to teach you my job? Why don't we just trust the marketers to do their jobs?" Which is very, very naive. And that was not my reaction most recently. But in the beginning when I realized how much of a hurdle education was going to be, that was my initial reaction, which is very naive.

LAUREN: What surprised me, too, and you asked what mechanisms worked, I had to establish a global enterprise QBR that just focused on the marketing function. Most organizations are familiar with business QBRs. We have four business units. Each business unit has a QBR. We also had to create a marketing one that we do quarterly because the type of conversations and the way that we look at the activities is so different. And that was actually the biggest game changer in creating a more common language and uniting our leaders around what things we had to invest behind. I was a little resistant to that. It's like, oh, another QBR? Who needs another QBR? It is been hugely impactful and a lot of work.

GREG: And for the listener, obviously quarterly business review, just in case. Lauren, what are you sharing? What are you presenting at QBRs? Because I don't know that I've asked, I will now. I've heard of other CMOs or marketing departments that are doing QBRs around marketing. Who's invited? Give me some of the dynamics, how do you think that should work, and then give me a sense of some of the topics that you might be covering in that.

LAUREN: So we include our four business unit presidents, our CEO, CFO, the business unit CFOs are invited as well. We have a marketing leader at each division and then our CHRO from the talent side. And we cover what are the marketing targets? So we have revenue targets, we have unit sales targets, we have commerce targets...

GREG: And marketing owns the revenue target?

LAUREN: Jointly, I mean, business owns the P&L. So ours is, we call it a pro forma or a shadow P&L. So the two sides own. Yeah. Only one of our businesses doesn't have revenue and unit targets. So we focus a little bit more on that business, on brand equity targets, engagement targets. But yeah, we have done a lot of work to quantify what marketing is aiming to achieve, and we hold ourselves very highly accountable to hitting those numbers, as well as all of our online sales targets. And we actually have targets, too, around sales attributable to marketing.

So we kind of boldly said, by X date, we're going to have 50 percent of our revenue as a company will be supported by digitally assisted sales or marketing attributable revenue. We only assign attribution if I can connect the two records. So I can connect a sales record with a marketing record, and only if there's an exact match, do we say that it's attributable to marketing. So we report on all of those KPIs, and then we usually do have time, assuming we have some time, we also actually report all of our opex. What's our working dollars versus non-working dollars split? What are the bigger buckets? That was very important, too. I think sometimes there can be a misnomer that marketing is just spending a bunch of money.

I've never seen that. Maybe in the '90s, dot-com bubble, whatever. We are not, we are very lean, scrappy. So I put all of our kind of mix and our priorities out there, and then we can have a constructive conversation with real facts. That is done a lot in terms of getting people together. And then we do examples and case studies. So we were talking about ROI and measurement before. We have an always-on test and learn program, AB testing. We do dark testing, and we will bring all those case studies and results forward to just continue to build belief. Here's what our Freedom Boat Club brand just did, and here's what happened when they added to their performance campaigns a national campaign that was more brand oriented. And we do those once a quarter for about three hours globally.

GREG: It's interesting, everything you just said, if I heard you properly, at least 90 percent of what you just said was all focused on the business dynamics, not like, "Hey, here's another pretty campaign we did."

Although I'm sure people are interested in the campaigns, they want to see it. I'm sure it comes up, but that's not where you just put the emphasis.

LAUREN: Right. No, honestly, the times I can think of where we're focusing a little bit more on the aesthetic with our Bayliner brand. During COVID, you brought up COVID, more than 50 percent of the buyers entering into that brand during the COVID years were first-time boat buyers. And it over-indexed with women, which is a priority in the industry if you're going to sustain relevance. So we did focus on making sure we well represented female interests, and we did some aesthetic repositioning with that brand. But it's still with a business objective in mind, obviously.

GREG: Have you ever done sort of any, I think it's called entomology research. It's where you actually go into people's homes, or go onto their boats and listen to how they talk about their boats or their experience in that. Have you done any of that?

LAUREN: Yeah, we do two dimensions. When you're talking about the language and the vocabulary, that will come through our brand health tracking through associations and things. But we also do recorded user experience studies. So not just the language, but also how they engage with the space. And we do quite a bit of that, actually.

GREG: I just interviewed the CMO of Hyundai in India, oddly enough. And he raised a point that really — you'll understand why it caught my attention — he said that teenage daughters, if there's a teenage daughter, what they figured out from doing that kind of in-home research around automotive, he goes, teenage daughters make the decision what car gets bought.

LAUREN: Oh, interesting.

GREG: And here's why that's really funny. I mean, you know me well enough, right? I'm a New York City person. I'm not a truck person. You would never describe me as a truck person. And yet, Lauren, we bought a truck when my daughter was a teenager based on her insistence. And my wife and I still laugh about it. Neither one of us are really truck people. And I loved having the car for a while. It was fun, but it was really driven by our daughter. So I wonder the things you kind of pick up that people wouldn't otherwise know.

LAUREN: Well, I would say the wife will often influence the boat purchase decision. And they often influence the attributes that you're looking for, whether it's a utility fishing vehicle or if it has more creature comforts, where you want to invest in the design side. But on your car story, one of my colleagues was saying maybe connecting to the TikTok, his daughter was turning 16. They had to buy her a car, and she really wanted a Jeep. So he sent her a link on Autotrader or something, and she said, "I'll just look it up on TikTok, dad." He's like, "TikTok is where you're going to figure out how to buy a car?"

GREG: It is happening. It is happening for sure. Hey, Lauren, do you have in your mind maybe some of the more, or even just one, really interesting thing that happened out of the quarterly business reviews, all these QBRs? Was there a feedback or a perspective or something you heard that you go, "Ooh, I did not see that coming," that somebody would think that way or would have that kind of input or that kind of value out of it? I'm curious.

LAUREN: I'm trying to think. Well, I think a couple things. Our brands tend to think their go-to markets are different. The brands are so different. There's not going to be a lot of synergies. There are so many synergies. I think it surprises people every single time how much we can take a capability that we develop on one brand and pull it across many.

GREG: Do you have an example of that?

LAUREN: Actually, a lot of our recalibration that we've done on media over the last couple years, we've been able to apply across many brands. It can be expensive if you're learning that lesson times 60-plus brands. So we've gotten really strong with our Freedom Boat Club brand, for example, on media management. And we've taken many of those lessons learned and pulled them over to the boat side, which buying a boat, the consumer journey is totally different. And yet, the way that we leverage media, there's a lot of consistency. But maybe the ones that surprised me, the moments where I was like, "I can't believe that was just said," were actually when I thought I was building an agenda to frame a perspective, and I thought I was on a real uphill battle, and someone said something like, "And thank you to our marketing partners for all the work that they put into this." And I'll give you an example. When we started to see the market turn last year, and many companies faced kind of a COVID correction year, we didn't for a very long time. Last year was the first year we started to see some changes in consumer demand, just macro kind of constraints.

And what surprised me was as budgets got tighter, I'm like, oh, here we go. I'm always selling. I'm going to have to fight. It surprised me, and this is obvious now, but how much easier it is to build an agenda around a stronger marketing function when the business really needs the demand. And I remember one meeting where we were talking about our test and learn strategy, and we were talking about some heavy-up tests. We were going to double the investment in a couple markets to see how much more incremental engagement we could drive. And I felt mixed going into the climate we were going into to say, we're going to just double our spend. And it was actually some of our business leaders, including our CFO, who said, "Do it. It's not worth the risk to hold back. Do the test, show us the results, we'll learn from there." And that was a surprise. I was not driving. That was really a pull signal.

GREG: Wow. That's crazy.

GREG: Okay, Lauren, so my most important question: Given that you know me, it's now been some number of years, do you know what brand of boat is right for me? What recommendations? So when I narrow the focus, what boat of Brunswick should I go get? Do you know?

LAUREN: I do think you're a Boston Whaler guy. I really do. It's the East Coast boating lifestyle.

GREG: It's that East Coast, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard.

LAUREN: You're a Boston Whaler guy.

GREG: Oh, okay. I don't know. I spent some time a number of years ago looking at a thing called sport yachts, which I thought was very funny. I just thought the name was hilarious.

LAUREN: I was going to say as long as I don't entertain your kind of your itch for a yacht, but I will say this, the Boston Whaler has a big portfolio range and there are many tenders that are Boston Whalers, if that doesn't surprise you.

GREG: That's true.

LAUREN: So you can get your yacht and a Whaler.

GREG: Oh, I like the upsell. That's very well done. I'm sure that will show up in the sales figure. See how marketing's working. You have to put that in your QBR. "I think I sold a yacht and a Whaler this week, people."

LAUREN: I just got Deb into a Sea Ray, too.

GREG: Oh, you did? Is that right?

LAUREN: So, I'll get to you guys eventually. Yeah.

GREG: Wait, wait, wait. What'd she get the Sea Ray... Wait, can I ask, can we talk about somebody on here? I don't know. What'd she get the Sea Ray for?

LAUREN: What for? For a better life!

GREG: Why did I not see that coming? I just walked right into that one, didn't I? No, no. Where is she? She's in Michigan, so is she on a lake there or is she transporting it to a lake? Is that what she's doing?

LAUREN: Yeah. I actually didn't grill her, but we have a boat on Lake Michigan and we have a Lund on an inland lake that we trailer. But yeah, I think she has a slip on a bigger lake there. It's perfect for Michigan.

GREG: I love it. I love it. I love it. Okay, well there we go. And any other hot boat tips for the listeners that they should know?

LAUREN: Just go slow when you're going to hit things. You're always going to hit things. Just go slowly. That's what I told her, by the way. She said, "I need a lot more lessons." I said, "Well, just so you know, you will always hit something. The art of it is to just go slowly into it."

GREG: There we go. Good. Well, that's learned from many consumer insights and reflections. Lauren, I can't tell you how much fun this has been. I knew it was going to be, we just covered so much ground there. I feel like I have a ton of other notes here I wanted to cover, but I think we need to let the listener go so they have more time to go buy boats. Thank you for doing this.

LAUREN: Thank you for having me. I love having these conversations and always chatting with you.

GREG: Appreciate it.

Thanks again to Lauren Beckstedt from Brunswick for coming on Building Better CMOs. Check the description of this episode for links to connect with Lauren.

If you like this episode, you might also really enjoy my conversations with General Mills CMO Doug Martin, FanDuel Chief Commercial Officer Mike Raffensperger, and AT&T CMO Kellyn Smith Kenny. You can find those episodes on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you are hearing me.

At MMA, we are working to make marketing matter much more through conferences, research and education. If you want to know more, 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 Jason Chase. A special thanks to Angela Gray and Dan Whiting. This is Greg Stuart. I'll see you in two weeks.