Tailored Brands CMO Carolyn Pollock, Part 2

Greg Stuart: This is Building Better CMOs. Let's get back to my conversation with Carolyn Pollock, the CMO of Tailored Brands. Carolyn, let's go to the big question of this for Building Better CMOs here. So as I told you the idea here, and it's kind of been themed with a trade association, I'm supposed to go fix stuff. So I use these as an opportunity for us to sort of identify and have discussions around areas of the business, areas of marketing that we don't necessarily get right. So you can go at it a couple of different ways. Where do you think we could be better? Where's the things you don't think we understand? I get some of that. Or don't have an appreciation for either the challenge or difficulty, or what do we need to have heightened awareness around? But just it's kind of a variation really of what you've already said: what do we struggle with that prevents us from being as either great or as important without the hype that we should be? What do you think that is?

Carolyn Pollock: Well, I mean it's sort of what we were talking about with how does the CFO measure as being successful versus the CMO. That part of the challenge with marketing is you can't tangibly measure everything, or we haven't yet figured out how to. And so how do we get better as an industry about figuring out measurement? I think it's also our expectations about what is measurable keep increasing, because there is so much more that's measurable than there once was. Obviously, with digital marketing, highly measurable to a good extent. There are still flaws, even within digital marketing in terms of how you measure and all of that. But it's much, much better than what we were used to where you just put out a TV ad and you just kind of thought, "Alright, well I ran the TV ad for this time, and I think I saw more people walk through the door of my stores and buy things. I think that's related." But the way to really concretely connect that, we still struggle with to some extent. And we struggle with the whole thing, which I know you've talked about with others, too, around the long-term versus short-term impact.

And the investing into growth and the fact that that sometimes takes time and not everybody has the patience for that time. And then incrementality in general: how much of this is actually driving... of all that we're spending, how much of this is net truly incremental that wouldn't have happened if we hadn't done this campaign or whatever versus sort of just the core organic momentum that exists?

GS: Okay, so your topic is you chose to put everything that we're really not good at on the table all at once.

CP: All under the umbrella of measurement.

GS: You're right. But then you got kind of specific about how hard they are, and you're a hundred percent right. I've often said this, MMA has done a lot of work around the value of brand relative to short term and sort of what that means. And I'm still sort of flabbergasted that when we first started in that five years ago, we realized there was no methodology to measure the value of brand long term. Nobody built the methodology. So how can we go that far as an industry? And maybe that's an irrelevant point to sort of go back and beat ourselves up for what we got wrong, but it is kind of nuts a little bit. And listen, well, retail now you can live off of a promotion, you can live off store driving tactics. There's a series of things you can do. How do you look at brand in the context of the brands that you now represent relative to driving store traffic?

CP: Yeah, and I'm so passionate about this. I think this is true about, as I think about brand and what it is, it is a relationship that you have with your customer. And if you think about the relationship that a human has with another human, that relationship is rooted in emotion, right? It's not rooted in, "Oh, I really like Greg because he always gives me 20 percent off." It's like, "I like Greg because he challenges me and he's interesting and he makes me laugh." And that's how you build trust in a relationship, and that's what brand does. Brand elicits emotions. And I think that emotional connection is really what builds that over time. And so far the way that we've built emotional connection with customers is through film typically, right? TV now, video, social. And it still is all rooted in an emotion. You think even of influencer and creator content is still content that you've got a person who's talking about your brand with enthusiasm or with disgust, and that's driving an emotional relationship. So I think that that is so hard to measure. Just in general.

GS: You also, you did some ads here, some humorous ads recently for Men's Wearhouse. You want to just talk a little bit about what those were? Pretty funny.

CP: Yeah. And that's exactly what it was rooted in is that we were so transactional in our communication five years ago. Then we moved into the emotion of love as it's tied to weddings because that's our core business. And it was also in '22 when it was the year of the wedding and everybody was getting married post COVID.

GS: So that's the trigger is that I have to go to a still formalized event like a wedding, and so I need a new suit for that.

CP: Yes, exactly. And this idea of, we took the old Men's Wearhouse slogan of "You're going to like the way you look, I guarantee it," and we brought it into less transactional, a little more emotional about love the way you look. And if you love the way you look, what can you do with that? If you feel so great because you look so great, what happens then kind of thing. So it started with this emotion of love and the connection with a couple when they're getting married, and them seeing one another as they walk down the aisle.

Men's Wearhouse Commercial VO: You don't marry the like of your life, you marry the love of your life. And on your wedding day, you don't want to like the way you look, you want to love the way you look, and we're here to help...

CP: But then that worked great during that time of coming out of COVID where we all needed the connection, but really humor is such an incredible tactic for breaking through and getting that connection with the customer. So we decided that was where we wanted to steer. We engaged a great agency, Party Land, who really specializes in humorous advertising and particularly for men. And they just kind of get what makes guys laugh. And so we wanted to tap into that. So then it became this idea of, okay, if you love the way you look and you feel really great and confident, what does that enable you to do? And we've focused this really humorous character who feels like he can literally do anything.

VO: You're going to be the handsomest wedding guest. I look amazing. I feel like I can do anything. I can do anything. I can do anything. I can do anything.

CP: And he crashes a wedding and breaks into the father-daughter dance and dances with the dad...

VO: Move over her dad. [chime] Job interview, new outfit!

CP: And my favorite is an interview. He walks into the interview and he's like...

VO: I'm hired. Yes, you are. Let's golf to celebrate. I win! Hey, hot guy, marry me. To Men's Wearhouse. I love you.

GS: Yeah, I mean, clothes make the man, I think is what they've said. But yeah, they sort of do really provide an environment and you want to feel comfortable where you are. So it actually really makes sense. How'd you get to that brand insight, by the way?

CP: It's amazing the idea that it really kept being rooted back in, if you like the way you look, then if you love the way you look, then you feel great. And if you feel great, what can you do? And that was a consistent thing that came through in research about just... We used to talk about it in terms of confidence, but telling someone you're going to be so confident just doesn't work the same way. So it's more about what does confidence enable and what does that do? And then that just led to all these amazing humorous applications.

GS: I love it. I love it. Okay, so let's come back. So this, let me ask you always a kind of controversial question around sort of measurement, especially when it comes to creative. Do you pretest ads and so on? Do you guys go through that process, or what's your sense of that?

CP: We concept test.

GS: Concept test. Okay.

CP: Yeah, certainly with the humor we did, because we wanted to make sure. It was so new for us. We've never done humor as a brand, so we wanted to make sure it landed okay and that we were credible in showing up that way. But yeah, we didn't do the full with media and all that.

GS: Let me ask you a funny question. It's come up in other episodes here. How many creative derivations, how many creative assets do you have to produce off of that one big idea for a campaign? Yeah. I'm not testing your knowledge here as much as just trying to get a theme. It's massive.

CP: I mean, literally for our prom campaign, which everything nests under "Love the way you look." So even for a prom campaign, it's like if you're a prom kid and how do you show up and do fun things with your friends and all that? Just for one little bit of our prom campaign for the spring next year, we're asking for 150 videos that we're creating.

GS: Wow.

CP: Never mind what creators and influencers are going to create. That doesn't mean digital video and YouTube, and we're not doing prom for TV, but the volume of assets is staggering at this point.

GS: I was just having a conversation with somebody else here before I jumped over here to record this. And they were really talking about the degree... In fact, I'll even name the company because they'll appreciate it. VidMob, I was talking to Alex Collmer there, the CEO, and he was talking to the degree to which he thinks that individual creative units would not be performing. He's built a system to hopefully assess that. So I'm just in my own mind. Granted, creative is a big fail sometimes, having the right strategy is a fail sometimes. And then getting the right message to a consumer in a way that they understand it can be real challenging, too. And then when you end up with all these different units, but then who has the time to go test all those units? It feels like we're kind of caught in a little bit of a bind for our industry. And if you have an ad fail, what's the point of spending money behind it if it's just not communicating well?

CP: Right. Yeah, no, I think it's such a good point. And honestly, part of the debate I've been having with my team is do we need 150 social assets for this campaign? Do we know how well the 92 we created last year performed? And does that inform anything about what kind of content we should be producing this time around? Because 150 videos, we're not there yet with gen AI that we can do all of that through gen AI. So that's a lot of work. And I might have to hire two more editors, and just all these kinds of things that you have to think about. And yeah, it would be amazing if I could just say we ran all 92, these 11 rose to the top with these particular themes, and that's what we should double down on this season. I'm eager to find out how we can do that.

GS: I don't know if there's any answer to that one. It does feel really complicated, and I've started to ask that question a little bit because I've heard in the thousands...

CP: Yes.

GS: ... in the thousands...

CP: And I think that's true even for us with that was just my one little small...

GS: By the time you go through all the derivatives of that and its applications and placements and so on, well beyond the ship a 30-second... I mean, I'm old enough to remember when you used to send tapes to the networks to run the TV commercial. So that's a way back machine.

GS: But let's come back here to a couple of the big issues. So how does Tailored Brands — and if you want to pick on an individual brand or just an overarching — how do you look at that long versus short discussion? Because I mean, I pointed out earlier I was flabbergasted that there was no methodology. When I started to hear this issue and to realize that we didn't know how to do... And by the way, I was trained as an agency guy in Procter & Gamble, so very similar to your Unilever background. So I was raised on brand, right?

CP: Yes.

GS: But to think that we still don't know that after all these years of putting brand as our main thesis, ouch.

CP: You know what? I just keep coming back to where we have run some testing and just, again, some of this is just intuitive because this is the part of the art that's the art and the science. The consistency and the continuity of showing up with a message over time, you think back to almost every brand example. The ones that are really strong and bring long-term brand value, they've delivered something very consistently for a reasonably extended period of time. And I think what happens nowadays is people don't have that same level of patience or tolerance, and our attention spans are shorter, and we feel the need to be constantly changing things up. And I think that makes it even harder for how we measure it, but I think the more we can carve out ways to test it digitally makes it a little bit more possible. You can carve out an audience. You can try something out there, or I'm just such a huge fan of matched market testing at this point, too. I think that gives you something far more definitive. If you can do that and you can execute it and run it for a good period of time, that should help to show you what that longer term benefit is.

There are other tools that we've looked at with our media mix model and looking at a longitudinal set of results with that as well. Tracking that versus our brand tracker to see when you're running this media with this kind of message over this period of time, what's happening to your awareness and consideration simultaneously, and you can attach some sort of value to that. But it's still, I'm not sure it's meaty enough yet for a CFO to believe, "Oh yes, you need this many more millions of dollars to run your bigger continuity strategy" or whatever.

GS: I'm assuming Tailored Brands is a private equity play?

CP: Yes.

GS: Yeah. Okay. So I don't know the private equity companies. Don't mention their names here because I don't want to get into somehow I know their patterns. But often private equity get very focused on the fundamentals of a return on investment concepts. They tend to be finance people, so that's where they tend to lean versus you who leans towards genetics or reestablishing the genome. But have you noticed a difference in working with them versus maybe the experience you would've had... Like you said, you did consulting for a number of years, you worked with a lot of different marketers. Do you notice their sort of orientation? Do you have any advice for CMOs or marketers who are working with private equity and helping sort of assess some of these questions?

CP: Yeah, and it is funny. I hadn't really worked with private equity. I worked with venture capital, which obviously has a lot more patience. And then obviously...

GS: I've done a lot of venture. I know exactly how that works.

CP: They're in it for the 10-year game, not the three to five year game kind of thing. And then I've worked with public companies where it's the quarterly gain.

GS: Oh boy, another whole level of craziness.

CP: And that's a whole nother thing as well. And so it seems like PE companies tend to get a bad rap sometimes. And I think, frankly, I think it depends on the PE firm and their mindset when they go in with the investment. I would say we've been generally in a good place with that. I think either way, I think it still just keeps coming back to your point around these are financially oriented folks who want to still be able to see the numbers and movement and traction. And if they don't, they start getting impatient and start asking more questions. And so I think it's, again, the data is always going to be king with that and being able to constantly show proof points and show where there's progress, show where we're learning and where we need to double down. And I think we all can do better at having — and that's why the measurement thing is so important — is having the data to be able to show so that they can then quantify and understand how that adds up for them down the road.

GS: But here's a funny question about that. So let's assume, and again, I'm really trying to stay away from your PE firms. I really don't want to get into that, obviously. But are they prepared? I mean, certainly the public markets are not, but measurement's expensive. It takes time to figure out, and it's also incredibly... it's not perfect. I don't know if it's incredibly imperfect, but it's not perfect even when you set up MTA. I talked to a guy who runs an MTA firm, and he said the biggest problem is that we actually get the insights so late that nobody creates any change. And in fact, he said he'd asked his team one time and only 10 percent of the campaigns or 10 percent of the clients actually executed against new results from MTA. And the value of MTA is that you get results, you can't get them much faster. So I thought, wow, that's kind of crazy if only 10, if we're spending all that money. So it's hard to do. It's a little bit imperfect. There's elements of it being unproven in some dynamics. I'm a big fan of MTA, so I'm going to be careful about the listener here, what I'm saying. But then is the owner going to give you time to set up the infrastructure to do that, to do it right?

This is a real issue. It could take a year. I mean, I've heard of people spending two, three. In fact, I have a technology-oriented CMO... It's a long time ago, so nobody remembers. The CMO of Allstate, he had a tech background. He made three runs of trying to get MTA set up in Allstate.

CP: Wow.

GS: Who's got the patience for that kind of thing?

CP: Yeah, I think it's a real thing for sure. And I think that, generally, I think most PE firms are about making sure that you're starting to build a real multiple and real value. And for a lot of companies, the brand is part of what drives that multiple. Tech companies have their own multiple drivers, but if you're not a tech company, a lot of it is really the brand. And I think, my experience anyways has been, I think a lot of the PE firms who invest in consumer brands, they understand that to some extent.

So I think there's an understanding that these are the steps that need to happen to make that work. There's still, for everything, there's still a need to keep pushing as quickly as possible. And so you don't want to be wallowing in things for very long. And I think the most important thing is acknowledging what you're learning and what you're not, and why you're pivoting or making a change because you're not moving fast enough. And we went through this now where our MMM that we had just established, amazing and so much insight and richness that we're getting from it, but we get it quarterly and it's eight-week, 10-week lag. And that just wasn't, to your point, something that then made it actionable for us to plan. We would just be getting kind of our read on spring, and we've already had to start buying spring for the next year already.

GS: Correct. Or the markets change or the needs have changed. And then, yeah, I kind of question whether how helpful that can really be for us sometimes other than being interesting.

CP: Right, exactly. So it kind of helps you with some hindsight, but it doesn't help you with how do I make a decision now? So we're now moving to a model that's actually a blend of MMM with MTA to enable us to get weekly results. And we'll get those on the Wednesday the week following, which now we're going to have something that we can really harness. So we're a couple weeks away actually from getting that. But it's been a journey, and it's taken a lot of time and that's hard. You're right. I think helping the organizations understand why it's so important and why it is worth the wait I think is a challenge sometimes.

GS: And you and I talked a little bit before we came live here on this today with around just the morass of technology that's available to markets today. I mean, listen, MMA is a little business. We're almost $20 million of revenue at this point, and my tech budget's over $1 million at this point, which I find very funny. That was not the case when I came here to turn this thing around 10 years ago. I mean, tech was probably $50,000. I don't know what it was. It was nothing. So it's very funny it's gotten to be that much. But then how do you make all these decisions and bets against these different technologies? I feel like I'm just having sympathy for how hard your job is without coming up with answers. I'm not sure I'm helping the listener here somehow. You must be astonished at the tech budget that you have.

CP: Yeah, I mean the tech budget is huge, and if you look at that as a percentage of, I guess technically that's non-working media. I've worked so hard with my team to have a maximum kind of working, non-working ratio. And that kind of blows it out if you look at it that way a little bit. But it's so critical, and we're in the midst of literally overhauling the entire technology stack.

GS: Oh really? How old is your tech stack now? Can I ask just how old do you think it is?

CP: It varies what components, but we're at the point where some of it's like deciding, okay, do I pick all the different components and choose the best vendor for each of those that specializes in that, and then work on the backend to build all the connectors and integrations so that it works seamlessly? Or do I go to an all-in-one provider and make a huge investment and hope that that all works much better? It's challenging to know how to navigate that. Never mind just when I first started in the job and even still the cold emails that you get from everybody in the ad tech space. How do you navigate that? How do you know what the opportunities are? Who's the right fit? Who's got just a really great PowerPoint and doesn't really have the capabilities behind that? It's challenging for marketers, I think.

GS: Yeah, I've got a company that is involved with MMA as a member, and they've been, now they're on their third CEO in about the four or five years I've known them. And I've watched the company completely reposition what they do, which would be a very different tech solution under each CEO. And I'm enamored with each CEO's vision. There's no question about it, but it's like, it's the third one now, and I'm like, oh boy. Okay. I actually did finally call one of my member marketers and said, "Just break down for me what they really do well." But if you don't have always the access to do that, how do you figure that out? And then how do you find the missing pieces to all that?

CP: Yeah.

GS: What do you do having people to run martech, ad tech inside of Tailored Brands? So granted, you could push that across the different divisions, that's helpful, but that would make the play sort of make sense. What's the appetite to aggressively invest in that, as you kind of hear maybe from the board or others? What's the tone in the company towards that kind of thing? I think I'm asking.

CP: Yeah, I mean, I think there's a recognition that we've been operating in a state of tech debt for some time. And we got good guidance and advice on what it's going to take to get out of that and the amount of time that it takes. This has been the journey that we've been on from when I started almost five years ago. And so yeah, my martech team didn't exist when I joined.

GS: That's kind of what I'm asking. When did you get a martech team actually? When was there a specialist on that?

CP: Well, the first year was COVID, so we were dealing with a lot of other things. But I would say probably three-ish years ago, we started really building it up, and it's really accelerating now as we are growing and driving more integrations and all of that. And not just on the martech side, but also within our engineering team for the teams that are supporting us.

GS: Can I ask — and again, I'm not looking for confidential information — but what are the moves that you think you make to try to figure that out? What are the first capabilities that you try to hire? How do you look at some of that? Do you remember how you went through that process?

CP: Yeah, I mean it started with getting a leader who could help define a road map. And I think I really indexed on somebody who'd done it in a couple places and who had a good point of view and perspective. And then we've also spent a lot of time talking to other companies in our space in particular. And everybody's at very different stages of the journey, but everyone's on the journey.

And it's really helpful, I think also, to talk to others about not just the vendors that they chose, but why and how they built what pieces they put together. And if you're considering one vendor versus another, does one integrate better with the other components? So I think the shared knowledge that exists out there of what we've all been going through and are going through, I think that's incredibly valuable for that information exchange. We're all trying to figure it out. And everybody's got kind of a different use case, but there are some commonalities that help with that decision making.

GS: Where yours gets a little complicated too as a retail business... Some of the work the MMA has done has been to define that there are really only three core marketing strategies. There's just three, everybody. Stop making up a lot of other stuff. It's either going to be brand, okay, that's a play. There's going to be direct-to-consumer, transactionally oriented, or there's going to be customer experience. Those are really the three core ones, and you can have them in different combinations. So you talked a lot about getting the brand right first makes sense to me, and now I'm hearing you move towards probably setting the platform for more customer experience, I'm guessing was where some of that's going.

CP: Absolutely.

GS: I think the challenge we run into is that a lot of CMOs who got to the CMO office got there through brand. And yet customer experience seems to be where part of the war is and will be for retail, I think to probably a large degree. How do you think you and/or your team sort of migrate then to do more customer experience and just assume... You're having to remake a team here over time. Not trying to communicate anybody to the team that's already there, but you have to add new capabilities and new insights and so on.

CP: And I think it's bringing in new capabilities of specialists who are really good at that, but helping the others understand that they've got to figure this out, too. So whether it's the creative team, or the media team, or obviously teams like email and all that, they all are having increasing dependencies on the technology that is enabling what they're doing. And they've all got to get a lot more steeped in understanding how to define really what you need from the technology down to the detailed level use cases as well as the bigger picture outcomes. And thinking about it from a way that will help direct an engineering team to know what they have to go build for that. I think it goes to this idea of that kind of cross training and building skillset. Just because you're a creative doesn't mean that you're not going to need to understand how dynamic content delivery works in an email platform, for example.

GS: I wonder your reaction to this: we've seen some information, some research that we did around marketing org and it seemed to indicate — it's not conclusive — but seemed to indicate that customer experience was the marketing strategy of the future. It wasn't just brand. And experience can build a brand, too. So I mean, I want to be careful about those sort of complexities. What do you think about that movement to customer experience, given all the businesses you worked on?

CP: I think that's true. If you go back to that is like you said, that is what helps drive a brand is the experience that somebody has when they interact with you, whether it's in a store, on a website, talking to customer support, seeing an ad, interacting with you on social, all of those are customer experience.

GS: All those are experience.

CP: And every single one of those interactions shapes their relationship with you because of whatever emotion you elicited in that experience. So I do think we have to not lose sight of that and not lose sight of what do we want to push on the customer? What are we trying to achieve? And how do you interact with the customer such that you both get something out of it in the end?

GS: Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So much. Yeah, it's very interesting here, Carolyn. I think that I have a feeling that this conversation for me with you — and I've talked to obviously a number of CMOs — I think I'm realizing the incredible complexity of our business in a way that as much as I sort of understood, it just kind of went to a whole nother level. To think about how all those pieces come together and you bring them together. It's not easy.

CP: No.

GS: And I don't know that there's any magic. I don't even know if I know what the magic answer would be. I'm sitting here listening to you and thinking like, "I'm a trade association. I should have processes, platforms, sort of thinking around how you accommodate this." And I don't know if I know off the top of my head how you do all that, how you'd sort of provide a sense of clarity to what to do next.

CP: And I don't think there's a cut-and-dry playbook. It really is so different depending on...

GS: No one size fits all.

CP: And it's not just the company and the brand. It's like the stage that company's at and the maturity of that brand and all of that.

GS: Or even in a private equity environment, what are you doing? What are you doing long term? What's the transactional time?

GS: So listen, before I wrap things up, I'd be remiss, especially we had all this talk about technology, not to sort of touch on AI and how you see that affecting marketing. You want to give some general thoughts about what you see around AI and its application, and how Tailored Brands and you are starting to think about it.

CP: I'm so excited. I mean, again, with keeping with the theme, I think AI is the next frontier, right? So the internet was that. Now it's AI. We all know that, and we're all super bought into that. But I'm so excited about what it can do for us for so many different applications.

One, we were talking about the volume of content that needs to be created, right? It's not there today, but it will get there. And I have total belief that it will get there. It will not only allow us to create those versions, but it will allow us to better measure the impact that those versions are having and help optimize on that. I mean, I've already seen some tools that kind of start to help with that to some extent. It'll help us take disparate sources of data and input about a customer and how they react to what gets in front of them, and consolidate that into something that you can take action on. So you can take data from Google search trends and data from your website and data from your ad performance, and combine all those together to make even better ads that you wouldn't be able to.

Just the sheer volume of that task and trying to build all those connected points, I think, would be really hard for a human to do. And most of us don't have the people nor the time from a road map standpoint, either, to do that. So I think there's so much in terms of how we can make sure that we're better showing up to the customer in a way that's really relevant for them, that will enable us to be so much more effective at our job and be able to measure it better and then further optimize it as well.

GS: I don't know how far along you all are on that journey, but do you have a sense of how the ultimate benefit... I mean, AI has a lot of benefits, that's what we've kind of touched on here. Do you have a singular focus around what you're aiming for there yet? Or maybe a better way to even ask that question is has the company established a goal for AI, an objective for AI within the company where you want to aim towards?

CP: I don't know if we've fully established that. I think we've been, for us, reasonably progressive with this in our adoption. I've been really impressed with how really, truly cross functionally teams are adopting it in multiple different ways across the company. And we have regular check-ins as a cross-functional team that the CTO and I are kind of co-leading a task force on it. And we have regular check-ins on how it's being enabled across different teams and departments. And so I think right now we still have been in an objective of learning, and then a lot of folks starting with where we can get efficiencies. And I think we started with ideally, optimistically, and originally with like, we're going to measure the ROI right away. But we're just not there yet. And so I think as we've learned, we've tempered those expectations and it's more about where are we seeing efficiencies? Where are we freeing up people time so that we can do other things? Where are we able to have more direct and personal interactions with a customer at scale that we weren't able to do before? So those types of things we are starting to see, and I think as we learn more, we'll start shaping more specific targets and goals. Yeah.

GS: Yeah. It's interesting you say that. I talked to, he's the AI evangelist at Google. I don't know, let's assume he's in the center of paying attention to what both Google's doing and what he's doing outside. And I did ask him a dumb question, which is what do you think the center point of all this is? Do you have a sense of what, if you were to summarize it — you don't have to go as far as one word, which he did do — but I said, what do you think that is? He said personalization. And it's funny because we take all of marketing's ills, I think the biggest, dare I say, crime we've committed — and that's kind of a strong word — but is that as much as we try to be respectful of consumers, media channels haven't allowed us to do that. And we've not had the tools internally to be able to create messages that are relevant to them for that reason. It's kind of what you just talked about. You do campaigns based on proms or weddings or important events in life, and that puts a focus up. And then we need to target that to people and those moments that they're ready for that. How powerful that would be.

CP: And I think yes, for those moments and then even all the way down to we're not always getting right, all of us, even product suggestions, which should be a very basic thing based on things you've bought or what you've looked at. And I think getting to a place where you can not only take that information, but also other things around the kind of channel that customer likes to interact with, the type of content they react to and put all that into a much more tailored... It's not just about the product, it's also about the life stage that they're in. It's also about what we know about them and where they're at in their lives and their families or whatever it is. Build something that really is meaningful to them and do it in a way that isn't creepy and is embraced because it's super relevant. I think part of the backlash on privacy stuff today is that we're not getting personalization right a lot of the time, and then it just ends up being creepy. It's like you looked at a pair of pants once on a website and now you see them every single place you go, and by the way, you already bought them somewhere else and yet they're still showing them to you. And that's the stuff that doesn't work. And that's the stuff that gets people thinking, I don't want to be tracked.

GS: Right? That's when they click into the option that Apple gave us and said, "Hey, I don't want to be tracked" and stopping. It's like, no, no, no. You're making this a less good experience for yourself. I'm not going to try to do anything bad with that, I don't think.

CP: And I think most people, again, from eBay, people are basically good. I think most marketers do want to use that data for good. I think there are examples where it's not, and that harms the effort as well. But it's more about, I think, the consumer expectation is so high now that, "If I'm going to give you this information about myself, use it well and take care with that information and don't abuse it and over market to me. Use it in a way that makes my experience truly better." And so I think that goes back to the whole customer experience thing, that this has got to be mutually beneficial.

GS: Somehow we've lost that sort of orientation or insight or technology or some rules. I'm not sure exactly, but we're not quite there yet.

GS: Okay. Last one for you here. I often don't ask this question, but I definitely want to ask you.

Being the C-suite executive of any company is challenging. There's just no question about that. And I heard a great thing the other day. They said, everybody loves to get where you got to, but nobody wants to inflict the pain it takes to have gotten there. This was in the context, it was shown with a visual of an Olympic runner. Everybody wants to get a gold medal, but not everybody wants to do the hard work it takes to go get a gold medal. So I guess just in your own experience, if you were trying to get to the C-suite... And then continue to operate at this level with the people you do. Everybody's really smart, they're all paying attention, they're hopefully there for the best of intentions to try to do the right thing. If you were to give advice to other future CMOs, what would that advice be, Carolyn?

CP: This is something I'm so passionate about because I think that it's our duty as leaders in the industry to really keep thinking about the future of it and the people that will be rising through to eventually replace us all.

As challenging as it is for us, I think it's going to be even more challenging down the road for a lot of the reasons that we've talked about. But one of the things that I've observed is that with the way marketing's gone, where you can get highly measurable in digital media and you get people who are laser focused on performance, and those people are very different from the people who think about brand strategy. And then those people are very different than the people who think about technology that I think we're doing our profession a disservice by not building people who have generalist type of experience and can truly connect the dots. Because in a lot of organizations now, the CMO is the only one who has purview across all of those areas and is the one driving the connections between those dots. And that is, I think, going to be a folly for the industry.

And I would encourage people to not always be so worried about moving up the ladder within their specialty, but looking at lateral opportunities as well. If you're a creative person, find a project at least where you can get deep into the data and the analytics around something. Or if you're a media person, find a project where you can really understand the technology that's driving what you're doing, or the creative and how important that message is to the content that's in your media. And I think getting people to have a little bit more understanding of how all of these different pieces must work together to be effective in building that brand relationship with the customer, that's the thing that I think we need to all help our teams groom to do.

GS: Are you saying be a generalist or are you saying be an expert in more areas than you currently are?

CP: I think it's okay to be an expert in one area, but I think you've got to really understand how all the other pieces feed into it, and that's not just at a surface level. So I think you have to dig into it.

GS: Yeah. I heard you say generalist earlier. There was some part of the conversation here you and I've had where I heard generalist and I thought, I think part of the challenge is we don't know enough. But then what you did when you brought that around, you said, no, go spend some time in media, go spend some time in research, go spend some time in technology, I think is what I'm hearing you say. And develop some expertise in those areas. Expertise maybe is the wrong choice of words. Develop a competency or at least an understanding of that so you can bring it into the greater whole. That's what you're saying. Have you had a chance to do that in your career by chance? I'm just curious if that's sort of personally related to things you've done over the years.

CP: Yeah, I did. I mean, I was fortunate at eBay where I was able to have a lot of different opportunities. Coming from packaged goods, we are trained to be generalists there, and you work with all the different capabilities, but you're really the one quarterbacking it all and you have to learn...

GS: That is a brand manager job.

CP: ... how that all works. But at eBay, I had the opportunity to run everything from very high-level strategy around programs and more the creative side to the relationship marketing and running our email and direct mail programs. And those were two very different parts of the brain to use. One was highly quantifiable and tangible and targeted and all of that within email and direct mail. But then the creative side and how we were coming up with ideas and using that to change perceptions around our brand or whatever, that was less measurable and tangible, but the two worked together so importantly. So it did give me a good sense building on that generalist experience I had already from packaged goods, but it then allowed me to go deeper into a couple key areas and learn a lot more there.

GS: It's funny, you're almost kind of suggesting... I'm taken back by the tagline on the website, which you've said here, helping people love the way they look and feel for the most important moments. You're saying, when you've got to show up for research, you've got to show up for some other thing about marketing, it'd be best if you had some understanding about that is kind of what you're saying, it's a variation of that. Be ready for those moments. Exactly. And the job has gotten incredibly complex. I've talked to a lot of other CMOs, and I don't know why I heard it even stronger today than ever, so I think that's just what we're up against to kind of do this.

Carolyn, I can't thank you enough. Really appreciate it, really insightful and interesting. Thank you.

CP: Thank you so much for having me.

GS: Thanks again to Carolyn Pollock from Tailored Brands for coming on Building Better CMOs. Check the description of this episode for links to connect with Carolyn. And if you want to know more about MMA's work to make marketing matter more, visit mmaglobal.com or you can attend any one of our 44 conferences in the 16 countries where MMA operates, or really write me: greg@mmaglobal.com. Now, thank you so much for listening. Tap the link in the description to leave us a review. If you're new to the show, please follow or subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, iHeart, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can find links to all those places and more bettercmos.com. Our producer and podcast consultant is Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm. Artwork is by Jason Chase. And a special thanks to Angela Gray and Dan Whiting for making this happen. This is Greg Stuart. I'll see you in two weeks.