Marketers have known that consumers use their mobile phones for research when shopping, to compare prices or check availability. Marketers also know that consumers give preference to socially conscious and eco-friendly companies. App-makers have tuned into the the intersection of mobile product research and ethical consumption. These platforms, which are typically crowd-sourced, enable consumers to make in-the-moment decisions on which brands to support and which to spurn.

What are ethical consumption apps and how do they work?

Ethical consumption apps allow consumers to quickly and easily see what brands align with their personal causes. One of the most popular consumption apps is , which prompts users to join campaigns to support different causes, such as animal rights, green energy or ending child labor. Consumers can scan product barcodes and learn more about how the company aligns with their chosen causes. There are options to view alternative products that better relate to a user’s chosen causes, share information about a product or company across social channels, see what other users are boycotting and communicate your decision to the company.

explored how these apps motivate their users. Christian Fuentes of Lund University and Niklas Sörum of the University of Gothenburg studied three ethical consumption apps, finding they work in two core ways to enable and reinforce ethical consumption. First, the apps put pressure on consumers by making consumption ethically problematic. Ordinary consumption is considered inherently moral because it’s shaped by values such as caring for others, but the process of ethicalization rearticulates a person’s moral code every day. Put even more simply, the apps place a filter over the daily consumer landscape and show how almost every action can be an ethical dilemma. The apps also problematize everyday life by linking consumption with the consumer’s identity and status.

Second, ethical consumption apps don’t just point out problems, they empower consumers to act ethically. The app provides the research, often through crowdsourcing, which gives consumers the information they need to make ethical decisions. It’s also a platform to share decisions, find alternative solutions and reach out to companies.

“The apps we studied provide consumers with databases containing sustainability information aimed at assisting them in making their everyday consumption more sustainable,” Fuentes says. “The apps were designed to assist consumers, providing them with the information they need, when they needed it.”

What these apps mean for marketers

Fuentes says that the problems being addressed by ethical consumption apps relate to both the complexity and transparency issues inherent to marketing. The apps address consumer concerns of being misled by company claims.

“[L]ots of companies are still hiding behind obscure, sugar-coated claims, or not saying anything at all,” says Sandra Capponi, head of business development and co-founder of the ethical fashion shopping app . “Green-washed marketing just won’t cut it in the eyes of the consumer anymore. Besides, it can really hurt a brand when consumers find out that these messages contradict the truth.”

Greenwashing is one of the more notable examples of how marketing can mislead consumers. It refers to the when a company spends more on advertising its eco-friendly business activities than on actually helping the environment. Unfounded claims are also a prevalent practice in food marketing; some food brands use labels such as “natural” that are generally considered meaningless because their usage lacks any governance.
The apps act as sort of a check on marketing claims. Of course, as Fuentes explains, “no information is neutral. In selecting information and framing it in a specific way, these apps are also defining sustainability or ethicality in a specific way and pushing this definition and framing onto consumers.” Marketers can use the apps to determine which causes motivate consumers, but they can’t just claim it, they have to prove it.

“Every time someone buys from a better-rated brand, they’re sending a clear message to the industry to be more transparent and accountable for their impact,” Capponi says. “That has consequences across the entire value chain from sourcing and manufacturing to distribution and—of course—marketing. Unless marketers respond, their brands and their products will be left behind in the eyes of customers.”

Good On You works with more than 60 ethical brands to help them share their stories and promote their products. “Essentially, we offer these brands content marketing services,” she says. The app company recently worked with retailer C&A to launch their sustainable jeans, as well as with Patagonia on a campaign to secure World Heritage protection for Australia’s Tarkine rainforest.

“We also work with multi-brand retailers to help them understand the ethical performance of their portfolio, choose which brands to stock and communicate their ethics,” Capponi says. “Many retailers are starting to use the ‘Rated Good On You’ stamp to promote their most sustainable brands to customers.” It’s an ethical marketing tool that could give companies a lift among ethically conscious shoppers.

Promoting your brand’s ethical choices speaks to another growing trend: buycotting. Rather than boycotting, buycotting involves spending money to support companies that consumers agree with. surveyed 2,000 U.S. and British consumers who had taken at least one of nine actions (ranging from sharing a social post about a company or brand to participating in demonstrations) in response to what a company or brand did. The survey found that 83% said that it was more important than ever to support companies they believe “do the right thing” and buy from them, compared with 59% who said that it was more important to participate in a consumer boycott.

Getting on the good side of ethical consumers may require a deeper dive into supply chains, but brands that are conscious of social, economic, environmental and other issues can drive sales by making those stances and practices transparent. The more consumers are aware of those positive efforts, the better the reviews on these crowdsourced apps. Marketers can think of ethical consumer apps as the Cliffs Notes version of their company’s sustainability report, available at customers’ fingertips. Research points to consumers being motivated to support do-gooder brands; ethical actions are opportunities to draw customers willing to vote with their dollars.

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OPPORTUNITY

Knowledge-building

The largest percent change  in marketing knowledge investments in the prior 12 months was in developing new marketing knowledge and capabilities.

RISK

Not sharing the knowledge across teams

 say that a lack of cross-departmental collaboration is the biggest barrier to executing digital initiatives.

“In conversations with most of our clients, training has been discussed at length. From distributor training to internal staff training, utilizing interesting, interactive [learning management systems] to bring organizations and brands together has been a focus. Each organization has their own issues, but leveraging technology to train about products, culture and mission is a trend that will continue and grow in 2019.”

—Jim Heitzman, president of advertising agency Celtic Chicago

OPPORTUNITY

Deeper customer insights

 say that they would find great value in services that intuitively learn about their needs over time to customize product, service or content recommendations.

RISK

Failing to speak with customers directly

 of B2B content marketers say they have conversations with customers as part of their audience research. As explained in Liam Fahey’s The Insight Discipline, insight often comes from small data—which means interacting directly with consumers.

OPPORTUNITY

Working across departments 

Professionals give their company’s cross-department collaboration efforts a , leaving plenty of room for improvement.  

RISK

Conflicting goals and priorities

 say conflicting goals and priorities are the biggest barrier to cross-departmental collaboration at their companies.

“[There’s] lots of pressure to be integrative [and] cross-functional in approach to go-to-market strategy.”

—Bernie Jaworski, the Peter F. Drucker Chair in Management and the Liberal Arts

OPPORTUNITY

Personalization

 are more likely to shop with companies that always personalize experiences, and  that they would find great value in services that intuitively learn about their needs over time to customize product, service or content recommendations.  

RISK

Limited concern about data privacy and security

 say it is extremely important for companies to protect their personal information, and 48% will try to buy only from companies they believe will protect their personal data, though they don’t fully trust all of the brands they conduct business with. Despite high customer concern about data privacy, marketers rank the topic as  on a scale from 1 (not at all worried) to 7 (very worried).

“Personalization will continue to be a big differentiator. Using technology does not mean talking to customers at scale generically; it creates the opportunity to talk to customers specifically on the right channels at the right time.”

—Erika Brookes, CMO of Springbot

OPPORTUNITY

Making a social stand

 are belief-driven shoppers, a 13-point increase from the year prior. It’s not just millennials, either: A majority of all ages and all incomes are belief-driven buyers.  who take a social stand say it shows their company cares about more than making profits.  

RISK

Negative effects on the company’s ability to attract and retain customers and partners

 do not believe it’s appropriate for their brand to take a stance on politically charged issues. Although this is down from 82.6% six months prior, CMOs remain concerned that taking a stand will negatively affect their ability to attract business, make them stand out in the wrong way and be a waste of resources.

Marketing careers in 2019

MANAGERS

Keep your team happy:  of workplace happiness for creative and marketing professionals:

1. Doing worthwhile work

2. Feeling appreciated for what they do

3. Interest in their work7

Foster a positive culture:  would not accept a position if the role were perfect but the corporate culture wasn’t.

Consider flexible work arrangements: Half of advertising and marketing hiring decision-makers feel productivity would increase if their company instituted a compressed schedule, where employees work four 10-hour days.  allowing staff to attend to nonwork-related tasks while on the clock to boost overall performance.

Provide opportunities to learn new skills:  rate efforts by their organization to prep employees for new technology adoption as fair or poor. The top skills they would like to develop include: 

1. Web and user experience design (24%)

2. Content creation and content marketing (8%)

3. Data visualization (8%)

4. Video production (8%)

5. User interface design (7%)10

JOB SEEKERS

In 2019, the number of marketing hires is estimated to . The biggest percent increase in planned marketing hires in the next 12 months is in B2C product companies (9.7%), followed by B2B product companies (7%), B2C services (6.3%) and B2B services (4.1%).

Polish your digital skills:  say it’s hard to find talent with up-to-date digital skills. Employers are increasingly interested in candidates who are proficient in:

• Artificial intelligence and machine learning
  
• Content creation and content marketing
  
• Data science, data analysis and A/B testing
  
• Digital strategy
  
• Front-end web development
  
• Motion graphics
  
• SEO and SEM
  
• Social media management
  
• User experience and user interface design
  
• Video production

High-Tech Trends to Watch

Authentication technology: are interested in fingerprint recognition to make payments. 59% of consumers abandon online purchases because they didn’t have their debit or credit card and 49% abandon their cart because they forgot their password.

Smart speakers: The number of smart speaker users in the U.S. is expected to grow to . The average smart speaker user has the same profile as most early tech adopters: affluent, older millennial males. However, smart speakers have started to gain traction among other demographic groups, particularly younger Gen X women with children.

Nanoinfluencers: Marketers are tapping nanoinfluencers—online personalities with as few as 1,000 followers—to reach desired consumers. Unlike celebrity influencers, these smaller-scale influencers are easier to work with and their lack of fame makes them more approachable and more genuine to their followers. Instagram users with 1,000 to 10,000 followers earn the , and  say they would be very likely to follow a recommendation from an influencer of this size.

Blockchain: If you still don’t know what blockchain is, it’s time to do your research. Blockchain may have major implications for marketers, as the technology is predicted to change data collection, digital display ads, consumer targeting and digital asset security. 

Chatbots: Chatbots can deliver the speed consumers crave. The  of chatbots identified by consumers are 24-hour service (64%), instant responses (55%) and answers to simple questions (55%).

Snackable content: Think tweet-able graphics and bumper ads (typically six seconds in length). These easily digestible pieces of content are almost too short to ignore. Google tested  in 2016 and found that 9 out of 10 drove a significant lift in ad recall.

We Asked Marketers: What’s In and What’s Out for 2019?

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“Continued migration to digital marketing and budget shifts away from traditional sources. Increased buzz on predictive analytical modeling and focusing more on the future than on past historical data.”

—Bernie Jaworski, the Peter F. Drucker Chair in Management and the Liberal Arts

“Communication and conversion via technology that moves further into the background, learns daily habits and frees the user from a handset.”

—Tasha Cronin, co-director of interactive production at Droga5

“2019 will be the year when the AI hype cycle turns into AI implementation in most of our marketing tools. … First, AI functionality, flexibility and ease of use will increase. Second, there’s a growing awareness of the cost-saving benefits of AI within marketing. Third, companies are realizing that AI is crucial for implementing one-to-one marketing—particularly across social media channels.”

—Grad Conn, chief experience and marketing officer at social media management software company Sprinklr

“The surge in influencer marketing will reach further into the B2B world. While few B2B brands will have the budget—or desire—to earn a Kardashian plug on Instagram, receiving an endorsement from a valued expert voice within the field can go a long way.”

—Jeremy Hogan, associate director of content and social, Celtic Chicago

“Widespread use of virtual and augmented reality as a marketing tool. With commercial applications for these technologies coming online at a breakneck pace, these are no longer futurist concepts, they are the present. … Look for [small- and medium-sized businesses] to get in on the act in 2019 and determine creative ways to use this exciting technology to engage their customers and prospects.” 

—Adam Grossman, CMO and EVP of Boston Red Sox & Fenway Sports Management

OUT

“I have the same item that I’ve been unsuccessfully wishing away for years, but it’s getting closer to reality all the time: the end of demographic targeting.”

—Peter Fader, professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania

“Treating content like a test-and-learn budget. It should be a cornerstone of marketing and sales strategy. (Same with) fixed marketing plans and budgets. Agile is the new world order for marketers, not just for developers.”

—Erika Brookes, CMO of eCommerce marketing automation platform Springbot

“User interest is no longer king; marketers need to focus more on intent. While a company’s value and story will be the same, the language around any outreach must reflect the intent of the user. Whether that’s looking for growth, profit or something more qualitative, [language] needs to clearly align with your user’s intended outcome.”

—Hana Abaza, director of marketing at Shopify Plus​

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Slack messages, memes, huddles and pre-Super Bowl tweets conspire together to provide me with all the threads I need to weave coherence around the trials and tribulations gripping “This is Us” characters. And I’m here for it—so much so that I’m toying with the idea of actually becoming a viewer.

Author Seth Godin might call “This is Us” remarkable. The characters emote vulnerability, the storylines resonate broadly and the writing tugs at our heartstrings. Viewers feel so connected to the show that they tell their friends and loyally tune in for new episodes every week (or over the weekends, if binging).

As a marketer and business growth practitioner, I aspire to get people talking about my brand and my services and what makes them so unique. I’m grateful that remarkability isn’t reserved for a great drama. Athletic wear, financial services, personal hygiene products and even basic water can be remarkable to customers who research, buy, consume and effuse about the items to their family, friends or colleagues.

What characteristic can a business, brand or individual display to be considered remarkable? Compassion. I’m drawing from my discussions with industry leaders and visionaries on my podcast. In my recent “You’ve Been Served” podcast interview with Seth Godin, he explains how we can incorporate remarkability into our businesses.

These three actions capture how firms and individuals can improve their compassionate practices and leave a lasting, remarkable impression on customers.

1 Identify your personal mission

Start by understanding what matters most to you and how you want to make a difference. Waking up every day with clarity about what we want to bring to our life, environment and community helps ensure we take daily steps toward achieving those high-level goals. “If we commit to something that matters and show up, show up, show up until we make an impact, that’s a life well lived,” Godin says. 

I wake up every day with a specific intention and I continue to affirm it throughout the day. For example, if I commit to a day of giving, I engage by giving a smile or a genuine compliment to people I meet. Or I may find a unique way to support a colleague on a project. Each day is a commitment to the broader mission of compassion.

2 Seek opportunities to show compassion in every aspect of your work

Godin believes there are many opportunities in our professional lives to show compassion: “The best work we do, the biggest contribution we make is in the moments when there is no right answer, when there’s no obvious path. Most people have trouble when they refuse those moments.”

When we run into a colleague who isn’t having the best day or a customer who is distracted due to personal issues, we should share a kind word or let them know that they’re in our thoughts. Sometimes the greatest impact comes from spending a few moments listening to them. This may go against old-school professionalism, but listening is a way to show empathy and build more powerful relationships.

3 Know what matters to customers and support them beyond selling

When you align your resources to support causes and organizations that your customers hold dear, it speaks volumes about your firm’s compassion and gets customers talking about you.

The simplest way to identify your customers’ needs is to do a social search. What issues are they most frequently tweeting about? What organizations are they fundraising for? How are they spending their volunteer hours?

“Be generous with your ideas, spirit and connections and your presence,” Godin says. Support doesn’t need to be monetary. Supporting your customer includes volunteering with an organization your customer donates to or using your social platforms to share thoughts about issues important to your customers.

When businesses improve their compassion beyond a product or service, it shows care to the customer. It shows the customer that they matter. Customer word-of-mouth will spread, and it positions the company well in a crowded marketplace. We become remarkable in the customer’s eyes.

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Marketing efforts don’t always show the immediate results that sales team efforts show because marketing exists early in the customer journey. To successfully secure the funds for your plans, your team must show how those plans will be beneficial for the future of the company. 

It’s A Numbers Game

The best way to get other department heads to reallocate a bit of their budget is to show them what’s in it for them. How will this investment impact their ability to meet their revenue and profit goals? Prove it with metrics that show your department’s contribution to sales lift, sales-qualified lead generation and market penetration to your target audience. Map out the planned KPIs for the work you are proposing, showing how you plan to measure ROI and present it in a compelling manner. 

Examine these five metrics to build your case: 

1 Ratio of new sessions to recurring sessions. Google Analytics can reveal how many of your site visitors are new and how many are repeat visitors. Both are valuable, especially if they each grew reliably during a certain campaign.

2 Customer retention rate. Measure customers who have returned to your business to make purchases or use your services. This is a good indicator of brand loyalty in particular.

3 Cost per lead. This metric is calculated by dividing spending by leads generated. Inbound marketing can create far lower costs per lead, compared to heavy-spend outbound techniques. Use this metric to show how much money you saved your organization.

4 Online engagement. Likes, shares and mentions don’t create revenue, but you can use increased engagement to demonstrate the effectiveness of your marketing.

5 Total conversions. The ultimate goal of marketing is to convert leads to the next stage of the sales funnel. Show your boss how many customers started as leads.

If you’re able to present instances where spending improved any of these marketing results, you’re on the right path to getting the budget your department needs.

Moving Into the Future

• ROI results are the first step in justifying a bigger budget, but forecasting how marketing spend can influence your organization’s future bottom line is just as important. 
• Strategies for anticipating future marketing success:
• Use metrics to show how your current objectives will be amplified by a larger spend.
• Show how an increased budget will put your organization ahead of competitors.
• Look at current market trends and stress the need to further invest to keep up.

Combining prospective gains with past successes makes for a convincing argument. These measurements can dictate a strategy for improving branding, competing with peers, keeping up with leading-edge trends and, ultimately, generating favorable ROI.

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By late 2016, Roetzer had become so obsessed by AI’s potential in marketing that he founded the , a group with the mission of making AI approachable and actionable for modern marketers. Roetzer still runs his company, PR 20/20, but he says that his AI group now takes nearly all his time. He badly wants to figure out how organizations can pilot and scale AI tools to increase efficiency and reduce costs. 

So far, he has nearly the entire marketing industry to work with. 

“The vast majority of the industry is at what I consider the pilot phase,” he says. “Most are trying to understand what AI is, then how to apply it.”

A 2018 report by Boston Consulting Group and MIT Sloan Management Review—titled —finds that only 18% of companies are “pioneers,” or organizations that understand and have adopted AI. A third of companies (33%) are “investigators” that are in the pilot stage and know a bit about AI, while 16% are “experimenters” that are piloting AI without fully understanding it—they hope to learn about AI as they use it. The rest (34%) are “passives,” or organizations that haven’t adopted and barely understand AI.

Over the past few years, many marketers have marveled at AI and wondered the same thing Roetzer did after watching Watson dominate its fleshy opponents: How does that work? As 2019 begins, marketers can move beyond passivity and into being AI pioneers.

Learn Now

Like Roetzer, Robert Redmond watched “Jeopardy!” in awe as Watson dominated the show’s legends. Redmond, a self-described sci-fi geek, had been hearing about AI since he was a young boy, but the AI’s game-show performance was a glimpse at the technology’s capabilities. 

At the time, Redmond was working as a creative director of teamDigital Productions; by 2016, he worked at IBM with Watson Advertising as creative and strategy director. Redmond is tasked with figuring out how Watson can help brands have unique, AI-driven chats with their customers. 

When Redmond first learned that he’d be working with Watson, he says that he knew close to nothing about how AI worked, especially from an engineering perspective. Redmond calls the six months leading up to working with Watson his “baptism” into AI—he was already an AI convert, he says, but he still had to fight to understand what was possible with the technology.

“I read a lot and I asked more questions than most would probably be comfortable answering,” he says. “There was a lot of ‘Can we do that?’ And the learning came by understanding the implications on the back side of those questions.”

Marketers—most of whom likely don’t fully understand AI, let alone its true potential in business—should also be asking a lot of questions. Redmond believes that businesses should learn by digging into possibilities and seeing what AI tools are available on the market. Both he and Roetzer have encountered some companies that use AI-based software without realizing it—this is likely the case for many companies searching for their first piece of AI-based software. 

For marketers eager to learn about AI, Roetzer suggests reading  by Paul Daugherty and H. James Wilson and  by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb. “Most of the really valuable AI education has nothing to do with marketing or sales,” Roetzer says. Even so, books like these can give marketers a window into AI and its business potential. 

Marketers should learn how their competition is using AI. They should also ask vendors pointed questions about the AI software they’re selling. “A lot of tech vendors are slapping ‘machine learning’ and ‘AI’ on their branding,” Roetzer says. “A lot of times, they don’t even know what that means. The sales and marketing teams can’t explain how their products use AI. They’re just told by the engineers that it’s AI.”

Marketers can also play with online AI demos to get an idea of how AI-driven tools work. , Roetzer says, as does IBM’s Watson. One Watson tool——allows users to log into their Twitter account and receive a personality analysis based on their tweets. 

“There are a lot of resources out there, and you can connect the dots pretty quickly if you just consume the right resources and understand the ways you might be able to apply it in your business,” Roetzer says.’

Find Easy Wins and Tough Problems

Companies without AI experience will likely have a steep learning curve, Redmond says. “There’s definitively going to be a training period, a modeling period, and probably a fail period if you’re stepping into a scenario where you are really starting from scratch,” he says. “It’s a difficult transition.”

Redmond and Roetzer both say that this difficult transition will make early, easy wins essential. One potential easy win, Redmond says, is using AI-based programmatic advertising tools to bid on media buys. Another he suggests is natural-language processing tools that can quickly judge the tone and intent of business communications, such as emails, memos or marketing materials. “You can discover new ways or new features that might be important that you didn’t realize or pressure points that may be bigger than you’ve been admitting,” he says. “You uncover the insights, and you can act upon them.” 

The simplest way to find easy wins, Roetzer says, is to make a list of all the tasks in the business—from quick to time-consuming—and measure how much time employees spend on each task, as well as how much money the company spends on software or outside services for each. Then, marketers can rate each task from one to five based on how much value AI could bring. A one would mean little to no value, a five would mean a good AI solution would be transformative. Listing, measuring and rating may sound arduous, but Roetzer says that the process will give marketers an idea of AI’s potential value in cutting down time and costs. 

“If you’re the director of marketing, and you’re trying to get buy-in to try this, you can go and say, ‘Hey, I went through an analysis. Here’re the five use cases where I think we create the most value,’” Roetzer says. 

The C-Suite Must Buy in, Time Must Be Given

Redmond normally works with companies that have a mandate from the top to adopt AI, now. The chief technology and chief information officers with whom he tends to work are focused on a problem at a high level and want to solve it with AI; that desire spreads through the rest of the organization.

But not every marketing manager will be so lucky. Roetzer says that even marketers who get the C-suite to buy into AI software often have executives quit on their AI project before it can prove its efficacy. AI systems, especially at small or midsize companies, sharpen over time and often need months to learn—it’s hard work to get AI right, it likely won’t work right away and it may even fail during the first pilot. If a CMO adopts an AI-powered media-buying tool, for example, and it doesn’t show lift three months and $20,000 into adoption, many executives will scrap the idea of AI altogether, convinced it doesn’t work.  

“It’s a hard thing to explain to the C-suite if they’re not the ones driving it,” Roetzer says. “Even at the pilot stage, there needs to be buy-in at the top level. [They need to know] that this is going to be an ongoing experiment, and it’s going to transform everything we do. But we have to have the right investment and the right patience to see it through.”

Organizations must understand from the start that AI is not a magic switch, Roetzer says. Companies can’t just expect to adopt AI and—poof!—solve all their problems. Adopting AI is a lot of work and requires a lot of data to train its models; it takes a lot of strategy to prioritize what cases are helped by AI and what cases should be left for another day. “Some people may give up too easily,” he says. 

Although Roetzer knows that it may sound as though he’s trying to scare people away or downplay AI’s potential, he believes that marketers who properly adopt AI will be given “superpowers.” “It’s going to fundamentally change the way we do marketing,” he says.

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People hate potholes. Drivers dislike being surprised by mid-road jolts and hate fixing the all-too-common damage to their vehicles—the American Automobile Association reports that potholes cost U.S. drivers an annual average of . And just think of how all those bumps in the road could ruin mid-transit pizzas! 

OK, drivers don’t likely think much about how potholes might ruin their pizzas, but the advertising team at Domino’s Pizza has. , Domino’s advertising agency of record, suggested that the pizza chain ask customers what roads in their area needed repairs. CP+B pitched that Domino’s would give a grant to the municipality in charge of maintaining that road, then use the repairs as the backbone of an infrastructure-based advertising campaign. 

“The first time I heard the idea, it was obvious to me that it really was a breakthrough, unique idea that would resonate and demonstrate our obsession and passion with pizza,” says Kate Trumbull, vice president of advertising at Domino’s Pizza. 

Trumbull says that the Domino’s ad team saw pothole repair as an opportunity to ease their customers’ journey—after all, why should a bad road get in the way of good pizza? It also fit with the company’s previous campaign: Domino’s had given customers “” on their pizzas. Domino’s replaced ruined pizzas—whether damaged by potholes, a ravenous dog or a slip-and-fall accident—so long as the customer returned the cheesy remains. 

Trumbull says that the idea of taking customer requests for road repairs was revolutionary, but she had no idea how they’d pull it off. Who would they work with? Were local municipalities even interested in taking money for potholes, money that historically comes from public funds? She had no clue.

Action

Before launching the campaign, Domino’s and CP+B cold-called municipalities to see if they’d be interested in road-repair grants. The duo became familiar with the winding-but-staid nature of working with local government; sometimes, they’d find the right person on the first call, other times it took multiple callbacks, pass-forwards and long games of phone tag. “It can test you and test your patience,” Trumbull says. “But getting those early confirmations that this could work really motivated the team to keep pushing.”

Trumbull realized that many local governments were as excited by the idea as she was. Cities with small budgets seemed especially thrilled: “They really wanted to work with us and make it happen,” she says. Some governments had no interest, but Trumbull heard enough positive responses that she became more excited by the idea. The campaign would help the company sell more pizzas and drive brand buzz, she believed, but it would also be uniquely engaging. 

“We want consumers to know no other brand loves pizza more than we do,” Trumbull says. 

In late 2017, Domino’s began work on its Paving for Pizza campaign. Domino’s awarded grants to four cities that it had cold-called. On Dec. 12, 2017, road crews paved eight potholes across three roads in Bartonville, Texas, the first city to be awarded a paving grant. The crew used a road roller branded with a Domino’s sticker—a video filmed by Domino’s shows the roller moving backwards to reveal a branded stencil with the company’s logo and the tagline, “Oh yes we did.” Then, in March, Domino’s awarded a grant to Milford, Delaware, where crews repaired 10 roads. In April, crews in Athens, Georgia, repaved 150 square yards of failing roadway.

On June 11, 2018, Domino’s sent out a press release and launched a microsite where customers could submit requests for roads in their area that needed repairs. The website also served as a place to show off successfully paved roads, as well as statistics and reactions. Stephen Bailey, the program development coordinator of Athens, is quoted on the  as saying that this grant was “certainly a new type of opportunity for us.”

Within the first week, customers sent in 47,197 nominations for repairs. 

Then, social media exploded with chatter and Trumbull’s phone glowed and buzzed. “My mom called me, my aunts and uncles were texting me,” she says. “People are just like, wow, Domino’s is seriously doing this?”

Although Domino’s ad team was excited, they kept their media budget steady throughout the campaign. They’d reach out to franchisees to let them know that they had given a paving grant in their area, Trumbull says, and franchisees would often send their own press releases or bring pizzas to the road crews. But after the initial press releases and ads, the campaign spread most successfully by word of mouth.  

“People bring it up with me,” Trumbull says. “‘Are you guys really paving?’ And when you hear that, something has really struck a chord.”

Result

In Andrew Essex’s 2017 book, , he touted an infrastructure advertising approach as the future of ads. Essex, who currently serves as CEO of marketing company Plan A, had simple reasons: Print ads haven’t worked in 20 years, TV viewers see commercials as more annoying than informative and internet users can wield adblockers to rid their screens of pop-ups and sidebar ads. His main point: Companies need to get creative and push beyond all-too-familiar ads or risk becoming irrelevant. It’s no surprise, then, that Essex had nice things to say about Domino’s campaign: “Absolutely brilliant,” he says. “Anytime that you can find whitespace or surface that isn’t mediated into a communication channel, you’ve done something brilliant.”

Brilliant campaigns get brilliant results: Jenny Fouracre-Petko, Domino’s director of public relations and charitable giving, says that the campaign received 1.1 billion traditional media impressions from its launch in June 2018 through November. 

Trumbull says that during that same period, the microsite drew 170,000 nominations for road repairs from 16,000 unique zip codes. The microsite itself received 500,000 hits during that time. Trumbull says that the company doesn’t share sales data, but simply called the results “strong and successful.”

Domino’s has continued to give grants for road repairs. As of November 2018, Trumbull says that they’ve given grants to pave 11 towns, with 20 more local governments reviewing grant agreements. Domino’s even decided to give grants to municipalities in all 50 states; Trumbull hopes to see the last roads paved by Spring 2019, at latest.  

Outside of success metrics, Trumbull says that the excitement generated by the campaign was unique. She had no idea people would get so passionate about a paving campaign; franchisees started matching Domino’s donations to pave roads and Trumbull even received pictures of people dressed as a Domino’s road crew for Halloween. 

“It’s exceeded expectations,” she says.

While the Paving for Pizza campaign finished at the end of 2018—save for some straggler roads still to be paved—Trumbull hopes that Domino’s can create more campaigns that address friction points in the customer journey.

“For us, this wasn’t about infrastructure; this is really about pizza,” she says.

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 remembers having to keep herself from shaking with anger when she heard this response. The comment came from a European businessman she was interviewing, she says, a man who had sat on many boards over the years, mostly in manufacturing. She found his opinion dogmatic and short-sighted. “It just didn’t make sense to me,” she says. 

Whitler calmed herself. “Help me understand,” she remembers saying, “what is it that makes you think that marketers are never valuable on the board.” 

“Well, marketing is largely luck,” he responded. “And it’s not strategic.” Whitler asked what functions were strategic, to which he replied, “Operations.” 

Whitler says that she nearly fell out of her chair—operations is strategic but marketing isn’t?, she thought. Instead of telling him that he was wrong, she kept listening and realized that the way he thought made sense: The boards he had served on likely marginalized marketing, shunning it as a waste of time and money, never treating it as a strategic function or giving it a chance to drive growth. How could he think that marketers should be on boards if he’s never worked with a good marketer? 

Whitler—who earned her Ph.D. in marketing in 2014 after two decades as a high-level marketing practitioner and now works as an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business—wanted to explore what effect marketers could have on boards. After eight years of research and writing, Whitler and two colleagues—Ryan Krause and Donald Lehmann—published their paper, titled  in the September 2018 issue of Journal of Marketing. 

Numbers in the paper show a stark reality: Although 16% of boards have at least one member with high-level marketing experience, a survey of board members showed that only 4% believe that marketing experience is important. Ninety percent of boards with a marketer have only one; 9% have two and less than 1% have three marketers. They found no boards had more than three marketers. 

But there’s room for hope: Whitler, Krause and Lehmann analyzed 64,086 biographies of board members who sat on Standard & Poor’s 1500 firms between 2007 and 2012, searching for those with marketing experience. They found that firms with at least one experienced marketer on the board had revenue increases of 5.78 percentage points compared with firms with no marketers on board. The researchers found evidence suggesting that boards with experienced marketers are positively associated with future business growth, but say that this relationship is “highly contingent.” For example, growth is stronger when the firm’s economic circumstances demand marketing expertise—namely, when the company’s market share is weak and its industry is experiencing weak growth. What does it take to make a board pay attention to marketing? Perhaps a single marketer, the paper says, but “[the marketer’s] ability to do so depends on the extent to which they can influence the board and the extent to which the board can influence the [].” The lack of marketers on boards “impairs firms’ ability to tackle demand-side problems, even though boards and CEOs consider growth generation among their most challenging problems,” the paper says. This is a contradiction, the authors write, which suggests that boards can’t see the connection between their inability to address growth challenges and their lack of marketing experience. 

Marketing News spoke with Whitler about her research, board-level aversion to marketing expertise and how marketers can win more influence in the years ahead. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Marketing News: Why has so little research been done on how marketing influences the board?

Whitler: Management believes that it’s a marketing issue and marketing has historically said upper echelon stuff—governance, boards—is the realm of management. I’m hopeful that some of the work that’s been done at the CMO level—like the  have been done on why the CMO matters—makes an impact on the firm. There’s hope, energy and excitement for marketing to weigh in and potentially even lead the marketing conversation in the upper echelons of the firm.  

MN: Why do boards seem averse to marketing expertise? 

Whitler: There has been research done on management that demonstrates that board members are susceptible to in-group bias, just like the rest of us are. In this case, the in-group bias is functional. If you have a board of all finance people, they all use the same language, they’re all trained in a similar way and all see the firm in a similar way. When given a choice, they’d love to hire more finance folks. 

That collides with something else that happened: In 2002, the U.S. passed the  after the implosion of Enron, WorldCom and others. It’s a regulation that mandated all boards must have financial experts and it held boards more accountable for firm performance. After that regulation passed, boards structured themselves differently. There are fewer board members—part of the reason is that the requirements of board members went up and it was tougher to get sitting CEOs on the board. Also, the average size of boards tended to go down. You’re now being mandated to have a finance expert on the board because of the need to monitor the firm’s performance. There was this rapid shift toward pushing for more regulatory-type experts on the board—finance, accounting, maybe legal in some cases, but a lot of finance experts. So now you have a shrinking average board and more of one function and one mindset. What happens on any team when you start getting a dominant group? Is it possible that you might look for more people like yourself? 

Now the mindset of the board chiefs changes and their desire to bring in marketers lessens. This is all a hypothesis—I’m still pulling together pieces of information. But over time, we’ve had regulatory and marketplace changes that have driven structure and composition changes. Then on top of that, we know that in-group bias exists at the board level. These are problems.

MN: One section of your paper says that this bias against marketers is most likely to be held by CFOs.  How can marketers change that bias?

Whitler: Marketers and finance people come from very different thought worlds. In managerial research, it’s well recorded that there’s been some conflict between the two functions. Finance tends to manage the purse strings, but marketers are trying to engineer growth. Engineering growth oftentimes requires investment, so they think differently. Marketers have a growth mindset and an external mindset, while finance is a more inwardly focused, throughput-oriented function. They have different orientations and they’re oftentimes pitted against each other. 

The nature of these two has to be in balance for the company to work well. You need both sides—it’s the yin and yang. I would suggest that you want both functions to look for the value in the other. But if I’m talking to a marketing community, the onus is on us to help. We’re in charge of changing consumers’ minds. If you have an obstacle inside the company where a function doesn’t value you, we should have an expertise in being able to affect that belief.

MN: In 2018, Spencer Stuart reported that a large number of CMOs were changing jobs; some CMOs changed companies, some lost jobs. Are companies—perhaps even marketers themselves—still confused about what, exactly, a high-level marketer does and how they should be measured? 

Whitler: Yes. Over the course of the last eight or nine years, I’ve conducted 500 or 600 interviews—I’ve talked to CMOs, CEOs and executive recruiters. Nobody really understands the variance in the marketing function.

I’ll give you an example: I was talking to a marketer who graduated from a top MBA program. He worked at a large beverage company before taking a promotion to work at a tech company. I know from my research that those marketing roles are totally different. At the beverage company, he led strategy for the brand; he was in the driver’s seat. In tech, marketing follows. He had moved from one type of marketing role that was a leadership, strategic role to one where marketing was not valued nearly as much. It was more of a support staff for the engineers. After all my interviews, I knew that would be a horrible shift. I asked him, “Knowing what you now know, would you have taken the job at the tech firm?” He said, “Absolutely not.” 

The problem is that he did not know of the variance in roles. All he knows is levels: He knows that a director is senior to a brand manager and so he’s looking at a very blue-chip tech company going, gosh, everybody thinks this is a great company! Well, it is—for engineers; not as much for marketers. All he evaluated was brand name is good, level is better and money is better. That’s the degree of his assessment and he jumped. Now, his training is not a great fit and the job is not what he thought it would be. 

MN: If marketers don’t even know their roles, how can CEOs or the board know?

Whitler: CEOs are not experts in CMO roles. I’ve interviewed folks who have had five, six or seven different CMO roles—they get it because they’ve lived through the pain. But somebody who’s had one or two CMO roles doesn’t know enough to figure it out. 

MN: Do CMOs and marketers consider who is on the board when looking for a new company?

Whitler: CMOs have not historically thought about the board. My hope is that our research will help them understand how who’s on the board can affect them. Just something as simple as: Are you invited to board meetings? Because if you have an advocate—a marketer—on the board, they’re more likely to want to hear from the CMO and the firm.

MN: Is increasing influence as simple as having one board member with marketing experience?  

Whitler: In our dataset of over 65,000 board member biographies, we don’t have much incidence of board members being marketers. Roughly 16% of boards have marketers, but it’s typically one person. We don’t have boards with six or seven marketers on them, so we don’t have a large sample. But I can give you a story of how the power of just one individual can change everything. 

I spoke with a woman who is on the boards of multiple large companies. On one board, in an industry with monopoly-like power, she was the first marketer on the board. I asked her, “Do marketers matter? Help me understand what type of impact you have.” She said that when she got to the board, she was fascinated because her experience had been in industries where marketers were drivers of firms—she had that profit-and-loss marketing experience. For her to enter an industry where marketing has not historically been very important and many of the firms have monopoly power, she noticed that the thinking is quite different. During her first meetings, she just observed and said that the board didn’t talk about the consumer or the customer. Not once. She’s on other boards and she’s a very successful practitioner who had reached the C-level at large, respected companies—to sit through a board meeting and not hear anybody talk about the external consumer was somewhat shocking to her. She also asked about their digital strategy, because that was a hot topic at that point. After the board meeting, she was pulled aside and told that digital is a tactical discussion and they, at the board level, don’t deal with tactical discussions. 

Now, three to four years later, digital transformation is a core strategy of the company. They talk about the consumer all the time and they even have somebody at the C-level who is in charge of consumer engagement. How did that happen? How does one voice change the strategic direction of the firm? I started probing, asking her questions, and she said, “I just started helping them see the future. They currently have a monopoly, but in the future they will not. I started showing them trend information data and where the industry is going. And then I simply asked questions.” 

MN: Is one voice on the board enough to influence the top management team—CEOs, CFOs, CMOs?

Whitler: One of the things that surprised me most when I did the interviews with the marketing board members is how engaged they were with the internal marketing apparatus of the firm. We’re taught, historically, that the board meets four times a year and has very little direct interaction with the management team. Obviously, they have a lot of interaction with the CEO and the CFO, but beyond that, not a whole lot. But several of the individuals I interviewed were asked to lead or serve on task forces. They have different terms, like ad-hoc committee task forces, but these are essentially special committees designed to help solve operational issues in the firm. 

When this would happen, the marketing board member was working directly with the CMO and with some marketing function to solve specific problems. One marketer, who worked with a very large fast-food company in the U.S., was on their board and saw that marketing in the firm was not doing well. The CEO-chairman asked the marketer on the board to lead a task force to look at marketing in the firm, including key partners like advertising agencies. That’s a very engaged level of work with the management team. This individual brought in experts from New York ad agencies and other leading marketing companies and formed a group to counsel the internal marketing organization. 

MN: Fast-food companies are struggling with a shrinking market right now, so it makes sense that they’d try that. But are stories like this out of the ordinary?

Whitler: Today’s contemporary, progressive board is expected to improve business outcomes, one board member told me. Think about it this way: If you’re paying board members $250,000 per year and you’re paying to wine and dine them, the board could be a multimillion dollar investment. Don’t you expect an ROI? If all they’re there to do is to make sure that the books are accurate and to monitor the functioning of the management team, you’re not activating the full potential of the board. More progressive boards expect board members to have positive impact on business results. 

In management literature, researchers think of boards as playing three different types of roles: a monitoring role, a social capital role and a human capital role. The social capital role is about the value of networks, meaning if I’m a board member on American Express and a board member of Procter & Gamble, I now have relationships in two different industries and experiences that I can bring to bear on each company. My knowledge as a board member at Procter & Gamble may help me make connections and my network may be able to help the performance of Amex and vice versa. A finance person can serve on the board and in a monitoring role, but they also have expertise potentially in M&A work and that expertise can be useful in helping the management team. These people have 40 to 50 years of experience—the human capital role can be critically important. 

MN: How can marketers win more board-level influence? 

Whitler: The first thing is that they have to earn it. I spoke with a CMO of a large financial services firm and the CEO was clear: He wasn’t going to give her more authority, but he wanted her to have a bigger impact. The CEO invited the whole marketing function to step up. “I’m inviting you to play a more impactful role,” he told her. “I’m not giving you more territory but I’m inviting you to be more influential.” She said to her team, “Let’s engage in a different way: How do we think about the big problems of the company?” She listened differently to the CEO and the senior team. She looked at the big challenges and stepped into the gap. Rather than saying, “This isn’t my job, my job is X,” she said, “The company is having a problem in a certain area. Let me get my team to think about it and I’m going to come back to the table with some thoughts.” Her team wasn’t asked to think, but they started stepping up. I call this stepping into the gap. She told the CEO, “I know that this is not technically in my area, but marketing can lend a voice on this. I’m pretty sure what started happening is…”  And the CEO said that he knew she was going to have a bigger impact. 

How do you get more influence? The short answer is that you have to earn it. At one level, you can be invited to the table, but when you’re at the table, you actually have to have influence. How do you know if you’re in a position to grow your influence? How do you earn that right? Demonstrating the type of impact you can have, the way you work with your internal peers and help them achieve their goals are likely effective ways. There’s an opportunity to step into that gap. Over time, if we do a good job of that, we earn the right to be invited to more of those important conversations. 

MN: And in most cases, I’m guessing that there will be no invitation. The CMO or marketing manager must take the initiative.   

Whitler: Yeah. As a former manager, a former CMO and a former GM, who did I always love to promote? The people who stepped into the gaps. There are a lot of people who wait for the ball to be thrown to them, but the problem is that balls are being dropped all around us. I look for the people to step up and say, “Hey, that ball didn’t come to me, but the ball’s being dropped and I’m going to step up and I’m going to pick up that ball.” That’s a signal that you’re ready to be promoted. Those tend to be very high-impact people. To earn the right, you have to be competent. One of the things I often share with CMOs is that you want to constantly be developing and growing and improving your own capability. Invest in your own learning and growth. Most C-level marketers need to go back and at least take contemporary stats. When I was learning stats the first time, we had books; we didn’t have computers, we did everything manually. Today, you can quickly do conjoint or cluster or factor analysis—tasks that would have taken two hours to calculate manually. C-level marketers need to retool and to stay current with the digital transformation. 

MN: What about marketers who want to get onto a board themselves?

Whitler: Part of it is awareness of marketers’ positive impact. There are a couple of executive recruiters who use our research to share with boards when it might make sense to add a marketer. It’s not under all conditions, but if boards or companies are struggling with certain issues, there are times when it might be valuable to add a marketer. It’s good for them to have this empirical evidence of how marketers can have a positive influence. 

Another part of is it that when marketers get on board, they have to be successful and effective. If you have only one marketer on a board—like the marketer on the board with monopoly-like power—you need to speak the board’s language. If she came to the company and didn’t speak the language of the board and wasn’t perceived to have a positive effect on board processes and outcomes, that wouldn’t be helpful. We want effective, successful marketers that will help grow the companies for marketers in the future to be in the boardroom. There has to be a positive experience for the board members who sit on multiple boards. They should be saying, “I have a marketer on this other board. They’ve really been helpful in addressing certain issues at the company and I think that type of expertise might be valuable on this board.” But if they don’t have a positive experience, that will not bode well for marketers. 

I don’t think that all marketers are going to necessarily be good board members—not all marketers are equally skilled or are prepared to go on boards. Future research needs to help us understand what those skills are. Under what conditions are some marketers prepared to be successful at the board level? What type of training is required? We don’t know yet.

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