Transcript

Bennie F Johnson

Hello, and thank you for joining us for this episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. I’m your host, Bennie F. Johnson, AMA CEO. In our episodes, we explore life through a marketing lens, delving into conversations of individuals that flourish at the intersection of marketing and the unexpected. We hope to introduce you to the visionaries whose stories you might not yet have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know. Through our thought -provoking conversations, we’ll unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. Today, my special guest is Steve Dennis. Steve is a strategic advisor, a keynote speaker, a marketing strategist, and bestselling author. His latest book, “Leaders Leap, Transforming Your Company at the Speed of Disruption,” explores why so many transformations fail and what leaders must do to get their organizations back on the road to relevance.

He’s had a diverse career as a C-suite executive for two Fortune 500 companies and most recently working as a consultant and member of several leading boards. Steve is currently president of SageBerry Consulting. And prior to founding SageBerry, he was the Chief Strategy Officer for the legendary brand group Neiman Marcus, where he led the company’s customer insight, loyalty, and omnichannel marketing efforts, something we’ll talk about today.

He’s a Forbes senior contributor, co-host of Remarkable Retail Podcasts, and he’s amplified these themes in his first book, “Remarkable Retail.” It’s a true honor and privilege to welcome Steve to the podcast. Welcome, good sir.

Steve Dennis

Well, thank you. That was a very nice and generous introduction. I appreciate it.

Bennie 

Oh my goodness, it is a pleasure for us to have you here. And you’ve gotten into so much trouble over the years. You’re a remarkable guest to have here. 

Steve 

I don’t know how I feel about that. Good trouble, hopefully.

Bennie 

So, you know, we’re, we’re going to talk a lot of… you should feel great. This is, you know, I love to have conversations that deal with disruption, right? It’s the, it’s really the energy of the day. It’s the story of the day and the story of moving to relevance. So I’m going to jump right into- what were the lessons that led you to think about your book, “Leaders Leap?”

Steve

Well, you know that, well, first of all, kind of the through line in my career, whether I was on the corporate side or since I got on the consulting side, speaking that kind of stuff has been being really fascinated by the pace of change and how organizations need to evolve to stay relevant. And I’ve worked in and around that for a really long time.

Bennie 

Mm.

Steve 

And one of the things I started to see, so I started my retail career a million years ago at Sears Roebuck and Company, which some of your listeners I’m sure will know, was once the biggest retailer on the planet and now essentially doesn’t exist. So I lived through the kind of beginning of the decline there or at least the time where it was obvious that the world was starting to change very quickly and Sears had not changed enough. Then a little bit of working at an iconic retailer like Neiman Marcus where it was also starting to become clear that more change was gonna be necessary and then being out commenting on strategy and it’s just it started to be kind of a fascination for me.

Bennie 

Right. Mm-hmm.

Steve

And it’s actually not a phrase that appears in “Leaders Leap,” but it’s one that I found as I’ve been talking about the book and working with clients I keep coming back to, which is if the world has changed so much, why have you or we changed so little? Because you do see so many iconic brands, retail and otherwise. Tupperware just looks like it’s going away, you know, fairly recent news.

Bennie

Right. Right.

Steve 

So it’s just been a sense of fascination for me. And as I look at what’s out in the world, there’s lots of great strategy books that I would call more on the academic side. So going way back, like Innovators Dilemma, Good to Great. But yet most transformations still fail. And every day we’re seeing companies, once powerful, that are still struggling. 

Bennie 

Right. Mm-hmm.

Steve 

So I wanted to really dive into that and see from my own experience as well as through some research, whether I could bring a different angle to it and maybe some different advice to get people to think about how they might be able to accelerate the change and respond to all this disruption we’re all living through.

Bennie 

So you talked a bit about it and you named some of the great titles that come to mind when you think about change is disruption. But you’ve kind of led to that space that we’ve talked about before where we know, what to do, yet we do nothing. Is that kind of the  -shirt that we’re seeing it in kind of big legendary brands? 

Steve 

What I try to do is strike the balance between a lot of the strategic points that others have made. But what’s different about this book is I rather than focus my attention on business strategy, though there’s a bunch of business strategy in it, rather than focus on kind of cultural change or organizational dynamic. 

Bennie 

Mm. Mm, right.

Steve

My focus is on the individual leader primarily because particularly if we’re talking about big complex organizations, the change needs to come often from the top or at least some of the key people who have to change their orientation. And in a lot of cases, and I delve into this, the reason they don’t change is because they’re afraid. The reason they don’t change is because their egos get in the way. The reason they don’t change is they haven’t done the work to see their business in a different light.

Bennie

Mm-hmm.

Steve 

So there’s a tendency and I think fundamentally what’s behind a lot of failure of transformations is this incremental approach. know, be a better department store, be a better taxi service, be a better hotel. Well, that works until, you know, Uber comes along, until Airbnb comes along, until new, you know, Amazon comes along, Temu, Shein. So, so there’s a reframing, a mind leap as I call them that leaders need to make.

Bennie

Right. Right. Right.

Steve

That in concert with good strategic planning and good cultural change needs to occur. But I think if you don’t start with the leader, there’s very little chance that no matter how good your plans are, whatever great consultant you hire, you’re going to have as much success as you like, or you might in fact need to stay in business.

Bennie

What are some of the lessons that you think individual leaders need to really internalize here? You know, you talked a bit about fear and ego and putting those aside, but what are some of the lessons that you found that, you know, serve leaders well in this day and in this situation?

Steve 

Well, I try to strike a balance in the book between being sort of a serious business book, not sort of venturing too much into personal self-help. So sometimes I got to be careful with my language because not only am I not qualified to do, to be the Brene Brown of retail or something like that. 

Bennie 

Right, right.

Steve

But the first thing I recommend in the heart of the book, part two and mind leap number one has to do with crushing your ego, because I do think that ego is often the enemy. Now that plays out in a lot of different ways. One of the ways I would say I see most consistently is many leaders believing that what made them successful in the past, kind of like what got you here is likely to get you there. And what I’ve been saying for a while is not only is that probably not true, now, you know, people are in different circumstances and have different degrees of urgency or problems in their business.

Bennie 

Hmm. Right.

Steve 

But if you think all those things that made you super successful over the last 20 or 25 years, when the world in most cases was really, really different, if you think that is going to position you well, you’re probably wrong. But, and this is the crush your ego part, it might actually get in the way. It’s not just that you need to pick up new skills. It’s like if you keep pounding the same set of nails with the same hammer, it may slow down the progress you need to make.

It may not make you open to the things you need to be doing. It may not allow you to be working with the kind of people or motivating people. And just from a diversity standpoint or more digitally minded people versus, say, more traditional mass marketing or brick and mortar kind of orientation.

Bennie 

You know, in addition to ego and fear, what are some of the other blinders that you’ve seen leaders encounter?

Steve

Well, the other one I often point to is kind of the way you frame a problem. What questions are you asking? What problem are you solving? So even just going back to what I mentioned a few minutes ago about, about what Airbnb or what Uber have done. They didn’t start with the premise that somehow hotels are broken. So let’s create a better hotel. They create, they started with the end in mind, kind of the customer job to be done and work backwards and say, what the customer wants, what our potential clients want is they want a great place to stay principally when they’re on vacation.

Bennie 

Right. Right. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Steve

You know, and, and, and so now there were things like leveraging technology that made it possible. There were things like this, you know, asset light model that investors love and all that kind of stuff. But it was the idea of solving a problem in a fundamentally different way, partially because they weren’t burdened by the legacy assets.

Bennie

Right. Mm.

Steve 

Which is a huge problem in getting established companies to move. But also they really understood how customers were changing, how technology can enable it. Similarly with Uber and Lyft, not a better taxi service. It’s really accomplishing the end the customer has in mind in a fundamentally different way. So I think the, and it’s cliche to say, what business are you in? But I think it’s actually today, even a more important question than it was when I was in business school 40 years ago.

Bennie

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right.

Steve 

Going to my 40th business reunion, by the way, this weekend, or this next weekend.

Bennie

Congratulations, my friend.

Steve

Thank you, well, it makes me feel incredibly old, but the reason why I think it’s more important than the question 40 years ago is it’s so much easier now to reconfigure a business model in a different way by pulling pieces in.

Bennie 

It really is.

Steve

And a lot of the friction that was in the system of business, you know, relying on physical assets or how am going to connect with customers? And we can do that, obviously, just from a marketing standpoint is so, so different than it was. So they get to open the aperture. You have to have kind of this beginner’s mind approach and think about creative ways, kind of re-imagine the way you could leverage perhaps strengths you have, which could be your brand name, could be other assets in a fundamentally different way to sometimes solve even bigger problems than you might have even thought about.

Bennie 

Well, it really thinks about, it challenges our thinking that they’re kind of standard models to begin with, where you’re really kind of choosing your own adventure. Most of our most dynamic business models are parts and pieces of other business models pulled together to make something fantastic. And there things we can lean on, like this is how this can work. Now let’s shift it and add this other component to it. So I’m going to ask, because we talk a bit about, you know…

Steve 

Mm-hmm. Right, yeah.

Bennie 

You know, not that we’re giving you credit for your 40th year reunion. We’re not going to believe that. We’re not going to believe it’s been 40 years, but I’m going to ask you this. 

Steve 

I was the first six year old to go to business school.

Bennie

That there we go. But I’m going to ask the question of what brought you into retail? You know, retail as, as a space has been such an important part of your career and a foundational part of this work that we’re talking about. What puts you into retail?

Steve

Well, I’d love to tell you it was part of some beautiful master plan, but the way it happened. 

Bennie

I wouldn’t believe you. I wouldn’t believe you anyway.

Steve

Yeah. Well, actually I have a friend, Ron Thurston, who’s written a very good book called “Retail Pride.” And he refers to retail as the accidental career because the more people that he’s met and I’ve met, we discover a lot of people just kind of ended up in retail. Not, you know, maybe because they started working to make some money during the summer or, know, something like that. And then they ended up staying.

And here we are 30, 40, 50 years later. No, what happened with me was that I had a job. I was working for a CPG company in Chicago for various reasons, that wasn’t where I wanted to stay. was, my wife was working at Kraft Foods. So we were wanting to stay in Chicago. I had decided that I wanted to kind of stay in strategy and innovation if I could, wanted to get myself positioned for perhaps a general management job. 

Bennie 

Mm.

Steve 

And I just happened to get approached by an executive search consultant for this opportunity at Sears. And I would say that I had mostly known that I liked consumer driven businesses. Like I didn’t particularly see myself as being in manufacturing or tagger, whatever at the time. So I liked that retail was this consumer facing business. I’d done a lot of consumer insights work. So I thought that was relevant. And I also felt, which turned out maybe not to be totally true, but I felt like Sears was kind of on the cusp of making some big changes and that that was the thing I could ride. And they did basically say, you know, if you do this for a while, you’ll get a general management job, which did end up happening. And then I’ve stayed.

Bennie 

There we go. So now we’re in retail. You know, it’s interesting, we talked about kind of legacy and dynamism and some of these brands have been known for Sears was often known for its direct to consumer business. We talked about before shaping that. And Neiman Marcus notoriously always takes over the Christmas news cycle, gets some news with kind of the most over the top, most dynamic consumer space in there.

Steve 

Mm-hmm. Right. Right.

Bennie 

Having that experience of being at the every man’s consumer book and being at the super elite, I can’t believe you’re selling that experience onto the work you do now with kind of mass customization of brands. How have you seen the power of direct to consumer change for the retail business over the last few years?

Steve 

Well, no, I appreciate that question. I don’t know that I’ve actually gotten a question kind of in that vein. Well, first of all, the journey from Sears to Neiman Marcus, I often call going from the outhouse to the penthouse because it was quite a big shift. But in a lot of ways, retail is retail. There’s still lots of things you’ve got to pick out product that people want, customer service. But obviously, the trappings are quite a bit different. I think one of the things I really came to appreciate…

Bennie 

Yeah. Right.

Steve

I think I mentioned I spent, when I was at Sears, I did do a lot of innovation work and a lot of customer insight work, both primary research, qualitative research, pilots, all that kind of stuff. And so when I got to Neiman, and also because Sears was very early, and a lot of people don’t remember this, but Sears was very early in on e-commerce and probably around 2000 was the second biggest e-commerce player behind Walmart.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right.

Steve

So we were pretty early and also pretty early in starting to understand how digital and physical channels would work in concert or could work in concert. So when I got to Neiman Marcus, which had a very significant direct business, which was mostly catalog, but moving very quickly to e-commerce and where we were really fortunate to have a tremendous amount of customer data, partially because of our private label credit card business, partially because of client telling and a bunch of other things.

Bennie 

Right, right.

Steve 

It really gave us this ability. You some people, you probably remember this. In the nineties, there was a book, this one-to-one future by Peppers and Rogers. And I was very excited about the possibility of mass personalization, mass customization and all this kind of stuff. And so we were actually doing a lot of that at Neiman’s. And so what it, what it helped me really understand is how you can use deep customer insight. How you can tailor the marketing, tailor the personal experiences much more to do what I think we all are aiming for is to, how do you be more powerfully relevant and differentiated? 

So I really got a ton of understanding about that. I certainly started to understand digital and physical interaction much more. And then, you know, really what’s transpired since then is probably everybody would know is that the channels started to shift so much. So many more, well, just different media, different ways to reach customers, different ways to persuade customers, et cetera. But I had a really good foundation, I think, in kind of old school direct marketing and old school data mining and old school email database kind of things that as we got into a mostly digital world, it was a lot easier for me to understand it.

Bennie

It’s always interesting to me how much some of those old school skills and thought process really we get a chance to lean back on and they have some relevance as we move forward in there. You know, just a way of thinking, a way of kind of proving out a way of building delivery in there that, you know, it helps to shape how you yield the new platforms and new channels.

Steve

Yeah, it’s funny you mentioned that I actually, and again, I think we talked about this a little bit off of Mike. I hate to be the like either I told you so guy or like, you know, in my day. But I remember meeting with a pretty high profile founder of one of these so-called digitally native vertical brands that were, you know, so hot over the last 10 years. And I remember early on meeting with him and… And he, first of all, I tell this story in my first book where I said, you know, when are you going to open stores?

Bennie 

Right. Right. Right.

Steve 

And he said, we don’t need no stinking stores basically. And, now they have like 80 stores, but the other thing I said was hire somebody from a catalog merchant, know, Williams Sonoma, J. Crew, like you need somebody who understands that. And he’s like, that’s so true. That’s traditional marketing. They’re not going to understand. And I’m like, what they understand is the discipline and the measurement and how to test and learn and all these kinds of kinds of things.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Yes.

Steve 

So yes, it plays out in very different ways today than it 20 years ago for sure. But I’ll tell you some of the some of those things that I learned, but also I’ve just seen so many other people who are much more focused in that area, much more expert in that area than I am. You know, they just got so much of it right where some of the newer folks, they could see certain things in a different light, but they didn’t appreciate some of the kind of foundational elements of of marketing, of retail.

Bennie 

Right, it’s so true. I’m always amazed when I walk people through the case studies of how the catalog or online experience drives other purchases in different ways. you’re like, no, we’re all about this. We don’t need this catalog. And yet the catalog is a key driver to 80% of your purchases of this experience. And it’s more about substituting retail for experience.

Steve 

Mm-hmm. Mm Yeah.

Bennie 

You know, that I was going to ask you that question, you jump to it about this whole kind of reverb to stores. It’s brick and mortar, brick and mortar. We’re all digital. We don’t need a space. And then what do consumers need to distinguish you? Oh my goodness, a built experience that changes. Now, not exactly the store of yesteryear, but it’s a store nonetheless, right?

Steve 

Yeah, I think, and I guess I have a certain amount of notoriety because I really push back against this idea that that big on a broad basis that brands could be built digital only. I think that works really well. And one of the things perhaps you’ve heard or some of your listeners will have heard, I call it buying versus shopping, but other people call it kind of errands versus experiences. And, you know, if you look at where online only businesses work really well. They tend to be convenience driven. Get this off my to do list, just have it showing up on my door. But a lot of other retail, and this is why 80% of all retail is still done in the store, has other things that come into play. I want to try it on. I want to understand why is this sweater $100 instead of the $40? Or I want to put an outfit together or sit on the sofa. Or I want to be with my friends. It’s just fun. You know, so on and on and on. 

And so this is where I think one people that didn’t appreciate the role of stores in terms of closing the sale. You spent all this money on marketing, but if you can’t get people to the point of purchase to close the sale and also not return it, physical stores happen to be really good at that in many cases. So to me it was always obvious that physical stores weren’t going away. They were going to continue to lose share, but they were going to be incredibly important for a whole bunch of reasons. So I think a lot of people just got that wrong. 

I think today there’s a little bit of a misnomer about this big return to store post-COVID. I mean, when you compare it to when stores were shut down or when people were afraid or just kind of got out of the habit of going to stores, we are seeing a little bit of bounce back. But I think what you can really see quite clearly is those brands that have a clear, where their physical store adds value. And they do it in a really compelling way and they have that relevance and differentiation. They’re opening stores, their stores are doing terrifically. You also see just a tremendous number of stores that are closing because their stores don’t add value. They’re just kind of big boring warehouses or they can’t figure out whether they’re a low price person or they are service person and they get just stuck in what I call the boring middle.

Bennie

Right. Right. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Right.

Steve 

So really what’s going on in physical stores is the boring middle, unremarkable middle is collapsing, but you see lots of great store performance on the value and convenience side. You Walmart’s killing it. Dollar stores are killing it. Costco is killing it. And then, you know, on the higher end of, you know, LVMH, et cetera.

Bennie

Right. And I think there’s a great re-imagining happening as well. We were looking at some of the kind of store landscape and retail where you’ll see a brand close an old model store to only reopen in the next building over or the next block over a new imagined experience. 

Steve

No, absolutely. I think there’s a lot of that. And I think, you know, in some ways I kind of hate to say this because it’s certainly not a proprietary idea from me. And I think this is not a new topic, but I know in some of the companies that I have studied or worked with that the way you get to a lot of this is by leveraging customer insight. But in a lot of cases it’s by doing customer journey mapping.

Bennie 

Right.

Steve 

And if you understand why you lose customers along the way, that customer journey mapping might be on a mobile device exclusively, or it might be, I’m driving down the street and I decide to turn left or right, or I go to the mall and I decide to make the trip to your store when I’m going to Lululemon or something like, there’s all sorts of ways and it can be complicated to do well. 

Bennie 

Right.

Steve 

But the ones that have said, we’re moving off out of the big regional department stores is because they understand they do their research and it’s like, well, I’m already running into Target and the dry cleaner and whatever. And for me to go another 20 minutes, park in the big parking deck, go up the escalator to buy a lipstick. It’s just not worth it. I’ll go to Ulta. I’ll go to Sephora. It’s in the same mall. Like it’s not complicated and it’s not like they necessarily love Ulta so much better than they love Nordstrom. It’s just, you know, the incremental effort to complete something in their life isn’t worth it. Or I’ll just buy it online because it’s just something that I don’t care that much about and it shows up on my door. 

So understanding that I think leads you to format changes. It leads you to marketing changes, potentially product changes, service changes, et cetera.

BREAK

Bennie

So I’m going to ask you a bit of a question, I was thinking about this. You’re, you’re imagining this, this journey. So I was thinking of my own kind of journeys to the mall and the space in there. And my journeys end up being multi-generational journeys, right? So I’m taking that mall trip and my daughter is pulling for Sephora and Ulta. You know, she’s, she’s probably looking for a sponsorship after this, after I mentioned her now, right? 

Steve 

Hehehe. Mm.

Bennie 

But, but so, you know, what advice do you have for retailers and for marketers dealing with the creative energy and destruction that comes from multi-generations dealing with the brand and the retail space at the same time?

Steve 

Yeah. I often, I often talk about, I think there’s kind of two, well, barring, mentioned Seth Godin earlier. One of the things I love that Seth talked about years ago, he had a blog post about the, have you ever seen a timid trapeze artist? And, and the answer is no, because they either get fired or they get killed. And, but the point is if you’re going to make a leap, you know, which is very much tied to my book, you have to be willing to let go of some things from the past.

Bennie 

Right, right. Yes.

Steve 

And I think this plays out to your question in a couple of ways. One is it may be letting go of a format like a big department store in a regional mall that isn’t working anymore. But it also may be letting go of your historical customer base. Now the issue of course is you rarely can just say, well, I’m done with these people that are paying 70% of my bills to move. Like it’s not really a trapeze artist because you’re not totally letting go. It’s really, an evolution.

Bennie

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Steve 

So I could tell you Neiman Marcus, one of the problems in the luxury department store industry is customers are older. Customers have generational values, what have you, that are less important over time. And a new generation is coming on that see the world in a different way. So how do you make this transition from being reliant on aging baby boomers, let’s say, to bring in a new generation of customers? And I think the answer is, I don’t know. Like it’s hard to figure out, right? 

Cause if your brand is so associated, has such a strong image, and you know, it’s one of the complexities I think of being in a lot of different categories. Like if you compare, I don’t know this is a good example, but if you compare say Neiman Marcus to Walmart, you know, Walmart is about vast assortment, we have everything and low, low prices, right?

Bennie 

Right, right.

Steve 

Neiman Marcus is about very high end curated, et cetera. So it’s not confusing. I mean, there’s also issues of just people can’t afford to shop at Neiman’s, cetera. So I’m not trying to dismiss those but those are very clear positionings. And when you start to shift what Neiman Marcus is about to attract a younger customer, you may have to change the way your store looks. You may have to change the price points, et cetera. 

The more you do that, the more you perhaps risk alienating your current customers. So I think it’s actually quite complex when you’re a multi-brand kind of retailer or any kind of brand really that kind of tries to cover a wide set of products for a particular set of customers to shift the kind of center of your bullseye.

So there aren’t a lot of good examples really of companies that have been able to do it. I mean, one example has been, know, Cadillac is probably one of the few companies that kind of was able to attract a younger generation, but it took a long time and a lot of money to do it. So it’s a very big, big problem.

Bennie

Right.

Steve 

And I think in some cases you just can’t do it in your current format, which is why you see what you said earlier, a re-imagining of maybe a smaller store, more focused, younger, different product category, or maybe a sub-brand, where American Eagle has Aerie, you know, like, let’s not try to do everything under the umbrella of this big brand, which has a very clear identity, and it’s tough to move.

Bennie 

One of the lessons that I love from a retail space, I remember being in Starbucks worldwide headquarters a few years ago, and they had their kind of brand journey arc, and it’s all Starbucks what you’d expect, but over on the side, there was a completely different brand, completely different space, which is the story of Seattle’s Best. And I remember one of the brand leaders pulling me aside, it says, Seattle’s Best competes in places where Starbucks can’t and shouldn’t. 

Steve 

Hmm.

Bennie

And it was just this kind of simple but perfect moment of understanding where your values of the brand are. Ultimately, this is all a part of the main corporation in space. But to have this distinction, this maturity, this discipline, to know that the state fair is Seattle’s best all day, every day.

Steve 

Yeah. Lately I’ve been saying, cause I have a, a board of a company I’m on and then we’re doing a lot of work on customer segmentation. And I keep coming back, where I say, you know, choose your customers, choose your destiny. And they’re so product focused that we keep talking about products. I said, well, choose your customers then then choose your products because really having that clarity around who you’re for and who you’re not for is so powerful.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm. Right. Right.

Steve 

And I think we were talking about this a little bit offline. I think one of the big challenges with many brands, not just retail brands, is as you grow and you continue to serve, expand your reach, continue, you’re adding more locations or you’re adding more product variation or whatever, but all this broadening what you’re trying to do.

Bennie 

Mm.

Steve 

You often start to either hit a wall because sometimes people say, know what? You’re just too much of everything for everybody. And so you’re not for me anymore. Or you just lose your focus in terms of execution. And which I think is part of what’s happened with Starbucks. Or you just create an opportunity for somebody to come in and say, OK, well, you know, Nike, I’m going to I’m going to figure out the five percent of your customer base that are more profitable that I can serve in a really unique way..

Bennie

Right, right. Mm. Mm-hmm.

Steve 

And so, you know, I’ll go after the apparel business for men’s and so you create Vouri or you’re On running or, know, so it’s a pretty classic problem, I think, in a lot of respects. But I think what’s different today is the consumer’s ability. Like, like if you were starting a new kind of fighter brand 30 years ago, how are you going to get people to hear about it? Right. Like you couldn’t.

Bennie

Right. Right. Right.

Steve 

It wasn’t possible to have your new product blow up on TikTok or whatever. So now consumers not only are very hungry, not all consumers, but many consumers are so hungry for new. I don’t want to be the mainstream. I want to be the next stream. And so, and there’s just so many ways to do it. And then you find your people and they’re recommending. So I think the whole way viral marketing, kind of there’s the old school way I think about viral marketing and there’s just the in the mix.

Bennie

Right.

Steve 

So, it allows brands to come up that can poke at a vulnerability of the iconic brand, pick off perhaps the most profitable, interesting customers and interesting because they may also find other customers for you, which is kind of the essence of my first book, “Remarkable Retail” and build a business. And then, you know, they get to a certain scale within, well, now we can afford to market more traditionally. Now we can open a store. Now we can. And it just ratchets up. So I think that’s why, you know, going back to kind of where we started, you know…

Bennie 

Right. Right. Mm-hmm.

Steve

When I talk to people about some of these things and you go, well, like, so is the world really different? Like is the marketing world or the product development world or whatever? Pick your pick your poison, you know, which are, is it really different? And almost everybody says, yeah, man, it’s pretty different. And is it good to be like, if you look at what’s happened the last five years and the pace of change is the pace of change in the next, the next five years likely to be about the same, a bit slower, a bit faster. Almost everybody says a bit faster, maybe a lot faster. And I’m like, okay.

Bennie 

Right.

Steve

So therefore you’re aiming higher in the value you’re trying to deliver, therefore you’re moving faster, therefore you’re acting more boldly. Well, you know, not so much.

Bennie

You’re either riding the wave or you’re getting taken over by the wave, right? So, so, so I love the fact that we’re juggling in effect intellectually all of these strategic moments. So I’m to throw another piece into this because I love you so much just to make it more complex. So how does our global reality change this as retailers now, you know, are seamless with borders and spaces and sometimes we’re challenging unique retail experiences that are international borders separated. How do we think about this as marketers with a global playbook now?

Steve 

Well, so one of the things I’ve talked about for a while, which I have stolen from military strategies, this idea of, it’s a concept called VUCA, which is an acronym, which talks about the world we live in, and the acronym VUCA is volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. And I think part of the first step here is just accept that that is, in fact, the world we’re in, know, whether we see, you know, what’s going to happen with the U.S. election, what’s going to happen in the Middle East, et cetera. 

Bennie 

Mm-hmm.

Steve 

Like there are just these, these forces that will likely affect your business in some way. And perhaps in a more pronounced way than was, was also true a bunch of years ago. So there is an aspect of you need to set the intention to, and, and more than the intention set the intention and then commit the resources to stay on top of these things as best you can. But there’s also a lot of stuff that’s outside of your control. 

So I think ultimately the big message is do your homework for sure. Position yourself to be really, I call it skating to the perimeters of your ignorance. There’s things that you don’t really understand that you’re gonna need to understand and choose which ones those are and kind of keep pushing yourself.

Bennie 

Right.

Steve 

Probably also talk to younger people, different kinds of people to make sure you’re really fully considering what needs to be in your consideration set. But a lot of it is building more agility into your business model. I think this, probably both of us, we spent a lot of time in this kind of study, study, study, plan, plan, plan, ta-da, kind of. Well, there’s aspects, there’s some things that have to work that way, but there’s many things where that’s just an outdated way of doing business. So agility has got to be part of your business.

Bennie 

Right, we’re, right, we can’t be led to just waterfall, right? Just waterfall development. We drop it in, we go away, and then we ta-da, we introduce it. 

Steve

Yeah, and I think the other thing in a more, I mean, again, maybe sort of an obvious point, but I think when I get people to sit down and think about how different it is, being in a fundamentally more digital world just means that people are more connected, things happen faster, and many barriers are down. So when I was at Sears back in the 90s,

And we were very worried about the growth of Home Depot and Lowe’s in particular, Best Buy, those kind of category killers. I could tell you, and this is embarrassing because we didn’t respond very well, but when I joined Home Depot was in like a third of the country or something. I don’t remember exactly, but they were not national. And, but it was very clear they were trying to become national. But to think about brick and mortar is it takes a long time to find sites, build them and open them.

Bennie 

Mm. Mm-hmm. Right.

Steve

So I could see what the future looked like in terms of us going head to head with Home Depot, but they weren’t going to be national for 15 years, right? Well, in a digital world or a much more digital world, things happen obviously much, much faster. So just in a retail environment, two Chinese retailers, Temu and Shein, will probably be among the top 10 retailers in the world next year. Temu is about three years old. Shein is a little bit older.

Bennie 

Right, right. Mm

Steve

But basically nobody in North America was paying any attention to either of these companies two years ago. And now they’re this huge thing. Now there’s other issues with uncompetitive practices and unethical practices and everything that might trim their sales a little bit. But the point is, you know, just the ability for ideas to spread quickly, for brands to go from no awareness to pretty high awareness without massive TV budgets and all that other kind of stuff that, you know, that’s the way we learned marketing. know, the mass days of 20, 25 years ago.

Bennie

We can go on and talk forever about the space in there. And I’m going to, I’m going to invite you back for part two of our podcast as well. As we get to the end of space, you know, for our listeners and strategy officer to strategy officer, what advice do you offer for them about thinking about the next 24 months? How should they in their own industries, in their own practices, based on your experience and researching and having and live the space of change and disruption, what should they hold on to for the next 24 months to help them?

Steve 

Well, I think the more prosaic piece of advice is just to make sure that they are really rigorously examining the current situation, like breaking, you know, have they opened the aperture enough? Are they doing the work? Where are they uncertain? Testing their key hypotheses, asking themselves what if you’re wrong or where they’re uncertain, try to fill those gaps. So having a foundation of as much understanding as you realistically can get. So that to me is pretty foundational.

Bennie 

Mm-hmm.

Steve

The second piece, and this is more of a cultural thing, is really, you know, are you taking enough chances? Are you putting enough unfinished work out into the business, out into the world, whatever that might look like for you? Proof of concept testing, you know, it could be just more personalized marketing tests or whatever. Like it’s a range of, depending on what business you’re in, of different kind of experiments. But one of the things I’ve learned from my own experience, but in particular, working on “Leaders Leap” is when you actually study companies that are successfully transforming that reliably produce more innovation. It’s not generally the case that they have some magical innovation process. Like they’ve really figured out a gating process or a review process or vetting or whatever. It’s that they try more stuff. And so, so volume.

Practice developing that muscle getting reps in, however you want to think about it. And then the last one I’ll say which is maybe a little bit off your question, but I often go into organizations that are working on strategic plans or wanting to innovate more just want to get sort of poked, but you know poke the bear a little bit and for some reason they pay me some money to come in and do it It’s a little bit of self-flagellation maybe but I often start off and I say, you know, you know, I’m new here I did this actually with with one of the companies we might have mentioned earlier I came in and I said, you know, I’m new here. 

Bennie 

Right. Right. Huh.

Steve 

I haven’t worked here before. I mean, I know you guys from the outside, but I don’t really know like how things work here. So tell me, would you say the culture here is fundamentally wired to say yes or is it wired to say no? Now, pretty much everybody knows, you know, quote unquote, the right answer is wired to say yes, but almost always the answer is wired to say no because so many companies are just protecting the status quo or just doing things a little bit better.

Bennie

Hmm.

Steve 

So I think you have to sort of think about your kind of orientation. Are you on offense versus defense? Are you really being expansive enough in your thinking or considering, you know, what if you wrong? Are you willing to compete against yourself? And then do you have, you know, that forward momentum, which oftentimes means more experiments.

Bennie

I love it. What a great way to close out our conversation. Taking the risk, taking the leap, being bold, experimenting more, and pulling in a little bit of our old…

Steve 

Rinse and repeat.

Bennie 

I know, I love this Steve, we’re bringing a little bit of the old school to impact the new school. So thank you.

Steve 

In some ways, everything old is new again, but…

Bennie

Hey, it is. And remember, you know, that you can go and transform a brand and transform it again and then transform it again. And so with those notes and this encouragement, thank you for joining us and thank you all for joining us for this incredible episode of AMA’s Marketing / And. Once again, I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson, and we encourage you to check out Steve’s latest book, “Leaders Leap” available anywhere you pick up your books, both physical and digital. We encourage you to explore more of the resources of the American Marketing Association to help you navigate an agile and dynamic, creatively disruptive new world. Thank you.