Content Disrupted Podcast with CMO Tricia Nichols.
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Brand bonding is more than just a buzzword. This is a science that any marketing team can master. In this episode of Content Disrupted, pioneering CMO Tricia Nichols talks about driving and tracking brand bonds, balancing short-term and long-term views, and using her science of data to make decisions at the right time. Share your insights on answering the right questions.
Tricia Nichols is a consultant, angel investor, director, and former CMO for Gap, Estée Lauder, Pepsi, IPP, and Belk. She is known for her ability to lead innovative strategies, drive growth and deepen consumer engagement for iconic and emerging brands. She fosters new avenues for revenue growth through decision science, and her commitment to creating unique and compelling consumer value propositions is core to her approach.
Episode highlights:
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[02:55] What is brand bonding? — In today's noisy digital environment, building strong connections with customers is more difficult than ever. With channel fragmentation and the transition to a cookie-free world, marketers are developing strategies to reach audiences across a wide range of digital touchpoints and create experiences that deepen their bonds with viewers. You have to adapt. Tricia defines brand bonding as multiple active engagements with brands that customers want and support. She focuses on going beyond brand awareness and building deep connections with customers over the long term. Her experience is that once marketers start using data science to measure brand bonding, they can begin to understand what causes people to connect with a brand and what they do when they connect with a brand. We can begin to uncover what it's all about.
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[09:38] micro storytelling — The Key to a Connected Brand Narrative – Tricia shares the approach to “micro-storytelling” she developed during her time at Estée Lauder. Brands often have a macro story that is included within their customer value proposition. The problem with this is that while macro stories may resonate with an overall group, they are less effective when speaking to specific demographics or individuals facing specific challenges. Micro-storytelling allows marketers to break down a brand's value proposition into smaller stories that resonate with different customers. It's all about answering the right questions at the right stages while maintaining a consistent narrative thread.
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[13:27] Decision-making with data — Tricia is known as a CMO who drives digital innovation. She takes a strategic approach when it comes to leveraging marketing data. Before diving into analysis, Tricia recommends defining the business decisions that the data will lead to. She avoids getting bogged down in irrelevant data by asking important questions like “What are we trying to test or solve?” In advance. She's also a proponent of having prescriptive data and corporate health dashboards that answer questions like, “What were people's behaviors like before they left?” Implementing this dashboard maintains accountability for marketing and allows brands to test and learn what drives the most positive business results.
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[16:19] Approaching data attribution in marketing — Tricia recommends considering how you need to organize your data attribution depending on whose question you are answering. While CEOs and CFOs may prioritize immediate impact on sales, marketers must insist on considering the long-term health of the company and where to go next. However, marketers can't just look at historical data. Data science allows her to predict the impact of future decisions, such as the impact of removing a product or deprioritizing a channel. Similarly, marketers can use predictive modeling to identify promising new channels and customer acquisition strategies, even if the actual initial results appear weak.
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[24:20] Opportunities and pitfalls of generative AI — Tricia believes Generative AI can be a useful tool for marketers, but emphasizes the importance of using it strategically. She emphasizes the importance of keeping humans in control of a brand's voice and core messaging, and using her AI for optimization and scaling, rather than creating content from scratch. For example, while AI cannot create micro-stories without instruction, it is still prone to providing inaccurate or illusory responses that you don't want to put in front of your customers. Tricia says brand bonds rely on human empathy, understanding, and strategic control, which she believes is lacking in AI. She recommends that marketers use her AI as a tool to support the decision-making process and enhance marketing efforts, but not rely on AI as the sole voice of the brand.
Follow and subscribe to Content Disrupted on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google Podcasts. Every two weeks, we explore the most relevant topics for enterprise marketers, from the psychology behind today's digital buying behavior and how to create more relevant creative to how to maximize your marketing team's internal trust. We host candid conversations with pioneering CMOs and researchers on high-volume topics.