Jonathan Craig0:06
I'll tell you when I interview people in marketing at Schwab, the first thing I say to them is, 'Why would you work in an industry where the language is esoteric, the regulations are intense, the clients are generally pretty disengaged, and I'm the CMO and I'd have trouble defining the shopping process?' And they usually look at me sort of stunned, like I should get out of this office. But you've got to have passion. I grew up in Toronto, a suburb outside of Toronto. I've been in California 20 years, but I'm still Canadian at heart. I think you're sort of a culture of your upbringing. And once I started investing and saw the power of investing, it's become a pretty big mission for me. This sounds trite, but I do come to work every day believing that we're making a big difference. And you know, why hire marketers? I tell them, if you can't get passionate about what we're doing, you shouldn't work here.
I think marketing has evolved so much over the years. I think it used to be in many ways that sort of an advertising and communications discipline, and a CMO of Schwab's job... I fundamentally think that great marketers in this day and age are general managers first, who combine that with incredible marketing instinct and acumen. Our profession, I think, needs to be less stewards of a company's words as we are guardians of a company's actions. And we live in a world of low trust, of noise, and high connectivity. And in this world, people are going to watch your actions and not listen to your words. So as a CMO, I spend a lot of my time thinking about how do we live up to our brand promise every single day at every touchpoint. I think ultimately that is what marketing is all about.
There's two types of disruption out there. There's disruption that happens from upstarts, and you know those stories: the Ubers, the Airbnbs. These are companies who fundamentally changed industries, but those companies were funded to disrupt and they had nothing to lose when they started. There's a second type of disruption that comes from incumbents, you know, companies that have been around for a while. And paradoxically, I'd argue it's harder to disrupt when you've been around for a while, especially when you're doing well, because are you truly going to be willing to sacrifice in the short term for the long term gain? And I think to move the ball, or to move the puck as a hockey fan, I should say, move the puck to where the client is going in such a way that it hurts us in the short term but positions us for the long term. We made a bunch of moves already. In 2017, we cut our commissions in half, we launched the lowest cost index funds in the industry, we launched a satisfaction guarantee. All of these are disruptive to us and disruptive to the category. No one was forcing us to do it, but as we see through the clients' eyes, we feel like this is where the puck is going and this is where they want us to go.
Every Canadian has some affinity with hockey. I play in a California street hockey league, which most Californians wouldn't know what a street hockey league is. But what I love about sports in general, and hockey, is the intensity, the passion, but also the fact that at the end of the game you're still shaking hands and you're still having a beer and you're still enjoying yourself. And I think work works the same. I love to win at work, but I say to people, winning is fun and we need to have fun.
