The Soul & Science of Marketing Innovation | Mark-Hans Richer, Global CMO & SVP of Direct Commerce.

A lot of happenstance and Ouija board type stuff.

I went to school at Northwestern. I was a history major and did not take a single marketing course. They didn't offer any marketing courses. I did start a small business when I was there, and that effort actually taught me a lot of lessons that I almost still use today, even in different scales. It got me in love with the idea of creative and business mixed together. It was the entrepreneurship bug that bit me. But when I started looking around after school for things that would be kind of business and creative, which seemed like my center point, advertising popped up pretty quick. I had an ex-roommate, a good friend of mine, who had just recently gotten a job and got me introduced in a couple places. I was lucky enough to get a role as an assistant account executive at TDB Chicago, and never looked back from there.

That was my first job, yeah.

Well, arrogantly enough, it was called Richer Student Enterprises. What it did was I decided that the world needed to have a better version of the Northwestern school mascot as a stuffed animal. It was, still is, the mascot Willie the Wildcat. I decided there just needed to be a better one. So I went and developed a business plan, sourced the product, got it developed, went to the school, got a licensing agreement. I learned what the difference between gross and net was because they wanted 6% gross, and I put that into my little business plan, and that's like, nope, can't afford that. Learned what net was. They agreed to 3% net. The rest is what it was. I did that business for three years, hired a couple salespeople, did a lot of marketing, and learned about inventory control, product quality, customer service, segmentation, and a lot of stuff.

I would call it entrepreneurialism. It's the idea that you can force courage inside of a business. We think of entrepreneurialism as the place where new ideas live and bolder thinking. I've always felt that the businesses that actually have the most benefit from that are actually the bigger businesses that need that kind of thinking inside of them. I've always been pretty good at figuring out not just how to craft a new idea but also to get it to stick inside of bigger businesses for the benefit of the businesses. It's not just having ideas for the sake of having ideas. It's, hey, we got a strategy or an objective or a mission we're chasing, and this might be a scarier way of getting there, but it might be a better way too. I'm historically the guy who will stand up and try to figure out how to get that done.

Well, you laugh, but I did write one. I haven't published it yet because I can't find a good literary lawyer. So if you got one, I just want to make sure that I'm not crossing any lines with my stories. So if you got one, pass it on, because I need that.

Every great brand has its moments of renewal over time. The trick is finding out not just what to change but what not to change.

Anytime you're pushing a change agenda, the white blood cells inside the organization who think that any kind of change is a risk of the core, they're going to come out and they're going to attack you. That's where the fun begins. That's what I've, through my experiences, proven to be pretty good at. I was eight-plus years at Harley during some pretty massive moments of change as CMO there. I've been at Fortune Brands Innovations for seven and a half years almost, doing some pretty massive moments of change. So I've had a longevity inside of a role that's not typically known for longevity, pushing pretty big change agendas, and it's gone pretty well so far.

I agree with you entirely. The other thing that I think I've been pretty good at in my career, and one of the ways you get to speed of change, is knowing again what to change and what not to change. The CMO gets let go, and the first thing they do is they come in and they have to show that they're going to make a big difference, so they fire the agency. It proved that they've got the gumption to make a big change. Well, it takes a while to figure out what you actually want to do with the new agency, so that takes some time. You start going out looking for new agencies, that takes time, pitches, etc. By the time you actually get any new ideas going, if you even got your strategy together by that point, you're talking about a year. You've already kind of messed yourself up right there.

That's a great question. When I started at Fortune Brands, part of my job title was Chief Marketing and Innovation Officer. My responsibility was to set up the innovation practice inside the company, really from a product perspective, product innovation. There's obviously very well-worn process around product innovation that many companies follow, and we needed to establish those inside Fortune Brands, and we did. We've made some huge strides there. But as you think about just the broader idea of entrepreneurship or innovative thinking, a lot of it comes from just giving people permission. I had a boss one time. We were in an offsite, and it was one of those unfortunately touchy-feely offsites where someone was trying to help us know each other at a deeper level, asking these kinds of questions. This person, basically responding to what do you admire most about the other person, said to me, 'I admire that Corporate America hasn't crushed you.' And what they meant by that, as I learned more, was you didn't get broken by people telling you no. People are going to tell you no because there might be good reasons why there's no, right? So you learn from those and you get smarter, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't try. I think a lot of people just stop trying after they've heard no a number of times, or they just think that their boss isn't really ever going to be interested or their boss won't fight for them or help knock down the barriers to enabling new ideas. That's what an executive has to do. It can't just be about their ideas. It has to be about what else can liberate from the organization for their ideas. Sometimes you got to go advocate, and you got to run interference, and you got to help them navigate around corners that they can't see. So I think that's the setting example part. It isn't setting the example by having all the ideas. It's setting the example that this is actually possible, letting them have a little sense of belief and faith that, well, not everything is probably going to get done that you might think needs to be done, but there are possibilities and there are people that will help you do that. Once you've established that tone, then it sort of feeds itself.

I sometimes think of work as being a corporate athlete. Sometimes you get really drained, just like an athlete does in a professional sport. Professional athletes have to deal with the same thing. So you gotta find moments to recharge. You're not going to win every game. You're not going to hit every shot. That's part of it. If you have that expectation, then you realize that if I hit three out of every 10, I'm still an All-Star.

Well, that's the trick, isn't it? It's part of being a corporate athlete. You got to understand that you're part of the business, and in business there are things you can control and things you can't control. You got to realize that if you're operating at that C-level, you are responsible to the business. Part of being responsible to business is, of course, wanting to maintain all your consumer equity and grow more of it, grow your pricing power, grow your market share, your relevance, and all the things that a CMO is supposed to do in partnership with the rest of the business. But you can't get everything you want. You might have a certain spend level that you've modeled that says this is going to be the most effective spend level, and because of something in the economy, whatever, you can't do that. That doesn't mean you give up. It just means you recalibrate to keep the strategy. What you don't want to ever do is lose the strategy just because you have a bad quarter, two bad quarters, or your spend levels weren't quite right, or you couldn't do some project when you wanted to and it gets kicked to the next year. Anything that everybody in this industry knows and understands because you've lived it: if you let that become okay, every quarter we're going to come up with a new strategy to chase the market. That's a recipe for disaster. But if you really understand your consumer and your targets and what they want, what they need, how you meet those needs, how you're distinctive, all the things that are at the core of our responsibilities, and if you don't let the organization throw you off that scent... Another metaphor I like to use is the boat. You're in a boat in choppy waters. If you're looking over the side, you're definitely going to hurl. If you keep your eye on the horizon line, you're much less likely to throw up. That horizon line is the thing that keeps you knowing where you are going and what we are all about. Any one quarter, two quarter, one year type of financial challenge shouldn't change your fundamental strategies.

I will say that Fortune Brands Innovations is one of the most complicated businesses I've ever had a chance to work on. Unlike GM or Harley, it's really omnichannel, and it's much more complicated from that perspective. I am responsible for the direct commerce business, so that's another part of the omnichannel: how do you balance that versus channel conflict but also serve the consumer well and the brand? And then just the variety of brands that I work on now. You mentioned Master Lock, Sentry Safe, Moen, House of Rohl, Therma-Tru, and Yale. I do work on all of them. It's a great challenge. But yes, there are parallels. As they say, history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Lots of times in the business, I will experience something that feels a lot like an example I may have learned out of GM or Harley or any of my advertising brands I got a chance to work on. That fosters creativity and innovation too, because that parallel, given it's a different industry, gives you a little different kind of clay to mold with. You go, 'Hey, we kind of handled it this way at GM, and this is a lot like that. Have we ever thought about X?' And because it's an entirely different industry, they might not have actually thought about X. So you get a chance to create with some parallels that aren't obvious to them, which makes it fun. It feels like you can add a lot of value beyond making mascot plushies in your late teens.

That's a great question. I'm just curious by nature. I love business and I love creativity. I have not yet met a creative challenge in business that I didn't find some inspiration from. I don't care if it's a small thing, a big thing, a big brand, a small brand, an unknown brand. It's always kind of got me going, this idea that I could work on several things and try to solve some of their biggest problems. The downside of it is you never really get a chance to see that stuff through. Lots of times, having the strategy but then you can't execute through it, and things happen in the execution where it can take the strategy off center if you're not really sure exactly how that strategy was built. So you're in these companies like Coach or Under Armour where I had two assignments there, and you're kind of passing it off. 'Okay, here you go.' And you never get the fulfillment of, can you pull that through? You don't get the chance to work with the people that you got to work with on the contract, and then you just kind of say see you later. That really wasn't as much fun as really owning something and being able to bring it to life and also running all the traps that it takes to get those ideas to come to life.

I've had a lot of public and notable successes. I don't know that those are necessarily the ones that I would... I mean, there are ones I could say and everyone would be like, 'Oh, okay.' But the answer really are things that are maybe a little bit more under the radar but really successful. GMC trucks was a brand I got a chance to work on when I was at GM. At the time, GMC was seen as the very, very poor stepbrother to Chevy trucks. I had just joined GM two years prior on Chevy trucks and helped launch the Chevy Silverado, which was their biggest product line at the time. GMC trucks was seen as not doing so well. They had a strategy but they hadn't unlocked it. I was basically given the role to lead advertising for GMC and told we've got about six weeks to fix this or else something really bad might happen. Congratulations, you got a promotion. Good news, bad news is we got very little time to prove to senior leadership that this thing can continue to exist. I don't know if that was just being traumatic and overly existential, but that's how it was positioned to me. Six weeks in that world is like nothing. I loved it. They had two agencies involved at the time who were kind of set at each other's throats to try to get the best idea. It was very political. The good news is I was very young and very naive, so I just figured I wasn't going to mess with any of the rest of it and just cut through to get to the essence of it. I picked one of the two agencies and said, 'All right, I'm going to ride with you guys.' I didn't have six weeks for a pitch or any of this other stuff. We got a strategy tied down. I spent an entire week with all of the research decks they had, with all this consumer insight and brand position research and all the stuff that somehow didn't unlock anything for them. I just ripped pages out of this deck and that deck, trying to find the pattern. I know the answer is in here already. We don't have time to go find a new answer. The answer's got to be here. I cobbled the pages together of what I thought the threadline was of what made sense. I brought that to my new boss basically the next week after getting the job and said, 'I think this is the center point of what we need to do.' She said, 'Okay, great,' because everything they tried up to that point wasn't working. I went with the agency that I had sort of chosen to work with, which was Lowe Lintas and Lee Garfinkle and Susan Caner. We developed 'We Are Professional Grade' as the tagline for GMC. That is still the tagline today. GMC is now the second biggest division of General Motors. It's a multi-billion dollar brand, and it would have been very foolish for GM to shut it down. I'm proud that I had a role in helping them not do that.

I have a lot of bad phrases that I'm known for that people mock me about, but I'm not going to say any of those because they're painful for me to repeat. But as far as mantras that I sort of live by, I have some fake Latin phrases that resonate with me. This was literally the tagline of that stuffed animal business that I told you about at the beginning of the call. It's 'Illegitimi non carborundum,' which isn't real Latin but roughly means 'Don't let the bastards grind you down.' The reason I chose that even as a 19-year-old was so many people told me I was an idiot for even trying to do this. In retrospect, it is kind of a silly idea. You're going to make a stuffed animal? I had so many people just basically laugh in my face. 'You know what the hell's wrong with you?' And yet I had this conviction that this was something that was going to work and I could figure it out. I did. I took a $35,000 bank loan out in 1985 and I paid it back early. Did I turn into the Master of the Universe, Mark Zuckerberg? No. But I learned a lot of stuff. I had to learn that lots of people tell you, you don't have to listen to them. So that phrase comes to mind. The other Latin phrase is 'Post mortem nullus voluptas,' which means 'After death, no pleasure.' I've tried to live my life a little bit that way too. I've always been seeking travel adventures and wanting to do things early in my life and not save it all for retirement. I've always tried to make time to do the adventuring and traveling and discovering that I've always yearned to do, and just start doing that right away. Even with the money that I made from the business, I took a trip around the world after graduating instead of getting a job. I just had this money I had made, decided to burn it all on a trip around the world in 1989, and came back with no money, no job, and no prospects. One of the best decisions I ever made.

That's a good one. That's a deep cut. I like it.

Well, I guess there are lessons I keep relearning. You kind of forget and then you relearn it. But it really is this idea of simplicity. Especially when a business is trying to change or something's happening that you didn't expect, there's some kind of complexity going on, which there always is. But when it gets really hot, one of the best answers to that is simplicity. Just getting it back to real fundamentals, like you just said. It seems super hard to do that for some reason, but it is almost always the right answer. Whether trying to figure out how did this happen, and a team sets off to do a six-week analysis of something and they come back with all that data, and then really after you look at it you spend a moment with it and you realize that it was kind of Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation was actually the most true, and all this other stuff was just noise. It wasn't causation, it was just correlation, and it wasn't valuable. So the simplest explanation, we probably could have gotten to a little sooner if we had thought about it. That's on the side of 'what's happening to us.' On the 'what do we do about it' side, if you have a simple problem, you can come up with simpler solutions. What I don't like about simplicity is that people think that it's stupid. 'Keep it simple, stupid,' right? That's the mantra. To me, simplicity is always smart. Smart simplicity, not stupid simplicity. It really helps you focus, it helps you execute, it helps you get people together because they can understand it better. Simplicity is an undervalued aspect of what can make a business run a lot better. I feel like I've been relearning that lesson here in the last couple weeks.

I agree with you on that. That's a great one. I know I'll build on that one. We do these employee surveys twice a year, and we get feedback. Lots of times I underestimate the value that I can provide by meeting with people one-on-one or in small groups. We used to call this management by walking around. Now people are much more virtual, and the value of those intersections are not as obvious and not as easy to do. We work with so many different companies at Fortune Brands Innovations that I'm not literally surrounded by all the people that I work with most directly. I started getting some feedback from people about how they would like to feel more connected to me that isn't my direct team but it's like their people and their people's people. So we started doing these roundtables where I would just do skip-level meetings. It takes work to figure out how you're going to actually do it. Unfortunately, I can't always do it in person, but I try to as much as I can. I used to do this at Harley too, and I loved it then and I love it now. Somehow I lost track of that idea over time. But you get so much out of it. The feedback, you can understand more about what's really going on in the organization, how people are feeling, what they're struggling with, and some surprising misperceptions where they think we said something 50 times and everybody gets it, and you hear from someone that they do not get it. It's not because they're dumb, it's just we have not found a way to get this across in the right way. That's a great thing to learn. So I just think those skip-level meetings, management by walking around, rebuilding those interpersonal connections, making the time to do it, it's not a new tactic, but I think it's an important one for today.

Thank you, Jason. Appreciate it. Congrats on everything you do and in pushing these ideas out in the world. I think it's been really valuable. Congrats on that.