Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Uncensored CMO. Now, in this special series, we are partnering with our very good friends at NBC Universal to do a special series focusing on CMOs that have used the game-changing power of sport to transform their brand. Now, first up in this special series, we have none other than the inspirational Kory Marchisotto, the CMO of ELF. She always delivers and never holds back. I know you're going to love this one. Here it is.
Kory, welcome back to the show.
Thank you for having me. One year later.
Exactly one year. So, what's happened in that year? I hear rumors. I hear rumors that, you know, there might be some awards in the making.
Yeah, ELF time is a very serious... well, time is a construct at ELF. One year is about a decade. So the amount of things that have happened in the last year is definitely 10 years anywhere else. So just maybe a couple of key highlights. We've completed our 25th consecutive quarter of net sales growth and market share gain. We have entered into a definitive agreement to buy Rhode, the brand created by Hailey Bieber. And we are here in Cannes shortlisted for the Titanium and the Glass Lions, which is the first time both in my career and for ELF. So, lots has happened.
Well, congratulations. So, you have been quite busy since we last met, haven't you? Now, I hear that the Titanium and Glass entry has made waves. It's quite a thing and I'm a virgin at this game of Titanium and Glass.
So, I'm learning a lot of things, including we have to present live to a jury, which I will be doing tomorrow morning. 9:15 a.m. is Glass, 10:45 is Titanium. It is a very tight spot with very specific instructions on what can be done within the time that you have. So we have prepared a case presentation for the jury that has to bring some sort of new information to the table versus the presentation that actually won us a spot on the stage. So what we're focused on is two things in particular with our So Many Dicks campaign. The first one is degree of difficulty to really help the judges understand that we took something that was impossible and made it possible. And the second one is continuity. A lot of the campaign work that comes in for Lions, they're a moment in time. We dropped a campaign for the Super Bowl, it made waves, we moved on. Our So Many Dicks campaign is a minimum three-year commitment from our company about truly changing the board game. So, we're going to focus on both degree of difficulty as well as continuity.
Now, for anyone who hasn't yet seen So Many Dicks, he says, tell us a little bit about where the idea came from and how you brought it to life in such an unmissable fashion.
Well, if you go on the journey of ELF, we're known to move at ELF speed. We defy gravity. We defy this time-space continuum. Everybody looks at us and wonders, how do you do these things so fast? This is actually the opposite. This is the one campaign that took us the most amount of time that, in fact, even when it was finished, we held it until we felt like lightning could strike. So to take you on the genesis of the campaign, I was after a couple of board meetings sitting looking at our board of directors and I'm like, this can't be normal. It was majority female, incredibly diverse and I was like, this can't be normal. Can somebody run the numbers and tell us of the 4,100 publicly traded companies, how many have boards of directors that look like this? And the answer came back as one. Wow. We were the only board of directors of 4,100 publicly traded companies in the United States of America to have a board that was majority female and over 40% diverse. So when you have that information, you don't really know what to do with it. So you do what people like you and I do and you take it on a spin and see what happens. Do people respond? Do they react? So we would take it on our speaking engagements to press interviews to media interviews and every single time we would say it, it was met with an unprompted round of applause. So we knew something in that was generating an emotional response from folks. So we said, okay, well what if we actually put a marketing wrapper around this and tried to actually make change because in the US, 70% of the economy is driven by consumption. Well who are the consumers? They're very diverse, increasingly so. And fun fact, women are over 50% of the population but they influence 85% of all purchase decisions. So if women and diversity are driving the economy through consumerism, then they're also represented in the boardrooms, right?
No, boardrooms are 78-88% white and 73% male. So we said, okay, well, we have the receipts to prove that it works because we've got 25 consecutive quarters of growth, top line, bottom line, really healthy. So if anybody could be a beacon of change to put more women and diversity in the highest seats of power, it would be ELF. So we decided to create a campaign that would jolt people into awareness because first and foremost, what is a board of directors and why should I care? So we had to shine a light on why this matters. If corporations are running the economy, then who's sitting in the highest decision seats really matters for how the entire US landscape is going to operate. So we came up with a campaign called So Many Dicks, So Few of Everyone Else. And the genesis of that was we entered 35,350 names into a database, first time it had ever been created, of all sitting board members on both the NASDAQ and the New York Stock Exchange. Once we entered those numbers into the database and did all the crunching, we found out that there are more men named Richard, Rich, or Dick than entire groups of underrepresented people.
That's incredible. And that's how So Many Dicks was born. Amazing. And what's the response to the campaign been like? Because it's very hard to miss, isn't it? And he says,
Well, first it's really hard to put to market, which we didn't anticipate. We were like Sisyphus always pushing the boulder uphill. First, can I sell this to my C-suite? How many CMOs would take a campaign called So Many Dicks and go sell it up the chain of command? The C-suite, the board of directors. So being able to push that path tells you a lot about ELF and our ability to disrupt norms and shape culture and do the hard things. What I call the path of most resistance. But the path was way more resistant than I anticipated. First, a lot of newscasters, broadcasters won't even say the name Dick. Second, we had cities like Las Vegas that wouldn't even run the campaign. AI tools will tell you no, sorry, that's outside of our parameters. So we realized that we were getting blocked in so many places. So once we were able to push everything through and at least the places that would accept it to go, we blanketed Wall Street and took on the New York Stock Exchange. We covered the buildings. We covered the Oculus. 200,000 people pass by there every single day. And the campaign really caused a stir. The most important part of which is young folks were talking to their parents about it for the first time. People on our board of directors said, 'You know, this is the first time my daughter ever asked me what it meant to be on ELF's board of directors and told me she was proud of me.' So, it started conversations that are happening everywhere. And a problem that was in the United States all of a sudden was being covered by media outlets in 70 different countries. So it took on a life all of its own around the world that we didn't even anticipate. The goalpost for us knowing that you have this provocative campaign called So Many Dicks was just hit a majority positive sentiment because we were bracing for impact. You don't know how this is going to go. We knew we had an ironclad case, but you still, you know, it's a fine line between being coveted and canceled, if you will. So, we were aiming for 51% just like let's get to just a majority of positive sentiment. 99% positive sentiment. 99%.
Amazing. It just shows how you uncover a real truth like that and how the majority of people are, you know, on your side. And we had so many people that were like, I'm a Dick and I approve of this message. Well, I was wondering, any CEOs called Dick get in touch with you after the campaign?
Yes, quite a few. And they were all very positive and very engaged. So many people thanked us for what we were doing. The outreach to us, how do I get involved? How do I rally behind the cause with you? How do we make real change? So, in fact, the place we're standing today, which is about a year and a half since campaign went to market, we've built a coalition of over 45 companies who want to help us make real change in the boardroom.
That's incredible. Now, you mentioned turning up on Wall Street and of course, you're a publicly listed company. You referred earlier to your 25 consecutive quarters of growth. Congratulations, by the way. That is an amazing achievement by any stretch of the imagination. What's the secret to continually growing? Because you're getting to some scale now in terms of a billion-dollar organization, but still only 700 people, so you know, we forget how few people there are really per dollar of turnover. What's the secret to continually getting that growth? Because it must get harder and harder the more success you have.
I used to think that. So I started ELF six and a half years ago and we had some incredible wave makers the first year and I remember after that first year being petrified. How am I going to overcome that next year? And we would sit around the table with the teams and be like, we have to... we did record-breaking work. If you go back to that year, it was the year we did the TikTok campaign with an original music track and it was the most successful campaign in TikTok history. And the virality was outrageous. And we had a couple of other record-breaking work that we had done. And you sit there and you're like, 'How are we going to come up with a plan that's going to be even better?' And after year two, I never asked myself that question again. Year two was even better than year one. And each year it gets better and better and better. And the reason for that is because it's kind of like an algorithm. The more you feed it, the smarter it gets, the more courage you have, the more bravery you have to move at the speed of consumer and to move at the speed of community. And as long as you have the people you serve at the center of everything, if they are the heart that pumps the blood and the oxygen to all the vital organs, there is no ELFing limit. And that is the most important part is to make sure that everyone in the organization never lose sight of who are we serving? What is our raison d'être? Why are we here? That's who we're here for. The connection that we have made with our community, the way that we have this direct dialogue with what I call zero distance. And when I say zero distance, I mean zero distance between me personally and our community, between our CEO and our community, between our entire C-suite and our community. We go on TikTok lives. We go on our Twitch live streams. Our CFO, for example, Mandy Fields, went on our Twitch live stream to promote our new game, Fortune Island, that we created in Roblox, which is all about earn, learn, flex, financial advice. A hundred thousand people showed up to listen to financial advice from our CFO.
That's amazing. Has anyone had that kind of audience before?
I don't believe so. And so it makes you realize that ELF is not really just someone's beauty brand. They're not just coming to us for a transaction. Sure, they're coming in to get the best of beauty at an accessible price. They also are coming to a place they want to be a part of, a sense of belonging, a place that they could learn and grow with people who are giving them pathways, people who see them and listen to them. So to go back to your question, how do you keep this going? By doing that, by making sure that you create a world that people want to be a part of, that they can belong to, and most importantly, that respects their most precious asset of all, which is their time.
It sounds easy, but I'm sure it's not. You know, in terms of you say it's an algorithm, we just repeat it. None of this is easy. So what is it about the culture and the way you work in the organization that allows you to create the conditions for that way of working to happen?
