Welcome ladies and gentlemen to Uncensored Renegades. This is a new show that I'm launching with Kory Marchisotto and we're going to be focusing in on leadership and we're going to be doing that in a new format which is the two of us tackling one topic for 20 minutes. So shorter than normal show but super focused and with the absolute rockstar that is Kory. I know you're going to love this. Now, if you want to make sure you get this every single week, please do go and subscribe to Uncensored Renegades in your feed and then you'll never ever miss an episode again. But without further ado, let's get into it. Here it is. Okay, boss. We're back.
We're back. We're back and we're going to try to do it under 20 minutes again.
We're going to attempt. We're going to attempt. This isn't going so well, is it? But we're going to try. We're going to try.
We got this. Let's go, Johnny boy.
We're going to try and pick maybe the dullest topic that we could possibly pick. We're picking them, aren't we, man? We're going to talk about numbers.
I love numbers. You know what I say to my team all the time? Know your elfing numbers. If you are in business, if you are working for a publicly traded company, better yet, if you are working for a for-profit institution, you better know your elfing numbers.
Years ago, when my daughters were quite little, I was putting one of them to bed and she was like, 'Daddy, can you tell me what you do?' And I spent about 15 minutes explaining everything that I do in marketing. And she looked at me, she goes, 'So, basically, you do the cutting, the sticking, and the coloring in.'
I was crushed. I was like, 'Yeah.' Okay.
Oh, but how sweet is that little distillation that she made?
I know. She's about right. Of course, you know, but I think the thing that people forget, isn't it? That's the reputation. That's what people see. They see the thing that most people tend to see from us is the advertising bit. The reality of a marketer's job, particularly in a role like yours where you're very senior, it's the business of business and it involves a lot of numbers, doesn't it? And having to convince the board to invest in what you're doing and to basically you are shaping the future P&L of the company.
Well, if you go back to your daughter's assessment, she's not wrong. It's the sticking, the coloring. What was the third word?
Cutting, sticking, and coloring.
Cutting, sticking, and coloring to drive the revenue. There we are. And to make sure that we can run the math through the P&L and get to the place that we want to be going and reach the goalpost. Right? So, one of the things that I hear a lot of CMOs especially complaining about is nobody understands them. We hear this all the time. Scott Galloway talks about CMOs have a branding problem. I actually don't think that's the problem. I think the problem is most functions are black and white. You know exactly what this function is doing. It's got a starting point. It's got an end point. And pretty much everybody can explain it. Marketing is amorphous. Again, I've said this before. Ask a thousand people what is marketing. You're going to get a thousand different answers. When things are ambiguous, people are naturally confused. So then your job is to be the decoder. And I think CMOs don't realize that. If you are talking to a CFO, do not go in there with your magic wand talking bibity bobby go in there and talk about business impact. We did this thing and here is a direct line to revenue impact. For example, I have somebody that just started on my team. He's absolutely incredible. He's day one impact. He literally ties every single creator that he gets to talk about ELF to either EMV, which means earned media value, or revenue. And we can see that right away on Amazon, for example. Hey K boss, I hung out with these two influencers. They made this post and today that product is up 4x. He's a director. He's not even a suite executive. And he sends that to me in texts and I encourage him to keep doing so because I can then trumpet his triumph. Right? That's what CMOs need to be doing. Direct impact. We did this because of this. We saw this insight, this data point, whatever it was that led us to that moment. And because of this, this thing happened. That ability to connect the dots is the most important part of a CMO and that's how you get increased budget. So if I think about my journey at ELF, when I started we were investing 6% of net revenue into marketing and digital and I oversee both of those areas. I didn't go in and say I need to have 24% on day one. I am at 24% six and a half years later because I held hands with the CFO. We agreed together on taking a pragmatic approach. I didn't know what was going to drive the brand. I needed to put a lot of stimuli out in market to see what it would react and respond to. So I took her along for the journey and we did it together. Hey, let's get to 10% as a starting point. Then let's pause and reflect. See what worked. See what didn't. See what it responded to and then let's uptick if we see it works to 12. 12 became 14. 14 became 18. You see how this goes. But a lot of people immediately just say, 'I don't have enough money. I don't have enough people. I need everything now.' No, you don't. Incremental progress and being able to pinpoint the specific metrics and tell that story with impact is actually how you win the suite and the boardroom.
Yeah, totally agree. Make the investment case, not the cost case. One of my favorite ever quotes I've come across is Guy Lodish and Carl Mela, I think it was Harvard Business Review about 10 years ago, and they said this, 'If brands are built over decades, why do we manage them in quarters?' And I think that comes to some of the rub here, doesn't it? Because we so often measure what's easy, not measure what's hard.
And it's you talking about the 6% to 24%. That's where you win the game. That's hard to measure.
Much harder to measure than what we sold yesterday or how many people saw us on TikTok.
How do you make the case for the longer term moves that you made?
Well, remember we went from 6% to 24% over six and a half years essentially those 25 quarters by which we started to raise the investment and where we're standing today, we have 25 consecutive quarters of net sales growth and market share gains. So we know it's working. We also do ROI analyses to make sure that we can tell our shareholders and our board of directors that this investment is delivering results. So by whatever metric we look at it by, we see that marketing works. Now I wouldn't walk into any room and say marketing works. I would walk into our room and say our marketing works because we're doing community-based marketing. We're essentially co-creating the brand with our community. And that's actually making them a stakeholder in the business, if you will, right? Because they're actually creating it with us. And I think it depends on what you hold dear as a company. And usually whenever anybody, especially CMOs ask me for mentoring all the time, almost every question they ask me, I say it depends. Do not go into your boardroom and sell a campaign called So many dicks unless you are ELF. Yes.
