Building a global brand: Lessons from FedEx – Part 2

Gabriel Cohen: Welcome to the second part of our amazing conversation with Monica Skipper, who was a VP of Brand for FedEx for 20 years. If you missed the first part of our conversation, you can go back and listen to that as well.

Holly Osborne: I have to imagine that the data became your best friend, right? As much as we want to make sure our gut, and our instincts, and the art of shepherding a brand is still there – that had to be the great equalizer in a business where there were thousands of touchpoints. You could say the numbers tell us that these are the top three things.

How else did you use data? Was there any other piece of data or study that you guys did that felt like it would save you at times? Like, without this we’ve got anarchy – dogs and cats living together. So yeah, tell us about data and the role that it played.

Monica Skipper: Yeah, it’s so important. And Holly, we had so much data, as you can imagine.

I think the challenge with data is you have so much, it’s hard to figure out what to use and how to use it. And I think we had so much data that there were times where it was like, that’s data, but is it really information yet? And how do I apply it? How do I use it?

Holly: Right. It’s not an input, it’s data.

Monica: Here’s a great example. I think brand health studies are important – don’t get me wrong – but a brand health study for FedEx… we maybe did it every other year… it didn’t change. So, what did it tell us?

I mean, it just didn’t move. It might move up a point, down a point, over a point. So it kind of got to be like, “Okay, I know we need to do brand health, but what do we really want to learn from brand health? And how does that information help us?” So then we started digging a little deeper and said, “Do you consider FedEx a brand for you?” We called it ‘Brand for Me’.

What we started learning is that if people do think we’re a brand for them, it increases their loyalty, it increases their propensity to use us.

So I started using the ‘Brand for Me’ data more than overall brand health data because it just was kind of like this big ship that didn’t ever turn. But ‘Brand for Me’ – if it went up or down, you could tell that you either had greater loyalty, more propensity to buy.

Here’s the other thing. You cannot drive a demand for shipping. Think about that statement. You can’t drive a demand for it. You can’t say, “Hey, you want to ship today? Come get 20 % off.” If you don’t have something in your car to be shipped that day, it doesn’t matter if we’re giving you 20% off, right?

So, you also have to think about – if I am in your consideration set highly and then you do have something to ship, if I’m a brand for you, you’re much more likely to come to me then, when you have the need. So it’s really trying to change belief before you change behavior.

Holly: Mm-hmm.

Monica: Measuring that and understanding that helped us drive some changes around the company, around our marketing planning, and around what we were trying to achieve.

We would say we want to grow the percent of customers who say we’re a brand for them because we know once that happens there’s less price elasticity, there’s more loyalty, there’s more willingness to consider us when they have a shipment. So that was data that kind of helped.

Gabriel: What I love about that is – and this is a key lesson – is that you took a singular brand metric, but the work that you had to do, the real work in all of this was finding the leading indicator and connecting it to data points that the business is already looking at.

Monica: That’s right.

Gabriel: As opposed to trying to talk to the business about these other metrics. So you were able to kind of do both – find that leading indicator, correlate it and connect it to metrics that the business cares about – and show how the two are linked.

Monica: Yeah.

Holly: I’m going to get even more granular. How did you conduct data and understand the drivers… the real purchase drivers and consideration drivers among business customers versus consumers? Because you are a brand that truly straddles both.

I imagine that it was just as important to make sure that a corporation like Google chooses FedEx for its in-house shipping services, so that every Google employee worldwide is using FedEx to ship, as it is to make sure that every mom-and-pop shop and every Tom, Dick and Harry in Main Street, Illinois is choosing FedEx.

So tell us a little bit about how you learned about those two audiences and were they wildly different?

Monica: No, because remember what I said, each of us is an individual. And you think about your needs similarly.

We did look at data and by cuts – by small business, large corporation, consumer. On many attributes, especially around the brand, they’re wildly similar.

But also think about it – you couldn’t do it alone. Nothing at FedEx ever… I never did one thing alone. It always took a team of people. So we have a sales force and we have a dedicated sales force for the larger corporations.

If you think about like at Google. If our sales team has made the right deal and Google has signed on with us, every person at Google is going to use it because they have a corporate FedEx account. Now we want to make sure they feel good about using it. We want to ensure that people, even there, feel like we’re a brand for them. But that’s less of a need to drive a change and more of them just following what their corporate account and their corporate policy says.

So really you could make more change on the small business and consumer side because at the largest of largest corporations, it’s about a relationship – our company to their company, sales force to procurement manager – agreements that they’re going to use us for their shipping.

So really it’s a little bit below the largest corporations down to the individual that maybe were more important from a branding/marketing perspective.

Holly: Did you separate research so that you could really get inside of that B2B. I mean, to your point, I think what you’re saying is all of FedEx was B2H. It was business-to-human. But, at the end of the day, did it help you to bifurcate? And did you study business customers differently than you studied the consumers?

Monica: We studied them the same but we cut the data by their role, who they were. So the data cuts would come back as: a really large corporation, a corporation of 1000 plus, a corporation of 500, a corporation of 99 plus, an individual, a very small business, five or less. We did cuts by the profiles of our different customers.

Think about the data that FedEx has on hand that they can look at as well (I’m not there anymore, so it’s them, not me). They can look at purchase patterns. They can look at volume year over year. They can look at average daily volume. They can look at average daily revenue. They can look at lanes that are more populated that they use than others.

You can get a lot of information internally – not selling it, not using it externally – but just by trying to understand your customers. Actually segmenting them and bucketing them based on what you already know about their behaviors with you.

Holly: Yeah.

Gabriel: There are a lot more people that work in advertising, whether client-side or agency-side, that then work as pure brand strategists, right? And when you use the term brand strategists, anyone who works in advertising or campaign or is a brand marketer will say, “Well I’m….” and I sometimes think about what are some of those areas of distinct real expertise that are different.

One of the ones I always come back to is brand architecture. That is a very kind of distinct area of expertise. I can’t think of anything that elevates brand to a more strategic level in an organization. And also one where there are the most challenges politically because you’re moving people’s cheese.

I’d love to spend a little bit of time talking about brand architecture and some of your learnings and experience there around building and managing a portfolio of brands. Having to make difficult brand architecture and portfolio decisions. Can you talk a bit about some of the most meaningful moments that you had at FedEx? Whether they were big from a business standpoint… it could be a key learning, a conversation… you know, how to talk to a business unit leader whose customers just care about their brand and their business and you’re looking at the bigger picture.

Monica: It is the $64 million question. You just hit on it. Having a brand architecture decision is the key to any brand strategist’s success. And having that decision supported by all leadership – all leadership. Business, marketing, C-suite – that is the key to a strategist’s success.

At FedEx it was rather easy (compared to a lot of other places) because we knew we had a single… I’ll say master brand but I call it a hero brand of FedEx. We knew the power of FedEx. We knew the brand and reputation it had in the world. We knew what it meant and we knew that it could expand, and that we had permission for it to mean more than what it meant when it started expressing federal documents back in the 70s. Because we had a master brand or single hero brand strategy, we knew that any acquisition we made was going to become FedEx. FedEx something.

Now where we got sideways sometimes, Gabe, and this is back to your point… like we bought this new freight company and the leadership of that business unit said it has to have its own name. And I was like, “No, we already have FedEx freight. That’s a division.” They’re like, “Nope, this is different. It’s LTL. So it has to have its own name.” And we’re like, okay.

I mean, I said it makes no sense. People are not going to see the difference. We are FedEx to the world. If they want a freight product, they’re going to come to a freight group to get a freight product, whether it’s LTL or not.

Against my recommendation and the better judgment of the brand team at the time (even leadership of the brand team), we let them, for lack of a better word, have this new freight LTL. So it was FedEx Freight and FedEx LTL. Both the same color scheme, both similar offerings and all that.

Guess what? 18 months later they came to us and said, “You know, this is not working. We need to combine LTL into freight.” And I was like, “I told you!” I mean, talk about a moment where I felt vindicated, but also frustrated. “That’s exactly right. We told you you didn’t need a separate identity, a separate brand, a separate name because you were part of this larger group.”

So we spent the money to rebrand the acquisition to LTL and 18 months later we had to spend more money and more time and we had redundancies to then integrate them into freight to de-brand things, to rebrand things. Talk about a crazy moment.

I was like, “We just had this discussion.” Eighteen months is not a long time at FedEx – it’s just not. We’re a big ship, it takes a long time to steer it. I was like, “We just had this discussion. It was our recommendation. And now you’re coming back to us telling us you need to make this change after that’s what we recommended to begin with.”

So, to your point, it doesn’t always go as planned, but the best news was we knew it was going to be FedEx something. And I feel like sometimes when you acquire something, people think they have a shiny new toy and so they want to show off their shiny new toy. So their new toy has to have its new name or its own name or it’s something special. Like, “Look at this flashy thing over here.”

In the end, we ended up where we should have ended up. But what a roller coaster for almost two and a half or three years, changing over to one and almost being fully complete and then having to go back to what the original recommendation was.

Holly: Gabe, I love that you brought up brand architecture because now I have a burning question for Monica about that. I’m remembering the FedEx visual system of sub-brands… I was at Landor at the time. Now Landor had worked on the original FedEx logo with that kind of little special arrow in the middle…

Monica: Yep. Yep.

Holly: And I recall at the time decisions were being made about FedEx Ground. You settled on a green, a vibrant fun green. But the coolest and most interesting part I want you to tell us about, if you can divulge the secret, is how did you all decide to put a puppy dog in that logo? Because, you know, as you said earlier, the brand was a little more buttoned up. It wasn’t serious or unapproachable by any means, but throughout the system you had a very clear convention for your taxonomy and your nomenclature.

How did the puppy dog show up?

Monica: So that’s an awesome question.

Here’s the story. We were FedEx, we were an express company. We were purple and orange. That’s what we were doing. Then we started acquiring all these companies. And to your point, Holly, we acquired a ground service company, RPS. And we knew, again, because we have this single hero brand, that they were going to become FedEx something.

I remember the chairman called and said we need something that’s the same but different. Isn’t that funny? That was the request, same but different.

Holly: Whatever that means.

Monica: I think Landor helped us with this at the time. They were like, okay, we’re going to use the hero identity FedEx, but we’re going to use color to actually separate the business lines so that people can understand it is something the same, it is FedEx, but there’s also something different about it. It’s a different color, so it must mean something different.

Now, I’m going to tell you, I always think that is kind of like we’re letting our slip show or maybe in today’s world, we’re letting our spandex show. Like it’s an internal thing that we’re kind of sharing with the outside world. But for a while, I think it was fit for purpose.

But to your question about the dog… Ground was the company that we bought, but they actually had a home delivery service within the Ground service. So instead of it just being a business-to-business offering, it was to residences. So we used smaller trucks and we knew that they were going to be going mostly to residential places. And we were thinking, how do we get permission from neighborhoods to let our trucks be there, and be there all the time and more often?

Well, what better than a dog? People love babies and dogs, right? We didn’t want a baby on the truck so a dog made sense. We put a package in his mouth so that he looked like he was delivering a package. The whole intent was to be a little more accessible and a little more human and a little more… I’ll say homey, for lack of a better word, than our business identity and persona had been. To really make sure people in neighborhoods felt comfortable with us being there.

Holly: That’s killer.

Monica: That’s really the story.

But think about that too. It kind of goes back to Gabe’s last question. Did home delivery really need its own brand from Ground? Because eventually it didn’t, eventually we walked away because home delivery is really a service that was offered through the Ground company. It had its own brand for a while and it doesn’t anymore.

I remember people calling in to customer service and someone would say (because it was new to us), “Was it Ground or Express?” And the customer on the other end of the line would say, “I don’t know, they had on a green sleeve.” Because at the time we had really differentiated the business lines and the brands by their color, their uniforms, their labels – everything really was color-coded and we used color with meaning.

Now that was fit for purpose at the beginning and people understood there were some nuances and differences. But over time, and really long before we probably changed our identity, it really wasn’t fit for purpose anymore. It was much more of an internal thing – different pay scales, different job responsibilities, different benefit packages maybe even.

We were letting that internal purpose for unique branding drive our external expression to our customers. And it took me eight years and three tries to get the board and the chairman and everybody in agreement that we should go from the color-coded company to one purple and orange company with just our lines of business still over there.

So three tries in eight years, I am persistent if I’m nothing else. Because it was fit for purpose when we did it, but by the time it wasn’t fit for purpose anymore, we weren’t ready to change because of our internal concerns.

But over time… back to your point Holly about data and research. We used customer data to drive the decision and inform why we should be purple and orange. How we uniquely owned purple and orange in the world and how customers had an expectation that we were purple and orange. A lot of customers thought that green was for the holidays and red was for the holidays and that it was just like a fanciful expression of our brand, not anything with meaning as it had been years before.

Gabriel: What worked the third time, or maybe what had changed that allowed the stars to align?

Monica: I’m going to say this – there was a leadership change at the head of the general counsel’s office. And I think that’s finally what allowed the change. And today… and I’m not there today, but as I was leaving… they’re really moving to an all-one FedEx and not even having the lines of business there, and it just being FedEx. Which is so interesting.

When I made this pitch over the years, I said, I think we should move to FedEx purple and orange now and eventually we should move to taking all the descriptors away and really move to this single entity. And as I was leaving, they were kind of moving in that direction.

I think now that’s pretty much where they are. Now, you won’t see that physically on every asset because of the inordinate number and the cost that it would take to change them all at one time. I think over time you’ll see that at those multiple touchpoints.

Gabriel: What I love about what you said is it brings a lot of the reality home of what it means to be in an organization, which is the role that humans play. Sometimes you might have all the data and the strategy, and you might be right, and what changed from one time to another is the human making the decision changed.

Monica: That is correct.

Gabriel: We talked about the evolution of brand as a discipline right at the start of this conversation. What we need to remember is it’s really a pendulum shift. In the same way that you hear conversations of, this company has got rid of the CMO… well, another company has probably added a CMO. I think we oftentimes see this through the lens of brand as well, which is organizations where brand is able to seep into culture and experience and into innovation and all of a sudden a change in leadership happens and brand is back to being T-shirt and cups department.

Sometimes the hard part in conversations – at least I know that I have with clients – is the reality of you just need to wait for there to be some kind of people change. That’s the reality. Oftentimes we get asked, do you have a deck that tells this story? Like, it’s not going to make a difference.

Monica: That’s right. I remember there was one night where there was a board meeting that day and I got a call that night and they said, “We’re a go.” It was the second time I had tried and I was emailing my team like, “We did it. We did it. We really, really did it.” The next morning I got an email at 7am that said, “Stand down.”

Holly: Oh no!

Monica: I was like, “I’m so disappointed! But I’m going to try again. The timing will be right again at some point because it’s the right thing to do.”

Gabriel: And that’s the key – never abandon the convictions.

Holly: Yeah.

Monica: Not if it’s right. I have the courage of my convictions, especially when I know it’s the right thing. But it has to also be the right time or in your case, Gabe, what you said, it has to be the right person. So there are a lot of factors. We did it and it just took a lot of “hurry up and waiting.”

Holly: Well, I think it goes to show that a no isn’t a no, right? It’s never a one or even two-dimensional thing.

Gabriel: It’s a “not yet.”

Holly: Exactly, it’s just a yes waiting to be converted. That’s not to say that you keep chasing a dead end or a red herring, but Monica, you knew, your gut was right. And so it was worth going back to the plate and batting again and again.

That’s pretty amazing. Love it.

Monica: Yeah. The fortunate part for me is that it was still right by the time it happened. Because you’re right. When you start thinking about the evolution of brand and the pendulum swinging that you just talked about, Gabe – you’re right. And what if the pendulum had swung another way?

In this case, I didn’t see that ever happening. Again, I saw us moving the way they’re moving now – continuing to simplify, continuing to create that single hero, continuing to take off the lines of business.

Think about it, Holly, do you care if your package to Gabe goes air or ground? No, you care if it gets there when you need it to be there. And really we’re asking customers to do some lifting that they didn’t need to do that we could do behind the scenes for them and make their life simpler and make their experience easier. I have a package, I need it there tomorrow at noon. You tell me how I can get it there and what are my cost options.

Holly: Right, yeah.

Gabriel: You talked earlier about hating to be the brand police. Something that is a passion area of ours in talking about almost having to rebrand the notion of governance. It’s one of those areas where governance in a world where you only had a few people using the brand, even if it was on a lot of surfaces like FedEx is, it was kind of constrained to a few people. But it always had this sense of okay, it’s going around slapping people on the wrist with a ruler saying, “That’s not on brand. You can’t do that.”

I think that even in the stories that you’re telling… you already had one of the key elements, which is this concierge mindset. This non-fixed mindset of “not everything can be guidelined and sometimes you need to give a little”. With the example of the superhero in Asia [mentioned in Part 1] because you probably didn’t have superhero guidelines, right? You can’t guideline everything out.

How else do you kind of see this notion of governance, or as we like to call it ‘brand enablement’ (which is in many ways what inspired us to give this podcast the name that it has)? How did you see governance and enablement evolve and the role of things like training and education, building ambassadorship, influence… How did you see that change and evolve? And what kind of direction did you give to your team to evolve the skills and the mentality?

Monica: Yeah, I do like to call it brand enablement because I think I hate governance, because I think most people hate being governed.

To your other point, Gabe, I also think there’s no way you could create a guideline for everything that somebody else can think of, right? There’s no way. There’s just no way. And then when people come to you and say, “Where in the guidelines does it say this is not on brand?” And I’d be like, “You know what? I couldn’t think that you were going to ask me for that. So there’s no way I could have said rubber ducks do not represent the brand.” – as one example. I think you’re right.

The first thing is there’s a lot of influence at FedEx and I guess expectation that people would move around the organization. They would call people like either T-shaped (where you had kind of a breadth of experience) or I-shaped. I’m very I-shaped. I love brand. I want to stay in brand. If that meant I couldn’t go any higher on the ladder, VP was fine because that’s the work I loved and I wanted to do that work.

Other people really wanted to touch a lot of areas. I tried to plant brand people from my team into many other areas around the company. Into the digital team, into the operations, into the comms team. All of the sudden you’ve now sent your brand people, who grew up in your organization, out to all of these other places. So I would encourage that 100%.

The other thing we tried to do… and again, things evolved, so on our brand center, we didn’t have video for a long time and all of a sudden we had video capability… so we started recording training sessions. And doing like the “why”s behind things, and doing little snippets of video where people could learn something and just touch base real quick.

So maybe like the evolution of the brand, where we started and where we are and kind of why we made the decisions we made along the way – that might be my talking head on a video for 15 or 20 minutes. But then we could also have other people. We could have a snippet from the chairman. We could have a snippet from the president of our… services was the division we were in before all of this reorg stuff.

We could have other people also talking about the brand and its importance in video on our site. Which also gave it some credibility, some believability, some I’ll say weight, gravitas, right? And so having the chairman, when you heard him say something about brand and you put it in your video, that really helps. Also, it made it accessible to people around the world who couldn’t come to a brand training session.

Then we also asked people around the organization, did anyone want to be a brand champion. Maybe you got some swag. And people would come and take two or three training courses, and they would then become a certified brand champion out in their organization wherever they lived or worked. Finance, accounting, wherever they lived and worked. And so I think that was also helpful.

But I think the biggest change in that was changing our mindset of always trying to get to yes, but trying to get there in a way that made sense for the brand. That was kind of our… “It’s not no, it’s just not that way. And what is the right way to get there?”

I truly believe if you help the businesses or the organizations or the group that comes to you be successful, they’re more likely to come back to get your help again, which gave us influence in the organization without having to have policies and police.

If the legal team was having a conference and wanted some banners up, if we helped them get them and design them and make them – well, that just made it easy for them. So they were more willing to come back to us the next time they needed something.

So our goal in the group was really to be helpful and to try to find ways to get to yes and to get there in a way that fit under this umbrella and this idea of our brand.

Gabriel: I want to get to a couple of the convictions and points of view that you have. And one of the things that we were talking about offline is you were talking about the importance of having both client and agency experience. Talk a bit about that and why you think that… It’s one of the things that, as an agency person, I often think about.

Monica: I just think it’s critical. I don’t think agencies, many times, understand the corporate structure. The corporate governance structure, the approval process, the way that you have to sell something internally at a corporation (I know you have to sell things at an agency, but at a corporation), and how many stakeholders actually have a say. Especially in a company like FedEx where it’s a consensus-building company.

And I think there’s no way that a client can understand what they’re asking of an agency if they haven’t been on the delivery side for a client. If you as a client say, “Yeah, I need that and I need that at four o ‘clock.” and it’s 2:15 – they have no clue what they’re asking for.

I always tried to be the client. I’d worked at a database and direct marketing agency, so I had served a lot of banking customers. I would always try to work with my customer/my client and say, “Okay, I know you’re asking for that by four. What do you really need? Who are you trying to convince? And what else maybe could I get you by four that will work? And then if you still need that other thing, I can try to get it to you maybe by this time tomorrow.” sort of thing.

If you’re a client and you’ve never had to serve a client, I think you don’t really know how to be a good client. Not intentionally… but I don’t think you know what you’re asking for and I don’t think you know what you might be putting somebody through to try to get that thing that you say you need and you really may not need it the way that you’re asking for it. I don’t know if that makes any sense to you all but…

Gabriel: It does, but also go back to the other side of it.

What do you feel in all your years of working with a lot of larger agencies that the team should be asking you? Or how should that be impacting the deliverables that they give,in order to take into account these aspects of the socialization and decision-making that you talked about?

Monica: That’s a really good question.

I guess it’s around understanding the client’s process. Ensuring that they know what the client is going to have to go through to get whatever that agency has provided approved.

If they ask maybe more process questions and even timing questions. Like if the agency says, “How long does your process last? How long will it be before you get back to me?” Because I know there’ll be times where we’re working on a schedule and we’re trying to do… production for one example… and you’ve got a timeline.

If you as the client miss your approval, now you’ve missed all of your production window and you’ve got cameramen to pay and directors to pay and talent to pay. Sometimes you can move it, sometimes you can’t. It depends on the contract, the idea… you might have a location that you only have for a day and now it’s gone because you didn’t get your approval.

So I think it’s working together on the front end to both understand. As the client – the production process and the implication of changes. And as the agency to understand the internal process and approvals and the timeline for that. So that working together you are building a bridge that actually meets in the middle.

Gabriel: Where do you stand also on the importance of agency partners today more and more building capabilities for internal client teams? Enabling and empowering the teams to be able to go in and present the work, so that the agency isn’t the star, but the internal team is empowered to sell it in and do that work.

Monica: I think it’s got to be a combination. I think the agency needs to… especially the creative team, they need to be able to share their vision and how they got to that story. And be able to kind of show that they know the business and that they’re delivering on the brief that the business provided.

I also think as the client, you have to help sell what the agency is also selling. If you believe in it enough to bring the agency in to share that with whomever the final approval group is, then you also need to be, I think, partnered and aligned and selling the same thing.

When that doesn’t work is when the agency wants to sneak in something new that they think is cool and that they want to show the leadership that they’re thinking all new and modern, and you get taken off guard as the client.

That has happened to me… not often, but a couple of times. And I’m like, “We said we were going to present this, you knew we were supportive of this. We said we could show these other things that we didn’t support and even say, “Here were some other ideas that we considered but didn’t want to move forward but wanted to show you that we were thinking outside of the box.” I’m cool with that. But don’t surprise me in a meeting with my leadership EVER, if you’re the agency.

And I would say for the client, I don’t think that you should keep your agency from being seen by your leadership because I think it’s too far removed and it’s not fair to the people who actually generated the work and are probably the most passionate about it.

Holly: Well then they miss that direct feedback, right? And then what you’re doing inevitably is playing operator… or kind of a chain and something is going to get lost in translation. So then that agency is, “Man, if I could have just been in the room and got that feedback directly, that could have been a game-changing conversation.”

I’m curious, did you build up at any point… and did it change over your 20-year horizon… the in-house capabilities? Did you bring some of those agency capabilities under your roof? And when did it work well and when didn’t it?

Monica: Yeah, the only real additional capability that we brought in was like SEO. Really trying to manage optimization and figuring out should we make the investment rather than an agency. Trying to have a more direct understanding of search terms and then using those to create our marketing materials, our content, our website – because bringing it closer gave us more information much more quickly.

But if you think about the creative and the production, I mean, we had people in-house who were like the overseers of the production. You might call them an internal director of production, but they were just working with another production team.

When I started FedEx might’ve been producing 26 commercials a year. When I left, they might have been producing two or three commercials a year. It wasn’t ongoing full-time work so it didn’t make sense to bring capabilities in, that wouldn’t be used full-time. We could just buy what we needed when we needed it. But SEO is a full-time job, it’s ongoing.

So really trying to understand the balance of buying what you need when you need it if it’s not a full-time gig, and bringing the full-time gig in-house.

Holly: Okay. So I have a follow-up question then on that, if I may. Going back to the conversation about understanding, empathizing and allowing different business units and different geographical regions to modulate messages. Let’s say they come to you with an idea, Monica, and your answer is “No, but…”. It’s never just no and it might not be yes, but there’s a but in there and you’re trying to help them make it right.

This is such a practical question, but one that plagues so many people. Where does the budget come from?

Monica: Yeah.

Holly: In order to do it right, you know that they don’t have the budget for it. So how did you govern that and manage it, and how did you decide whether you were going to help foot the bill to make something better and get it right?

Monica: In the US, I had the budget – so that was good. Internationally, each region had the budget.

Holly: And what if they didn’t have a budget? Would you ever kick in?

Monica: You know, there were times… but there are also rules and tax implications and money transfers that can and can’t happen. So it was rare that I actually kicked in.

It might be that the company did a budget reorganization or transfer internally to move money, but I didn’t typically just say, “I’ll just kick in for you to do that.” It was more of a corporate governance type move – budget is allocated to you, we’re going to reallocate some of that budget. But there were a lot of other implications that somebody in tax and corporate finance worried about that I didn’t.

Typically the regions had money, not a ton, but they had money. But anything that they were doing, because of the relationships that we had built over time… and remember 20 years is a long time… because of the relationship, they would come and say, we have this new idea and we want to do it. And I would say, “Really?”

Sometimes it was like, “Man that’s cool. Let’s try it, let’s see if it’ll work.” Other times it was like, “Really? Really? Is there another way we can get there? Did you see other concepts?”

Holly: Next question, next idea.

Monica: Yeah, yeah, “What’s next?” And sometimes it was like, “No, this is what we’re going to do.”

The brand director that I worked for… before I was lucky enough to get that job and move on… she said, “Monica, you cannot fight every battle. You cannot. You have to choose your battles wisely.”

So there were times where it didn’t make sense for the brand, but it was going to be maybe something in one region and kind of unique to that region and probably not go very far. Maybe they had a smaller marketing budget. Maybe they had fewer customers. There are just times where you say, “Okay, it is not how I would do it, but okay.”

Holly: Yeah.

Gabriel: Monica, 30-second answers to these last two quick questions.

Your view on the term employer brand.

Monica: I don’t think there is “employer brand.” I think there’s one brand with an employee value proposition. I think the employee value proposition is important. What’s in it for me as an employee? But it’s all one brand. And if it’s not, shame on you.

One brand.

Gabriel: What’s been the impact for you of being part of professional networks, like the Brand 50 where you and Holly met, and learning from peers and how important is that?

Monica: It’s my most favorite thing I’ve ever done. It is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done, and it’s the place where I feel like I professionally developed the most. The ability to learn from peers who have the exact same issues, the ability to share in a very candid way what’s going on and get sympathy or empathy… you know I think misery loves company sometimes… but also to get support and knowledge is tremendous and I highly recommend it.

And you come away getting to associate with folks like Holly who you just love and enjoy and want to be around.

Holly: Monica, paid it forward. I mean, for every question that Monica had, 15 people had a question for Monica. So remember that – it was a virtuous circle.

Monica: Yeah, I loved it.

Gabriel: Monica, this has been absolutely wonderful. I think we could have kept going for three hours on this wonderful start to our series – amazing learnings.

Thank you for being on with us.

Monica: It’s been absolutely my pleasure. I hope there’s some nugget there that helps somebody somewhere. It’s really fun and I appreciate you letting me share my experience.

Holly: Thanks Monica, what a blast.