Sr
Marketing
as Service
Well Done Is Better than Well Said
“We don’t do things just because they’re a trend; we do things
because we think it’s the right thing to do for our customer.”
John Hayes
American Express
Soap box time. Of all the elements required to be a successful CMO,
few are more overlooked than Marketing as Service. The basic idea is
relatively easy to grasp: Rather than starting with what you want to say
to your consumers, focus first on what you can do for them. Here’s an
example near and dear to my heart from when Renegade worked with
HSBC: The BankCab. New Yorkers who were HSBC customers and
were lucky enough to hail this classic Checker cab were treated to a free
ride anywhere in the city from the most knowledgeable cabbie in the
five boroughs. It made headlines, and more importantly it made “The
World’s Local Bank” more than just a slogan.
One company that practices Marketing as Service regularly and
has done so for decades is American Express, which helps explain why
AmEx has been my go-to source for content since I started blogging
in 2006. Among my favorite examples is Small Business Saturday. The
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service in this case not only establishes a day that puts the spotlight on
small businesses and rivals Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but also
enables small businesses to be more competitive throughout the year
with marketing toolkits that highlight their distinct advantages over their
larger competitors.
And helping small businesses grow is hardly an altruistic endeavor
for AmEx. Years ago, the company realized that when their customers grow, AmEx grows right along with them. Enlightened self-interest
propelled them to provide highly useful content in the pre-Internet
days, in the form of breakfasts, newsletters and magazines, and more
recently in their carefully curated online OPEN Forum. Interestingly,
this “do” turned out to be more than just a useful service to its customers; it also attracted prospects once AmEx decided to make all the
content public.
Which brings me to my interview with John Hayes, the long-time
CMO of American Express. Hayes, who started his career on the agency
side, has presided over a successful stream of “Marketing as Service”
programs from those mentioned above to Membership Rewards, CEO
BootCamp, the Women’s Business Initiative, and two relatively recent
social media experiments called Link Like Love and Card Sync. The
commonality? A relentless commitment to doing the right thing for the
AmEx customer.
Has a service mentality always been front-and-center at American
Express? How does being a great service company affect your marketing?
American Express has been around since 1850, and when we first started,
we were a freight forwarding company, not a payments company. Then
we slowly moved into the travel business and the traveler’s check business. The company was 108 years old before the first American Express
card appeared. Since the beginning, there has been a focus on being a
great service company, whether that service was freight forwarding, opening up markets for people to travel and experience the world, offering a
safer way to carry money with travelers checks, or offering something like
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the American Express card to simplify people’s lives and make it more
rewarding. All of those things come from a service culture, a company
focused on service.
As I understand it, there is not yet a clear link between OPEN Forum
(AmEx’s content and networking platform for small business owners)
and significant new revenue. Yet the program is very popular and widely
seen as a success. How is this so?
I think there are some general trends that are very positive, but you’re right.
When you get to a granular level, it’s difficult to say this program generated
these many cards and this much spend for American Express.
We have a belief that if you serve people well, they’ll become your customers; because everyone wants and deserves to be served well. We don’t
require people to be a cardholder to use OPEN Forum. We created the
site because we knew that part of enabling the success of small businesses
was helping them understand what other small businesses had already
learned to help them be successful. That’s why we created it, and that’s
why we made it an “open” network—so that small business owners could
find others that would be of most value to them.
When you’ve contributed in a meaningful way to a small business’s success and then say, “Hey, I’ve got some other services for you. I’ve got a
card that could help you manage inventory better,” they are quite open
to it because they’ll say, “Well, you guys have already been helping me
grow my business, enabling my success,” and that’s the philosophy. Some
programs we can measure on a granular level, and some we can’t, but
we’re careful not to overvalue the things we can measure or undervalue
the things we can’t.
Given that everybody is creating content and other companies are
targeting small businesses like you are, what are you doing to stay ahead?
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What’s really important is that we don’t do things just because they’re a
trend; we do things because we think it’s the right thing to do for our
customers. In 1971, we started a publishing group called American
Express Publishing. Wow, what a concept. Who was talking about content in 1971? But this company had the foresight to understand that in
order to be a lifestyle services company for businesses and people, you
need to talk to them about their life, not what they’re going to use to
pay for something.
The philosophy that got this company to create a publishing group in
1971 is no different than the way we think about our company today.
If you’re in the service business, every interaction with a prospect or
a customer should be a service interaction. We provided those magazines as a lifestyle service and if you look at what we are doing with
American Express UNSTAGED for example—bringing music to so
many people around the world on a live-stream basis—the philosophy is the same. That is our way of serving customers, based on their
life and passions. We should be helping our customers experience
what it is they want to experience, and many of these experiences are
open architecture because we also want prospects to know what it
feels like to be a member.
Have you seen your role as a CMO evolve over the last ten years?
My role has evolved a lot. First, it’s evolved from the standpoint of
understanding what is happening in the world related to media. How
are people consuming media? How are they absorbing new messages?
Those things have changed fairly remarkably in the last decade. Part of
my job is to make sure I understand how the world works today whether
that’s social media, digital, or traditional, and how it’s changing. How are
brands being established in the landscape today?
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My role is also about identifying which elements of American Express
will not change from its origins and which elements absolutely will,
in terms of how we go to market. Trust, security, and service will not
change. This company has existed for 165 years because it has reinvented
itself many times, but always grounded in the enduring values of trust,
security, and service.
What role is big data playing in your job today?
Data is a fundamental part of what we do today and it’s a great opportunity because data can allow us to optimize on a much shorter cycle. We
also see it as an opportunity to serve customers better and of course as
a company known for trust and security, we believe in using it in a privacy-centric way. With data, I can anticipate your needs, I can help you
with the things you want, I can begin to understand what you might
need in the future, so data can be very useful in service and marketing. I
won’t talk about marketing without mentioning service, because I think
there’s a lot of marketing out there that is of no service to anyone and
frankly doesn’t have much impact. The things that are sustainable are the
marketing elements that serve people well. So data becomes an enormous
opportunity not only to find prospects and continue the dialogue with
our customers, but also to understand them and offer things that are a
real service to them. This enables us to begin the relationship on a service
level and not just a sales level.
As the CMO, how much influence do you have on the entire
customer experience?
I don’t know of a company that is structured in a way where the CMO
has control over all customer touch points and in reality it’s not practical. That said, it is the responsibility of the CMO to influence customer
value and measure that value over time. This is fundamental to building
a strong brand and business.
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
• The idea behind Marketing as Service is simple and proven—do something for your target and they will thank you with their business.
• AmEx figured out a long time ago that if they help small businesses
grow, AmEx will grow along with them.
• Think of Marketing as Service as making deposits into the “goodwill
bank” of your customers that ultimately you can redeem for incremental
sales, loyalty, and referrals.
Further reading:
Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Ben Franklin