Drive Sales Overnight, Build the Brand Over Time

Episode 150. Holy crap, who thought we'd have made it this far? Today, we have someone whose career spans NASA, Taco Bell, Whole Foods, and now children's clothes. We're talking to Jeff Jenkins, the CMO of Carter's, and we got a lot to talk about. So let's kick it with episode 150. All that and more on today's episode of the Marketing MadMen. They say marketing is a madman's game. So now we turned it over to the Marketing MadMen with Nick Constantino and Trip Jobe.

Happy Saturday. Welcome to the Marketing MadMen, Trip Jobe and Nick Constantino here live from the Battery, Season 4.

Season 4. I can't believe they let us go this long. It's fascinating.

There are some surprises out there, I guess.

Yeah, that we're still doing it as #1.

Yeah, well, we've got a great guest today, and I think we're going to really learn a lot about both his marketing career and the changes Jeff Jenkins, who is CMO at Carter's, has seen in marketing during his career. So welcome, Jeff.

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

It's great to have you. It's funny, we've talked about the demise of the CMO now for so long and on so many different episodes. We actually get our hands on one.

Oh, don't fire me too fast.

What's going to happen?

So let's start. Let's go back to the beginning. First of all, how did you get into marketing? And then we could go through some of these stops along the way because there are some ones that blatantly stand out to me. But how did you get into marketing? Talk about the collegiate career. What made you want to get into this wild world?

Yeah, so I got into marketing because of three simple words. You're never going to guess them. Ace of Base. So if you remember, All That She Wants. I Saw the Sign. All That She Wants.

Oh, there's the zinger. I'm done. I'm going to go. There you go. There you go. No.

I actually saw the vinyl over the weekend. My son and I were at one of the vinyl record stores and it was sitting there.

Very cool. So I played tennis as a kid. I was playing in Europe as probably a 16 year old. That song was just a banger in the clubs in Europe. I found it, I bought it on a CD single, if you remember when those were a thing, brought it home to my friends and was like, hey, this is going to be the next biggest hit. They were all like, whatever, dude, not really. And then suddenly they blew up. And I thought, of course, it's all because of me, right? Not because of Clive Davis signing them to a record deal and promoting them, but I thought it was me, word of mouth. That was my first interaction of like marketing, like feeling like there's a reason why things become popular and I could have the foresight to see what the consumer wanted and how it translated. Fast forward to college. I started as a biochemistry major, realized while I was good at it and got good grades, it was the most boring thing on the planet. And the fact that I was going to do 7 to 10 years of school to become a doctor and not really talk to people, which is my thing. I was like, done here. So I went and became a theater major, which is really useful in the real world.

You can't get more opposite than a doctor than a theater. Imagine a play on biochemistry. you really want to banger there?

So I became a theater major, and then lo and behold, I got cast in a play that was going to Broadway right out of college and did it for two years. But in the middle of that, I was living in New York City.

What play? Hold on a second. Let's stop for a second. I know. Tell us the play. Tell us your role. Tell us how it did on Broadway.

It was called Big Love, not associated with the Showtime show. It was a retelling of an original play by Aeschylus, which was the first known play they ever did. But it was done in like a MTV. The floor was a trampoline. It was wild. And it was headed to Broadway. We did it in Chicago, in New York, San Francisco. And while I was doing it in New York, I got a day job. Got a day job like literally temping at MTV. The guy I ended up temping for was the original creative director of MTV, who invented the phrase, I want my MTV. And he could not have been nicer to me and got me in. I was like, I don't know about this acting thing, but this marketing thing of being able to create things, I was doing the subway series, New York Yankees, Mets was while I was there.

That was one of the first years that I did it. And no, because I was at Yankee Stadium painted in black and orange face paint, which you do not want to do. If you recommend, don't go to do that.

So I was there for the subway series and I was doing man on the street interviews and doing marketing for what was then Spike was to become Spike TV. So I helped transition TNN to Spike TV. And it was just like, that was my turn on moment of like, I've got to figure this marketing thing out. And that led to the rest of my career.

Yeah. So you're in the 2000s?

So 2000, 2001, I left New York when 911 happened and moved to LA and that's When I randomly, not randomly, I'd also done a, while I was a biochemistry major, I interned at NASA during college. And then when I wanted to leave New York, I called my old boss and said, hey, any chance you have a job opening? And so I went from working from MTV to going to work for NASA.

Okay, that's a good place to stop. Let's talk a little bit more about that. So NASA, was, we had the time there in the 60s and 70s where this was it, right? We were going to the moon, the world, this is the space race versus Russia. I mean, NASA was, we're heroes. Now we're at the point where we have, what did Trump call it? The space command team that we have our own.

Space Force.

Space Force. So how do you message something like NASA? What is the goal? What are you trying to get out? Are you trying to get to the masses? Are you trying to get to engineers to work for NASA? Talk a little bit about that because I feel like when you talk marketing, that's not the first thing that comes up in people's minds.

Totally true. So I worked in the media relations department and our whole goal was to help people understand the point of NASA. I got really lucky in the fact that two things happened when I was there. One was the Mars rovers launch. So Spirit and Opportunity. So that was like a big deal for NASA. To your point from the space race, it was really the first thing in a long time that was like captivating the public's attention. We were sending these rovers to drive around on Mars. So I got to work on the Mars rovers under a woman named Veronica McGregor who didn't think like a government employee. She'd come from CNN. She was like, how do we like do more live news feeds, new things, media? And it was really about two things. So it was about like helping the media tell the story of NASA. And then secondarily, because I worked at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, which is the Center for Unmanned Robotic Exploration of Space, which is in Pasadena, California, it was the closest NASA facility to Hollywood. So we got lots of people coming over when they wanted to do TV treatments, pilots, movies, and I would take them around and help them interact and work with real scientists to understand the science.

Yeah, JPL is really cool. So when I was in LA in the early 90s selling copy paper, that was when we had the contracting, talking about having to get certain clearance just to get in to meet purchasing.

Oh, no, I had, I don't know what it was, some secret or top secret clearance to work there. as does every employee because you go through the gates and the security. Yeah, it's wild.

So we're going to jump around a little bit. Okay, so I pre-read a lot of these things. So let's fast forward to NASA to you work for KFC in Australia, which is fascinating because a couple of things. One, KFC, this was, it was Kentucky Fried Chicken. This is rebrand time to KFC, but it's a different world in a different country. And I only know, so when I spent some time in Prague, and it was huge in Prague on every street, and you just do not associate the Czech with fried chicken, but it is.

China, KFC got big.

So talk about what got you to Australia, what it was like there, what you learned from working and doing marketing there and how it's different. And talk a little bit about how a brand like KFC made its way over there.

Yeah, no, it's I mean, KFC is the powerhouse you don't think of. It had, and this is probably in 2000 and 11 or 12 was when I went over. And KFC at that point in the US was a little flat in the US, but it was growing like wildfire around the world and it was challenging everyone in the world. It was kind of a thing. So I work for Yum Brands, Taco Bell, and every so often they do a rotation, say, hey, we want to send someone internationally. My wife was eight months pregnant and they came and said, hey, do you want to go to Singapore? I'm like, I don't think my wife's going to move to Singapore 8 months pregnant. Fast forward a month and a half. She had a baby. had been two weeks, the baby was two weeks old. The CEO called me and said, who happened to be Australian? He goes, hey, how about going to Australia? And I'm like, we are in for Australia. He goes, how about in four weeks? And so we moved within nine week old, eight week old to Australia. We lived in Manly on the beach in Sydney. It was phenomenal, like the best experience of my life. And I went to work for KFC. My first two weeks I spent in the back of a KFC hand breading chicken and learning how to make chicken because the best thing, right? Someone once told me that there's no replacement for a good foot reconnaissance. So being on the front lines is the unlock for every business because you're close to the customer. So they at Yum, they really embrace that. So you have to go work in the kitchen. So I was working making chicken and then it became like a war. So they were in the middle of the chicken wars in Australia. It's like a real thing. It was a real time. McDonald's didn't have like a chicken sandwich and they were trying to get into it. So we were battling out. It's called Macca's over there, McDonald's. So Macca's versus KFC. And so it was all about learning. You have to learn. It's like a whole new sense of humor, right? The Australian sense of humor is very different.

We just recorded with the Australia guy, which makes it that much funnier.

Yeah, right. And it's like they have a total different sense of humor.

Words mean different things. Some especially dirty words here are used a little bit more freely over there, which is amazing because we're like the dirtiest people on Earth. And some words they say I'm like.

Totally. and by the way, I'm not a guy who ever really cursed in the office. I went to Australia and I was like cursing like a sailor. It's just amazing. So it was a it was a fun it was a fun thing. It was really a big battle time between the two brands for like dominance of the market.

Had the Asian, like Jollibee, had they made their way over there? Because you're talking to the Philippines, they start now that those start coming, those are going to take over pretty quickly. Those are what I hear.

I mean, it's the thing in the US, it's like McDonald's sells more chicken than hamburgers. Like, you don't think about that, but it's like the dominant protein in the world, and so It was a fun time and you just learning I ran the cricket sponsorship. Why they have an American guy running the cricket sponsorship who had no idea how to play cricket. My son is now obsessed with Australian rules football, watches it on the weekends here in the US. So it stuck with us and it was a fun time to sort of be a marketer in a different country and like learning how to.

How long were you there?

I was there for one day less than a year, for tax reasons, if anyone ever asks.

364 days. So I have a very important KFC question. So I don't know how high up you got, but have you ever seen the secret recipe?

I have never seen the herbs and spices. The 11 herbs and spices. No, I've never seen it, but it is one of those things, you know, two different suppliers make the stuff and they mix it together so that no one ever knows it.

It's like Colonel Sanders that you have to open up with a special code with both eyes to go in.

I have a feeling, though, that he might have tried on the, you know, that wig at some point with his theater background.

Oh, yeah, the wig, the hat, the white suit, it's all there. That's it.

All right, so let's talk Taco Bell. So Yum Brands, same company, same parent company, right? So we're at Taco Bell. So one of the things I find fascinating about Taco Bell is They are just relentless marketers. I mean, they are taking the same set of ingredients and making something new almost monthly. I have not made it to the Cheez-Its yet. I am upset with myself that I have not. But they seem to be just repackaging things, which is what marketing is, right?

It is the rice, bean, and cheese, three-card Monte.

Isn't it?

That is exactly what the brand is.

So talk a little bit about, one, I know that while you were there, they really were getting into the apps. And apps have become now synonymous. If you're a restaurant and you want to succeed, you need the data, you need the loyalty, you need apps. Talk about your time at KFC. We've about a minute and a half. Let's go with that. Segue that into the next segment.

Perfect. Yeah. So if you think about Taco Bell's customer, it is a customer that as soon as you get your driver's license, you go there because mom and dad don't want to take you there. They don't want to eat there. They want to have a burger. So for us, it was about getting that 16-year-old digital consumer.

I'm sure that's the only reason a 16-year-old is going there.

They have less than $10 in their wallet.

But you know what, to be fair, they know it. They know when they embrace it, when their cantina chicken came out and they said, hey, we're not just for late night, they lean into that, which is something most people are afraid of.

100%, but to your point, they know than anyone, right? You think about something like Doritos Locos Tacos, that is the Stoner's dream food. Let's be honest.

I invented it 10 years ago. I mean, every person in college was like, they thought of this, like, how have we not combined these things yet? Exactly.

So then for the app and the digital side, it was simply, hey, every single customer we looked at had a phone in their hand and they were at that point where they were starting to do everything through it. And it was how do we acquire customers? And the single greatest thing was Starbucks had done like the digital paying. But no one wants, no one goes to Taco Bell often enough to really load like $25 onto your Taco Bell card like you at Starbucks. You go every day at Starbucks. So it was like, let's get into the ordering business. So we built an app that was literally all about ordering your food. And then when you drove within, you know, let's call it a mile radius, the Bluetooth went off, the GPS went off, and you started cooking in the kitchen by the time you got there.

And the bell. And the bell went on. So with the bell, we are hitting to a break, but we'll pick that up when we come back. And we are Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3.

Now back to the Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3 FM.

Welcome back to the Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3. Nick Constantino and Trip Jobe here and with Jeff Jenkins and we're just finishing up our conversation on Taco Bell because if we can't tell it's just a point of just great just great pride for me. So One of the things I find ironic about Taco Bell is when you actually look at the ingredients, calorie wise, everything, density, vegetables, it's actually one of the healthier fast food options. How do they, so again, we're marketing to the right people. You know your audience. Those people are not necessarily concerned with health, but how does that just slide under the radar that all these other guys are getting away with it? It's actually pretty good for you relative to most of the other things.

Relative and it's super friendly for if you're a vegetarian or vegan like it and the thing is those audiences that are vegetarian that are vegan that are long they know the hacks to get like the good stuff. The problem is you never want to sell that.

You could make that. There's nothing sexy about it. Nothing sells. There's nothing sexy about a bean burrito.

No, there's not. So it's all about the indulgent, you know, the cheese crunch wrap that just launched that looks delicious, clearly not healthy, but there are healthy versions of everything they have on the menu. And that's like the secret sauce that everyone can go there and get something, whatever they want.

Yeah, they've done an awesome job. So let's fast forward now. So we were talking a little bit before the break. You've been at Carter's for five years now, which in the CMO world is almost 1000 years. That is like dog years. We're just killing it out there.

So how was the transition, okay, to Carter's? How did you make that first?

So wild transition is simple. That is my belief is that if you're a good marketer and you understand the consumer, All you have to do is apply the same rules and principles. And so the simple thing was, at Taco Bell, we were trying to get those 16-year-olds and we were keeping them until they were 24. Now all I've got to do is find those new expecting parents and keep them for 10 years. It's the same sort of life cycle of a business, just simply one is up at 2:00 in the morning for different reasons.

But sometimes you have to have, especially if you're going in the roles you're talking about, you have to have senior leadership who gets that and isn't this focus of industry focus?

That is true. And that's one of the hardest things to break into is like people are like, well, and that's been the sort of thing about my career. I've worked in aerospace at NASA, I've worked in entertainment at MTV, I've worked in grocery at Whole Foods, you know, and now retail and clothing and children's apparel, all different industries. And like sometimes people will try and like, you know, pigeonhole you. I'm like, look where I've been. Like it's hard to pigeonhole, but it happens. because they expect you to know that industry really well.

And I think the hardest thing for an outsider to understand about marketing is how many things go into it. PR, HR, internal, external, advertising. Everyone just thinks it's running commercials and campaigns. There's so much more, even the lines between what is PR and HR have blurred, because what you message to your internal people now gets out to the public. So I think it's just a misconception of people don't understand all of the parts that play into marketing.

Analysis. I mean, there's so many going on.

And you know, that brings up a good point. So talk a little bit about what is your day-to-day? What on a day? other than coming to this awesome show and stopping everything else you're doing for priorities, what does your day look like? What would you find most off-putting people that they wouldn't expect you to be doing?

Oh my goodness, I think as you said, the world of marketing is changing every day and it's never been a more exciting time to be in this industry. Like for me, if you think about it, there was like you when they invented television, it was like 40 years of television was the only thing. And then and then there was, the internet and sort of social media. And now it feels like every five weeks there's something new. There's a new app, there's a new platform. Now there's AI.

30 years ago, there were 6 to 8 forms of marketing. Now there's 250 plus and that's growing every day. I mean, people that are selling you stuff are advertising. Amazon makes more money with their advertising platform. They do have selling stuff to some extent.

It is wild. So the whole thing is, you know, my day is very varied. No day is the same. I think, we're in retail, and retail is detail. So when you're in retail, every day you wake up. I don't really sleep well. I get up way too early. It has nothing to do with work, but I just, I'm up at 4.30, 5 o'clock in the morning, because I used to play tennis all the time, and that was when I got up to train. So I got 6am court time. 6am court time. So it has stuck with me. So I get up, I look at the daily sales. How did we do yesterday? What can we adapt? You know, because I believe in the fact it's sales overnight, brand over time. You've got to drive sales overnight, but you have to build a brand over time. And that's where I think most CMOs are caught between sort of a rock and a hard place now. You've got performance marketing and all the things you can do in the lower funnel and all the tactics and all the performance media and all the optimizations you can make. But if you start getting in that world and you forget, hey, I've got to build a brand that people are going to love for 1000 years or 100 years, you're in big trouble. So my day-to-day can be anything from I'm going next week to shoot a commercial in Toronto. This week I'm optimizing media at the lower funnel. We're building, we are just finishing out our cross-channel personalization engine that we're installing in our website. So it is 1000 different things. I'm also working on PR, as you said. We work with our HR partners to really make sure that the messages we're going to project externally are also projected internally and everything's aligned. And then you think about it, we have earnings calls, we have IR, PR. It's just, it's a constant sort of day-to-day is so different for me, but that's what gets me up out of that every morning because it's like, oh, it's a new challenge every day.

Yeah, and they all feed into each other, right? Like you said, if you're doing all those things in the short term and keeping an eye on the overarching brand, you could have the best brand in the world, but if you're not performing, it's like some restaurants, right? I went to, there's a restaurant, I'm not going to name it, that opened here to all this great hype and it was all this top of the funnel brand, everyone knew it. I got there, it took me 40 minutes in line to get a burger that wasn't right. So if you're not executing, then the brand is worthless because that first experience is really, really important as a new parent. right? What if you come into a store now and all of a sudden the clothes don't fit? You're never coming back. So if you don't have both parts of that, it's unbelievable. So my question, you're in retail. Okay, the retail apocalypse, man, how long they've been talking about the retail apocalypse? They've been saying it's over, no one's going to brick and mortar and all of a sudden they wake up and they're like, oh my God, everyone comes into the stores, they're dying for human connection. What is going on in retail? What is the media getting wrong? What are people getting wrong? What are you seeing out there? And let's take e-commerce out of this first. Let's just talk the in-store retail. What are you seeing out there right now?

Well, I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head. It was, it was, oh, stores are dying. And then suddenly it's like, oh, Gen Z loves stores and Gen Z loves malls. And so I think it is. I mean, COVID was the great sort of like shake up and it was, oh my goodness. Everything's going to go to e-commerce and stores are going to close. And then suddenly it's like, guess what? Stores are doing really well. Guess what? People are going back into stores. People are looking at it. We're really lucky in the baby business and the kid businesses is when you have your first baby and you're becoming a parent for the first time, the first thing you want to do is touch and feel, right? You want to have that little tiny little bodysuit, little pajamas that you can show your friends. You can post it on Instagram. You can do the social cred. Look, I'm having a baby.

Which is so depressing, by the way. That's the first thing you think. Let me touch it and throw it on Instagram. No, it's a child.

Let's keep it.

But anyway, yeah.

Totally, totally right. I mean, there is a whole like, you mean look at what is the gender reveals, the balloon pops and like the whole like productions people are doing to create these moments. And but it's great for us because people love to go in the store and they want to touch and feel. They want to have that little moment of, oh my goodness, I'm having a child. So stores are one of our strengths. It's a huge asset for us. And I think in a world where retail has changed, Amazon's changed the world. Now if you look at Target and Walmart, they've changed the world. What you have to be is an omni-channel retailer. You have to do online really well. You have to do stores really well. And you have to connect the two.

Well, I was going to ask about the go-to-market philosophy, because also I believe you, know, from a store perspective, I mean, you have your own stores, you've got the ability to sell through other places. So I mean, how do you approach that?

Yeah, I think it is, we want to be where she shops. That's how we think about it. shops at Target for her household goods. She will do Walmart for groceries. She shops us for depth and special occasions of baby clothes. There's lots of different reasons to be in different channels. I also think she also wants convenience. And so that's the number one thing. So whether convenience is, hey, I'm at Target, I want to pick something up just because I'm already here. Or hey, I want to go and really have a convenient shopping experience where the people that are working in the stores at Carter's are unbelievable resources around baby and child. The person working at Target may be working the baby section and the electronic section and the household goods section. So I think those are the things you're trying to do. And then it's like, how do we build convenience? We do one hour delivery of baby clothes, which sounds absurd, but people use it because you have a blowout and you need to get a new little outfit. There is a way for you to do that within one hour from almost all of our stores in the US.

Yeah, and that's where marketing comes in, right? Because that's, I didn't know that. And again, my kids are in the thick of it in that age. And I didn't know that. I don't know if my wife knew that. I don't know if we're have those instances. I don't know what I'm feeding their kids. Maybe too much Taco Bell that they're having such instances coming up.

Do you have it in adult sizes for Nick?

But you know, one of the things that struck me, so I go to one up in off of Scenic Highway. It's where my in-laws live. And you know, Some people say it's about experience, but for me, it's just a neatly organized store that's easy to find what you want. You can look through because I won't name this the department store, but there's department store you walk into and it looks like a bomb just got lit up off in the middle of the store and the closest exploded in every direction. There's no organization. There's no, you walk in and I don't want to say sterile because that's the wrong word, but everything is well laid out. It is color organized. It's clear in front of you. see what you want, you can get it, walk out. Not super expensive. It's a nice experience, which is counter to what they're saying now. Everything's got to be experiential and you have these people and consultants. I don't need a consultant. I need a onesie. So talk about just how the stores are laid out psychologically and how you're getting people to do things. Because I know that user experience now is what's key to everything.

Oh, and we're investing in store experience and user experience every day. And I think to your point, what we know is consumers shop by age and gender for kids, right? They start with, I've got a three-year-old girl, and so that's where we gotta make it easy for her to navigate there. But then one of the great things about our stores, and we're doing some really interesting things sort of experientially, it's less about creating this like cool experience, but it's like, how do I keep a kid occupied while mom shops? right? That's sort of the thing for us. If you take a kid to a Target, and we love Target, they're a great part of ours, but they're 100,000 square foot box. I can't let my kid roam free. In our stores that are 5,000 square feet, you don't worry about your kid getting lost inside of a bigger place. So, but we have these zones.

It's for us. There was a little time. We stopped that. That's a good thing at least. But that's part of merchandising is how you think about the whole family experience in your store, right?

Yeah, 100%. So we've created zones like games on the floor, those projection games where the kids can step on turtles and play like sort of little games on the floor. But then it's about how do we make it easy for mom to shop so that she can get in, get out. That's partially why we've done the omni-channel because sometimes mom doesn't want to take the kid out of the car seat. She just wants to be able to pull up the store, put it in her trunk and head out. So you've got to cater to all those experiences. and really merchandise the store. Really, as you think about through her mind or his mindset, about 30% of the shoppers in our stores are male. So they're dads.

Probably more in an emergency. I had to go because the kid went into the clothes with his pool with his clothes on, which he shouldn't have. So then I had to go buy new clothes. So I had to go run out and go get it. That's why I was a, otherwise, you know, my wife does the shopping. But so what about e-commerce? And I want to separate these out because I'm going to ask you the inevitable hard question is, how are you tracking those people online that are shopping in stores and how we're cross-channeling and how we're doing that stuff? Because I've heard a lot of different answers. So first off, How much e-commerce are you doing? How different is the strategy of e-commerce versus in-store retail?

Yeah, I mean, I think five years ago, everyone had an e-commerce strategy. I think now everyone has an omni-commerce strategy. This sort of notion of like, we've got to be there for her wherever she shops, whenever she shops. And so we have rebuilt our app. When I got to Carter's in 2019, we sort of sat down and said, how do we rethink our app? How is it the passport to parenthood? How do we, when you are in the thick of it, especially in the zero to three, you think about you're buying clothes at three months, at six months, at nine months, at 12, they're growing at a huge rate. So having an experience, an app experience that helps you understand that, reminds you what you need, that gives you checklist of, okay, your child's now at the potty training stage, you gotta get pull-up pants, like that sort of thing, that digital experience is super important. So what we've really done is really tried to invest in that experience and really think about how do we make that digital shopping experience as sticky as possible and as easy as possible. So if you go into our stores, super easy to navigate. Same thing with our e-mail.

It's a lifetime journey, essentially.

Yeah. It's a life stage journey, right? From 0 to 10, we know sort of how your kid's gonna grow, like because every kid sort of grows at different rates, but once you're on the curve, if you've got a fast-growing kid, we can understand that. We've seen it before. If you have a kid that's on the regular curve, we can see that. And it's all about giving you of what you need at the right time.

Yeah, here's a suggestion, because this is one we did wrong. We just assumed, always get one size bigger. And then what happens is you put it in the closet and you forget it's there and you have to go buy new clothes. That was one we just, that was just a, you know, that was just a, I had two young kids, so you're just not really paying attention to anything. Buy one size bigger, they're growing fast, and then they're out of a growth spurt and you're like, oh, I have clothes just sitting here, I forgot about this. That's a good thing for you guys. Talk about, so you know, data obviously is huge. You're in an app, you're seeing the journey, you're understanding by buying power, behavior, you have so much data. How is it translating? How are using that data for the retail experience, because that's one thing people get wrong. Like you said, they're either e-commerce or retail, but you can use the e-commerce data to influence decisions in how you do things in retail. So how are you using that omni-channel strategy?

Yeah, no, data is the most powerful tool that every, not just marketing, every business has today, because there's more, you can see more data, you can understand more. And it's two things, which is one is you got to use it to make, what consumers want you to use the data for is to make their experiences better. and easier for them. They don't want it to be the creepy stuff that can show up of like, hey, we've all been tracked across the what feels like tracked across the interweb where you're sitting there and you're saying something, I'm going, I want to go see this movie. And then suddenly 2 minutes later you get an Instagram ad for that movie while you're seeing there. And you're like, were they listening to me?

Yes.

And the answer is no, they weren't. But we know that your phone's next to that phone and it's suddenly, you know, that person's seen this movie geolocation and we know you searched this and.

And AI, I believe, is going to make that worse, by the way, because these mics are on and you're transcribing and doing all these things, which is just feeding this data back to a bigger thing that's just cross-referencing. So I think it's going to get worse before it gets better.

AI has its own challenges, right? It's going to accelerate everything, not just marketing. Everything's going to be touched by AI. It feels like right now in the world of AI and the buzz around AI, feels like the buzz of when the iPhone and Facebook launched in sort of like that time around 2007 where everything was going to change.

So I love that you said that, because if we remember that first iPhone was not great. functionality. And if you remember the first Android phone was even worse. It was just not a good experience. And what I'm seeing is in between McDonald's, what happened with AI at McDonald's, where they were getting the order, someone's like, I need a cheeseburger and they gave them 37 ketchup packets and people are just screaming at the AI because it got it all wrong. There are some things I try to transcribe these episodes and even ChatGPT is like, dude, that's too many words. Like what do you mean it's too many words? I feel like you're supposed to be some genius system. What do you mean it's too many freaking words? I try to put logos in and misspells everything. So it's a good because. iPhone, look what it is now. And I will get there. But the wishes and the dreams and what everyone thinks is happening, we're not there. We're not even close to there yet. This thing still has very strong limitations. I'm also understanding that you're going to go into the world of how much gas is getting global warming and all this stuff, like the amount of power it takes to power some of these interactions with ChatGPT, when you start seeing what it is, I mean, it's more than using a computer for a week to do 1 transaction on ChatGPT. So I agree with you. We're not there yet, but what it's paving out and what people are talking about is going to be, it's going to touch everything.

Yeah, no, someone, there's a great quote, I don't know who said it, but they said, you always underestimate what will happen in the next year, but you underestimate what will happen in the next 5 to 10. And I think that's what's happening with AI. People think it's going to change the world tomorrow. but you won't recognize the world in 10 years. Yeah. And I think at the same time, that was what the assembly line did. And that was what so many things, the Industrial Revolution did all these things. So the advice that I give to people is like, look, if you're curious, get on the train now. I don't care if you start with the simplest, you can go on Gemini and just say, generate me an image about this. And just learning how the math works, you experiment. That is the only advice. If you're worried about it, you're better to be on the train than off the train.

So we used to talk about test and learn. So how do you, how does Carter's think about that?

Good thing, like you stopped the rabbit hole. Thank you.

Stop the rabbit hole. Every day. We think about it every day. Every day we are testing and learning on our site, on our e-mail, in our stores. We have, I don't know how many tests concurrently running in media. I think it's all about optimization, right? So we're trying to test and learn daily, and you have to measure, right? And someone once said, measure what you treasure. And so that is like every test has to have a point, has to have a thing, and it has to be a readout, and then you have to make a decision based on that. And so we're maniacal about testing. But I think the question is, don't test yourself into a rabbit hole and get down there, keep your head up, don't lose the forest for the trees.

So that's a great point, because it's going to segue to the next question I have. So we're going to separate brand marketing from performance marketing. So I understand for performance marketing? How you're testing? How are you testing brand marketing? How are you understanding what impact some form of marketing has on your long-term brand vision?

Yeah, so I think we look at it from a couple different ways, right? So one is we have our brand health metrics. So we record our brand health metrics. We talk to thousands of consumers every quarter. What's your perception of the brand? How are you offering to buy it? What do you think the most trustworthy is?

Are you scouring social media for people talking and stuff like that? And anything.

We look at that. We talk to individual consumers. We're always mining it so that we have a baseline of what it is. And then as we run brand marketing, how does that change the perception of the brand? How does it change on social media? Social media is the next place. Parents right now are Gen Z parents are now becoming this year the largest group of parents out there. They're 26, 27. years old. Their generation that now is like the TikTok generation, so TikTok parents. So we went from an Instagram strategy five years ago to now TikTok, which didn't exist, to what's our TikTok social strategy? How do you engage those parents? And the sentiment of the brand has to fit the new platform and what people expect. And that's just like something as a marketer you have to keep fresh on.

And you're right, those windows are getting shorter, right? The Facebook generation was a lot longer than the Instagram generation and the Instagram was a lot longer than the TikTok generation. So what's the next thing? You have no idea what's coming.

It's coming.

Yeah. And so the reason I ask is, again, that's why it's called performance, because it's easy to measure. It's much harder. So one of the things we use a lot is we use Google Trends, right? Is how many people are just looking for you? Is that the top of mouth? Is it there? Does that exist? Because it's a simple way to show it, but what kind of metrics, when you say success, are you doing TV, are you doing OTT? Where are you finding success in that brand vision?

Yeah, and what I would say is the time horizon is what you have to think about. The performance marketing, you can put it on today and you can see it tomorrow, see it the same day, right? Did I get a click on my PMax Google ad? Yes, no. Did it convert? Yes, no. What was the average order value? What was the dwell time on site? How many pages did they look at? That is easy.

What made them stop? What made them stop?

Where did they click out? Why did they bounce? But on brand marketing, you may see an ad on our OTT because we run OTT, we run digital video, we run all the different pieces. But you may not action that until three months later, because you're for us, you are driven by. What's the attribution window? And there's really three reasons you buy kids clothes. One is that you have a special event. The second is your kid grows, and the third is the weather changes. Those are the big 3 triggers of why you buy. So I need to be building my awareness with you right before back to school, and then you might shop at back to school. But if I try to measure, did you buy something because you saw an OTT ad yesterday, probably not going to be the thing. So we think about it in the longer.

I think there's also, it'd be interesting to get your opinion on going back to the life cycle, but it's the generational and it's the brand building that you made now with the Gen Z's.

Yep.

Right? And what is that brand value from them and how are they interpreting that to their kids that are now entering the parenting stage? How do you think about brand across generations in that way? Because you've got a brand that's been around through multiple generations.

160 years. I feel like you've been sitting in the back of my office listening to our conversations because that is something we go through every day in the conversation which is we have the greatest asset ever which is we have generations of grandparents and parents who love our brand, know our brand, grew up on our brand, but then how do we keep the brand relevant for that next generation? And so that's the thing. when I when it talked about.

I mean that's the Stanley mugs. I mean that's the Stanley mugs. These are great Crocs is another great example of 1 that how you have to reinvent yourself. You have to run keeping your history and pedigree.

1000%. My grandfather took Stanley lunchboxes when I was a kid. I remember him carrying those to the factory that he worked at and now they are the hottest thing that my daughter has a Stanley mug. I'm like, how is this possible?

But isn't it ironic? And I agree with you, but the risk taking is what allowed those brands to come back in. It wasn't a methodical approach. It was, hey, we got to take a risk. It was, you know, let's get Post Malone to wear Crocs. It was these, which I hate influencer marketing as a whole just because I think it's misunderstood, but those would spark it. So you have to have a certain level of risk tolerance also to take the risks here.

Yeah, I mean, I think especially with the Stanley, the sort of influencers they went after and how they built that entire sort of resurgence around a group of moms that were blogging heavily and being influencers out on the West Coast. You have to be able today to put your brand in someone else's hands and trust that it's going to be okay.

And not be afraid to get it wrong. Because you can't get it right every time. If everyone got it right every time, marketing will look very different. It doesn't work that way.

That is that and that is probably the it is a risk that you have to do, but it is a risk because now the most powerful media channel out there is no longer TV. No one sits down on 7:00 on a Thursday to watch Seinfeld anymore. They are watching everything everywhere and everything's fragmented. So in order to reach them, like my son, he is an 11 year old baseball player. What he watches is like baseball influencers and all the things he wants to buy on YouTube. He doesn't have TV. It's YouTube. And that's all he watches. And you're like, in order to reach that, you've got to figure out who is your audience that generation is watching on TikTok on YouTube. And that's the most powerful media channel because even the parents of today aren't asking their parents for the same advice that they once were. It used to be, I got all my advice from my parents on parenting. Now I'm going to my community on TikTok, my community on Instagram, and we've got to be in that community and we've got to be relevant.

Yeah, no, it's a great way to put it. And I ask, so I ask so much about brand marketing, performance marketing, because our next conversation is going to be more about the role of the CMO and how that changed. But so your strategy, you're always thinking of brand marketing. That's the long-term play. The performance marketing is the short-term play. Talk a little bit about just what you see other companies doing wrong and why we're having such a hard time, how CMOs are turning over so quickly. Are they putting too much pressure on the performance side? Are they forgetting out the brand marketing side? What are you seeing out there? What are you having conversations with our CMOs about?

I think for the most The job of the CMO is misunderstood that is why I think the turnover is, because essentially, as soon as sales dip, it's because something in marketing didn't go right, and that's the first easiest place to sort of take, Well, the media didn't work, or the ad didn't work, or at the end of the day. Marketing is more than putting ads on TV. It's more than running performance marketing. It is part of the sort of fabric of understanding the consumer and making sure the consumer is sitting at the center of everything the company is doing and helping drive that strategy into other parts of the company and being sort of very consumer first.

No, absolutely. And I think part of it, and maybe we'll get into this when we return from the break, is, and you know, a couple times during my career, marketing leadership coming in right up front talking to the C-level What are the expectations? And I think being honest about those expectations. And I think that's a challenge that some CMOs, when they come into a company, maybe those expectations weren't properly aligned. And 18 months later, guess what? If you'd set the expectations, maybe you'd understand there's a chance we're going to be here. But when we come back, why don't we hit that and we hit a little more on the kind of the CMO tenure. You're listening to the Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3.

Now back to the Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3 FM.

Welcome back to the Marketing MadMen. Trip Jobe and Nick Constantino here with Jeff Jenkins, CMO of Carter's. And I kind of went to the break talking a little bit about some of that CMO tenure. And I said, I think some of it is setting up what are the expectations when you walk in? And I'm just curious kind of your view of that.

Yeah, someone once told me when you get to the C-suite and as a CMO, the best friend you need to make is the CFO. And that is something that I think I've been lucky in my career as a CMO to have really great finance partners and really think about how do I have a finance partner, not necessarily as a CMO, but someone embedded in our team who's grading the homework. Because marketers are notorious for overstating the results and under delivering. And so I think for us, it's always like, how do I have someone from the finance team who is trusted by the CFO to grade our own homework, right? Did we achieve the results? Did we get enough sales? Did we get enough transactions? Are we getting the conversion we want? Is the average order value high enough? Are we getting the price increases that we want? and having them do it, because otherwise, as you said, marketers can come in, they can fall prey to the fact that they love to sell and to market, and they can overmarket what they can do. And I think that's the key difference.

Or they hype the fuzzy metrics.

Yes.

Sometimes. And that's when I started my career. It was back, there were a lot of people who hyped awards and hyped, ad placements and things of that nature and impressions and all that. And they're the fuzzy ones.

I think one of the big problems you have with data is if you are someone who understands data, you also know how to manipulate data. And it is pretty darn easy to look at a pile of data and pull the stuff that matters the most and convince somebody who doesn't know any better that you're succeeding. Right? It's like the joke, right? Has anyone ever told you when they lose at gambling? No, they only tell you when they win. How many bets they made. Oh my god, made $1000 in the NHL playoffs. What about the 2000 you lost on the 6 bets beforehand? No one tells you that stuff. So I think one of the biggest problems, and I agree it's a misunderstanding, but I also think that the balance between performance marketing and brand marketing is much harder to quantify. I think it's also when the CFO is involved, again, like you said, are they setting the metrics that you are basically succeed upon? Because if you're setting up your own metrics, you're going to always succeed because you're picking the metrics in which you're most likely to succeed at. So I think all those things are true. But I also like how you started the conversation in the last segment where you said the first thing you need to do is check sales numbers. You're not checking the click-through rate on your Google Ads campaigns because you know what happens? algorithm change. What did you as a marketer do? Nothing. That is Google algorithm change. They do it all the time. And for what anyone says, they're not trying to make it better. They're trying to make more money off of it. That's how capitalism works. So I think one of the biggest problems is that when these metrics are set up, you're not talking to sales. You don't understand what the needs are. You're going in trying to change a culture to marketing culture. And sometimes that culture doesn't need to change. It just needs to be communicated better, which is ironic because that's the job of marketers is to communicate, right?

That is the job is to communicate, right? Someone once told me a great thing, which is it's about dollars, not followers. And that has stuck with me. It doesn't matter how many followers you have. This is like, if they're not converting, if they're not hitting a sales number, it doesn't matter. And so I think that's why the tenure is so short, right? But doesn't that make it hard?

Let me just counter that real fast, because what if they're 22 years old and they can't buy yet because they're not at the age where they have kids? You still want them to be brand aware and know it's there because eventually they will have kids and don't you want them to come to you?

Oh, yeah, from a lead perspective, yes, but I think at the end of the day, you know, there are vanity metrics, or you can have the vanity metrics, I've got oh, I've got this many followers, but at the end of the day, if you're not generating.

And just from somebody who does this now, the world has changed so quickly. One of the things I loved about radio, you have to build an organic fan base. There's no cheat. There is a cheat for everything. You can pay for YouTube views, for Instagram subscribers, for TikTok. You can pay for everything. And there's nobody there to quantify, are they really listening? What is your time spent? One of the proudest things I have about radio, our app, 33 minutes average use time on an app. That is outlandish. That is not something that you could just start an app one day and you're gonna get that kind of time. So I agree, and I think that those vanity metrics get worse because the capitalism structure allows you to buy all this stuff and remove reviews. I'm going to guess.

Of the fact that, Jeff, that you look at sales numbers every day, that you have a pretty good relationship with your peer that runs sales.

Yeah, so I do. We're really an interesting organization, which is half of our business is our direct-to-consumer channel. So it is our stores, it is our e-commerce, it is that. The other half of our business is our sales teams at Target, Walmart, Amazon, Kohl's, Macy's, you name it. We're the number one baby brand in all those channels and we're the number one baby brand in our channel. And so I think it is a healthy relationship of working with our sales team that's out there selling into Target. What are you hearing from those retailers? What are they giving us? What do we need? We have a whole marketing team dedicated to supporting that sales organization. And then we have a whole team working with our direct-to-consumer business. And we have meetings, sort of, if you will, we used to call them, as a yum term, Jeep Bonnet, which is from the World War II, where you would literally have a meeting on the hood, the bonnet of a car for 10 minutes and set your plans for the day. And so we have those every day. What are we hearing from the field? What are we hearing from the staff selling in the stores? What are we hearing from our e-commerce team? How do we adjust? And then let's move forward.

Yeah, I love it. I mean, you're an institution that's big enough to have those conversations, right? There's probably some smaller companies that you're just kind of repeating yourself over. You have so many different moving parts. I will kind of end with this. So talk about Atlanta. So you're headquartered here. We're right by Lenox. We have the big building. Talk about Atlanta. Talk about what you feel of this is a home base, what you're doing to let people know that you're here. And then you've lived in a lot of places. What do you think about Atlanta overall and what the marketing scene is like here, what the business scene is like here?

Yeah, so I moved to Atlanta for this job five years ago. Ironically, my wife was born a quarter mile from the house we bought at Piedmont Hospital. She lived here for three months and then moved away and has never come back. So it's oddly home for us. Atlanta as a city is amazing. The amount of talent that is here from a marketing, from a business perspective, the growth trajectory the city is on, and the community of Atlanta. I think that's the thing that we are really putting a doubling down this year. We just did a big partnership with the Boys and Girls Club of America and we want to lean into really being part of the city. I think that's something that is incredibly important and what Atlanta does better than most big cities is it doesn't feel like a massive city. You go to New York, I've lived in LA, I've lived in New York, it feels like a monstrosity that you can't wrap your arms around and there's lots of little distinct pockets. Atlanta, the city has this identity of Atlanta No matter what pocket of Atlanta you live in, people identify with Atlanta versus I'm A West Sider in LA or I'm from the Valley. It is Atlanta and I think the amount of talent, the amount of universities, the amount of businesses, the growth trajectory and the fact that it is, I've been in other cities where they are sort of refusing to grow and they want to keep the thing that is Nashville or Austin, to keep Austin weird, they sort of resist the growth. Atlanta sort of said, we can be Atlanta, but we can also grow. And I think that's the duality that they've mastered.

Yeah, the infrastructure was here and we're growing with it. Austin doesn't want more people there because they can't have more people.

The city is overwhelmed already.

Nashville can't have more people. They don't even have the hotels to bring more people in. We have the infrastructure. It's here to grow. And again, you can grow in every direction, but you could also grow in the city. If you look, my parents came in from New York, they're like, how many cranes are here? There's not a lot of cranes in the skyline in Manhattan. There's not a lot of cranes in Long Island where they live. It looks like the same place for 50 years, the exact same place. So we have the ability to grow. What's that talent looking like? What is hiring and recruiting like for you guys? Are you having success? Do you find people? It's a company people want to work for. How much of your marketing is going to just recruiting people?

Yeah, no, I mean, it's been a it's I would say the entire jobs industry has been wild over the last few years of COVID because the expectations of hiring have changed, the expectations, there is the element of for a while the market was so crazy, like people were getting job offers right and left, particularly when everything was remote, because all of a sudden you could recruit people from other cities that you weren't, because we have, we literally deal with apparel, children's clothes, you gotta touch, you gotta feel it, you gotta connect with those parents. We have 750 stores in the US and 1000 stores in North America. Being in person matters. And so I think that has been a thing for us. We are, I would say we're an employer of choice. People love working. We have like one of the best cultures in my opinion that I've ever worked for. Yum is another one that has a great culture. Carter's is unbelievable. We have, you know, most of the people that work for us tend to be parents, right? And so we have this experience. I coached Little League baseball for four years. I would leave at 4:45 on a Thursday because I had to coach. My team would go see me do that. We have an amazing culture. And then we are able to find talent here in Atlanta because there's so many great universities coming here. There's so many other great companies here. People want to stay in Atlanta so they can tend to move around between companies. And it's been, I would say, not an issue for us. We continue to find phenomenal talent in Atlanta.

You can stay true to your brand internally as well as externally.

1000%.

Which is fantastic. And not everyone does, because sometimes, as we talk, people will chase trends, they'll chase people, they'll chase things that aren't really at the core of their brand. So Jeff, this has been fantastic. Thanks for joining us. It's a great story at Carter's and also great to hear your story. And you've been listening to the Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3. We'll be back next week.