Julia Child once said, “Find something you’re passionate about and keep tremendously interested in it.” For kitchen appliances manufacturer Cuisinart—a brand used by the legendary American chef—that passion is innovation.
Innovation has been a key ingredient in Cuisinart’s recipe for success ever since it debuted the food processor in the United States in 1973. The Conair Corporation brand’s ingenuity has evolved over the past 40 years—particularly in marketing—and technology has brought this change from a low simmer to a full boil. Instead of solely broadcasting its messages through channels such as direct mail, TV, and radio as it did in the past, Cuisinart now uses marketing technology to get closer to the customer and derive insights quickly.
“The difference with people who are running marketing now is you have to be not only a traditionalist, but a technologist, too,” says Mary Rodgers, Cuisinart’s director of marketing communications for the past two decades.
Marketing technology, for all its assets, can be both a blessing and a curse. Marketers can be guilty of chasing the “shiny new object” and letting technology dictate their strategies instead of facilitate them. Not in Rodgers’ kitchen. She sets her problem-solving objectives first and then finds solutions to help her achieve them. You could say that her relationship with technology is similar to a chef’s relationship with a knife: The knife helps the chef execute the meal, but it’s still the chef who controls the knife.
As Rodgers puts it, “I don’t let technology get in my way.”
Still, knowing which tools to invest in and how to leverage them can be cumbersome. To ensure that technology is a benefit to Cuisinart’s marketing, instead of a burden, Rodgers adds another crucial component to her menu: people—specifically her sous chef, Conair Corporation’s Global CIO Jon Harding.
“It’s all great to have all these software solutions,” she says, “but you need someone sitting behind a desk to use them. It’s not like you press a button and it takes care of itself.”
Together with their agency partners, Rodgers and Harding combine their expertise to provide a better experience for Cuisinart and its customers. Here are three examples of how the two executives collaborate and reinforce the notion that both marketing and IT need to have seats at the strategy table.
Preheating a partnership
Rodgers and Harding didn’t always have a cooperative relationship. In fact, Harding says that it wasn’t until three years ago that marketing and IT decided to combine synergies—specifically, for a social analytics initiative.
The idea to implement a social analytics tool was based on Rodgers’ need to uncover the sentiments and conversations generated by her three core customer segments: brides and grooms, mothers with children under the age of two, and women 25 to 54 years old. She already knew these customers’ demographic makeup and purchasing habits through product warranty registration forms and marketing studies; however, she wanted to have a deeper understanding of how customers felt about Cuisinart and its competitors. She also wanted to know what customers were talking about on social media for future content and campaign inspiration.
So, Harding worked with a consulting firm to find a solution that would uncover these insights. After the firm suggested implementing a social listening tool, Harding and Rodgers discussed the options and jointly decided to implement NetBase’s social media analytics platform and use it to evaluate conversations happening on Facebook and Twitter. But the platform wasn’t an overnight success. On the contrary, hiring holds put the project on the back burner and both Harding and Rodgers agreed that training Cuisinart’s marketers on how to use the technology to derive meaningful insights was a struggle.
“Even though it’s new technology, it still requires effort on the marketing side,” Harding says. “My challenge in other [departments] is finding the right people to work with.”
After collaborating with NetBase, members of Cuisinart’s IT team, and its agency partners to pick up the additional work and iron out the kinks, Rodgers and her marketing team started running pilot campaigns to test the technology and collect insights. In one test the team noticed that parents were talking about the types of kitchen appliances their kids needed before heading off to college. As a result, Cuisinart started promoting products on social media that students could fit in their dorm rooms, such as coffee pots or Griddlers.
These insights didn’t just benefit marketing; they also better-informed IT. Harding says he was surprised to learn, for example, that most customers were having conversations outside of the brand’s official social channels. “By using one of these tools, we could make sure we got that feedback, whereas previously there was a risk that we were only really hearing the response to our social media channels,” he says.
Cooking up service
In addition to working together to launch the social listening initiative, Rodgers and Harding are combining forces to introduce a product registration system, which will fully launch in January. Powered by SaaS platform Registria, the system enables customers to scan product codes via their smartphones and automatically register their products via email, online, or mobile, instead of having to go online and manually enter in all of the information. Rodgers says that this initiative not only creates a more convenient and seamless experience for consumers, but it also makes it easier for Cuisinart to update and access its customers’ demographic data and purchasing behaviors.
As with the social listening project, this initiative was a team effort. Although Harding says Rodgers took the lead in terms of researching and choosing the solution, he and his IT department have been working on the solution’s contract details and ensuring that consumers’ data is protected. He adds that Cuisinart plans to integrate its product registration system with Conair’s corporate CRM solution to better educate call center agents on Cuisinart’s customers.
So, if a customer calls about a problem that he’s having with his food processor, for instance, the company’s call center agents can know exactly who that customer is and which food processor he purchased.
“We want to make [the customer] experience as seamless as possible,” Harding says, “because we all hate it when we call a call center and, even though we spent $200 on that item, we have to spell our name three times and all of that stuff. By integrating what Mary’s [selected] as a neat way to get that registration, we’re going to improve our source of lifetime value to the consumer.”
Repurposing the leftovers
The product registration system isn’t the only recent development Cuisinart has made to streamline its customer experience. The company also integrated a new online retail intelligence solution called Channel IQ for its website in December. Before this implementation, online shoppers looking to buy a Cuisinart product would have to visit the brand’s site, review a list of retail partners selling Cuisinart products, and click a link to go visit that retailer, which would bring them to a Cuisinart-branded landing page where they start the search process over again. Now, once customers have chosen which Cuisinart product they want to buy, they can choose from a short list of retailers selling that exact item and click to go to that specific product page on the retailer’s website.
Collaborating on this project—as well as the former two—has benefitted Rodgers and Harding in several ways. Not only were they able to tap into each other’s area of expertise, but they also were able to repurpose each other’s ideas and solutions.
In one case Harding originally purchased Channel IQ to monitor retailers’ online pricing of Cuisinart products. But after speaking with Rodgers, he knew that it could also work for her. Similarly, Harding knew that he’d be able to integrate the product registration technology with Conair’s CRM system because he had already done a similar integration for a Conair Corporation brand in France. Recycling these ideas and products, he adds, helps Conair as a whole cut down on technology costs.
“By collaborating, there’s more chance of finding a solution and sharing ideas,” he says, “and perhaps something that we bought for another purpose, we can reuse.”
Avoiding too many cooks in the kitchen
This collaborative approach makes Harding and Rodgers a dynamic duo. But another ingredient in their recipe for success is that neither executive lets too many cooks into his kitchen.
Rodgers, for example, prefers to work with smaller agencies and niche vendors instead of industry behemoths. Doing so, she says, simplifies the execution process and often results in these smaller companies prioritizing Cuisinart’s business.
“I prefer to be more like the medium-size fish in a small pond than a little fish in a big pond where I’m not going to get anything done,” she says.
The company’s overall structure supports this independent culture. Although Cuisinart Corporation is home to multiple brands, the company treats them like “autonomous business units,” Harding says. As a result, Conair Corporation doesn’t have an overarching CMO. Harding considers this a benefit in that there are no “standardized marketing practices” to follow, which allows Cuisinart to be entrepreneurial.
As collaborative and entrepreneurial as they are, Rodgers and Harding don’t see eye-to-eye all of the time. “Sometimes we just agree to differ,” Harding says. But even Rodgers admits that she’s more accepting of IT’s ideas now than she was in the past. “Over the years I’ve become more open to other people bringing things to the table,” she says.
So, what will the duo cook up next? More collaboration is on the menu to ensure that Cuisinart gets the most from the marketing tech tools it adopts.
“It’s all great to have the tools, but you need to put in the time and effort and really use the tools as they’re meant to be used,” Rodgers says. “Doing all of this work with Jon leads me nowhere if we don’t together put in the appropriate effort.”
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Marketing Tech Changes Everything
2016 will be a seminal year for marketers who are adjusting everything from budgets and processes to staffing and strategy as they aim to exploit technology
Part 1 > The Marketer and Her Sous Chef: Cuisinart’s director of marketing communications may drive strategy, but it’s her collaboration with the CIO that allows the brand to cook up true innovation.
Part 2 > What the Dickens to Do About Marketing Tech: It’s the best of times and the worst of times for marketers with unlimited possibilities and limited resources.
Part 3 > Technology-Driven, Must-Have Marketing Skills: The proliferation of marketing technology is changing how marketers work and the skills they need to succeed.
Part 4 > Buyer Beware: Marketers may not be asking the right questions to select the optimal marketing technology and then maximize it.
