CMA Connect

In this episode of CMA Connect, CMA's CEO Alison Simpson sits down with Scott Megginson, President of Kantar Canada, to discuss how marketers can stay ahead in a rapidly changing business landscape. Scott shares his perspective on the seismic shifts in consumer insights, the most significant changes in Canadian consumer behaviour, and how data democratization and AI are transforming the world of research.

00:00:03:06 - 00:00:23:04 Presenter Welcome to CMA Connect, Canada's marketing podcast, where industry experts discuss how marketers must manage the tectonic shift that will change how brands and businesses are built for tomorrow, while also delivering on today's business news with your host, CMA CEO, Alison Simpson.

00:00:23:06 - 00:00:50:17 Alison In the rapidly evolving business landscape, marketers are constantly seeking ways to stay ahead of the curve and drive truly meaningful growth for their organizations. But what if one of the keys to unlocking these new opportunities and gaining a competitive edge lies in the democratization of data and the adoption of innovative technologies? Today, I'm joined by Scott Megginson, president of Kantar Canada and a very seasoned insight leader with over two decades of experience on both the client and the agency side.

00:00:50:22 - 00:01:17:19 Alison Scott's also a regular guest speaker and coach for the research analytics program at George Brown College. Scott's here to share his perspectives on the seismic shifts that are happening in consumer insights and in the market research industry. We're also going to discuss how Kantar is leading the charge by making their vast troves of brand data accessible to marketers everywhere and at no cost, which is certainly a remarkable opportunity for brands and businesses and a bit of a surprising approach for a research company.

00:01:17:21 - 00:01:34:16 Alison So from navigating changing consumer behaviours to leveraging AI-powered tools and platforms, Scott is here to offer a wealth of knowledge and practical advice for marketers who are really looking to elevate the role of insights within your organizations and drive real business impact. Scott, it's truly a pleasure to welcome you here today.

00:01:34:21 - 00:01:43:09 Scott Thank you. Alison. I hate to admit it, but it's actually over three decades of experience and I'm going to date myself there. But thank you for making me a bit younger.

00:01:43:12 - 00:01:45:04 Alison You're aging very gracefully.

00:01:45:06 - 00:01:46:03 Scott I'm trying.

00:01:46:05 - 00:01:52:18 Alison So I want to start with what do you see as the most significant shifts in the Canadian consumer behaviour and attitudes right now?

00:01:52:20 - 00:02:16:01 Scott You know, it's an interesting question. Kantar isn't a public opinion company, but we do a lot of work monitoring consumer trends. We have a group within the company that manages our, runs our Canada Monitor. You know, if you're three decades like me, you might remember the yankelovich monitor. And this is just an evolution of that same, the same tool.

00:02:16:01 - 00:02:34:21 Scott And it's, really to monitor social trends, with consumers. I mean, this is opportune. We're going to be diving into this at the CMA CX event in June. We actually have our expert coming up to talk about some of these trends and how it impacts marketers. But, you know, when you think about top concerns of Canadians right now, they shifted.

00:02:34:22 - 00:03:00:08 Scott They shifted during the pandemic. And right now what we're seeing won't be a surprise - inflation, the economy, health care, housing costs and climate change, in that order are the top five. But there are a lot of implications for marketers. When we dig into it, Canadians are really in a frustrated state. They're frustrated. It feels like a stacked deck. They're impatient to get ahead right now.

00:03:00:10 - 00:03:17:23 Scott You know, they've been waiting and waiting and they're impatient to move ahead. Almost half believe that they'll become rich in their lifetime. And that was about a third of people in 2018 before the pandemic. So I don't know if people are buying more lottery tickets or waiting for the big ship to come in, but they want to be given a win, too.

00:03:17:23 - 00:03:42:22 Scott And that's something to think about with, for marketers. They're uninspired by innovation. It's something that we're seeing as well. They're uninspired by marketing as well. They're looking for relevance through emotion, value and control. Those three areas. So what they're really looking for is a reason. It's about giving them a reason. A higher proportion about quarter, don't pay any attention to advertising right now or claim to.

00:03:43:03 - 00:04:09:18 Scott And maybe it's more. So they're just not feeling they're getting the relevance or messaging. And another thing is they're looking for self care. And there's a whole set of implications here for people that work in wellness and health areas that could do a lot with it. But all brands can in a way because, you know, it's not just the wellness we think about with diet and other areas, but they're working with self care through things like novelty and nostalgia.

00:04:09:21 - 00:04:35:19 Scott We actually saw people are nostalgic for the pandemic, if you can believe that. Social connection, and they really just need a break and get off the treadmill a bit. And, you put these things together and it's really supported by, economists are now saying that Canada's productivity is, it's measured at point 3% versus 1.5 in the US. So it's, productivity is super low in Canada.

00:04:35:21 - 00:04:51:04 Scott But there are great opportunities for marketers. You know, marketers can give hope. They can inspire innovation. They can help people achieve their mental and physical health goals as well. So, you know, when there's a problem, there's a solution. There's a lot marketing can do for this.

00:04:51:06 - 00:05:11:12 Alison And that's very insightful and very instructive to know from a, certainly from a marketer and a brand perspective. It's a bit sad to see, certainly the level of productivity in Canada from a competitive sort of North American and global scale. That's certainly something that we, as a marketing profession, but every business really needs to be able to address.

00:05:11:13 - 00:05:22:01 Alison When you talked about a third not paying attention to advertising, I mean, that's been one of the challenges of marketers for a long time. But have you seen that increase where even more people just aren't paying attention?

00:05:22:03 - 00:05:40:17 Scott Yeah, I mean, in this particular measure, it has been an increase and it was about a quarter. But we have other data sources, other measures that we take that would look even higher than that. And, you know, a lot of it's a clutter and the noise, a lot of it's just the the challenges that media has, with ad blockers.

00:05:40:17 - 00:06:00:04 Scott And there's just so many ways to avoid advertising in general. But when you do have a captive audience, that's a problem. You know, if a quarter or more people aren't paying attention, all because of the cynicism they have towards the advertising, that's an issue. And that's gonna be a big issue to deliver messages. So it wasn't a surprise.

00:06:00:04 - 00:06:06:08 Scott It's been going this direction, but it is an opportunity to deliver better messaging to consumers.

00:06:06:13 - 00:06:18:00 Alison And when you were sharing some of the more recent findings, the one that certainly surprised me the most was people feeling a little bit melancholy and almost wishing back for the days of the pandemic. So what surprised you the most?

00:06:18:02 - 00:06:52:03 Scott So I'm a Gen-Xer, and a leading Gen-Xer, so, I grew up in office environments and and things like that. And I mean, as a person, it just befuddles me that people don't want to go back to the office and such. But as an employer, you know, I look at our younger employees that we have as well, or people with families and lifestyles changed so much during that, like just all the concepts of pet ownership and parenting and, and, dry cleaning, just everything else really, really changed.

00:06:52:03 - 00:07:12:16 Scott And that's why companies like Lululemon did so well. They reinvented workwear with leisurewear. You know, as a person, my age, I have trouble getting my head around it. I couldn't wait to get back. But it's pretty clear to see with how slow Return-to-Office has been with people, and some of the things that people are longing for are the different social connections. 00:07:12:16 - 00:07:30:14 Scott I think everybody out on their street, you know, having a drink together, at social distance, and there's a whole new level of social connection that started during the pandemic that's starting to get disrupted, and people are just missing probably how they learned to cope with it in a way, having that taken away from them, and their lifestyle.

00:07:30:15 - 00:07:34:11 Alison We joked about the new normal, but the reality is there's no such thing as the new normal.

00:07:34:16 - 00:07:39:22 Scott There's no normal. We'll find out eventually. Maybe, but not for a while, right?

00:07:39:23 - 00:07:58:10 Alison Now Scott, your experiences on both the agency and client side of delivering insights and doing that across a really vast range of industries gives you such great perspective. So I know our listeners would certainly benefit from your advice on how insights teams can be a more powerful growth driver for their organizations.

00:07:58:12 - 00:08:19:10 Scott And, you know, I've seen a lot in my years, and I started on the agency side, for eight years, and then I moved to the client side for 11. You know, I worked in CPG at both Warner Lambert and PepsiCo, and then came back to the agency side. A lot of people don't do the full circle. So I have seen a lot internally how client organizations with research and value it.

00:08:19:12 - 00:08:42:08 Scott And then now I have the privilege to work in so many different clients and so many different cultures, and you see a lot as well. I mean, a lot of that's my personal view on it. And I'll get back to that. But we've done a lot of work on this. So we have a whole consulting arm of Kantar, and we've been doing research in this area for a while now, and there is a gold standard study that BCG did.

00:08:42:10 - 00:09:03:01 Scott And that was the whole piece about moving from Insight to foresight, back in the, you know, the early 2000s. And that was held up for a long time. And it was a call to action for internal researchers to to really move to the, the what now, what you know, and so what's, in all those as opposed to just the what.

00:09:03:03 - 00:09:25:16 Scott But things have moved rapidly, and that's really seen as table stakes right now. So we did a big study and we, it was called Insights 2020, it was in the Harvard Business Review. We've had a few of these studies published there, and we actually conducted research with over 10,000 people at different levels in different sectors and organizations. And it's over 60 countries, including Canada.

00:09:25:18 - 00:09:49:00 Scott We had a lot of interviews here in Canada as well. And, what we did was, we divided, we divided the results between high performing companies and all the other companies. And then we had the, because it was claimed, we had NYU do a validation with financial results and it was pretty accurate, actually. People who said they're a high-performing company were.

00:09:49:02 - 00:10:11:22 Scott And you that's nice. We'd all like to be. But so we felt good about the segmentation that we had. There were a few things, like a couple of rules of three that we found out here, as key implications. And one of them was that the high-performing companies that were achieving this great growth were consumer-centric, it was consumer-centric growth, you know, putting the customer, consumer in the middle of it.

00:10:12:00 - 00:10:37:09 Scott And what they did was - one, they delivered a total experience to customers. And think about how we bring our brand promise together, with our customer experience and the whole cycle. And then think about how the customer experience is informing the brand promise and what we advertise, and tell our customers or consumers what to do. And companies don't do this very often.

00:10:37:09 - 00:10:56:22 Scott I mean, I've seen so many examples where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing, and it's it's different departments, it's different agendas, it's different budgets. Whereas top performing companies have a seamless flow between the two. You know, I'll give you another plug for CMA CX, because, you know, I think you're going to cover a lot there.

00:10:57:00 - 00:11:24:00 Scott But we saw this behaviour and the high-performing companies were four times more likely to have this, this total experience, than the other companies. So that was pretty big. Another one was customer obsession. And customer obsession starts at the top of the organization. You need your CEO, your CFO, your head of sales, your HR, your supply chain, everybody at the top and all the way through down

00:11:24:00 - 00:11:50:01 Scott the organization has to be obsessed with the customer and the consumer. This is critical. Also leads to a purpose-led organization, which, you know, every person at a checkout counter to the driver to, you know, the people manufacturing the plant are all serving the same purpose. And it's the customer obsession. Again, the companies that did this, like demonstrated four times more than all the lower-performing companies.

00:11:50:03 - 00:12:17:14 Scott And then the last one, and this is one that applies to our research in particular, it's strategic leverage of insights and analytics. Right. And we call it the Insight Engine. And if you want, I can unpack that a little more because it has three components to it as well. But so what do you do. So what differentiates the high performing organizations with Insights Engine is that they have a leading role of insights and analytics, meaning they have a seat at the table.

00:12:17:16 - 00:12:39:08 Scott They often report to the CEO of the company, and they're part of the decision making. Whereas under-performers and we see this a lot as well. And I've been in organizations like this, they have a separate insights and analytics team that reports to marketing or other functions. So they divided across functions and they effectively act as a marketing services team.

00:12:39:10 - 00:13:15:07 Scott So it's critical that the insights team is reporting up high, has a seat at the decisions. And independent budgets help a lot too. The other thing is they unlock the power of data. And you know, we we've all talked a lot about data visualization and how important that is. But it's also leveraging how research has changed, like now we have so much automated research and we have so much AI-generated research coming up in the near future, that that rather than conducting big studies and going to reams of data, it's getting early signals and then responding to them.

00:13:15:07 - 00:13:38:21 Scott And the value that these researchers bring is that they can look at a red flag coming up, pinging on their phone, and sit down with the CMO and have a really good discussion about what happened, what we think is going on, and what can we do about it or get ahead of it, maybe it's an opportunity, right. But it's like working in real time with real signals rather than big research studies and the experiment.

00:13:38:21 - 00:13:56:19 Scott And back in the day, YouTube was known when it got started. They put 10% of the research budget in things they had no idea if they could possibly work or not. Nobody does that. They're too conservative. Very few companies do it. And then 20% was stuff that day was wild ideas last year, that okay, let's let's prove them out now.

00:13:56:21 - 00:14:13:18 Scott And then the other 70% was stuff they knew worked. And so you're always like, you're always bringing new thinking that way. And I think it was YouTube, I'll give them credit for it at least. But that kind of thinking with experimentation. And the third thing is that these insights engines, these companies have worked really well with insights.

00:14:13:19 - 00:14:37:05 Scott They develop critical capabilities. And we're not talking about tech in this case. We're talking about the people capabilities and skills that bring, storytelling and creative solutions. And more important than anything else is that they are answering business questions, not research questions. So when you make a recommendation, it's how it's going to grow the business and drive shareholder growth.

00:14:37:06 - 00:14:44:10 Scott It's not about, hey, you moved this measure up 4%. Congratulations. Here's a bonus, right. I call it smiley KPI.

00:14:44:10 - 00:15:15:02 Alison It's such great perspective Scott. Now I've been the CMO and often thought one of the superpowers of the marketing team at that executive table is being the voice of the customer. And obviously having insights and data to lead that. When I've had the best impact, when we've had an executive team that was working together, it was around being very insights focused, recognizing that the customer wasn't just the marketing ownership, it was the customers needed to impact absolutely everything that we did.

00:15:15:04 - 00:15:27:18 Alison I haven't been in an organization where insights was a separate department with direct reporting into the CEO. So that's a great observation that some of the top- performing companies have that.

00:15:27:20 - 00:15:52:10 Scott Unilever, globally has had that, and they really flourished, during that whole time. And there are I mean, there are examples around the world where that happens, like, you know, I remember my time at Warner Lambert, they made a big change. And this was back, you know, 1999, like 25 years ago or so. And one of those big visions was that the insights team,

00:15:52:12 - 00:16:12:10 Scott they should have their own budget and they should report to the president of Warner Lambert, our division for Canada. And that was achieved. And it gave us a lot of attitude, latitude rather to, to be, strategic advisors and partners and, and if you've ever heard Peter Rodriguez and I share stories of that day, we worked together,

00:16:12:10 - 00:16:35:19 Scott I know he's a regular with the CMA. When you have that, it's very different from when you work for an organization where you are given a budget, by marketers, could be any team, really, and your job is to go and get support for what you're doing often. You know, it's like that whole David Ogilvy "lamp post for support, rather than illumination" thing that we've heard a zillion times.

00:16:35:19 - 00:16:57:07 Scott But it's true. Whereas, if you have control over the budget, you can invest it in areas that can have the maximum impact for an organization. Tell people things they might not want to hear. And then, tell them things that are going to really help drive the business. So it does happen in different places. Like I never got all the way to bright when I was leading insights for different organizations, but it did make a lot of progress in these areas.

00:16:57:07 - 00:17:19:16 Scott And what I found really quickly was to do that, you needed to help every stakeholder around the table. And I mean, like the, you know, the leadership table at the company. And so what are you doing to help HR, and what are you doing to help the sales team, food service team. Obviously, you're working the CMO closely at that point too, some companies do this.

00:17:19:16 - 00:17:30:15 Scott And the more direct connection there is between insights and leadership, it's great. It helps drive this, but you don't get a seat at the table, you have to earn a seat at the table. So you have to have something of value to bring to it.

00:17:30:17 - 00:17:39:06 Alison It would certainly remove any perceived bias if they were reporting directly, instead of reporting through any other of the colleagues around the C-suite, so it's...

00:17:39:11 - 00:17:40:18 Scott Accountability.

00:17:40:19 - 00:17:44:00 Alison Something I haven't seen before. So it's a very interesting finding from my perspective.

00:17:44:00 - 00:18:15:05 Scott When we talk about the behaviours, because I know, you know, you said in the introduction, talking about democratizing data, we'll get into that, I guess, but one of them is there's a big behavioural difference between low-performing organizations and high-performing organizations. High-performing organizations are sharing and collaborating. Everything is accessible for everybody to interpret and challenge, right? As opposed to hoarding, because it gives some level of perceived power, or control, which is really negative and could drive the organization down.

00:18:15:05 - 00:18:17:18 Scott So yeah, that's another key part too.

00:18:17:18 - 00:18:33:21 Alison That's a great add on. Thank you. So I am very curious to hear what inspired Kantar's decision to democratize brand data, in particular to give it away for free. And I'd love to also hear, are you already seeing brands take advantage of this very generous opportunity?

00:18:33:23 - 00:18:58:02 Scott A bit of background on that really quickly. What we've shared is all the data from Kantar's brandz that we do around the world. I mean, this is, this is a huge country is it's multiple categories. It's, 18,000 brands, probably about 20,000 by now, it's over 5 billion data points. And, you know, as we're reporting on it, we're using it for our brand valuations on a regular basis.

00:18:58:04 - 00:19:21:01 Scott Our vision is to be an indispensable brand partner. That's what we want to be. So we made the decision to put this forward with the idea is that democratizing data, making available for everyone. And I mean, obviously, the benefit is that people see the data that might spark their interest, or they might be, they might like our approach and want to talk to us about it, or doing some work with them, of course.

00:19:21:01 - 00:19:39:18 Scott And we're a business now, not for profit. So we're looking at that. But it's really stimulated a lot of great discussion already. So, if we throw out the link when we put this out, I mean, as a follow up, anybody can go in there and it's, there are no strings attached, you register and you have access to all of it.

00:19:39:20 - 00:20:04:03 Scott So that current belief is in the data democratization. And so this is one step. But we also create a lot of libraries of all the results. So if our clients will allow it, everybody in the organization can access results on a regular basis at their fingertips. And so there are a lot of steps, I mean, dashboards that have been a really great move that the industry has taken forward, to make data accessible for everybody as well.

00:20:04:05 - 00:20:22:19 Scott And some of the biggest questions we get from Canadian clients are, what's going on with the American clients? Or what's going on with the English clients? And they don't share. We often have to help with the sharing. And you know, we're happy to, you know, if we don't get our hands slapped too hard. That type of thing. The idea here is to share the brandz data and all of everything that's in there.

00:20:22:21 - 00:20:43:00 Scott And you asked about who's using that and such right now? And so we found that the early users, early adopters in the market, or I've seen personally in Canada, in some cases is smaller brands like ones who don't have big tracking budgets or the data. And they're just really interested, you know, once a year checking out what's going on or are looking at other categories.

00:20:43:00 - 00:21:07:11 Scott And so we've had some of them, using it, which is great. You know, glad we can offer that up for them. We've had some marketers who are, who don't have brand data available, at the time they need it, have big meetings or decisions to make, and had one of those recently and she accessed it. And it was very helpful to make some informed decisions based on, you know, consumers and like how they felt about the brand against competition.

00:21:07:13 - 00:21:33:07 Scott I think one of the coolest use cases, I was, last year I was leading automotive sector in the US and, and we had a, agency planner that was really grappling with global positioning for their brand. So I introduced them to, to brand snapshot, and they were able to take a look quickly at how their brand performed in every market or many markets, like 12 or 14 around the world.

00:21:33:09 - 00:21:57:18 Scott And see, in the strong markets, what consumers thought about the brand versus the market in the US, where they're quite weak in comparison. So ton of value right there. I could see this being of amazing use to, mergers and acquisitions going forward. Because if you have your eye on a brand, you can take a look at how well do they fit with our brands currently or, you know, are they, is there a lot of interaction?

00:21:57:18 - 00:22:11:08 Scott Are they truly incremental?, Yeah. Maybe a little bit of that that you could look at. But it would make a lot of sense I think as part of the research to get a little bit of a brand view in there too. So, so that's available for people too.

00:22:11:10 - 00:22:46:19 Alison It's such a valuable offer, when I think about our, our membership and the Canadian marketing industry, where so often we're the Canadian office or region for a global brand and business, and it's can be hard justify why we need Canadian specific marketing. So having access to this sort of data on such a global and significant level, and at no cost, is a really powerful advantage in helping demonstrate why Canadian brands and marketing teams really do need to invest in Canada.

00:22:46:19 - 00:23:00:23 Alison Because on the surface, especially if you're looking from south of the border, you can see how we're similar to the U.S. and it might not always be so obvious how we're different. So thank you on behalf of the profession for giving us access to a really powerful way to help build that case.

00:23:01:05 - 00:23:18:03 Scott Yeah, and that's a great use case right there, Alison, where I mean, you could compare the brand in Canada and the US as it's from the database for both, and someday, if you give me another shot, I would love to talk about the importance of Canadian creative and why U.S. ads don't transfer into to Canada, because we have data on that too.

00:23:18:03 - 00:23:19:08 Scott You're right on the mark.

00:23:19:10 - 00:23:38:17 Alison That is definitely a hot topic and I will happily bring you back to have that conversation. So there is very little business marketing topics today that AI isn't impacting. And obviously that's true of insights in the research too. So I'd love you to share how you see AI help transforming the world of both research and insights.

00:23:38:19 - 00:24:01:18 Scott That's a good question. It also goes back to our discussion about insights engines and the importance of that, and experimentation and interpretation and such. As technology changes, the best researchers and marketers are going to have to change with it, or they'll be obsolete very, very quickly. And there's, you wouldn't believe how much resistance, I mean, I've been doing this so long.

00:24:01:18 - 00:24:27:13 Scott Like, I just I use every bit of energy just to try to keep up, if not ahead of some of the trends that are happening in research. I'll give you a couple of examples, personal examples of when, you know, I've seen, people are resistant to it and I won't mention names, but there's one example, going back eight years ago or so, and we started launching, Kantar started launching automated research, and anybody could access it.

00:24:27:13 - 00:24:48:06 Scott Again, it's different forms of democratization. You could do a study right now or an ad agency could test their own ad and show data to the client. Anybody could access it. And I remember when we first put it up, just one traditional researcher in the market just getting really upset on my LinkedIn feed saying, what do you mean?

00:24:48:06 - 00:25:12:12 Scott Anybody with a credit card can do research? That's not right. Of course it's right! Why not? And then, we've seen a lot. I mean, the one of the last hot topics was, system one under you know, the, the whole, you know, neuroscience, behavioural science aspect. And I remember sitting at a dinner table, we socialize with a competitor, and this competitor making a full statement.

00:25:12:12 - 00:25:39:13 Scott Everybody at the table. Real science is just a fad, right? Well, I don't know about that. It's kind of driven a lot of what we do. But just a couple of examples, and those are just personal examples, but you need to leverage this stuff. I mean, this is the greatest opportunity a researcher can have is to try something new and get a fresh look at things. Like, we've been we've been using AI for six years now at Kantar. It's not new to us. Like we use it for text analytics,

00:25:39:13 - 00:25:58:23 Scott We have our link AI. This is actually we were talking about ads going from market to market. We develop this for Coke and Microsoft to test how ads could move from market to market using AI and our normative database. And we use this in our tracking to forecast, based on the trends. We have always on market mix modeling now.

00:25:58:23 - 00:26:19:06 Scott And it's incredible how you can leverage AI, but it's Gen AI, which is the real game changer right now. And it's a huge area of focus for us. We have a nature, partnership. I don't think it's been announced yet, but we're working at very high levels globally. So we can put this in everything we do. And it's going to, it's going to really help with not just our own productivity,

00:26:19:06 - 00:26:45:12 Scott how we work, but our ability to analyze and work quickly. Like, it's going to change how we collect data. It's going to change how we analyze data, how we deliver data. But at the same time, like this is for, you know, broader for researchers, it's an opportunity to do stuff we're talking about, you know, redefining yourself, always. like, who would be a, who would be better at being a product engineer than a researcher that's been trained

00:26:45:12 - 00:27:16:15 Scott to ask questions your entire life, right? And good questions and bad questions. Like, you know, what I play with? And I, you know, I give really bad poetry, because I'm not a good poet, but I can really probe copilot to answer some good questions, right? And it's also about really embracing the dynamism is critical. You know, I talked about being in the forefront, but you can immerse yourself in uncertainties and the uncomfortable zone and then use this for scenario planning, too, and play out different scenarios as, as AI is advancing.

00:27:16:17 - 00:27:39:12 Scott But I think one of the key pieces right here, one of the pieces of low hanging fruit, is I've talked about storytelling, and how important storytelling is for insights. When you can get AI to build your story for you and get it 70%, you can make that last 30% the most compelling thing in the world. Make sure it makes sense and tell a great story, rather

00:27:39:12 - 00:27:59:05 Scott than going through all the numbers and you know, it's up and down, it's just going to push us ahead. So, you know, if you look at Maslow, we're going to get towards our self-actualization if we choose to, rather than the security at the bottom worrying about our jobs all the time. So I think it's the greatest gift and the greatest opportunity, so very excited about.

00:27:59:07 - 00:28:17:16 Alison Yeah, I definitely share your enthusiasm for Gen AI and the whole example you gave around looking at the quote unquote blank page. It's always easier to edit than it is to create from scratch. So, from a storytelling perspective, even if you don't like the starting point, it just makes it easier to then jump down and edit and refine and tell it in a powerful way.

00:28:17:16 - 00:28:36:23 Alison So, great examples. So, in closing, you joked about your 30 years of experience, and in that 30 years you have learned a great deal, and you've shared a lot with us today. But that also means you have some great advice to offer. So I'd love to end our time together today by having you share one piece of advice for our marketers who are listening.

00:28:37:01 - 00:28:59:12 Scott Well, any marketer who's worked with me is going to be sick of hearing this, because it's the piece of advice I've given for many, many, many years. I give it to all my colleagues and all my, all my staff and everybody else. But I believe in it. When you're standing on a beach, and there's a major huge wave, tidal wave of change coming your way, you have two choices.

00:28:59:13 - 00:29:14:01 Scott You can stand there, deny it, do nothing, and you're going to get swept away and crushed by it. Or, choice number two, you can grab a surfboard and get on top of and have the ride of your life. That's all.

00:29:14:03 - 00:29:26:06 Alison Great advice. So I'm definitely going to be donning my surfboard and heading out, so I hope all of our listeners will do the same. Scott, thank you so much. I've thoroughly enjoyed the conversation, and we will happily invite you back to share more.

00:29:26:11 - 00:29:30:07 Scott It's been a pleasure, Alison. Thank you very much and would love to come back again. Thank you.

00:29:30:09 - 00:29:33:03 Alison Thank you.

00:29:33:05 - 00:29:45:19 Presenter Thanks for joining us. Be sure to visit the CMA.ca and sign up for your free my CMA account. It's a great way to stay connected and benefit from the latest marketing, thought leadership, news, and industry trends.

In this episode of CMA Connect, Alison Simpson, CEO of the CMA, welcomes Carolin Taubensee, Executive Director of Marketing Communications at APTN. They discuss preserving Indigenous languages, how marketers can reach these diverse communities, and opening doors for the Indigenous worldwide.

00:00:03 - 00:00:07 Speaker 1 Welcome to CMA Connect, Canada's marketing podcast,

00:00:07 - 00:00:17 where industry experts discuss how marketers must manage the tectonic shifts that will change how brands and businesses are built for tomorrow, while also delivering on today's business needs.

00:00:17 - 00:00:21

With your host, CMA CEO, Alison Simpson.

00:00:24 - 00:01:00 Alison With challenges in the industry's quest for inclusivity and representation. Marketers really need to navigate the journey of aligning brand narratives with the profound cultural heritage of indigenous communities. In this episode, I'm honoured to have a conversation with Carolin Taubensee, Executive Director of Marketing and Communications at APTN. APTN is the first national indigenous broadcaster in the world, and it's an organization that's not only carving out a critical space for indigenous voices in media, but also reshaping how brands can connect with this diverse and dynamic audience.

00:01:00 - 00:01:29 Alison So today, we're going to explore the business opportunity that marketing to the indigenous population represents. And we're also going to talk about the impact of indigenous media on brand strategies and uncover the diverse demographics of indigenous communities. We'll discuss the authentic ways that brands can engage with indigenous audiences, fostering social responsibility and long term loyalty. Plus, we'll discuss the pursuit of indigenous language preservation and how this cultural cornerstone is influencing the marketing sphere.

00:01:29 - 00:01:35 Alison Carolin, I'm absolutely thrilled to have you joining us today.

Carolin Thank you so much, Allison. It's great to be here.

00:01:35 - 00:01:43 Alison Now, I want to kick things off by having you share your insights on the size of and diversity within the indigenous population in Canada.

00:01:43 - 00:02:03 Carolin Sure. First of all, I'd just like to say that I'm coming to you today from Treaty One territory. I was born and raised in Winnipeg, first-generation Canadian from German heritage, and having worked at APTN for almost six years now, I'm happy to say that I'm an ally of the Indigenous peoples.

00:02:04 - 00:02:29 Carolin In terms of the learning and the understanding in terms of Indigenous communities in Canada, it's really important to know that they're not one homogeneous group. They have shared values and experiences, but there are vast differences when we consider there's over 600 distinct First Nations communities in Canada with over 70 Indigenous languages spoken.

00:02:30 - 00:02:42 Carolin And so Indigenous people are represented by First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people. And First Nations is about 60% of the Indigenous population, Métis about 34-ish percent,

00:02:43 - 00:02:54 Carolin and then about four or five percent for Inuit, which are largely people in the north. And in total, the population in Canada for Indigenous people is almost 2 million.

00:02:55 - 00:03:12 Carolin It's 1.8 million, according to the last census. And that represents a total of about 5% of the population in Canada. But what's interesting in terms of going into looking at that audience and that community, is it's the fastest growing population in Canada,

00:03:13 - 00:03:23 Carolin and it also has the youngest population, where 28% are about under 25 years old. And so as marketers, we're often trying to reach younger audiences.

00:03:24 - 00:03:44 Carolin So it's very worthwhile noting that Indigenous people tend to be younger. And it's on average, the average age of Canadians is, you know, early 40s. Indigenous people, it's a decade younger. So quite interesting when we think about the opportunities that are out there for marketers today.

00:03:45:07 - 00:05:08:16 Alison Carolin, I knew that I was going to learn a lot from you today. I had no appreciation for the size of the Indigenous community in Canada. And the fact that there are 600 communities and over 70 languages spoken. I also didn't know that they were the fastest growing community within our country. So thank you so much. That was incredibly illuminating.

00:04:04 - 00:04:11 Carolin You're welcome. It's also, I think, interesting to talk about a geographic distribution of Indigenous people as well.

00:04:12 - 00:04:29 Carolin Only 43% live on reserve and Indigenous people, they're more likely to live in large urban centres. And so in the largest Indigenous population in a city in Canada is actually in Winnipeg with over 100,000 people.

00:04:30 - 00:04:56 Carolin But there's large representation in Edmonton and Vancouver as well, in terms of city centre. But when you think about, on a provincial level, and you look at Ontario, the largest population of Indigenous people live in Ontario. It's almost 400,000 people. And so we really are in terms of Indigenous people spread throughout coast to coast to coast.

00:04:57 - 00:05:07 Carolin But when you think about sort of that distribution of reserve or rural, it's a large city population and the volume is across the country.

00:05:08 - 00:05:24 Alison Now, this multifaceted group certainly represents potential consumers for many brands and many of our listeners today. Carolin, in your experience, what are the opportunities that you see and how can marketers tailor their marketing strategy and approach to reach and resonate with Indigenous consumers?

00:05:25 - 00:05:36 Carolin You know, it's important. I think everybody realizes that Canada is a very diverse country, and so as marketers we strive to identify with consumers. So we need to represent diversity.

00:05:37 - 00:05:56 Carolin It's very important. And as marketers we can't get trapped into thinking what attracts me or what interests me as a consumer We really need to step into the shoes or the moccasins as the case may be into others and so that we can understand all all the different diverse communities that are in Canada,

00:05:57 - 00:06:07 Carolin including Indigenous people. Now, when we think about it, Indigenous people consume all the same products that non-Indigenous people do. They're buying groceries,

00:06:08 - 00:06:19 Carolin they're buying cars, they're buying houses, they're shopping in retail. And so it really is a matter of how do we associate with audiences of diverse

00:06:20 - 00:06:27 Carolin backgrounds because they are consumers of the products that were out there, products and services that we're presenting to as marketers out there.

00:06:28 - 00:06:39 Alison So, with an increasing interest in diversity and inclusion, I'd love you to share some specific outcomes and success stories of brands that have forged partnerships with Indigenous media entities, like APTN.

00:06:40 - 00:06:58 Carolin So as APTN is the world's first national indigenous broadcaster, we are able to share our stories with our voices and it's our narratives that really matter. And that's the importance of what Indigenous media brings to Canada.

00:06:59 - 00:07:17 Carolin There are many Indigenous media out there, whether they are radio stations, whether they are digital news platforms, traditional print, television. television, and many reflect and celebrate the cultures and the languages and traditions and wisdom of Indigenous peoples.

00:07:18 - 00:07:28 Carolin And I'm very humbled in terms of the knowledge that Indigenous people collectively have in terms of the environment, the land, water, the animals.

00:07:29 - 00:07:43 Carolin They're such important aspects in terms of our overall environment. And so-- I think that when we go into working with Indigenous media as marketers that are out there,

00:07:44 - 00:07:58 Carolin they're connecting with that community directly and showing that support and that relationship. And so I think that's a very important aspect of looking at marketing and how do we connect.

00:07:59 - 00:08:09 Alison So how can brands demonstrate a genuine commitment to social responsibility when marketing in Indigenous spaces and ensuring that they're not falling into a performative allyship?

00:08:10 - 00:08:23 Carolin I think the important thing here is for marketers to, as individuals, to take the time to learn and understand about different communities, including Indigenous peoples. There's a great course, the online course,

00:08:24 - 00:08:37 Carolin that the University of Alberta offers for free, and it's called Indigenous Canada, and it's great knowledge in terms of understanding the history and the perspectives of Indigenous people.

00:08:38: - 00:08:50 Carolin And so, as individuals, as marketers, I think it's important to put yourself in terms of learning about the communities and being sensitive in terms of ceremony,

00:08:51 - 00:09:06 Carolin spirituality. It's important not to just utilize traditional images in our marketing. It can be that there are people that are represented just in terms of diverse communities,

00:09:07 - 00:09:19 Carolin people of colour and so forth that they're integrated into advertising. But it's important to really learn about the communities and not, you know, utilize something that could be quite sensitive,

00:09:20 - 00:09:25 Carolin especially as it relates to culture and ceremony and spirituality.

00:09:26 - 00:09:34 Alison So, Carolin, I'd love you to share some of the ways the indigenous community has shown appreciation or reciprocated when brands engage with them authentically and respectfully.

00:09:35 - 00:09:48 Carolin A big part of Indigenous culture is really building relationships with other communities. And so when it is opened up in terms of marketers,

00:09:49 - 00:10:01 Carolin recognizing and showing importance that they want a relationship with Indigenous people is a cultural thing to be able to reciprocate that.

00:10:02 - 00:10:29 Carolin And looking at shared values is very important in terms of what is important to Indigenous people. And so looking at those aspects of relationship-building is a big part of being able to share and identify potentially with marketers that recognize and the values and the importance of Indigenous peoples

00:10:30 - 00:10:46 Carolin as a whole and being very respectful in terms of Indigenous people. So that just is sort of, you know, the full circle of building respect and relationships, is a big part of what makes sense and what's important to Indigenous people.

00:10:47 - 00:10:59 Alison Now, Carolin, with APTN's initiative towards Indigenous language preservation, what role do you think media plays in cultural sustainability? And how should brands align with these efforts for meaningful engagement?

00:11:00 - 00:11:10 Carolin I was mentioning earlier that there's over seventy Indigenous languages in Canada, and some of them are at high risk of being lost. And when languages are lost,

00:11:11 - 00:11:22 Carolin culture is lost. And so one of the things that APTN is working through and has for a while is providing content that is in language.

00:11:23 - 00:11:35 Carolin For so long, Indigenous people were not even able to speak their language. But we've come to a place where finally there's the respect that is out there in terms of enabling those languages to be spoken.

00:11:36 - 00:11:47 Carolin And so it's really important in terms of the role that APTN plays in providing content that is in a variety of languages. languages so that people can hear,

O0:11:48 - 00:12:03 Carolin get a sense of pride, and rebuild and reclaim those languages again. And so if there are marketers that are out there, that can help us achieve our goals collectively for the betterment of our communities,

00:12:04 - 00:12:19 Carolin then that would be so valuable in terms of meaningful engagement, and moving forward in terms of reconciliation. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission came out with a number of calls to action.

00:12:20 - 00:12:32 Carolin Number 92 in particular is really calling on corporate Canada to build the relationships and enable Indigenous people in terms of access,

00:12:33 - 00:12:51 Carolin whether that's jobs, education, whether it's learning and educating themselves on history and the legacy of residential schools. And so when we look at how do we challenge and what can organizations do in terms of achieving reconciliation,

00:12:52 - 00:13:19 Carolin that's an important part of it. And then even APTN has been called upon in terms of the call to action number 85. And how we support reconciliation together is being that leader in programming, and the culture, and being able to share those languages and help reclaim them again and build strength back up in the community to speak the languages that is such a strong representation of culture.

00:13:20 - 00:13:39 Alison Carolin, thank you so much. Now you've got an enviable job, you've got an outstanding career. So I'd love to close our discussion today by having you share one piece of advice for our listeners. It's a marketing audience, and I know they would benefit from some marketing advice and something you'd like to share with them.

00:13:40 - 00:13:48 Carolin You know, I started my career over 35 years ago. I was a media planner buyer at an ad agency and I've come full circle now sitting sort of at the media side,

00:13:49 - 00:13:59 Carolin within the media industry. And I would just say that what's important is knowing that media is an art and a science. We look at all the metrics.

00:14:00 - 00:14:11 Carolin Digital provides us so many metrics in terms of performance of marketing and advertising, and that's important. But it's also important to recognize the art side of it.

00:14:12 - 00:14:29 Carolin And intuitively, stepping out of the numbers and being able to identify communities, audiences, that may not always sort of meet the standards of the largest audience or impressions and those sorts of things.

00:14:30 - 00:14:47 Carolin And so my advice for young marketers is to recognize the art and the science of media and looking at numbers, but building in sort of those intuitive understandings of communities and what might be important to step outside of just the plain numbers themselves.

00:14:48 - 00:15:16 Alison That's great advice, Carolin. It's certainly very applicable to the media aspect of the marketing profession. I would say it's also very applicable across all aspects of the marketing profession. So it's a great note to end on. And I really want to thank you for being my guest today and sharing some really important insights into how marketers can resonate with and engage with our Indigenous community.

00:15:11 - 00:15:18 Carolin Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure to be able to talk about this today.

00:15:19 - 00:15:32

Thanks for joining us. Be sure to visit the CMA.ca and sign up for your free My CMA account. It's a great way to stay connected and benefit from the latest marketing thought leadership, news and industry trends.

In this episode of CMA Connect, Alison Simpson, CEO of the CMA, welcomes Caroline Gianias, President of Radio Connects. Alison and Caroline explore how changing media habits, the merging of traditional and digital mediums, and multicultural diversity unite to create new opportunities for marketers in Canada.

00:00:03:06 - 00:00:22:11 Speaker 1 Welcome to CMA Connect, Canada's marketing podcast, where industry experts discuss how marketers must manage the tectonic shifts that will change how brands and businesses are built for tomorrow, while also delivering on today's business themes. With your host, CMA CEO Alison Simpson.

00:00:22:13 - 00:00:52:18 Alison With the media landscape evolving so rapidly, Canada's media industry is very much at a turning point, stirring a vital conversation on the media's direction in our country. From the changing media habits of Canadians, streaming and increased digital advertising, to the consolidation of newsrooms, understanding these shifts is absolutely crucial for crafting media plans and messages that resonate. Marketers need to stay agile and informed, since adapting to these dynamic shifts is now more crucial than ever.

00:00:52:19 - 00:01:14:22 Alison To guide us through this pivotal time, I am absolutely thrilled to have Caroline Gianias, President of Radio Connects, join us today. Caroline is a highly regarded media expert who has worked with local and global clients across every major advertising category. In addition to her role at Radio Connects, Caroline also is the vice president of the World Radio Alliance and chairs the CMA's Media Council.

00:01:15:04 - 00:01:29:17 Alison Today we delve into how massive shifts in media habits, merging digital with traditional mediums, and Canada's rich cultural diversity create a realm of possibilities for marketers everywhere. Welcome, Caroline. It's really great to have you with me today.

00:01:29:19 - 00:01:35:05 Caroline Thanks, Alison. It's a pleasure to be here. Hope I have some good insights to share on this lofty topic.

00:01:35:07 - 00:01:46:14 Alison So to kick things off, I would love to hear how the evolving demographics and cultural diversity within Canada are influencing media consumption habits and advertisers' approach to segmentation.

00:01:46:18 - 00:02:14:13 Caroline Canada is such a big country. I mean, we're six time zones spread across a massive landscape, with cultural differences, we've got regional differences. We have two official languages, and on top of that, we're layered with this very rich and diverse cultural experience of new Canadians, and what it means to be a new Canadian, as well as just the changing technology that's having an impact on media consumption.

00:02:14:13 - 00:02:43:16 Caroline So it's a really big question and something that I'm sure advertisers are faced with every day in trying to solve their business challenges and using media as a part of that. Really, the disruption to media consumption has largely been led by technology and the fact that digitization of media, the fact that we're carrying around in our palms, the most powerful computer you could possibly have, that just opens a world of possibilities in terms of consumption.

00:02:43:18 - 00:03:20:05 Caroline So, you know, all it contributes to is just making that media consumption more fragmented, really. And so how do marketers connect with all of those different touchpoints? Right. That's the big challenge. I mean, the reality of 40 million people is that 80% of us are still living within, you know, 200 kilometres of the United States. Right. So this whole fragmentation of media and media consumption, I mean, a lot of it is still media and cultural influences, political influences, certainly economic influences that are all coming from south of the border.

00:03:20:07 - 00:03:48:23 Caroline And, you know, for Canada, the challenge in that is how do marketers, especially in global brands, maintain the fact that Canada is a unique and diverse marketplace separate from the United States and we're not the 51st state? And what applies in the United States? While yeah, there'll be similarities, but it still needs to be adapted because, you know, in Canada we have our own media consumption habits that are different and are regionally different as well.

00:03:48:23 - 00:04:18:23 Caroline And we have two official languages and I think a lot of the times when advertisers are so focused on what does it mean to be multicultural and support new Canadians and the ethnicity and diversity of Canada? Are we in fact ignoring a very big percent of Canada's population that's living in Quebec? That aren't even being addressed? What are we doing to include Quebec in those conversations, which I think often get left off the table when we're talking about Canada being a diverse and multicultural population?

00:04:19:01 - 00:04:38:15 Caroline Oftentimes, they're not even included in the advertiser's plans. So if we're looking at prioritizing ethnicity, cultural diversity, how do we do that beyond English and French in Canada? And are we even doing the right job in English or French in Canada? Right. So it becomes a very complex question.

00:04:38:17 - 00:05:05:10 Alison And it can be very easy to be sitting on the other side of the border looking at Canada and seeing how we're alike and really underestimating the crucial and sometimes subtle differences that make marketing in Canada truly unique. In your viewpoint, are the media measurement tools that are available today agile enough to capture the multicultural consumption patterns that are currently happening in Canada, and to do it an accurate way? 00:05:05:12 - 00:05:28:02 Caroline Yeah, it's challenging because, you know, the question always comes down to with measurement, what are you measuring? Are you measuring for insight to improve business outcomes based on understanding consumer, based on understanding media habits? Or are you measuring for currency to transact to purchase that media? So, you know, the two of them, they're very different things and they don't necessarily, are not approached in the same way.

00:05:28:04 - 00:05:51:20 Caroline Certainly when we're measuring for currency in Canada, we have Numeris. Right. And we have Radio Counts that supports on the radio measurements and they use very disciplined approach. It's, you know, using panels, it's looking at census data, it's extrapolating to population. Of course, in Canada with privacy, we don't speak to ethnicity, we don't speak to other than understanding in terms of the panels of languages spoken at home.

00:05:51:22 - 00:06:16:05 Caroline But we don't dissect in terms of, you know, am I speaking to a South Asian community? If I am speaking to a South Asian community, what does that look like within the association communities that look on many different looks as well? And quite frankly, there's just not enough people in the country, believe it or not, that we can actually subgroup those into into certain measurement segments and start saying, well, yes, I'm using media to currency against this particular segment.

00:06:16:07 - 00:06:39:09 Caroline There's just, it's difficult to do that and it's difficult to get around that with privacy. I think you can do that digitally by creating, you know, scenarios of that if people are consuming this content that they're likely from this aspect of a community or certain ethnic group. And that seems easy to do. But I guess the question comes down to what are you going to do with that measurement once you get it?

00:06:39:11 - 00:07:06:15 Caroline How are you going to use that insight to inform your executions? What are you doing to make that a better user experience? If you're delivering content against that community or that language, is it in the right context? Are you using the right methodology to convey the message? Are you, you know, is it reflecting their communities? So once you start asking questions if you're measuring against certain things, it's like, what are you measuring?

00:07:06:16 - 00:07:29:11 Caroline How are you measuring it? And what are you going to do with the insight you get with that measurement? And I think in Canada, fundamentally too, it's it's expense sieve to measure. It's very expensive to measure. And the question always becomes who's paying for that measurement? You know, are the advertisers paying for it? Are the agencies paying for it? Are the broadcasters in Canada, the private broadcasters and the CBC?

00:07:29:11 - 00:07:59:18 Caroline Are they paying for that? Because if you look at some of the vertical tech companies, they are measuring their own users. But, you know, they're all now putting that behind walled gardens, right? You can't necessarily get to that first party data that they're collecting about their user groups. So it's a very difficult question. And I think the challenge also becomes is, as soon as you establish the parameters of measurement, the goalpost has moved in terms of what we're measuring, what technology we're measuring, and it's constantly evolving.

00:07:59:18 - 00:08:21:17 Caroline So it seems like the measurement is always behind the consumption because people are moving so quickly to adopt two different things. And once you find a way to measure it, they've moved on to something else. But I will say that I don't think from the broadcast perspective in the traditional measurement, if you will, that we give enough credit in terms of some of the solutions.

00:08:21:19 - 00:08:44:11 Caroline You know, I do have a lot of exposure to global media owners in the broadcast space, and they look to Canada as, you guys are measuring streaming of over the air broadcast, you're measuring, you're using panels, you're looking at different time zones, like we are actually quite advanced in terms of how some measurement is being done. Yet we in Canada don't give ourselves enough credit.

00:08:44:13 - 00:08:53:22 Caroline You know, actually being at the foreground in some of those measurements that we've done and we actually have. But I don't think we give ourselves enough credit sometimes.

00:08:54:00 - 00:08:59:01 Alison I think that's true of Canadians on a number of different levels. So I appreciate you shouting that out.

00:08:59:03 - 00:09:00:00 Alison I also want to point out

00:09:00:05 - 00:09:21:17 Alison Something you talked about earlier. We have a lot of listeners and members that are part of multinational businesses and representing the brand in Canada. So what strategy should multinational marketers employ to harness the full potential of the Canadian media scene? And it would be great to hear what makes Canada unique and why should media investment here be more of a priority?

00:09:21:17 - 00:09:30:06 Alison Because as I mentioned earlier, it's easy to you're sitting in the States in particular to look across the border and see how we're alike and underestimate the important differences we have.

00:09:30:08 - 00:09:55:23 Caroline The challenges is to ensure that the budgets reflect the job at hand, especially in certain categories. Canada, the media has to work so much harder because the trade dollars relative to what some advertisers are putting in the marketing budget to support their trade initiatives is certainly less than what it is in other markets. So our media has to work that much harder to support trade activity.

00:09:55:23 - 00:10:14:14 Caroline So I think, it's really the challenge has always been, you know, the budget for Canada shouldn't just be a default to it's X percent of what you're doing in the United States. That's, you know, you can't do that because our media budgets have to work harder in terms of connecting with Canadians. We have that fragmentation to deal with.

00:10:14:16 - 00:10:41:14 Caroline We have dual languages to start off before we even talk about doing any kind of ethnic centric or ethnic media placement. We have to address that. We have two official languages, two media ecosystems that support English and French. So that needs to have a seat at the table to have those discussions, because don't just automatically assume it's the budget to satisfy Canada is a percent of the US budget.

00:10:41:16 - 00:11:16:16 Caroline You have to look at what the business challenges are, what the media ecosystem looks like and what it's going to do to get that job done. And it will involve a percentage of English in Canada, and that's just a reality. You can't ignore the Quebec market, as a lot of marketers will tend to do. And I think the other thing is to look at the fact of the role of different media has, even in a world of multiculturalism and new Canadians coming into Canada. At what point do marketers sit back and say, you're no longer new Canadian when? You've been here five years, three years, ten years, 20 years?

00:11:16:18 - 00:11:38:21 Caroline Are we talking about new Canadians and what's the business objective to meet new Canadians? It might be completely different. You know, there's not just media challenges that we have with trying to meet new Canadians or a diverse multicultural community. It's the expectations of the services that they're going to be getting. You know, a lot of sticker shock when people come to Canada, right?

00:11:38:22 - 00:11:58:06 Caroline It's like you think the land of milk and honey, and it's really expensive cell phone plans. It's, you know, cost of living is really high. Cost of rent and ownership and all sorts of things are really high. And eventually those things do play into media usage because, you know, you're not going to have that many streaming services because they're expensive.

00:11:58:06 - 00:12:26:16 Caroline And you know local media may become the touchpoint because it's free for the most part, right? You can get in and listen to radio anywhere, any time. You don't have to pay for that service. With basic cable, you can turn on TV and find out what's happening. And so I think the challenge for multinational marketers is really to understand what the Canadian landscape looks like and the fact that it's English and it's French, and that just looking at a percent of the US budget isn't just going to get the job done.

00:12:26:16 - 00:12:33:22 Caroline You've got to really understand what it is you need to achieve. And the cost of media in Canada, it's not it's not cheap, right? It's not cheap.

00:12:34:00 - 00:12:47:05 Alison With the rise of streaming platforms and consumers shift to new media habits, what are the key strategies that traditional radio broadcasters and media platforms in Canada are implementing to remain relevant and competitive?

00:12:47:07 - 00:13:09:18 Caroline Well, you know, it's interesting. I think, you know, people think streaming, and I'll talk to the audio space because obviously it's where I'm immersed in the most is that I think there's a real disconnect in terms of understanding what that actually means, because really in terms of audio, what's happening in that streaming landscape, is that really streaming is a replacement of our personal music libraries, right?

00:13:09:20 - 00:13:29:17 Caroline You know, unless you're a real audiophile and, you know, my 30 year old, 31 year old son is, he has LPs, is that most people, I would say most people, a selection of Canadians are choosing to rent their music libraries versus owning their music libraries. Right. And that's giving the rise to what we're seeing in terms of streaming.

00:13:29:18 - 00:13:52:10 Caroline Because previously when we would look at, you know, album sales, to determine, you know, the top, CHUM's top list, right? It's how many records sold, you know, what the radio stations were playing and now it's coming down to streaming because we could physically count that now, whereas before we weren't. So all that personal music time being spent with physical is now being streamed.

00:13:52:12 - 00:14:22:21 Caroline But it's not a new phenomenon quite frankly. Personal music has always been in existence. It's just now that it's being streamed on a device as opposed to being played on your record player or your MP3 player or your boombox. So I think there is a a sense of certainly with people in the industry who think that Canadians aren't listening to terrestrial radio anymore because they're streaming, when in actual fact, you know, the reach of radio has been pretty consistent forever.

00:14:22:23 - 00:14:49:19 Caroline And most of the streaming that's being done by those Canadians who are streaming is largely noncommercial. It's to their personal music libraries. Because if you actually look at the free online music streaming services or you look at even podcasting, like collectively the two of them, I think what podcasting is maybe 29%, and free music streaming is like maybe 8% of all of the audio listening out there.

00:14:50:00 - 00:15:30:11 Caroline Whereas like radio, if you look at PPM, it's at 84%. That's a very big difference. And even when you compare it to the Amazon Prime, the Apple Music, YouTube, it's, you're still looking at terrestrial radio being one and a half, two times greater in terms of reach of any of those platforms. So, you know, I think the adaptation that broadcasters are have, is that it's more so that Canadian to really rediscovering the fact that radio was the original mobile medium, right, the transistor radio, and now you've got it on your phone. So your phone has become your transistor radio and so people are able to take that that radio experience with them wherever they're going

00:15:30:13 - 00:15:54:09 Caroline because it's a different experience, right? People lean into radio, they're connecting and want to know what's going on in the community. And the further out you get from the major urban centres, the more important those connections become to local community. And I think that's true whether you're new Canadian, who wants to connect with their new environment, they're learning the language, they're consuming, you know, television and radio because they're improving their English.

00:15:54:11 - 00:16:19:23 Caroline So I think, you know, the fact is that we in the industry, I think, have a different perception because we tend to be bigger streamers in general. We tend to have more streaming subscriptions than the average Canadian. We tend to spend more time with streaming and on demand platforms than average Canadians. And I think that often colours our perception of what consumers are doing.

00:16:20:01 - 00:16:41:21 Caroline And I go back to, ThinkTV did a great survey with Ipsos and it kind of level sets those of us who work in marketing, those who work in advertising, think about what Canadians are doing and there's such a difference in terms of what our perceptions of media consumption of the average Canadian is our own consumption versus what we think they're doing.

00:16:41:21 - 00:17:07:00 Caroline And you see such a disconnect. And I think the challenge for marketers and those advising their clients is, we're not the average consumer, we're not the average media consumption either. And so we really need to kind of take a step back and really focus on, you know, what Joe or Jill or, you know, average consumer X is doing relative to what we're doing because we're not like everybody else.

00:17:07:02 - 00:17:26:15 Caroline And we need to remember that when we're developing our advertising strategies, our behaviours, our consumption should never be the baseline of what we're doing. And insights, information, data points about average consumers and their consumer journey should always be the focus point because it's so different from ours.

00:17:26:17 - 00:17:38:01 Alison That's such an important reminder that you've given us, Caroline, to not assume that how we engage with media, how we live our lives, it's usually fundamentally different from the quote unquote average Canadian.

00:17:38:03 - 00:17:39:10 Caroline Hugely different.

00:17:39:12 - 00:17:46:03 Alison Well, your stat around 84% of radio is probably a surprising stat for a lot of our listeners as well.

00:17:46:05 - 00:18:07:22 Caroline I think it is. And I think that they forget, you know, especially I think another interesting thing is that those of us who work in urban centres, even, you know, post-COVID, we did a survey not too long ago with Signal Hills through Maru Canada, just asking people, you know, who were in vehicles yesterday, because obviously radio is a very important part of the consumer journey in car.

00:18:08:00 - 00:18:41:00 Caroline And, you know, on average, 44% of Canadians were in vehicles yesterday versus 6% were in transit. So the reality is Canadians are very much car drivers and vehicle drivers as opposed to transit takers. And if you're trying to connect with consumers on the last mile about the purchase, being in the car is a big part of that. Right. And once you strip out all the noise of where you can actually meet a consumer with an ad message, like radio's 92% of that, because muscle memory, you get in your car and you turn it on. The radio comes on automatically, right?

00:18:41:05 - 00:19:05:21 Caroline Even in connected cars, whether you're an Android or Wi-Fi, Apple CarPlay, any of those different technologies, the time spent with ad supported or the amount of people listening to ad supported radio, the numbers are consistent it's above 90%, whether you have Android auto in the car or not because that connection to live radio, it's a leaned in experience and people rely on it.

00:19:05:23 - 00:19:23:18 Caroline And I think those of us in marketing who are not in cars, who rely on transit and think that everybody connects to their apps the minute they get in the car, that's you know, that's just not the reality out there. Right. And that's a big audience that we're missing if we're not focused on that.

00:19:23:20 - 00:19:38:23 Alison That's a great point. I'm sure some of our listeners are wondering if there's a demographic part of radio listening. Have you noticed in any of your research whether our younger Canadians as engaged with radio as we might be?

00:19:39:01 - 00:19:56:01 Caroline Well, you know, it's funny, we did just look at some research recently, and nobody wants to hear this, but the older you get, the more you consume. That's surprising. I remember I was at an agency thing not too long ago and I did have to counsel, I hate to tell you this, but you do turn into your parents as you get older.

00:19:56:03 - 00:20:15:09 Caroline You know, when you start when you move along from being a party of one, hopping on the subway or working remotely, to suddenly being in a car, driving through the drive through because, you know, doing school run and you got to run out for groceries or you ran out of milk, you know, not everything comes by a delivery service.

00:20:15:11 - 00:20:46:18 Caroline Uber eats or, you know, your grocery runs to your door. And, you know, radio does connect with more people as your life stages change. But I think, you know, it's interesting, I think people are surprised that even when you look at the younger demographics of 18 to 34 and you compare that with some of the digital platforms like Facebook and YouTube and, radio still connects with more of them than connects with YouTube or Facebook or TikTok or Instagram.

00:20:46:19 - 00:21:04:04 Caroline When it comes to 18 to 34s, like the reach of radio is still higher than those other media, which I think is surprising to a lot of people. The younger you are, the more exposure to radio, the more likely you are to have or to take some sort of action after hearing an ad, which we know is pretty surprising for people as well.

00:21:04:06 - 00:21:08:13 Caroline You know, but that came out in a recent study, and all of this is available on our Radio Connects website.

00:21:08:15 - 00:21:19:07 Alison Caroline, this has been wonderful conversation. I know you've got a busy day ahead, but before I close off our discussion, I would love to have you share one piece of advice that you would give to our listeners.

00:21:19:09 - 00:21:36:16 Caroline I guess it goes back to the we in the industry, we're a unique breed and our media behaviours are not like everyone else's. And I think we, as as you go through the media journey in the consumer journey and, you're looking to if I'm going to spend $1 an hour in media, where am I going to spend it?

00:21:36:18 - 00:21:58:02 Caroline You know, go back to the the business challenge at hand. Look at the consumer journey, not your media journey, but the consumer journey of the person that you're trying to connect with and ensure that you've covered all the touch points that are the most relevant and that the messaging you're delivering, it's in a context that makes sense for the person receiving the message.

00:21:58:04 - 00:22:23:03 Caroline Because I think, Canada, we're a vast landscape, fragmented media universe, media has its challenges in our marketplace to connect with English, French, multicultural, and it's always hard to determine where to spend that first dollar. So always go back to what the business challenge is at hand and what's the most effective medium you can use to resolve those business challenges.

00:22:23:05 - 00:22:33:23 Alison Great advice. Caroline, thank you so much for your time today and for a really great, insightful conversation.

00:22:34:01 - 00:22:45:18 Speaker 1 Thanks for joining us. Be sure to visit the CMA.ca and sign up for your free My CMA account. It's a great way to stay connected and benefit from the latest marketing thought leadership news and industry trends.

In this episode of CMA Connect, Alison Simpson, CEO of the CMA, welcomes Raja Rajamannar, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer and President of Healthcare for Mastercard and author of Quantum Marketing. Alison and Raja delve into mastering time management, key trends in this golden age of marketing, inclusive design and the skills marketers need to future-proof the profession.

00:00:03:06 - 00:00:32:22 Unknown Welcome to CMA Connect, Canada's marketing podcast, where industry experts discuss how marketers must manage the tectonic shifts that will change how brands and businesses are built for tomorrow, while also delivering on today's business themes. With your host, CMA CEO Alison Simpson.

Alison If you listened to our earlier episode with our board chair, Kerri Dawson, you absolutely know that future proofing the marketing profession is a top priority for the Canadian Marketing Association.

00:00:33:00 - 00:01:03:23 Alison We're very focused on helping marketers understand and manage the tectonic shifts that will fundamentally change how brands and businesses are built tomorrow, while also ensuring they're delivering on today's business needs. Today's guest is ideally suited to help us future proof marketing. Here's what he had to say about the current reality for marketers. "This era is driven by exponential disruptions, good and bad, in consumers' lives caused by a deluge of emerging technologies. And the resulting changes in the consumer landscape

00:01:04:01 - 00:01:34:03 Alison call for marketers to tap into the dynamics of the new paradigm and reinvent their entire approach." So it's my pleasure to welcome Raja Rajamannar to our podcast today. He's the Global Chief Marketing and Communications Officer and also the President of Health Care for MasterCard. Now, that would be more than enough to keep most of us busy. But Raja somehow found time to also write Quantum Marketing, which is a Wall Street Journal bestseller and must read for every marketer focused on the future.

00:01:34:05 - 00:01:58:13 Alison Raja is renowned for innovating for some of the world's top brands and businesses, and he's been recognized with many awards throughout his career. A few recent ones include Business Insider's twenty five most innovative CMO's in the world, WFA Global Marketer of the Year, Forbes Top five World's most influential CMO's, and the Campaign Power 100. Raja, thanks so much for joining us today.

00:01:58:15 - 00:02:23:14 Raja Thank you for having me here Alison. Much appreciated.

Alison Now, I'm actually not going to start with the marketing question. When I think about your massive dual global mandate at MasterCard plus your different board roles and the fact that you found time to write a book, it's abundantly clear that you've mastered time management. So please let us know how you prioritize and determine where to focus your time to drive the greatest impact.

00:02:23:16 - 00:02:51:14 Raja The first thing is, I start with the premise that you cannot manage time. You manage yourself not the time. And time just keeps going on, right. You cannot bend it, cannot stop it. You cannot accelerate it. The key thing is, as one of the authors has written beautifully, the title of the book is 4000 Weeks. That's all our full life typically is, about eighty years.

00:02:51:16 - 00:03:19:18 Raja And in that kind of a 4000 week timeframe, you need to be crystal clear on what you really want to spend each one of those precious weeks. You can while away time on social media, endlessly scrolling, and that can actually keep you busy and entertained and occupied for a few hours every day? Or you can choose to educate yourself how to spend time and build relationships with people or write books or do something for the community.

00:03:19:19 - 00:03:43:05 Raja It's all up to you. So the first thing is, what do you want to focus on? Where do you want to put your efforts? So that's number one. Secondly, I would say that there are a lot of things that we'd like to do, but we don't have to do ourselves. You can delegate effectively both in your work situation as well as in your personal situation.

00:03:43:07 - 00:04:03:11 Raja So, for example, there are a lot of people I know who are very hesitant to give access to their emails, to their assistants, or to their chiefs of staff. But if you give access to them, they can make your life so much more easier because they scroll through everything that is unnecessary that doesn't have to take up your time.

00:04:03:17 - 00:04:24:23 Raja But you need to have confidence in yourself to say, Look, there is nothing there that is hidden that will come to bite me back. So long as you're open, operating with an open kimono, that's fantastic. So I think there are some work related work, as I would say, is not just work at the business context, but work in the personal life as well that you should be having to delegate.

00:04:25:01 - 00:04:47:02 Raja That's number two. So don't be everything yourself. You can't just do everything yourself. And there's so many things that you would like to do. Number three, I would say, is that you need to be really conscious of not wasting time on things that don't matter. A lot of times we sort of get... I'll give you a beautiful example, the CEO of MasterCard.

00:04:47:05 - 00:05:11:00 Raja Right, the current CEO or the previous CEO too. So I'll talk about current CEO, Michael Miebach. He says okay, I'll have a 15 minute monthly meeting with you. That's all that I have with him. Fifteen minutes on a monthly basis. But those are power bank 15 minutes and I don't have... And the fact that I know that is only 15 minutes, I prepare myself extremely well,

00:05:11:02 - 00:05:30:03 Raja the key points, and not be anxious to sort of keep filling up the time, with all kinds of things and to update him about everything that I'm doing. The point is you do that exactly the thing with your team members, with your colleagues, with vendors. People are hungry for your time, but you should realize that this is your time.

00:05:30:05 - 00:05:58:14 Raja You have to manage yourself, and your schedule, and your meetings based on your time. So now things like this, maybe actually one day I should write a book on this. That's a good idea. Thank you. Something useful for me from this podcast already.

Alison I would definitely read that book and I know many of our listeners would as well. That's such great perspective, especially investing in communities and relationships, there's so many studies around what makes for a rich life and a long life.

00:05:58:14 - 00:06:34:21 Alison and those are absolutely core to that.

Raja And in fact, if I can just start one point, in terms of productivity, I find that meditation is one of the best productivity tools. It increases your focus. It increases your clarity of thinking. And somehow you can become much more creative to come to solutions. And I find that that is an incredible way to manage your time, because even, for example, for somebody who is traveling around in various timezones, jet lag is a reality that you have to deal with.

00:06:34:23 - 00:06:55:01 Raja Meditation actually helps you to relax, to get your body reset. And then all the focus and creativity and everything really is at a peak. And I say that that's something which is to be wholeheartedly embraced by people who are looking for productivity tools. Many people look at meditation, God, I have to spend half an hour or 15 minutes on meditation.

00:06:55:01 - 00:07:17:17 Raja I don't have time. But actually, meditation makes time for other things for you because you do things more efficiently.

Alison I've tried to meditate before. I'm a morning runner, so that's become my form of meditation. But you've given me pause and I will absolutely try meditation again. Now, Raja, you kicked off the year on a really inspiring note with a LinkedIn post that highlighted that this in many ways is the golden age of marketing.

00:07:17:18 - 00:07:43:09 Alison You also acknowledge that classical marketers have lost a lot of ground in recent years, and you now see tremendous opportunity for marketers to reclaim their territory in 2024, which is absolutely music to our audience ears. So what trends would you say are making this year the start of the golden age of marketing?

Raja There are multiple things. So firstly, if you look at the technologies that are very, very groundbreaking, right?

00:07:43:09 - 00:08:12:02 Raja In the past you had Internet, you had mobile, you had social platforms. Each one of these or a television or radio, they are all significant technological innovations that disrupted people's lives completely, transformed. And made them into a very, completely different kind of thing. For example, if you look at the pre 1996 era and post 1996 era, when you look back you say how could I have even lived without Internet before?

00:08:12:04 - 00:08:36:07 Raja Right? Internet has changed our lives dramatically and that opens up opportunities for marketing where you say, Hey, now I can reach consumers directly in real time, almost 1 to 1. I can be precise in my targeting. I can be very accurate in my measurements and so on. And that's how digital marketing was born. Same thing happened when mobile and social media came in 2007.

00:08:36:09 - 00:09:01:07 Raja The point is, today, unlike the previous paradigms of marketing, there are 24 new groundbreaking technologies that are coming up. Whether it is AI, or it is augmented reality, virtual reality, blockchains, 3D printing, 5G telecommunications. Already 6G is coming. It's around the corner. There are so many things that are actually happening at the space and proper technology perspective.

00:09:01:09 - 00:09:43:15 Raja Each of these technologies is independently capable of disrupting people's lives and businesses. The confluence of these 24 technologies is going to result in an unprecedented level of disruption. We haven't seen it yet. That's one part of it. But why is it good for marketing? Technology is a great leveller of the competitive field. In the past you had to be a big company with deep pockets to be able to invest in technology. Today, even if you are a tiny company with very modest marketing budgets, you can still access exactly the same technologies that a very large company is able to use. For $20 a month

00:09:43:15 - 00:10:21:11 Raja you can actually access the likes of ChatGPT, which are very powerful from a marketing perspective, probably we can discuss about that. So what happens to that kind of a context is that we have to realize that technology is going to be available to everyone. So you cannot distinguish and differentiate yourself based on technology anymore. Same is true for data, but the data privacy and regulations on one side and extreme collection of data on the other side, there is going to be a lot of anonymized and tokenized data that will be available for marketers across all industries and all companies large and small.

00:10:21:12 - 00:10:53:17 Raja If that is the case, what is going to distinguish one company from another company is its creativity and innovation. That's where marketing comes in. And we as marketers can actually advantage our companies by differentiating them, making them more relevant, making them more compelling to our target audiences. And that's something which is, I think, a dream come true. So today, for example, a lot of companies, particularly on the technology side, give a lot of importance to products, and their product is superior to marketing.

00:10:53:19 - 00:11:21:11 Raja It's ironical. When I was practicing marketing all these years, product was an integral part of marketing. It's the first P of the four Ps of marketing. But today there is a separate Chief Product Officer. There is a separate customer experience officer. So it's got fragmented. Now a product is very, very easy to replicate, particularly given the technological advancement, and the speed in terms of go to market is actually rapidly rising.

00:11:21:11 - 00:11:52:19 Raja So with the result of which, other people can replicate your products with equivalent or better functionality in a heartbeat. So if you want long term disruption, if you want long term differentiation at a competitive advantage, you have to connect emotionally. The emotional connection is what marketing is all about. It's about emote... generate the right emotions, engage consumers in a very compelling fashion and hold them close to you as a brand.

00:11:52:19 - 00:12:15:14 Raja That is what will give you the advantage compared to your competitors. And so marketing is going to be really the function that will drive companies. And therefore this is the golden era of marketing.

Alison That's so well-said and technology as a great leveller is relevant globally. It's particularly relevant in Canada because 80% of our economy is driven by small and medium sized enterprises.

00:12:15:14 - 00:12:38:12 Alison So the fact that they can compete in a way that they haven't been able to in the past is a wonderful opportunity. Now, in looking at the tectonic shifts, do you still think the four Ps of marketing hold true? And it's more how they will be brought to light?

Raja I feel that the entire framework for marketing has to be changed.

00:12:38:13 - 00:13:02:12 Raja And I had a conversation about this with my guru, who is Philip Kotler. If you think about it, the four Ps of marketing were formulated by Philip Kotler more than 60 years back. In 60 years, the world has transformed so dramatically. And that's what was the genesis of me writing this book. And I started asking myself, Are those still relevant?

00:13:02:13 - 00:13:29:08 Raja Is it like gravity, magnetism? These are things which don't change. They are very fundamental. They are foundational. They remain all the time. But is that true for marketing, or are things changing? So if you look at every single aspect of the marketing value chain, the concepts are no longer valid, the processes are completely inaccurate, and what we are doing is totally irrelevant.

00:13:29:10 - 00:13:51:23 Raja And I'm not saying it flippantly or just for effect. I'm saying it because I mean it. And I can tell you, let's take a couple of examples. Now, if you look at something like loyalty, the industry collectively spends about a billion, about $1,000,000,000,000 in RND every year, $1 trillion plus. There was a research report that came from BBC.

00:13:51:23 - 00:14:20:17 Raja It was published in BBC. And when I read it, what I found was that the research said it was being done amongst people who are either in a marriage or they were in a live-in relationship. They asked them, How many of you have cheated on your partners? And the number was an astounding 70%. And a further 15% said that if they are sure they will not get caught, they don't mind straying.

00:14:20:19 - 00:14:49:02 Raja Now, I'm not here to make any value judgment, but when I think about it, I say, look, if 85% of the people who have made some kind of formal commitment already, or informal or implied commitment, and they know that the consequences are terrible if they are caught, still, they're not hardwired for loyalty. If in real life and on far more important things that people are not hardwired for loyalty, we come as marketers and say, You'll spend $1 and each dollar you spend

00:14:49:02 - 00:15:11:07 Raja I'll give you one point and then I'm not pretending that you are loyal to me. That is the biggest fallacy. We are kidding ourselves. And, look at anyone. Like I know, for example, if I look at myself, I have got more than five airline frequent flier program, loyalty program memberships. I've got every single hotel chain. I'm on their loyalty list.

00:15:11:09 - 00:15:41:01 Raja Same thing with grocery chains as well, my everyday spending. I've got Costco, I've got Walmart, I've got Amazon Prime. Who am I loyal to? These are not loyalty programs. They are actually price incentives couched in a program. Loyalty is very, very misplaced in this context. We need stickiness. We need preference. So what, in fact, I suggested is that we should have a different framework to win and keep consumers on an ongoing basis.

00:15:41:03 - 00:16:09:13 Raja And that is what I call a preference management platform. And it should be technological driven and so on. So every area, whether you look at purchase, same thing is true. Market research. I actually started my career in market research and most recently I was chatting with the Head of Market Research and Consumer Insights at Unilever, and both of us were sort of commiserating and said the way we do market research is terrible and what you get is completely useless material and we rely on it as true.

00:16:09:15 - 00:16:32:00 Raja The reason is consumers cannot articulate why they have done something or why they like something. They are all subconscious. By very definition, if you ask somebody why you did it, they have to post-rationalize and tell you, and they are not psychologists to begin with. So the whole aspect of marketing has to be rethought. And that's exactly what I am saying, is what quantum marketing is about.

00:16:32:02 - 00:16:49:23 Raja And I share this with Philip Kotler, and it was so true. He had given me a note which I actually framed it and kept it in my home office because he is my guru and he is saying this is Raja actually what the future is. And what I have done is something which is which was very true for that era.

00:16:50:01 - 00:17:19:20 Raja But I completely agree with you. We need to reinvent ourselves, rethink marketing the concepts, the frameworks, the strategies, and therefore the tactics.

Alison So I'm going to jump to another emerging area that MasterCard is very much leading in, and that's around inclusive design. So you're definitely leading the charge in innovating with inclusive design. And your most recent announcement about Touch is a great example, which brings me to a few different questions, starting with what led to your focus on inclusive design and also if you could share the business case for inclusive design.

00:17:19:20 - 00:17:55:18 Alison I know our listeners would be very interested in that.

Raja Yeah. Firstly, inclusive by design is not about political correctness. I think it's... It should be self evident that if somebody is in a distress and if you are in a position to help, if somebody has a problem and if it can solve that problem, genuinely and their problem might be unique than the rest of the mainstream, so to speak, if you help them, they are grateful to the solution that you have given and they stick by you and you can actually have a very profitable business proposition.

00:17:55:19 - 00:18:19:10 Raja I keep saying that if you pursue purpose, profits will follow. They are not mutually exclusive. So what we really need to think about is how can we do things that are truly inclusive and can we make a business case for it? I'll give you one example. So when we started looking at say, you mentioned about Touch.

00:18:19:12 - 00:18:46:14 Raja So when we started looking at how many blind people out there in the world, and how do they use their payment products today? The experience was shockingly horrible. And we said, My god, the number of blind people in this world, fully blind or partially blind, is about 2 billion. I hope that number is wrong, but that's what statistic after statistic is actually showing.

00:18:46:14 - 00:19:10:05 Raja Assume that the number is 1 billion, it is a humungous number from just from a segment point of view. My grandmother was blind and I have a deep connection to that space, therefore, because growing up I have seen what she went through. Now, in this context, coming back to my business, which is credit cards and payments, payment cards, prepaid cards, debit cards, small.

00:19:10:06 - 00:19:28:18 Raja We said, how can we make it easy for a blind person to be able to use our cards? How do they know which is the front of the card, back of the card, where is the chip? Is it a debit card? Is it a credit card? Is it a MasterCard or some other card? How do they distinguish other than by putting it in a specific slot in that wallet or in their purse?

00:19:28:20 - 00:19:55:03 Raja So we said Braille should be the solution, because everyone is supposed to read Braille. But shockingly, a very tiny percentage of people, less than 10% of people who are sight impaired know how to read Braille. So that cannot be a solution. So we started racking our brains and eventually came up with that extremely simple solution where you provide a small notch on the side of the card, the shape of the notch tells you the type of the card. The location of the notch,

00:19:55:03 - 00:20:16:20 Raja if it is on the right side, just below the centre, you are holding the card the right way. If there is a notch, it is MasterCard. Now in one single small notch, we really came up with a comprehensive nice solution. When we launched it, what happens? It is now one of the fastest growing products that we have got. Highly profitable, already launched in 35 countries around the world.

00:20:16:22 - 00:20:42:03 Raja So there is, the results are coming from a business perspective, but the focus was actually on trying to solve the problem in a real way. And I have received countless emails from, I thought actually, even though my grandmother was blind, somehow I associated blindness with more elderly aged people. What I saw is so many mothers of kids who are teenagers and so on.

00:20:42:05 - 00:21:02:13 Raja They said we are so grateful for the solution because this is life changing for my child. It was unbelievable. The key thing is, it is hitting the right nerve amongst the audiences, those who are your core target audience, as well as the secondary tertiary audiences who are not blind themselves, but see the plight of the blind people.

00:21:02:15 - 00:21:27:13 Raja So this is something which is absolutely energizing. And when you talk of this, you know, purpose driven, that's one thing also which is very important is that attracting the right talent and keeping them at the company is very important, particularly if you are not the highest paid. And we don't want to compete on salaries or compensation. We want to compete on giving them the quality of the satisfaction of their work, right. of what they are doing.

00:21:27:15 - 00:21:53:01 Raja When you become truly purpose driven and really put your money where your mouth is and be consistent in your commitment to the cause and that the purpose you have a higher retention level, you are able to attract all the best talent. So it really solved so many things. So when people said, I have to do something purpose and it is a work thing or it is something which is basically meant for political correctness, I would say, stop, you've got it wrong.

00:21:53:03 - 00:22:12:00 Alison That's such a great example. I was on the board for the CNIB for six years, so I have a personal connection to it as well. But your example is also such a powerful counterpoint to the earlier conversation we had around loyalty, where the loyalty programs that we think are really building that true connection between brands and consumers are flawed.

00:22:12:06 - 00:22:49:13 Alison What you're doing from an inclusive design and recognizing a pain point that was solved with such a brilliant and simple solution is really driving true loyalty. Now, as we look to the future of marketing, what skills are most important for marketers in managing through the tech tsunami that we're all living through?

Raja I would say most of the top marketers, I would say, particularly the classical marketers, they're very good at psychology, sociology, design and areas like that, and the contemporary marketers are the ones who are more quantitative, analytical and they are much more left brained in their thinking.

00:22:49:15 - 00:23:16:15 Raja What you really need is a combination of these two. So which means you need people like Leonardo da Vinci, who are not easy to come by, and if they are there, they don't want to join marketing. They want to be in Silicon Valley or investment bank or be consultants. So we've got a tough challenge on that. But basically one of the things that we have to recognize is the future is going to be with the classical marketers who train themselves and upscale themselves at all technologies, data and finances.

00:23:16:17 - 00:23:34:22 Raja It's a little bit of going against that core grain, how to put the effort. Not to become experts in technology. So, for example, AI is coming, right? It's already upon us. People are saying AI is there, what do we do, how can we use it and stuff like that. But the fact is AI has been around for a long time.

00:23:34:22 - 00:23:57:21 Raja And MasterCard, we have been using it for more than ten years. And they built a whole digital marketing engine using AI and automation out of Singapore, six years back, before gen AI came. Now when gen AI came, that's when the prominence of overall AI has shot up. And many times marketers mean gen AI as the real AI, but as it is just a type of AI across the board.

00:23:57:23 - 00:24:24:23 Raja Now, the point is that if you don't know what AI is and what it can do, you get left behind very quickly. And I have seen the kind of productivity enhancements that AI can give you. It actually like, for example, in the B2B context. Okay. As an example, we have something called the RFP factory, which will respond to various RFPs that are given, sent to MasterCard. It used to take about 7 to 8 weeks before.

00:24:25:01 - 00:24:50:22 Raja Now it takes less than what that one day. One day. It takes, it frees up resources, it standardizes your responses, makes it more accurate and current. And it really looks at all the past RFPs that you have done, takes the tone out of those, takes the creatives out of those and really composes something which is incredibly more powerful than what a human being can do today. And in less than one day.

00:24:51:00 - 00:25:13:01 Raja So what the point is, if I am able to now do these kind of things across the entire marketing value chain, the gains can be incredible. But I talked about the digital marketing, the digital engine in Singapore that we created and now it is all around work. They're getting productivity enhancement between four and eight times. I'm not talking percentages, but I'm talking about multiples.

00:25:13:01 - 00:25:44:17 Raja So that's huge. I can kill my competition with that kind of a productivity. Now if you are not really caught up with the latest and greatest as far as technological enablements are concerned, you'll become obsolete, you'll be left behind. So the first thing I would tell marketers is you need to understand the new technologies. At this stage in my life and in my career, I spend about 5 to 6 hours every week educating myself on something new or deepening my knowledge on a subject that I wanted to pursue deeper.

00:25:44:18 - 00:26:01:06 Raja I think that's one thing people have to do. So skills wise, I would say learning agility today and investing time behind learning is the number one priority.

Alison That's such great advice and if you can find 5 hours to do it, there is no excuse for the rest of us. Now, before we go, you've been very generous with your time.

00:26:01:06 - 00:26:25:15 Alison I'd like to have you share one piece of advice that you think marketers most need to embrace in the year ahead.

Raja Learning. We spoke about it. But the second thing I would also say is that from a company's point of view, any company, I have worked at multiple companies are closely tracked in my voluntary role as the president of WFA, with my peers, CMOs around the countries across various companies.

00:26:25:17 - 00:26:48:22 Raja One of the biggest things is the C-suite in most of the companies doesn't get marketing. Whether it is a CEO, whether it is a CFO, whether it is a CIO, CHRO. Their understanding of marketing is very low. When their understanding of marketing is very low, you don't get full justice for what your team desires and they deserve, right.

00:26:49:00 - 00:27:23:09 Raja And you have to evangelize marketing, that the evangelization of marketing becomes with educating your peers. So one of the things I would say is for the coming year, if there is one priority organizationally that people have to set for themselves, is to build close bridges between themselves and the other C-suite executives and slowly pull them into the fold of marketing, meaning, involve them in their campaign creation, do creative workshops for them. They love get doing those kind of things because in their jobs there is not a whole bunch of creativity, honestly.

00:27:23:11 - 00:27:44:14 Raja Okay, and get them, take them to sponsorship events. Let them see the power of how your brand can be brought to life, how experiences can be curated. When you start drawing in these C-suite colleagues into the fold, what you'll see is they start embracing marketing, the start supporting marketing, then they'll start advocating for marketing. And that's a journey.

00:27:44:14 - 00:28:04:09 Raja It doesn't happen overnight, but I think the beginning of the journey, I would say if marketers are not already doing it, it's high time that you do it. And of course I talked about learning.

Alison That's such great advice and and evangelizing for marketing, it's inherent in the examples you've shared that in doing that effectively, it's all around the business performance and business results

00:28:04:09 - 00:28:23:19 Alison marketing can drive too. When you think about how to get the attention of the CEO and CFO, certainly it's got to be coming from what's in the best interests of the business and how marketing is playing a pivotal role in the success and growth of the business as well.

Raja Absolutely

Alison Well Raja, it has been an absolute delight. Thank you so much and I hope you have a wonderful day.

00:28:23:21 - 00:28:45:18 Raja Thank you, Alison. Thank you very much for having me, and you too, have a great day. Thank you.

Unknown Thanks for joining us. Be sure to visit the CMA.ca and sign up for your free My CMA account. It's a great way to stay connected and benefit from the latest marketing thought leadership news and industry trends.

In this episode of CMA Connect, Alison Simpson, the CEO of the CMA, sits down with Cynthia Pachovski, CEO of Ipsos Canada and Daniel Bernhard, CEO of the Institute for Canadian Citizenship. Together, they dive into their recent newcomer research, highlighting the myths and realities of racial diversity, the skills and talents newcomers bring, and their role in Canada's prosperity.

00:00:00:05 - 00:00:19:13 Speaker 1 Welcome to CMA Connect, Canada's marketing podcast, where industry experts discuss how marketers must manage the tectonic shifts that will change how brands and businesses are built for tomorrow, while also delivering on today's business needs. With your host, CMA CEO Alison Simpson.

00:00:24:18 - 00:00:53:08 Alison Canada, long known for our cultural diversity, has been a real beacon of hope and new beginnings for many. But beyond the warm welcomes, newcomers play an absolutely pivotal role in our nation's economic strength, as well as our demographic framework. They're more than just new faces. They're central to Canada's character and also Canada's growth. Consider this. In the last five year period, a stunning 79.9% of Canada's population growth has been attributed to immigration.

00:00:54:01 - 00:01:13:19 Alison And it's not just about numbers. It's about the fresh perspectives and skills that they bring with them. Over half of the immigrants who have made Canada their home were economic candidates who are well-poised to help grow and advance our country. The dynamic nature of Canada's economy is very closely linked to the fresh talent and entrepreneurship that's brought in by immigrants.

00:01:14:10 - 00:01:39:07 Alison For our business community and marketers, it's clear. Embracing diversity and innovation of our newest Canadians is key to our country's prosperity. In this episode, I'm thrilled to be joined by Cynthia Pachovski, CEO of Ipsos and Daniel Bernhard, CEO for the Institute for Canadian Citizenship. Ipsos and the Institute for Canadian Citizenship have joined forces to conduct a very robust research study on newcomers to Canada.

00:01:40:01 - 00:02:01:13 Alison In this discussion, we're going to explore the intriguing research findings that not only reveal the substantial contributions that newcomers bring to Canada's growth, but also some of the challenges that they face and the insights that can help revolutionize how we as marketers and citizens connect with and support this dynamic demographic. So welcome, Cynthia and Daniel.

00:02:01:23 - 00:02:02:16 Daniel Thanks for having me.

00:02:03:05 - 00:02:03:20 Cynthia Hello. Hi.

00:02:04:12 - 00:02:15:07 Alison So I'd like to start by having you share how newcomers contribute to Canada's population and economic growth. It would also be great to hear what impact the recent policy changes may have on these contributions.

00:02:15:21 - 00:02:38:23 Daniel Immigrants are, as you know, essential to Canada's future. But actually, I want to also talk before I do that about Canada's past. Canada's been an immigrant nation since that since the very beginning, before Europeans came here, there was lots of migration among Indigenous people from place to place, traveling and having to integrate into communities where they would arrive and abide by those laws. Afterwards were welcomed,

00:02:38:23 - 00:02:59:13 Daniel Europeans were welcomed here by Indigenous people, and the idea of Canada perpetually has been that there's more than enough to go around. It's a bountiful land and that you can come here and not be a renter, so to speak, but an owner of our society, not just a resident but a citizen. It's one of the things that distinguishes Canada from a place like Dubai, for example, where there's a huge foreign-born population.

00:02:59:18 - 00:03:20:20 Daniel They'll just never be owners of that society. You know, in Canada, you can be. And so immigrants continue to play an incredibly important role in Canadian life and the economy. We're talking about 80% of population growth, as you mentioned, over 100% of labour force growth in many cases. And a key driver of innovation, bringing with them ideas and perspectives from around the world.

00:03:21:02 - 00:03:38:16 Daniel The current policy changes that you talked about, well, I think what we see now is that Canada is beginning to turn its back towards immigrants. And at the same time, we see immigrants turning their back towards Canada. We can talk about that a little bit more if you like. But more and more, whether it's housing, health care, the education system,

00:03:38:16 - 00:04:07:22 Daniel Now in post-secondary education, it seems as though immigration is a key variable or axis in any of these policy discussions from a labor supply or, you know, supposed over abundance of demand for these services. We can talk about why those things aren't true if you want. But immigration is becoming a more and more important issue. And we believed really that if an issue this important can't just be managed on a whim, it needs to be managed based on data and based on the contributions of the many tens of thousands of newcomers themselves.

00:04:08:03 - 00:04:20:20 Daniel So many people purport to speak for them, and we decided through this partnership that they could be able to speak for themselves. So it's a central issue in Canada and we wanted to make sure there was really good sound data for policymakers and business leaders alike and to be able to adapt and contribute.

00:04:21:22 - 00:04:30:05 Alison I'd love you to do some myth busting and help us really understand the important role and how some of the things that are in the press really aren't true.

00:04:31:13 - 00:04:57:00 Cynthia So, interestingly, around the housing crisis, there is a sort of a tension here in the sense that the rising immigration is seen as a certain main reason for the housing crisis and most of the newcomers actually suffer from it at the same time. So it's not just on one situation. On one end, it's actually share the problem.

00:04:57:09 - 00:05:11:12 Cynthia 68% of immigrants say that it's the first problem or challenge they are facing when they arrived in Canada and even 86% of them say that the situation is worse than they expected on the matter.

00:05:11:20 - 00:05:32:01 Daniel And so what does this mean? This means that if Canada's dependent on immigrants for economic growth, social vitality and renewal, and all other manner of benefits, we need to stop just thinking about how many immigrants we quote, let in and permit, as though their situation in their home countries is so bad and everything in Canada is so good that the only question is how wide to open the door.

00:05:32:08 - 00:05:50:11 Daniel And what we're seeing is that actually people are coming here and saying, I don't know if I can make it here and they're leaving. And with them go talents and ideas and prosperity and potential. And so one of the things that we really wanted to do is clarify who immigrants are in this study. And that's something that's interesting for policymakers, but also for marketers and business leaders alike.

00:05:50:16 - 00:06:05:15 Daniel It's the only growing segment of the consumer economy and understanding them, I think, will be very beneficial not only in providing better service and meaning in the marketplace, as is probably a phrase that gets thrown around a lot on this podcast, but also for being a contributor to a positive life in the national interest.

00:06:06:18 - 00:06:11:22 Alison Daniel, I'd love to have you share with our listeners your definition of immigrants that were used for the study.

00:06:12:03 - 00:06:34:12 Daniel So the immigrants in this study are members of our Canoo Access Pass, this is an app that the Institute for Canadian Citizenship operates that gives people in their first five years of permanent residency free access to over 2000 of Canada's best culture and nature experiences, discounts with Air Canada, Via rail, pro sports, wine tours, ziplining, whale watching, you name it,

00:06:34:12 - 00:06:58:06 Daniel We got it. And the idea is to make the decision to move to Canada sticking and irreversible that people have a great time here, believe in this place, buy into it, become citizens and contribute for the long haul as Canadians. And so we have served over 400,000 people with this. Historically, there are about 250,000 people who are using it today, and they are the subjects effectively of this, of this research.

00:06:58:06 - 00:07:17:21 Daniel They come from all walks of life, all parts of Canada, and they are quite representative of immigrants themselves. They're younger than the Canadian population in general. They're better educated than the Canadian population in general. They come from very, very high future income potential, and they're quite optimistic and they're looking to make their way. So it's it's a really fascinating audience in a mode of discovery.

00:07:18:06 - 00:07:29:08 Daniel And they have been actually very, very forthcoming and eager to share their perspectives about how Canada can serve them better so that they, in turn, can make future contributions to Canada that are more valuable and enduring.

00:07:29:08 - 00:07:57:03 Cynthia And I would add that by this medium of having access to new Canadians, we are already at the, in the moment, at the perfect timing to be the most representative possible of immigrants because they are being captured precisely when they become citizens. So that's another very positive facts of the approach so that we have the best coverage possible of immigrants.

00:07:58:06 - 00:08:09:03 Alison That's great, Cynthia. I'd love to build on that. Given the importance of newcomers in Canada's growth, I know our listeners will be very interested to hear about the new research you collaborated on and how your two organizations came together.

00:08:10:04 - 00:08:37:11 Cynthia And Ipsos We have been working on this audience, immigrants and newcomers for a while. We have a lot of clients that we have that the requirements within the project and the results that we do. We ourselves have a community online, community offering newcomers where it's more a quality approach. And the big challenge that we have in market research in general is the ability to reach to

00:08:37:11 - 00:09:10:09 Cynthia Newcomers at scale, right? Because there is a lot of granularity, as you can imagine, because of the cultural background differences, because of the origins, the reason why you are coming to Canada, it's so diverse in nature that you need massive samples, if you want, of newcomers, to be able to understand what is at stake. And these granularity could only be a match with such a solution that the app and the members that the ICC has at their disposal.

00:09:10:10 - 00:09:27:13 Cynthia So it was kind of the meeting of the best world in this, and that's a market research founder and our already strong knowledge of newcomers and the ICC expertise and, and a pool of newcomers at their disposal.

00:09:28:02 - 00:09:56:14 Daniel You know and for us, I mean we had this this asset I suppose you can say this this audience, and we were increasingly frustrated by the clear lack of understanding in corporate Canada about who these people are and what they want. And so, for example, you know, there's a trend in advertising, as in the arts and in many other domains, to sort of fetishize diversity, to think that people who come from India, for example, just want to see Indian things.

00:09:56:14 - 00:10:17:12 Daniel And you know, that the multi-multi category, as they used to call it, and this was not only, you know, offensive, but also really counterproductive, our research shows that actually 96% of people who use our service are looking to have interactions with people outside of their cultural, ethnic and social group. And so we saw that this group was actually very misunderstood.

00:10:17:20 - 00:10:42:09 Daniel And Ipsos, as a as a research firm, also seems to have a really strong grasp of the fact that a customer is a whole person. They don't just exist in the marketplace and then go away. They vote, they have political interests, they've got other needs. And so we wanted to reflect that and understand that the stuff you buy and the services you receive and your corporate life as a consumer are huge, huge, huge, huge, huge influences

00:10:42:09 - 00:11:09:03 Daniel on your experience of life in Canada. That's just how it goes. And if we're not able to put the voices of newcomers into boardrooms, then we're going to really limit our impact and our ability to make Canada an enjoyable place. And so this was really a win win. Their philosophy, their focus on ESG really resonated with us. Cynthia's an immigrant herself, understands this experience really well from a personal perspective, and we wanted to put this asset to work in service of our mission.

00:11:09:03 - 00:11:15:14 Daniel So it was a really it was a really wonderful partnership that hopefully will bear fruits not just for us, but also for people who participate and subscribe to the study.

00:11:16:04 - 00:11:55:06 Cynthia And another dimension that making a difference here is your ability to get insights over time. One of the key learning we got from the pre study we did is newcomers are not a static audience and it's the needs and and perception and expectations are evolving, with is actually a pretty short time span. And it's very important to be on top of this evolution and this and these changes to make sure that precisely government and companies can address that at the right time.

00:11:56:06 - 00:12:00:15 Alison What are some of the most surprising findings that you've uncovered in the Newcomers study so far?

00:12:01:09 - 00:12:30:21 Cynthia One of the most interesting fact finding is that from a newcomers' perspective, Canada is not necessarily delivering on promise. Immigration is expected to be one of the key drivers of economic growth in Canada. Still, newcomers say that the situation is worse than they expected before coming, for housing, for their financial situation and also professional integration.

00:12:31:10 - 00:12:58:14 Cynthia So there are a lot of essential aspects at stake when that one of the reason they came to Canada and the situation is not as promising as it was supposed to be. And we have one quote you'll find very interesting to encapsulate, that is, I'm not sure it is worth the money I am losing each year and cannot progress I lack. How and when will I be able to recover from this time gap.

00:12:58:21 - 00:13:08:22 Cynthia So that promise is high and delivering on that promise is an issue that as a society and as an economy, we need to to address.

00:13:09:09 - 00:13:30:19 Daniel I found some really interesting things, you know, for example, people's disappointment with Canada seems to grow, not shrink with the time that they're here. In other words, you would think that someone settles in and has a hard go that and then gradually finds their way. But actually, you know, satisfaction with some of the kind of key pillars of of of the corporate scene declines progressively as people get familiar.

00:13:30:19 - 00:13:52:12 Daniel The more they know, the less they like. There's also some interesting findings, especially around financial services and some other kind of high value sectors where, you know, we see these companies pouring so much money into pre-arrival clients, like trying to get people the first day that they come. But actually there are indications that there are windows of switch-ability resulting from this dissatisfaction

00:13:52:12 - 00:14:12:19 Daniel much later in the piece that some of these companies haven't seem to realize yet. Instead, they're pouring money into people who are pre-arrival, who may be leaving because they're international students or they're on a temporary visa or they don't get permanent residency. So we've started to also see some sort of key disconnects between the data and that sort of typical practices in the marketplace, that I think have been really have been really fascinating.

00:14:12:19 - 00:14:43:23 Daniel But the one that just really jumps out to me is people, as Cynthia said, they do feel welcomed by the government, by society, by other Canadians, and the level of dissatisfaction in some of these major categories, which I don't need to name, but I think you can all guess, suggest that there are real great opportunities for companies that want to be a little bit more ambitious and a little bit more effective to win in this category and in so doing, make light the life experience of newcomers in Canada so much better so that they stay, become citizens and contribute for the long term.

00:14:43:23 - 00:14:52:23 Daniel So there's a lot of opportunity and a lot of zones of opportunity that have been identified just in this formative initial study and in subsequent waves, I think we'll get deeper and deeper into.

00:14:54:09 - 00:15:27:12 Cynthia Link to that, another very interesting fact is that, you know, we were talking about the fact that it's a very dynamic audience, if I may, or group, and you know, the journey and the immigration stage you are in is everything. So at first the expectations are pretty basic. It's more about price, it's pragmatism, it's effectiveness. In the service you are expecting from companies and the time passes and your level of expectations are growing.

00:15:27:17 - 00:15:51:09 Cynthia For instance, we have observed that for banking, the satisfaction never are going down from when you arrived until the third year. Let's say it's almost the fourth year of your arrival in Canada. And that's when churn is likely to happen, right? And then we go to another bank, right, to get better, a better service, because your expectation has grown.

00:15:51:09 - 00:16:10:18 Cynthia You have started to build a life for yourself. You have your assets, certainly back from your country of origin, and the level of expectation is completely different. So adapting to these dynamics is essential for businesses to continue to to succeed with this consumer group.

00:16:11:11 - 00:16:28:09 Alison Beyond the dissatisfaction, you also mentioned that the situation is insenting newcomers to opt out of Canada, and that's clearly a trajectory that we would want to change. So do you have any initial learning or advice on what we can do to improve the situation for newcomers so that they don't opt out and decide to leave Canada?

00:16:29:03 - 00:16:50:00 Daniel I'd like to just take a second, if I may, some of your listeners may not be familiar with the extent to which immigrants are opting out of Canada. We published a study at the end of October last year in collaboration with the Conference Board of Canada, called The Leaky Bucket, which actually answered a question that I had for two years that, you know, how many immigrants are staying in Canada and actually the government didn't know.

00:16:50:00 - 00:17:11:03 Daniel And until we looked into it, no one had bothered to check, which is revealing in and of itself, showed that Canada's immigration retention rate has declined by 31% in recent years. We're talking about, you know, significant changes. It used to take 25 years for 20% of an immigrant cohort to leave the country. Now it takes less than 20 years and that's shrinking

00:17:11:03 - 00:17:38:16 Daniel considerably. Among certain cohorts, it's even higher. So investor class, entrepreneur class, small and medium business owners, people who are admitted in these categories are almost twice as likely to leave the country within ten years as their counterparts in other immigration categories. So this is humongous. I mean, from a from a consumer segment perspective, it's huge. From a labour force perspective, it's a humongous problem. From a capital investment perspective, it's a huge, huge issue.

00:17:38:22 - 00:17:58:13 Daniel So I think Canada doesn't necessarily realize that our story of immigrants being people who show up with no English and $5 in their pocket like my parents did, work hard and make their way through and all that kind of stuff. We still tell that story. You know who the contemporary immigrant is? It's Cynthia, who's the CEO of a major corporation of the Canadian outlet.

00:17:58:17 - 00:18:24:18 Daniel Right? With major global experience. And if she decides that Canada isn't working for her, that's our loss, not hers. And so we need to shift our mindset from immigration being something that we do as an exercise of compassion to something that we do as an exercise of ambition and realize that we are competing with other countries in the world, including the home countries that these people come from, whose economic status has increased dramatically in recent decades.

00:18:25:01 - 00:18:58:19 Daniel And so, you know, if you're a phone provider in Canada as a telco, I'm just giving an example, you know, you're Bell, you're not just competing against Rogers and Telus, you're competing against the standard of people in India who are able to get way better service for way less money, and that's their expectation that you're competing against. So I think we just need to recognize that as Canada's become more and more selective about who we bring into the country, that the status and quality and characteristics and capabilities of the immigrant population has grown immeasurably, which means that they also are more mobile and they have other options.

00:18:59:01 - 00:19:14:21 Daniel And if they exercise those options, that's bad for your business from a staffing perspective, it's bad for your business from a consumer perspective, and it's bad for the entire country that needs both your business and the employment market and all of these other things to be humming and growing. Immigration has been the source of that growth and immigrants turn their back on Canada,

00:19:14:21 - 00:19:35:21 Daniel Canada is the one who pays the price. So that's been the situation. And in terms of winning, in terms of making the situation better, like I said earlier, a better experience in daily consumer life makes a difference. If you get off the phone with your cell phone company and they're ripping you off and charging all kinds of terrible fees and you feel terrible about it, you will say, Why did I come here?

00:19:35:21 - 00:19:56:01 Daniel This is awful, right? And so it's not just about your consumer experience, but which company you choose. This informs your experience of life in Canada. And I think that companies need to be recognizing that they're having a bigger impact, not just whether they win or lose a customer, but actually whether Canada wins or loses a contributor. It's much bigger than just your business.

00:19:56:13 - 00:20:29:00 Cynthia Fun fact - to illustrate what Daniel is saying is, when we ask a question about how do you feel treated, if you feel welcome, new Canadians, as well as Canadians by the way, feel very positive about it, but it's relatively less about businesses, how they are treated and welcomed by businesses than any other institutional non-for-profit organization. So it's not negative, but they don't say like we are not welcome, we are not treated well, but relatively less than other instances.

00:20:29:00 - 00:20:51:01 Daniel And this should be obvious to marketers, right? I mean, you know, marketers don't sell that we have the best widget for less money, right? They sell, they sell existential stuff, they sell belonging, they sell status, they sell sex appeal, they sell whatever. Right. Marketers intuitively should understand that people's relationship with these products are associated with broader satisfaction with life.

00:20:51:08 - 00:21:00:18 Daniel And what we're seeing is that in this category anyways, people don't seem to totally get it. And that message is getting through to immigrants and it affects the degree to which they think that Canada is a viable choice.

00:21:01:21 - 00:21:21:12 Alison So given Canada's cultural mosaic, lots of smart marketers have long embraced multicultural marketing. It might be tempting for some brands to think that their multicultural marketing also addressed newcomers. So it would be really helpful for you to speak to some of the key differences that are really unique to newcomers and how best to reach and market to them.

00:21:22:12 - 00:21:44:03 Daniel While this Ipsos study doesn't get into that right away, and as Cynthia said before, we're just going to become more and more granular, more and more specific as the study picks up momentum, I can tell you from other research that the Institute for Canadian Citizenship has done ourselves on the same population that, you know, we've learned that there are some major blind spots that marketers have.

00:21:44:08 - 00:22:05:10 Daniel For example, assuming that people's attachment to their home culture is greater than their desire to integrate into Canadian society. You know, we're a small team. We have 33 people on our staff. They come from 18 different countries. And so we're able to get a pretty strong perspective just in the office. And people say, I didn't want to live in Pakistan anymore.

00:22:05:10 - 00:22:31:09 Daniel I wanted to move to Canada. And as much as it's great to receive my marketing in Urdu, I speak English very well. I've got a Ph.D. which I wrote in English, and I want to know what life is like here. And so this idea of belonging into the country, of treating newcomers in many cases is like a separate fetishized category, that don't speak the language, that have no cultural awareness and need to be sort of spoon fed in these strangely patronizing ways which people believe,

00:22:31:09 - 00:22:48:19 Daniel I think, they intention them well, they believe them to just be accommodation or welcoming or flexibility or, you know, whatever you want to use. But actually it sort of disregards what people's experience tends to be, which is they want to come to Canada, They want to do stuff that Canadians do, and they want to be they want to be involved.

00:22:48:19 - 00:23:10:02 Daniel And so I think that's that's one big difference that we're learning and also that sensitivities like, you know, price and things like that apply even more so to this population that has big expectations about improving their lot in life compared to the typical consumer who of course, wants to make more money and do better, but may have smaller ambitions or smaller expectations of a big jump

00:23:10:09 - 00:23:30:06 Daniel than someone who's made such a dramatic move as to move country. They're expecting something much more and they're much more price-sensitive. So there's that plus the sort of cultural misunderstanding in the marketing. I think these are two things that our other research have taught us need to be addressed. And this research, that tells us what we don't want to do in this research, I think will start to tell us what we do want to do

00:23:30:10 - 00:23:34:06 Daniel And that's where I think the main value will be, will be to the subscribers.

00:23:35:10 - 00:24:19:04 Cynthia Another important fact that can help your point here is the impact and the importance of influencers. Like influencers of newcomers, particularly in the first few years. There is a lot of community building for newcomers and yeah this, not new Canadians that have been there for a while become a source of influence of advice for newcomers and that's more where the community express itself within this group.

00:24:20:03 - 00:24:45:12 Daniel Anecdotally I'll just add one last thing, which is that I think that newcomers to some extent feel exploited. They feel exploited by landlords, they feel exploited by educational institutions, they feel undervalued by their employers in large respect, and their statistics to bear that out. And to the extent that they just get marketed at, you know, very aggressively and quite transparently, based on their immigration status, I think people get defensive.

00:24:45:12 - 00:25:02:04 Daniel And one of the main advantages of our Canoo Pass, marketing through it, but also the research that we derive as a result from it, is that we are trusted in a sense because we're giving gifts. We're telling people, you're welcome, you're welcome here, you're in demand here, and we're going to put you up at the front of the line.

00:25:02:04 - 00:25:17:13 Daniel And so I think that building a trust relationship is also very important. And and we may not be doing that enough. Now, that's not something that our research bears out just yet. You could perhaps make associations, but it's something that we found in our general experience that I think marketers would do well to take to heart.

00:25:18:02 - 00:25:28:04 Alison So to close off our discussion, I'd love to have you each share one piece of advice for our listeners around what they can do to support and encourage newcomers to Canada.

00:25:29:00 - 00:26:08:00 Cynthia Now in French, we have a saying that says ********** meaning the advisors are not the ones paying the bills. What I would say is - listen, listen, be open, listen dynamically. Newcomers, as we said, it's a very moving dynamic group, that to make sure every dollar you invest in them, you get the return to investment that you want.

00:26:08:00 - 00:26:22:19 Cynthia You need to capture the essence of what they need at the moment they need it. That makes it pretty both interesting as marketers to work on, and that's what's going to the most rewarding for you.

00:26:23:13 - 00:26:41:00 Daniel The other thing I would just emphasize is to remember that when you're investing in a relationship with with a newcomer to Canada, you're not just investing in a new customer. Like when Bell calls me and says, go, you know, come from Rogers or Rogers calls me and says, come from Bell, and we just play this game back and forth.

00:26:41:18 - 00:27:13:17 Daniel You're investing in a lifelong relationship with somebody who will associate your brand and their experience with your brand, with how they perceive life in Canada more generally. And so you're doing a huge service to Canada, especially in these fundamental categories, if your customers are satisfied. But more than that, people who are facing discrimination, who are being charged rent too high, who don't know anybody who are having trouble making social networks, they will remember the people who treated them well.

00:27:13:17 - 00:27:37:01 Daniel And we could do a whole other podcast about brand stories from immigrants that I've heard who say when we came here and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And now we always eat at this restaurant every single time that we go on a road trip, because of that relationship between that restaurant and our immigration journey. You are talking to people at a hugely influential, open minded point in their lives when they're building lifelong brand loyalties in Canada.

00:27:37:16 - 00:27:49:04 Daniel That's a real opportunity that's different than just winning another switcher. And if you don't realize that, I think it will be to your detriment. So that would be the other thing. These are not just normal customers. This is a lifelong relationship at stake.

00:27:49:12 - 00:28:12:17 Alison So not surprisingly, this has been an incredibly insight, rich discussion. You have also done a really great job of myth busting and really bringing to light the important role of immigrants to our country, as well as the sophistication and, and who they are and challenged certainly my thinking, and others thinking, and stereotypes to become a lot more broad.

00:28:13:03 - 00:28:28:17 Alison So huge thank you, Cynthia and Daniel, for a truly great discussion. I'm fascinated to see how the research continues. Would love to have you both back in a few months to share some updates, but thank you both for a really, really great discussion.

00:28:29:00 - 00:28:29:13 Speaker 4 Thank you.

00:28:29:13 - 00:28:33:10 Speaker 3 Thank you.

00:28:33:10 - 00:28:53:20 Speaker 1 Thanks for joining us. Be sure to visit the CMA.ca and sign up for your free My CMA account. It's a great way to stay connected and benefit from the latest marketing thought leadership news and industry trends.

In this episode of CMA Connect, Alison Simpson, the CEO of the CMA, welcomes Kim Saunders, Vice President of ESG Strategy and Community Impact at Canadian Tire Corporation. Canadian Tire is dedicated to business growth and creating real change through philanthropy, ESG initiatives, fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion, championing gender equality in sports, and giving back to communities to shape a brighter future for Canada for generations to come.

00:00:00:07 - 00:00:22:12 Unknown Welcome to CMA Connect, Canada's marketing podcast, where industry experts discuss how marketers must manage the tectonic shifts that will change how brands and businesses are built for tomorrow, while also delivering on today's business needs. With your host, CMA CEO Alison Simpson.

00:00:22:14 - 00:00:46:01 Alison Welcome to a pivotal discussion on marketers and brands embracing ESG, environmental, social and governance. It's a strategy that's proving to be more than just an ethical choice, but absolutely a transformative business advantage and a really important way for marketers and businesses to get back to the communities that they're part of. Amidst the cultural shift towards environmental consciousness, as well as social accountability,

00:00:46:03 - 00:01:10:18 Alison ESG is often taking centre stage. And again, it's not merely as a compliance checklist, but as a core pillar of visionary business leadership. Beyond being the right thing to do, it's also smart business. Companies that are integrating ESG principles are witnessing very tangible benefits. They're seeing improved investment returns, enhanced brand loyalty and business resilience in the face of global challenges.

00:01:10:19 - 00:01:45:14 Alison In Canada, the positive ripples of ESG centred operations resonate with heightened consumer expectations that are driving companies to innovate for a better tomorrow. In today's episode, we're joined by an absolute leading light in corporate Canada's journey towards sustainability and impactful community engagement. It's a pleasure for me to have Kim Saunders with us today as the vice president of ESG Strategy, Community Impact and Sponsorships for Canadian Tire. Kim's responsible for the strategic development and programmatic build out of the company's ESG strategy and philanthropic spending.

00:01:45:16 - 00:02:06:14 Alison She also leads the marketing and fundraising support for the company's charity partner, Jumpstart, and has successfully developed some really exciting strategic community and sports partnerships. We're really looking forward to chatting with her about those today. So Kim, I'm absolutely thrilled to have you on our podcast. Kim Amazing. Thank you for having me. Alison So, Kim, as you know, I had the pleasure of chatting with Canadian

00:02:06:15 - 00:02:30:21 Alison Tire Chief Brand and Customer Officer Susan O'Brien on CMA Connect last year. It was very evident from that conversation and also from the one that you and I had earlier, that in addition to Canadian Tire being a renowned Canadian brand and delivering strong, consistently powerful business results and growth, you're also very much focused on giving back to the country and communities that you're part of.

00:02:30:23 - 00:02:50:18 Alison I know philanthropy and ESG have been a longstanding part of the Canadian Tire business, and approach. I also understand that it evolved fairly dramatically throughout the pandemic. So can you share a little bit about how it evolved and how that impacted your brand values? I know our listeners will also really enjoy hearing how you're now focusing your efforts from an ESG perspective.

00:02:50:23 - 00:03:08:04 Kim Yeah, absolutely. I'm thrilled to be here and talk about this topic. It's very near and dear to my heart and to us as a brand. As you mentioned, we've been around for 100 years. You're hard pressed to find a Canadian who doesn't know who Canadian Tire is and one of the most critical things they'll tell you is how much we support our community.

00:03:07:00 - 00:03:28:12 Kim And it is, it's been part of the DNA of the organization. If you go right back to the founders. They created a dealer model, which with the notion that we would share the business with others. The dealer model was about helping others take advantage and grow their own businesses. So right into the roots of the organization you get that notion of sharing and helping others.

00:03:28:17 - 00:03:49:06 Kim And as you follow the company's journey throughout the hundred years, you'll see many times where they were there for any disaster, any community need. The creation of Jumpstart that you mentioned earlier, helping kids with financial need, get access to sport and play. We are there when Canadians need us, and our dealer community are so generous at a local level as well.

00:03:49:06 - 00:04:11:17 Kim They are part of every philanthropic or community event that happens, and it's just it's part of who we are. But the pandemic was a really interesting moment for us because the country needed more than just what we sell and just our work that we do in sport. The country needed us to show up in a different way. None of us had been through something like this and we did what we always do.

00:04:11:17 - 00:04:34:15 Kim We showed up with our Covid response fund, and we put money into the needed charities, but we put PPE into the hands of frontline health care workers, which is not something you would typically think of as an action Canadian Tire would do. But it's what people needed from us. And that really spawned that internal look at ourselves to say, Hey, our role here is so much bigger in this country than just what we sell.

00:04:34:17 - 00:04:57:13 Kim And it is bigger than just helping kids get into sport. So critical that that action, but we also can do and should do more and that really spawned us looking inward at our brand purpose and revising it is what I would say. It's not a new action, it's a modernization of it and bringing forward. So we live by the mantra that we are here to make life in Canada better.

00:04:57:16 - 00:05:16:18 Kim That's our role. That's what we're here to do. And ESG, so our environmental actions, our social actions, and even how we govern ourselves is proof to that. It's the trust that you can put in us because we treat the planet and the people in our communities with the utmost respect. We do more for them and we give more than we take.

00:05:16:18 - 00:05:48:02 Kim And that's really where this all started for us.

Alison That's such a great combination of, the core to the business for 100 years and as the world around you, as Canadians around you are changing and evolving, you're staying true to your core principles and values, but doing it in a way that will resonate with today's consumers and tomorrow's. So your evolved vision is to be applauded and your deep commitment to ESG is absolutely something that I am thrilled to have your company leading.

00:05:48:04 - 00:06:09:21 Kim Amazing. Thank you.

Alison You certainly have a lot of well-deserved press around your decision to dedicate half of your sponsorship dollars towards women in sport. The act of actually doing it and making that commitment by a brand of your magnitude and profile within Canada is a first. And I have to say, as a woman who has personally benefited from sport in my life, I absolutely applaud the initiative.

00:06:09:23 - 00:06:28:04 Alison I'd really love you to tell us what led to that decision and what made now the right time to make the commitment.

Kim Yeah, it's an amazing thing that we do. Sport, as you know, as we mentioned off the top, is so foundational to us at Canadian Tire. We just believe in its power to impact children, to impact families, to impact lives at any age.

00:06:28:06 - 00:06:55:05 Kim And we first started having a conversation around sport back in 2018 when the women started coming back from the Olympics with lots and lots of gold medals. And we knew then that women in this country were poised for something really great. It wasn't something we really dove too deep into, partially because the infrastructure wasn't there. There wasn't really a place for women to go post-Olympics.

00:06:55:05 - 00:07:15:02 Kim For many sports, that is sort of the pinnacle. Or you end up going outside of your own borders of your country to play the sport you love. And for various reasons, both the infrastructure not being there, our organization being focused on a few things, we kind of let it sit there and bubble as we knew it was something we wanted to dig into, and we knew that the time had to be right.

00:07:15:04 - 00:07:44:17 Kim And then we sort of started to watch what was happening. And then some really impactful research came out of Canadian women in sport around the marketplace for women's professional sport, the business opportunity and really driving the case. And we kind of said to ourselves, now's the time. We can take a leadership position here. We can try and take all that great research and great experience that we're seeing out there and put our weight of our brand behind it and create that impactful change that we want to see.

00:07:44:19 - 00:08:09:00 Kim And so that time came to us because the infrastructure was starting to be built with the women's PWHL league starting to take shape, with Diana Matheson's Project 8 and her desire to create a domestic soccer league here starting to take shape, the WNBA bringing their first exhibition game here to Canada and it blowing the roof off Scotiabank Arena with people wanting to see more.

00:08:09:02 - 00:08:20:16 Kim So we knew there was momentum and we knew that we had a brand that could take a leadership role and help drive that further.

00:08:20:18 - 00:08:28:07 Alison And what's the response been like from your employees, your store owners, and you consumers?

Kim I think it's been even more than we could have imagined. We knew this would be a big moment. We did not expect it to be this big.

00:08:28:09 - 00:08:55:04 Kim Our employees could not be prouder of the actions we've taken. We hear it daily from them. We have had incredible response from female athletes, from other brands calling us, calling our other senior leaders to say, great, courageous job. We can't believe you took the leadership to do that. There's nothing greater than your C-suite getting a call from someone else's C-suite saying, great job.

00:08:55:06 - 00:09:21:20 Kim The industry has taken note of it. And I think what's most important is I see the consumers and the fans showing up to those events. You just have to try and get a ticket to a PWHL game in Toronto to know that there's something real here. There's something magical, and I'm thrilled to be able to be on the sidelines of what's going to happen with Project 8, what potentially could happen in basketball and any other sports that might come to life through this.

00:09:21:21 - 00:09:46:05 Kim So we are not the only brand in this game anymore. And that's the most exciting part, is that we were able to, yes, for us take a leadership position, but hopefully help spark some change that helps move others on to that side of the field.

Alison In Canada and globally, there's been a bit of a misperception that women's sporting events can't attract the same sort of audience and revenue and viewership as male sports.

00:09:46:05 - 00:10:12:20 Alison So I love the fact that you played a pivotal role in myth-busting and helping Canadians, and even globally, to build up appreciation that absolutely a great athlete is a great athlete and we are at least as compelling. So thank you.

Kim My pleasure. Listen, as a woman who loved sport and as a mother of a daughter in sport, I just I think this is so needed and honestly, it's great sport to watch whatever gender they're on, the ice or the field,

00:10:12:20 - 00:10:35:22 Kim it's a great sport to watch. And it's really exciting for me that we've been able to make such a big movement on the gender front, and it encourages me with the other parts of our strategy around sport and equity, which is helping Bipoc communities, LGBTQ communities, communities, indigenous communities. How do we help make sure that sport in this country is equal and welcoming and inclusive?

00:10:36:00 - 00:11:03:07 Kim That's the goal and I hope we're here for many years to come doing doing this work.

Alison Kim, with your really rich experience in driving these types of initiatives for it, what advice do you have for marketers who want to drive impactful ESG programs and don't have your personal experience and are probably earlier in the journey than you?

Kim Yeah, I think I think there's a few things I'd say to someone who was looking at this space and excited by it, which is - Dig in, learn.

00:11:03:09 - 00:11:36:09 Kim There's a ton of great information out there, literature, research, examples of brands who've taken advantage of the moment. So get out there and see who's done this and learn from it. A great resource that I love to share with people and really a foundational key to how we've built our ESG strategy is the Porter and Kramer Shared Value principle. Porter and Kramer are a couple of Harvard professors who a few years ago created the Shared Value Initiative, which is really the notion that you can have societal benefit and profit together.

00:11:36:09 - 00:11:58:08 Kim And as a corporation, it's not just an opportunity, it's actually your obligation. It's a bit of a challenge on capitalism and its traditional state. So we really are embedded that into our thinking. And I would challenge people to go out there, learn about it, think about it, how they can bring that to life. I'd like to talk about this work is, it's actions before adds You have to have meaningful action.

00:11:58:08 - 00:12:23:06 Kim You need meaningful, positive change for the stakeholders you're engaging with. And from that comes the best, richest storytelling you'll ever get. When you start with - How do I get the ad or the TV campaign or the marketing award for it? I think you lose a little bit of that richness and potential depth when you start with - How can I make a meaningful impact on the planet, on the people who are on this planet?

00:12:23:08 - 00:12:50:14 Kim If I think about the impact I can have, the stories will start to tell itself. And in fact, all of those stakeholders will help you tell that story of your journey. So I think that's a big thing, I'd say. The other part is just put your elbows up and get to the table. Ask your organization because you will find out that they are advocates for much of this work, whether it's protecting the environment or helping communities drive equality or being there for social change.

00:12:50:14 - 00:13:08:21 Kim Your employee base, your leadership, they all have personal views to this and I think you can harness a lot of power in looking at your employee base.

Alison That's great advice. Kim. I love your mantra, actions before ads. I'd love to hear if you could you give us an example of one of the stories that emerged from some of the actions that you took?

00:13:09:02 - 00:13:32:06 Kim Absolutely. Something that I might share with this group of listeners that I think could be very valuable would be how we have thought about diversity, equity and inclusion. In 2020, when George Floyd was murdered, all brands thought about how they could participate in a social conversation that was much needed. And we really chose the action of we need to think about this internally first.

00:13:32:09 - 00:13:52:21 Kim We need to think about - look inside ourselves and figure out what we need to fix about ourselves and take care of our employees. And from there we will then have an opportunity to talk about it later as a brand. And frankly, we sort of said you probably won't see an ad from us talking about our our diversity and inclusion strategies any time soon.

00:13:53:00 - 00:14:17:12 Kim What you're going to see us do is make conscious decisions about the products that are on our shelves or not on our shelves. Make conscious decisions about the spaces that we put into our regular advertising or into our marketing initiatives. You're going to see us talk to our employees in a different way. So we've taken the tone of - we could have put an ad campaign out there, but we've chosen to actually drive meaningful impact with our current stakeholders.

00:14:17:17 - 00:14:43:17 Kim And that in and of itself is how we come to market.

Alison So the CMA is part of annual most influential brands each year and earlier in the year we unveiled the 2023 most influential brands. One of the key insights that came out of this year's study was the really important role that partnerships and sponsorships can have in a brand's ability to influence consumers and clients in particular.

00:14:43:19 - 00:15:16:09 Alison I know that you got a lot of great relationships and partnerships and sponsorships, so I'd love to understand your approach to selecting the right partnerships and sponsors.

Kim Yeah, and I've had a long time in partnerships and sponsorship, and so I am a big believer in what that medium can do. To your point, from influencing change and driving opportunity for your business and your brand, but also in creating the stories that are so rich for an integrated marketing team to be able to play with. What goes into our strategy is, is a combination of things.

00:15:16:10 - 00:15:40:22 Kim It's about who the partner is and what they do. That's where we generally start. What's the impact they are having, what is the impact that they can have on the community with your support? And that community can be anything from a sort of more philanthropic social issue, straight up to, you know, professional sports and having an impact on inspiring kids and adults alike.

00:15:41:00 - 00:16:00:07 Kim So it's not necessarily about a social or a traditional ESG partnership. It could be any kind of partnership. But what are the values of that organization? What do they offer? What can you build together? And then how do you make sure that you are creating something that gives more than you take back? That's some of the things that we look at.

00:16:00:09 - 00:16:26:02 Alison That's very helpful. Thank you. So marketing budgets, certainly by extension sponsorships, and ESG initiatives, can often be the first to face cuts during tough economic times. I'm curious about how you maintain your commitment to those areas when you're faced with financial constraints, in particular, how do you continue to drive and advance your company's purpose during periods of budget pressures, which could include everything up to staff layoffs?

00:16:26:02 - 00:16:53:23 Kim Yeah, it's a great question because obviously when economies are in a tough state and businesses are looking at cost cutting with with regards to the current situation, it's an easy place to think about sponsorship and partnerships to go. What I would say is your values don't change because the economy's in a tough spot. So if you've entered into that partnership based on mutual values and mutual opportunity to impact the country, that's not going to change.

00:16:54:05 - 00:17:19:12 Kim How you bring it to life may change, how you operationalize it for that year may slightly adjust, but the value of being together as a partner won't. And so I think it's about choosing wisely when you go into that relationship. Good economy, bad economy. It's about thinking about why are we in this together and what are we achieving so that you know that when tough times hit, you still want to be in that relationship together.

00:17:19:14 - 00:17:38:19 Alison That's super helpful, Kim, and I love your call out that when times are tough, they're not just tough for our businesses and our brands. They're tough for the people that your sponsorships and your initiatives are helping serve, too. So it's in many ways the worst time to be walking away from a support when it can be also the time that's most needed.

00:17:38:21 - 00:17:59:00 Kim Yeah, absolutely. I think it is a time to double down and it's hard to do, absolutely, when you're faced with those pressures of the business reality, especially if you're a publicly traded company. There's just a business reality to it. But that's really the time to almost double down, particularly if they are things that impacts your employee base or whether they impact communities that are marginalized communities.

00:17:59:00 - 00:18:20:16 Kim That's where they need us the most. So, maybe you rethink that relationship, but I don't know that you always walk from that.

Alison So Kim, you have shared so many incredibly valuable insights with us today. Before I let you go off to your busy day though, I would love to take the opportunity to have you share one piece of advice for marketers.

00:18:20:16 - 00:18:47:01 Kim One piece of advice. If you are going to enter into the ESG realm, I would say roll your sleeves up, lean in to the table, get your elbows up. It's not always an easy fight. You are definitely asking for things that are sometimes ten and 15 years down the line when they return on that investment. You're asking for things that seem sometimes to be counterintuitive to the day to day running of the business.

00:18:47:03 - 00:19:07:05 Kim But if you believe in it and you know it's got that impact, roll your sleeves up, get your elbows up, get to the table and ask and know that it's a long time journey, but it's based on the right thing.

Alison I love that advice and I'm going to actually squeeze in one more question coming off of your advice. What attracted you to this particular part of building brands in marketing?

00:19:07:05 - 00:19:27:14 Kim What attracted me to this type of work was the opportunity to have an impact. Real meaningful impact, and being able to tie products and a strong business to a strong community and a strong country. To me, that is the ultimate opportunity here, is we can grow our business and we can do some good in the world.

00:19:27:14 - 00:19:53:13 Kim And I think that that for me is that is what's the most attractive about it. I don't have to pick, you know, whether we can make some money or I can have a good job with doing something for others in need. I get to be able to do both. And I think as brands, what an amazing opportunity for us to change the shape of this country, to change the way our planet is, is situated right now, to be able to do that and still grow a healthy business.

00:19:53:15 - 00:20:28:12 Alison I am so glad I snuck in. One last question. Thank you for indulging me. I love the way you answered that and how you're demonstrating the critical role the marketing profession plays in both building business and building our country. So Kim, it has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much and continued success.

Kim Thank you. I appreciate you having me here and championing this work and this way of thinking where I think it's an amazing opportunity for all marketers to get behind it.

00:20:28:14 - 00:20:41:03 Unknown Thanks for joining us. Be sure to visit the CMA.ca and sign up for your free My CMA account. It's a great way to stay connected and benefit from the latest marketing thought leadership, news and industry trends.

In this episode of CMA Connect, Alison Simpson, the CEO of the CMA, welcomes Jay Badiani, Chief Marketing Officer at IBM Canada. They'll explore the shifting B2B landscape, from new trends to cybersecurity challenges, and discuss IBM's mission to lead in business AI solutions, particularly within the Canadian context.

00:00:02:10 - 00:00:45:15

Welcome to Cinema Connect Canada's marketing podcast, where industry experts discuss how marketers must manage the tectonic shifts that will change how brands and businesses are built for tomorrow, while also delivering on today's business needs. With your host, CMS CEO Allison Simpson.

Alison Simpson

In today's ever evolving B2B marketing landscape, we're witnessing a transformative shift in both strategies and priorities. So as Canadian businesses are seeking to stay competitive and relevant through an incredible tsunami of change, it's absolutely imperative that marketers embrace new technologies, really bring a learning mindset to what they're doing, and take advantage of all the tools that are available to them today.

00:00:45:17 - 00:01:06:11

Alison Simpson

So to guide us through this very exciting time, I'm absolutely thrilled to have Jay Baghdadi, the chief marketing officer of IBM Canada, joining us today. With Jay's wealth of experience leading a client centric and agile team across the full marketing mix, he's uniquely qualified to offer a great vantage point into the insights that are shaping the needs of B2B companies across diverse industries.

00:01:06:12 - 00:01:26:14

Alison Simpson

So welcome, Jay. Thank you very much for having me, Allison. So let's kick things off with the diversity of clients and industries that IBM partners with. You have a really broad perspective, broader than most. So now that you were in the first quarter 2020 for AJ, what B-to-B trends are you seeing yourself from your role and also among your clients?

00:01:26:16 - 00:02:13:19

Jay Badiani

Yeah, that's a really great question, and especially because we've seen really strong economy in the last few years being slowed down a little bit. So there are some shifting trends where we see clients coming to us talking about growth and where they're going to find new clients and how they're going to retain clients. It's very important giving the slowdown in the economy that some are projecting and as well, we're seeing clients talk to us about their bottom line and always looking for help on managing cost and even more so looking at productivity and how they can help their employees work on the right things, work smarter and do a better job again, serving clients.

00:02:13:21 - 00:02:39:22

Jay Badiani

So those are two real trends we're seeing in industry today, is ever more focus on the top line and a continuing focus on cost management and the bottom line.

Alison Simpson

I know all of those will absolutely be resonating with our listeners. So without giving away anything confidential, can you share some of the recommendations? Are ways that you're advising or helping support your clients, answering those important questions?

00:02:40:00 - 00:03:07:20

Jay Badiani

Yes, absolutely. So I'll start where IBM comes from, the position that we want to be the number one provider of artificial intelligence services for business. AI for businesses is what we call it. It's actually a marketing campaign and it very much addresses what those concerns are and the challenges that we see clients having. We come at this from the context of how can IBM help?

00:03:07:21 - 00:03:48:11

Jay Badiani

There's been a, you know, a giant amount of conversation around A.I., and we come at this from a point of view. A we can be a trusted AI provider for our clients. And, you know, just talking about the top line and where where clients can scale and find new clients as well as how they can be productive. We have a platform we've introduced called Watson X and Watson has different elements of the platform that provide clients with the ability to look at their customer base, understand better where the clients are and what they might be seeking.

00:03:48:13 - 00:04:19:18

Jay Badiani

There's actually an assistant. It's an app that's built on Watson X called Watson X Assistant, and we have many clients using that to serve their clients better. And then we've also got another app on the Watson next platform called Watson Next Orchestrate. And that's one that's the generative AI digital app where our clients can go in and understand their course better and feed in a corpus of data feed in as big a model as they have or as much information they have to help their employees be more productive.

00:04:19:19 - 00:04:36:20

Jay Badiani

Like you said, not trying to share anything confidential, but this is an app I really like to share when I'm just meeting with people. An example of this Watson orchestrator app is something i have on my phone called Ask h.R. And no matter where I am, no matter what time of day it is, i can go to that app and all of our h.r.

00:04:36:20 - 00:04:55:05

Jay Badiani

Policies are in there. It's connected into our actual h.r. system of record, and i can connect any h.r. Transaction day and night, whether it's publishing a salary letter, whether it's for someone who's looking for i have an employee is looking for a mortgage, and they need a salary letter. You know, I can get that out to them any time of day or night.

00:04:55:06 - 00:05:19:03

Jay Badiani

If I have an employee to changing departments, I can, you know, move them from one department to another. If I have an employee who's looking for information about taking a leave of absence or if I need to even process a leave of absence of someone, you're not going to be at work for a period of time. I can do that all from a simple app, just literally typing in a natural language, English language, and on the transactions will actually happen.

00:05:19:03 - 00:05:41:22

Jay Badiani

So that's just an example of digital labor in a way that, you know, IBM, we're doing this internally for ourselves and we're actually marketing it to clients as well to help them be more productive.

Alison Simpson

That's a great example. And you're absolutely right. They're not just marketers all business people are looking at how do I understand Gen AI, and how can I leverage to help it make me more efficient and make my teams more scalable and more productive?

00:05:42:00 - 00:06:03:04

Alison SImpson

I love the example that you used on the H.R. side. Do you have some other examples, IBM or for some of your clients on what needs they're trying to help solve with Gen AI? I think it it's instructional for listeners to really see how other businesses and marketers are, what problems they're trying to solve with gen AI.

Jay Badiani

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

00:06:03:04 - 00:06:38:10

Jay Badiani

So the priority areas for clients, you know, we've talked a little bit about the top line and you know how it's harder to grow the top line in a market that's slowing down a little bit. But they also come to us with their priorities around ESG and particularly sustainability, regardless of what sort of what's happening in the market around revenue and costs, they've made commitments to shareholders around achieving certain sustainability goals, whether it's a reduction in carbon emissions, whether they've made net zero goals, whether it's, you know, business model transformation.

00:06:38:12 - 00:07:04:01

Jay Badiani

And we absolutely you know, I talk about AI for business. We absolutely have AI embedded in our sustainability software as well. So two really good examples of that is new software company IBM acquired, called Envisi helps you see your entire carbon footprint across your organization. You know, when we implemented in a certain way for them, it helps them manage it, right?

00:07:04:01 - 00:07:22:12

Jay Badiani

So you can be a utility or an energy company or you can be a bank, you know, a lot of different kinds of institutions have different sustainability goals they're trying to achieve. And in this is fabulous software that lets them see the entire their entire footprint and you know, what's what they could change that might make a difference.

00:07:22:14 - 00:07:51:10

Jay Badiani

Another element of sustainability, we always say, is sustainability isn't separate from profitability actually being a sustainable organization helps you be more profitable as well. And we have artificial intelligence based app called Maximo, and Maximo is around asset management. So when you're infrastructure heavy company, again, you have a lot of real estate, you might have a lot of vehicles.

00:07:51:15 - 00:08:24:23

Jay Badiani

Maximo Helps you predict the maintenance required on those assets, helps you understand exactly where all the assets are, you know, where they are in their life cycles and helps you then manage how much maintenance is needed or schedule maintenance. And you know, a lot of our infrastructure heavy clients look at that as very helpful to them to know that we can maintain machines better, make sure that they're not breaking down, make sure that they're not using excessive energy and making sure we're optimizing the assets that we have.

00:08:25:01 - 00:08:54:15

Jay Badiani

It's another way for organizations to be more sustainable and another area where, you know, again, clients, regardless of what's going on in the economic marketplace, is cybersecurity. So we have a lot of clients coming to us with cybersecurity challenges. Cybersecurity has never been more important than it is today. And some of our surveys that we do show that the cost of a data breach has been never been higher to remediate these costs, even in Canada.

00:08:54:18 - 00:09:15:17

Jay Badiani

And I'm not even talking about the cost to the brand and the cost of the value of a brand. I'm just talking about the actual cost to get in and figure out where the data breach occurred and seal it up and prevent it from happening. And also in in some cases, companies have to pay ransoms, right, Ransoms to get out of a data breach.

00:09:15:20 - 00:09:46:15

Jay Badiani

So our security software again uses AI to monitor the entire threat landscape. The software is called Q radar and Q Radar has air inside, and it can do the work of many, many air analysts. So, you know, just almost impossible for a human or even a team of people to track the literally tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of threats that are coming into organizations in a day, into large organizations or into governments.

00:09:46:17 - 00:10:12:17

Jay Badiani

So curator software has AI to help organizations do that. Those are just two areas. In addition to, you know, we talked about revenue management, cost management, but sustainability and security as well, where where I can definitely help.

Alison Simpson

Those are two very important areas. And I like to call out that sustainability and profitability aren't separate. In fact, sustainability can positively impact profitability.

00:10:12:17 - 00:10:54:14

Alison Simpson

And when companies and individuals are under revenue pressure, remembering that and knowing that sustainability can actually be a driver or not a roadblock is super important. On the cybersecurity front, I've certainly seen an elevation of sophistication in the attacks. Are you seeing that? And you're also seeing the volume of a tax increase?

Jay Badiani

Yeah, yeah, there's no doubt. We do surveys chief information security officers every year and on top of that, our security software gathers this data and it tells us that the volume is I know exponential is an exaggeration, but it is massively increasing.

00:10:54:18 - 00:11:21:03

Jay Badiani

And the capabilities that cyber actors have are also increasing. They use A.I. as well. So, yeah, there's absolutely no doubt that you need to keep up with threats. You really need to use the latest technology to combat the latest threats, because you're exactly right with your question. The threats are increasing and the bad guys are getting more and more capabilities.

00:11:21:05 - 00:11:43:06

Alison Simpson

So now you are part of an organization, a very global business. So I'm very curious to hear what differences you see for B2B marketing and customers in Canada compared to the U.S. and other IBM markets.

Jay Badiani

IBM is in a really unique position because we have a while, we're a very large global organization. We're very large footprint in Canada.

00:11:43:08 - 00:12:02:07

Jay Badiani

So, you know, I don't know whether the there is a company like IBM because we do see that a lot of organizations that are in the business that we're in, in the technology business, they might be global and others have heard of them for sure, but they don't necessarily have the same footprint of people that we would have.

00:12:02:13 - 00:12:29:00

Jay Badiani

So IBM is a different organizations. We're not just a tech company. We're a consulting company around tech. And so when we do our marketing, you know, my group is very focused on specifically Canada. We're very specifically focused on what we call field marketing and field communications here. And so we're always looking at ways to have a unique client experience in Canada for our clients.

00:12:29:06 - 00:12:48:02

Jay Badiani

And that's sort of I feel like it's sort of unique. You know, we're not relying on lots of TV ads, for example, we're not relying on a lot of, you know, Internet marketing, for example. We do have this sort of really large concentration here of trying to be with clients in the field. And social media is a big part of that.

00:12:48:02 - 00:13:07:20

Jay Badiani

So when I say, you know, field marketing, field communications, social media is really a big part of that for us.

Alison Simpson

And Jay when you're talking to your global peers and your American peers about the business customers that you're working with in Canada, are you seeing any differences in who those customers are or what they're looking for compared to the other markets?

00:13:08:02 - 00:13:31:19

Jay Badiani

There's you know, Canada is interesting in that we have some very large banks in Canada where other countries might have more banks, but maybe not the same concentration. And so there's definitely a difference here where we spend a lot of time on, I'll call it financial services. And so not just banks, but insurance companies too, is a big concentration for us on financial services.

00:13:31:21 - 00:13:55:04

Jay Badiani

And as you know, Canada, a large federal government big vendor in the market on for technology as well as the ten provinces and the three territory. So we have a focus on government and our public sector. And you know, those are two major sectors for us. They would be important in any really developed economy. I think in Canada there's probably a bit more concentration on fast services and on government.

00:13:55:04 - 00:14:17:11

Jay Badiani

And then of course, you know, Canada, we're very successful in many other industries, but I think that you would see in other countries there might be a bit more around any fracturing or a bit more variety around some of the industries like tech or retailing that they would market to. So we definitely have those in Canada we all know who are grocery retailers are.

00:14:17:11 - 00:14:37:20

Jay Badiani

We know some of our vape shops are, but I think in other countries there's maybe a bit more local diversity of those though. You know, off the top, when I was talking about retail, I was talking about where do companies find more customers? And we actually did a survey that was just published last week on our earlier in the year on retail.

00:14:37:20 - 00:14:56:00

Jay Badiani

And we see that a lot of customers online aren't that happy with their bindery. They're actually, you know, our survey said less than 50% were satisfied with their online buyer journey, but 80% said they would be happy to have an air assistant guide them and so, you know what, we're and this was a global survey. This just was in Canada.

00:14:56:03 - 00:15:21:17

Jay Badiani

But I think that would apply here, right, where you go to certain websites and they're fabulous and you're getting awesome recommendations. And it's so easy to buy and you go to other ones and you're like, I can't find what I want. Or, you know, it's a little bit tricky finding that's a little bit tricky with, you know, all of the delivery information is a little tricky with, you know, getting stuff to your door, you know, not satisfied with getting help when you need help, getting help with returns, or do you need help with return.

00:15:21:19 - 00:15:56:09

Jay Badiani

And so we see there's a big opportunity there. And absolutely, we see, you know, retailers, regardless where they are looking for a guy to better serve their customers and, you know, in Canada and around the world.

Alison Simpson

So building on that, have you observed many regional differences in your Canadian marketing?

Jay Badiani

You know, there's not that many differences, but one reason thing that, you know, cause us to look at our marketing strategies is the new law in Quebec and just making sure it's been an opportunity for us to take a step back and look at our campaigns that we run in Quebec.

00:15:56:11 - 00:16:16:02

Jay Badiani

And I think I don't know if other organizations are like us, but we do, you know, maybe there was a sense that we were taking campaigns and just sort of translating them into French, and this has caused us to just take a step back and beyond taking an English campaign and translating it to French, really try and understand is it right for the Quebec market.

00:16:16:04 - 00:16:38:19

Jay Badiani

So, you know, it's still it's still new law. It's still something that we're we're working through to make sure we're, you know, complying with French language laws. But also we want to make sure because that market can be different in certain aspects. Are we you know, or is everything contextually right for the Quebec market, not just having, you know, campaigns land there in French?

00:16:38:21 - 00:16:58:20

Alison Simpson

And then, Jay, earlier, you talked about air certainly playing a pivotal role in enabling IBM's business. You're creating a lot of great solutions for your clients to enable them to do more as well. And all of our listeners are certainly looking at general AI and new tools as a way to improve and get better at what they're doing.

00:16:58:22 - 00:17:41:03

Alison Simpson

Can you share an exemple or to of what you've seen organizations do beyond IBM to use AI to help achieve their goals?

Jay Badiani

I can talk about a few industry examples, but one overarching thing that I really would like to say is IBM's large language models. If you use them, you're indemnified from IP risks and I think that's something that companies see is really interesting because when you just go to, you know, an Internet app, you never really know where the information coming from that this AI is based upon and where are the answers coming from, and are you really using a model that's free of intellectual property risk?

00:17:41:03 - 00:18:04:14

Jay Badiani

And you've we've seen a lot of that in the news. So so that's one thing that we're we're really proud about, is we can indemnify customers that use our models because we know what the models were trained on. I talked a little bit about energy and you remarked about sustainability and profitability go hand in hand. And we absolutely this is a this is just still a big growth industry in the world around the economy.

00:18:04:14 - 00:18:28:15

Unknown

And what's going to how do we move from a carbon economy to a more sustainable economy? And there's absolutely more that will happen around putting the information that that sort of spread around the world in many different peoples, you know, that they have into a place where we can make the right decisions. One thing that IBM's done is worked with NASA geospatial models, and we've made these available as open source models.

00:18:28:19 - 00:19:07:23

Jay Badiani

So anyone is working with Watson and can work with our NASA geospatial models. And what that help people do is marry weather data with satellite data of parts of the world and really help them understand what's happening with the climate there, what can be done to improve the climate there, what changes are happening over time, whether it's industrialization, agriculture, deforestation, you know, is this just gigantic amounts of not just text data, but images and other kinds of geospatial data are being put together.

00:19:08:00 - 00:19:30:20

Jay Badiani

I by our customers and using our models. The last thing I'd say is, is security. It was a great, you know, question you had earlier where I was talking about security and it's never ending like that. That struggle is never ending. We're continually working with them around how can we keep up with the bad guys? How can we make sure that again, brands are protected?

00:19:30:22 - 00:19:53:06

Jay Badiani

You when you come into a store or you come into someone's website, you know your data is safe and that just goes across all industries, governments to we've seen we've seen where health care institutions have been taken down in Canada because of cybercrime. And we've seen, you know, other organizations around the world, you know, have major consequences because of cyber crime.

00:19:53:06 - 00:20:25:10

Jay Badiani

So this is it's a never ending one for everyone that we work with. But we know we know A.I. will help us if you don't have A.I. working for you, the bad guys do. And you know, we won't be able to keep up with them.

Alison Simpson

So Jay you've certainly given us lots to think about in your comment around the bad guys have access to Jenn-Air too, so it's so important for all of us to stay on top of and ahead of where the bad guys are so that we can continue to protect our brands and have the trusting relationships that we need with our customers and all our stakeholders.

00:20:25:12 - 00:20:46:01

Alison Simpson

So to close off our conversation, I'd love to benefit from the fact that you have this incredible, very robust marketing career and have you share one piece of advice for our listeners. What would you recommend marketers do to be successful and grow their careers in the months and years ahead?

Jay Badiani

First of all, Alison, such a great opportunity for me to speak to you today, so thank you very much for that opportunity.

00:20:46:03 - 00:21:14:11

Jay Badiani

I really enjoyed the conversation in terms of a piece of advice is nothing that we do is an individual effort. Everything is a is a team effort. And I really think it's important for people to collaborate with each other to know how one part of the organization fits into the work that they do and then how their outcomes affect what another part of the organization might do or even customers would see.

00:21:14:11 - 00:21:36:12

Jay Badiani

You know, there's marketing and then there's PR and external communications and it's all connected. So I think as much as people can see that the role they play isn't in isolation, it's all connected to something else. And eventually a customer will see that in the market or an employee or a government organization will see something from your company in the market.

00:21:36:12 - 00:21:56:19

Jay Badiani

Then it just helps you put into context just how important the work that we do is. And when we all collaborate as a team, the work will of course be better. So just just about team and collaboration and, you know, knowing how your organization works is so important.

Alison Simpson

I think that's great advice for all of us at all levels for sure.

00:21:56:21 - 00:22:23:09

Alison Simpson

I also want to thank you for the overall conversation. You have such a great experience and I really appreciate you making time in your busy schedule to join us today and share your wealth of experience around B2B marketing, Some of the regional and global differences you're seeing in Canada compared to elsewhere in the world. And the important focus that IBM has around Jenn-Air and some of the powerful tools and solutions that you're creating.

00:22:23:11 - 00:22:47:16

Jay Badiani

Thank you very much, Alison. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Alison Simpson

Enjoy the rest of your day.

Thanks for joining us. Be sure to visit the CMA TCA and sign up for your free CMA account. It's a great way to stay connected and benefit from the latest marketing thought leadership, news and industry trends.

In this episode of CMA Connect, Alison Simpson, the CEO of the CMA, welcomes Anne Marie Wright, Partner and Co-Founder at YOUAREUNLTD, and Marc Cooper, CM, President at Junction59. In this lively conversation, they dive into the opportunities the aging population brings, the challenges they face and the organizations spearheading efforts to eradicate age discrimination in Canadian marketing.

00:00:23:03 - 00:00:47:18

Alison Simpson

CMAs latest research findings echo a concerning truth experience is undervalued within our industry, says we are striving for diversity, equity and inclusion. It is absolutely essential that we recognize that age should not be a barrier to hiring, to working with or promoting a deserving employee. Ageism is a significant issue in the marketing profession, and many believe it's tolerated more than other forms of discrimination.

00:00:48:14 - 00:01:09:15

Alison Simpson

The recent DEI survey that the CMA conducted revealed that on average, marketers consider employees over 48 years of age to be older workers. So not only is are ageism in our industry and profession, it also starts up what I would say is a relatively ignored age. So while many boomers are reporting that they feel disadvantaged because the marketing industry is so image conscious.

00:01:10:01 - 00:01:37:00

Alison Simpson

All of this highlights the biases that can hinder the growth of experienced talent. Joining me today, I am very happy to have two exceptional minds who are actively reshaping this narrative. Anne Marie Wright is co-founder of Duo Unlimited and Marc Cooper is president of Junction 59. Anne Marie and Marc have come together to co-found the third State, a strategic partnership whose goal is to help leaders of businesses identify and harness the potential of aging and the new longevity economy.

00:01:37:16 - 00:02:03:01

Alison Simpson

So together, we're going to explore the pervasive impact of ageism and ages views within our marketing and communications community. We're going to dive into how marketers and communicators are in a truly unique position to help address and combat these problems for the benefit of the workforce. Organizations that engage these workforces and the consumers that we serve. So it's an absolute pleasure to welcome Anne Marie and Marc to join me on the podcast today.

00:02:03:06 - 00:02:03:19

Alison Simpson

Welcome.

00:02:04:06 - 00:02:14:14

Marc Cooper

Thank you very much for having us here today. It's really wonderful to be able to share these thoughts with the CMA and with the marketing community in general.

00:02:14:18 - 00:02:15:23

Anne Marie Wright

We're thrilled to be here.

00:02:16:13 - 00:02:29:06

Alison Simpson

Now I'm going to kick things off with our first question. And Anne Marie, why don't I have you start this one? Can you tell us more about what you mean by the longevity economy and why you see it as so critically important to our conversation today?

00:02:30:16 - 00:03:05:09

Anne Marie Wright

So the most important thing to know this stage is the world is rapidly aging and this is a global phenomenon. What we're referring to here is a demographic trend characterized by an increasing proportion of people over 50, driven by factors such as declining birthrates and increasing life expectancy. This phenomena, which is in fact one of the biggest global trends of our time, has significant social and economic impact.

00:03:05:18 - 00:03:37:17

Anne Marie Wright

And this has been studied by people like the W.H.O., hundreds of think tanks, institutions, global governments, and more. The impacts of global aging populations are both positive and negative. And because this is such a big conversation, what Mark and I want to focus on with you today is to talk about the positive and economic side of this story, economic side of this phenomena, what it means to marketers and communicators.

00:03:39:05 - 00:04:15:00

Anne Marie Wright

So in essence, we need to think about a very large and influential cohort of people, and it's a very misunderstood and very misrepresented audience, which we're going to talk about a little bit later on in this podcast. Fundamentally, this cohort is redefining, disrupting, accepted definitions of what it is to age, what old age means. The influence of this audience has given rise to something called the longevity economy.

00:04:15:00 - 00:05:03:23

Anne Marie Wright

And this terminology is framed by Joseph Coughlin at MIT H Lab. A Fundamentally, what this means is that's referring to an economic impact and potential of the growing and increasingly influential older populations that we're seeing on the global stage. It encourages all businesses and industry to recognize and respond to the diverse needs and preferences of aging populations. This economy, in fact, is so large that it's been referred to as the third largest economy in the world behind only the U.S. and China is $8 trillion and growing in the U.S. Unfortunately, we don't have any Canadian data on this.

00:05:04:07 - 00:05:34:02

Anne Marie Wright

And throughout the world, industry, governments, social institutions have been waking up to this new economy and our team has seen rapid growth and investment in this space over the last five years. For example, in the venture capital community, it's one of the largest segments of investment and in the last three years. So with the size of this market, one might be asking why is there not been more attention paid to the market?

00:05:34:12 - 00:06:15:05

Anne Marie Wright

And the answer is rather straightforward. The challenge is that ageism and ages views. The topic of our podcast has actually been in the way of progress here. And there's a difference we want to make between the topic of ageism and an age just views the challenges that ages and ages views have been in the way of progress. Ageism, as Alison identified earlier in the podcast, is a systematic and often deeply ingrained form of discrimination and prejudice that involves stereotyping against certain individuals or groups based on their age.

00:06:15:15 - 00:06:44:13

Anne Marie Wright

I want to be really clear here that ageism actually impacts many age groups, but the global research, the global study today is very much focused on aging populations simply because this is such a large, impactful cohort of people ages, views that are a manifestation of ageism in general, refer to a specific perspective or beliefs held by an individual or group that reflects ageism.

00:06:45:04 - 00:07:10:17

Anne Marie Wright

For example, if we hold a belief that older adults are not technically inept or older adults are set in their ways, these are fundamentally our just views that we hold. What's important here for today's conversation is that marketers and communicators we think can strongly lead a new narrative and movement to dismantle ageism and ages views.

00:07:11:18 - 00:07:51:05

Alison Simpson

But thanks to Maria, that's a great help. And you call a really important point. From my perspective, a lot of very important points from my perspective. But as marketers, not only do we have a responsibility and an opportunity to encourage diversity and the wisdom that comes with years of experience in how we hire, we also have a real opportunity to influence popular culture or by the marketing we do, and making sure that it's as inclusive as it should be and representative of the real world and the number of Canadians we have that absolutely have so much more to contribute, even though they might be in some people's definition older.

00:07:51:23 - 00:08:12:03

Alison Simpson

So I think there's two really unique, important opportunities there for sure. So certainly the CMA survey highlighted ageism industry as a real issue. Can you introduce some new thinking around ageist views and dive a little deeper into how these issues show up in our industry and as importantly, what we can do to start reframing our thinking?

00:08:14:00 - 00:08:43:04

Marc Cooper

You know, let's start with ageism in the workplace. Our industry is notorious for valuing younger versus older employees. And your CMA survey results actually reinforce this fact. I think there was a stat in there that 44% of marketers believe that age based discrimination is tolerated in their workplaces more than any other form of discrimination. So like all forms of discrimination, not only is ageism harmful to a workforce and a work environment, but it's actually bad for business.

00:08:43:18 - 00:09:09:05

Marc Cooper

There are hundreds of studies that show that a diverse and multigenerational workforce is more productive and produces better business results. This value can only be achieved by creating inclusive environments. Our industry has the capacity to reframe and change the narrative. Our community, we've always been trendsetters and we have a really great opportunity to sink our teeth into this and make some impactful societal change.

00:09:09:12 - 00:09:40:03

Anne Marie Wright

You know this great example from the Publicis group? They have been labeled or certified as an age friendly employer by the age friendly Institute out of the U.S. and they've taken a lot of really great steps to add age into their DEI policy. Publicis has in surveys there are they're very intentional about the experiences of their older workforces.

00:09:40:09 - 00:10:04:14

Anne Marie Wright

They survey them to understand how integration, mentorship programs needs can be incorporated to ensure that they're retaining and hiring in shock older workforces. And then just a number of mechanisms that they've been experimenting with to do so. So the Publicis Group is actually a great example in our industry of somebody who has embraced age.

00:10:04:20 - 00:10:26:05

Alison Simpson

Anne MarieI love that example because while ageism is rampant across marketing communications and the CMA research, we found that in agents sees the definition of what it was to be older was shockingly young, like your late thirties. So the fact that publicists are seeing this as an opportunity and a differentiator and Mark, to your point, it's really good business.

00:10:26:05 - 00:10:32:00

Alison Simpson

So they in many ways they have a competitive advantage by being among the first to identify this.

00:10:33:02 - 00:11:04:08

Marc Cooper

You know, they absolutely do. And, you know, when we look at ageism and ages views in the marketing communications work that we do, numerous studies show that audiences are vastly underrepresented in our advertising communications. While the 25 to 39 year old cohort is highly overrepresented. Equally, older adults are vastly misrepresented and misunderstood, oftentimes made to appear incompetent, especially when it comes to technology, or perhaps they're referred to as being set in their ways.

00:11:05:06 - 00:11:27:10

Marc Cooper

To quote a Forbes magazine article, The World of Old for Teasing is a hellscape full of reverse mortgages, erectile dysfunction pills and bathtub that will kill you. I think we would all agree that the world of stock photos is also filled with stereotypical images of older people doing yoga or running on a beach. Now there are new image banks that exist.

00:11:28:13 - 00:11:57:05

Marc Cooper

Even Getty is getting into the space by improving the images. We just have to source the right images that represent the audience that we know. There's an excellent report from WPP Australia. I think it's called Secrets and Lies. Google it, download it. It's great. It's got some really insightful information in there and it lays out who this new age in consumer is and is not, and their spending patterns, which is maybe the most important piece.

00:11:57:22 - 00:12:22:01

Marc Cooper

In fact, it even calls out that 79% have moved on from brands that are no longer fulfilling or meaningful. So that's a huge opportunity. If you get it wrong and an even bigger opportunity if you get it right. A recent piece in The Atlantic shares research to say that people feel 20% younger than their real age. So understanding this is really important to marketers.

00:12:22:06 - 00:12:28:19

Marc Cooper

We have to make sure that we're talking to people in the way that they see themselves, not in the way that the rest of us see them.

00:12:29:02 - 00:12:59:15

Anne Marie Wright

Outside of the communications side of things. The desire or need to focus on product service solution development for aging population is a real opportunity too, because lots of times we think about products, services, solutions in terms of, you know, moms who are 25 to 45. There's a world of opportunity to develop products, services, solutions. We're going to talk about a few examples of them in a few minutes.

00:12:59:21 - 00:13:27:20

Anne Marie Wright

For people over 50. The cosmetics industry, the beauty industry for a long, long period of time ignored this part. We can give you dozens of examples of how people like Vogue magazine and certain cosmetic brands are developing and focusing on not just communicating to women who are older, but developing new products, services, solutions for this audience in very meaningful ways.

00:13:28:15 - 00:13:52:00

Alison Simpson

You know, market every year, sharing some hugely compelling stats. So an $8 trillion industry in the US alone and the fact that 79% of that market will move on from brands that no longer they see as fulfilling, meaningful, irrelevant, what more convincing reasons do we need to give brands and the marketing community to embrace this incredible business opportunity?

00:13:52:20 - 00:14:05:12

Alison Simpson

It's a bit mind boggling to me that with the size of the audience and their spending potential and their loyalty to brands that actually recognize them, it should be some low hanging fruit for businesses.

00:14:05:21 - 00:14:36:10

Anne Marie Wright

100%. Alison in as our jobs as marketers are to meet our unmet needs to identify and service consumers at all phases and stages of life and the opportunity to open up new worlds, new audiences, innovation pathways for people who are aging. The opportunities are tremendous.

00:14:36:10 - 00:14:44:12

Alison Simpson

Anne Marie, I know you we've talked before and there's a whole industry around age tech, so there certainly are some venture capitalists that are starting to see the offer.

00:14:44:13 - 00:15:17:00

Anne Marie Wright

Yes, 100%. And I'll give a one of my favorite examples is for many years, women's health has been misrepresented as well. So we're starting to see a collision between aging, healthy aging and women's health. So I feel like menopause, for example, which has been misrepresented, misunderstood by marketers, by industry in general, is one of these explosive fields. Femtech for example, in general, especially related to aging, is explosive.

00:15:18:07 - 00:15:41:01

Alison Simpson

So great examples. It's always helpful for me and our listeners to have our topics and certainly true and brought to life by understanding how some brands and organizations are really starting to embrace it and succeeding. So I'd love it if the two of you could share some case studies or examples of what organizations are doing that are targeting consumer aging.

00:15:41:01 - 00:15:42:15

Alison Simpson

Consumers successfully.

00:15:43:06 - 00:16:05:08

Marc Cooper

Well, you know, the good news is that there are some that are doing a great job. So we're not starting from scratch here. One that comes to mind for me is the dove Pro page campaign. They actually first launched those products with a campaign featuring women over 50 showcasing real beauty. Breaking that industry standard of only showing young models.

00:16:05:19 - 00:16:33:14

Marc Cooper

So this is a really great flip on the typical beauty product targeting aging women with anti-aging products. Instead, they're obviously showing pro age products. And their tagline for this campaign is Beauty has no age Limit. So if you get a chance, I'd look up the Dove Pro campaign. And another great example is Saatchi Saatchi. I think it's called Keep on Rolling for Toyota Venza.

00:16:34:03 - 00:16:54:04

Marc Cooper

The campaign cleverly subverted expectations by showing older adults leading rich, active lives, contrasting with their children's assumptions that they were leading dull lives. In fact, I think those children were at home on their computers, living their life through social media instead of living their life in the real in the real world.

00:16:54:06 - 00:17:26:21

Anne Marie Wright

One that I like from the financial service industry is from Merrill Lynch. And they created something called the Seven Life Priorities Program. And what they did was understanding this aging population and understanding that 80% of their business came from people over 65. They started to think about money management in very different ways and supported not by just the conversation on how to manage your money.

00:17:26:21 - 00:18:04:17

Anne Marie Wright

It's how to manage your life until you're going to be over 100. And thought today's five year old is projected to lift the 100th. So what Merrill Lynch has done is said, how do you help? How do we help our clients plan for the 100 year life versus how do we help our clients plan for retirement? And so they're reframing how those what's often times called the third or fourth stage of life, how Merrill Lynch can service their clients in in more than just financial ways.

00:18:05:10 - 00:18:30:22

Anne Marie Wright

The other one that I think we all love is we all know Phil Knight and what he did for Nike and what he did for running. And he's a lifelong runner and he is now, I think, into his sixties and he wanted to create a running shoe that kept him moving, even though his body was aging, even though his body was changing.

00:18:31:05 - 00:18:57:12

Anne Marie Wright

It would be easy to say, I'm creating a running shoe for somebody who saw that, that that's all what he said is, I want to create a running shoe that keeps me moving. And so it was really the shoe was created to accommodate for issues of aging bodies, but it was positioned as something to keep me moving as opposed to something that I need to do because I can't run anymore.

00:18:57:15 - 00:19:01:22

Anne Marie Wright

It was a very positive spin on the proposition.

00:19:02:11 - 00:19:11:11

Alison Simpson

Those are great examples. Now, the media also has a really important role to play on the story. You're starting to see the media start to address this issue as well.

00:19:12:08 - 00:20:01:17

Anne Marie Wright

Yeah, one of the ones I love is with Chris Hemsworth, the big Marvel actor who in his late thirties was identified to have the biomarkers of Alzheimer's. And he embraced that to say and produce a documentary series called Limitless, which is really exploring how he can continue to live better longer. There's a documentary on Netflix which really looks at something called Blue Zones, and these are countries where people have lived longer, better, and the factors that are play into what a longer, healthier life looks like.

00:20:01:18 - 00:20:22:20

Anne Marie Wright

That is a series on Netflix today. I guess the last one that I really like too is I don't know if everyone's seen the new supermodel Syria, where they've taken the four supermodels. I think we all know who they are and and really told the story of their lives and how they're thriving into their fifties, how they're going to continue to thrive into their 60.

00:20:22:20 - 00:20:33:10

Anne Marie Wright

So it's been a very, very positive story on how the recreation and the disruption of aging is being taught today.

00:20:34:01 - 00:20:57:20

Alison Simpson

Those are great examples, and I think it's Forbes that have done it. 50 top women over 50 and just celebrating all of the success and continued ways that people of all ages are contributing. But instead of recognizing only at the young scale the thirties under thirties in the forties, under forties, to actually see 50 over 50, 60 to 60 over 60 like that feels like we're heading in the right direction for sure.

00:20:59:14 - 00:21:18:12

Alison Simpson

So there is no doubt from the insights and the data that both of you are shared with us that there is a tremendous opportunity by addressing aging in our community. So I want to make this super actionable for our listeners. What can marketers and communicators do to start to make a real difference today?

00:21:20:00 - 00:21:54:21

Anne Marie Wright

I think I want to separate Alison, how they can make a difference in their workplace, which I'm going to make a brief comment around and then Mark will talk about how in their work they can make a difference. We're very passionate about the subject of ageism because marketers in fact have the power to make change. It's a very unique form of discrimination because everyone, regardless of their race, age or gender, sexual orientation, will go through the process of aging.

00:21:55:15 - 00:22:29:10

Anne Marie Wright

It's the most universal and unavoidable aspect of the human experience. So if we acknowledge that ageism exists and we acknowledge that we're all going to face it at one stage or another. The more that we can understand and change that by simply creating awareness of it in our day to day and in our workplaces, the more we can eliminate this last form of discrimination, that means including age in DEI policies.

00:22:30:02 - 00:23:02:21

Anne Marie Wright

We don't have the numbers in Canada, but we know that over 80% of Global DEI policies do not include age. It's a really simple thing to do. Number two, look at retaining older workers in the workforce and learning about the benefits of multigenerational workforces. There's tons written about the benefits, the higher return on investment, the higher productivity levels of multigenerational workforces versus one dimensional workforce sources.

00:23:03:12 - 00:23:07:08

Anne Marie Wright

So those resist those with the things I think we can all focus on quite readily.

00:23:08:14 - 00:23:33:20

Marc Cooper

And of course, in the work that we actually do, we can expand our mindset around having multiple segments for our products and services or solutions. Ask ourselves how our brand can promote our brand proposition can be stretch to embrace new audiences. You know, this is what Dove did with their pro age campaign and with the products that they developed and we can understand who we're talking to.

00:23:34:04 - 00:24:11:21

Marc Cooper

I think knowing that 50 plus is not a single audience, you know, that's how we've traditionally grouped this demographic together. But 50 doesn't equal 60, which doesn't equal 70. And getting our heads around that and then speaking to those audiences appropriately is a good starting point. And then authentically represent older audiences in the communications, not based on those stereotypes and it's a great start if we build those multi-generational workforces as marketers and advertisers, because we then see these different perspectives from our colleagues.

00:24:12:02 - 00:24:25:10

Marc Cooper

So when we go to put them into the communications that we're building and we're putting out there, we're not playing to the stereotypes anymore. We're playing to the people we know. We're playing to the environment that we're working in. So I think they are actually quite closely tied together.

00:24:26:21 - 00:24:43:05

Alison Simpson

Really terrific advice. And you both have shared some really valuable insights tonight. So before I let you get on with your day, I'd love to close off the discussion by having each of you share one last piece of advice for our listeners and what they can do to help address the ageism issue. What's the first thing you would have them talk?

00:24:44:17 - 00:25:18:10

Anne Marie Wright

One thing is think stage, not age. When you remove the barriers of age, just view. Demographics mean less than her mindset and what people's needs are. A 70 year old can be just as vibrant as a 40 year old. And if we're building brands around true needs and true mindsets and true behaviors, I think we open a world to think differently about what our opportunities are.

00:25:19:09 - 00:25:33:22

Alison Simpson

I think that's such a great example. And I look at my own personal self, like in my twenties, I was in a lot, a lot worse shape than I am in my fifties. So ages very arbitrary in so many ways. Well, Mark, we'll let you close things off.

00:25:35:18 - 00:26:04:19

Marc Cooper

So I think you could ask us about our Ageless Universe initiative. It's something that third state recently launched and we really can't do what we were trying to do without the support from our industry. This is a multi-phased campaign with the goal of dismantling ageism in the workforce and in the work we do. So you can learn more at ageless University HCA and sign our pledge, which you can also just reach out to us, ask us questions.

00:26:05:10 - 00:26:32:09

Marc Cooper

The two of us are more than happy to talk about what this industry can do. We know that this industry has such a capacity to make change on this really important issue, perhaps one of the last areas of discrimination. And if we can try to beat this together as an industry, we're going to be in really great shape in the work that we're doing and in the way we do work going forward.

00:26:32:18 - 00:26:48:10

Alison Simpson

A great note to end on Marc and Ann Marie, thank you so much for all of the valuable insights that you share today and for helping bring more awareness to this really important issue in the marketing community. I'm very much looking forward to how we can advance this in the months and years ahead.

00:26:49:04 - 00:26:54:03

Anne Marie Wright

Thank you so much for having us. Alison, it's been a real pleasure.

00:26:57:07 - 00:27:11:20

Announcer

Thanks for joining us. Be sure to visit the CMA TCA and sign up for your free my CMA account. It's a great way to stay connected and benefit from the latest marketing thought leadership news and industry trends.

In the first episode of 2024, Alison Simpson, CEO of The CMA, welcomes Kerri Dawson, the Chair of the CMA's Board of Directors, to discuss her journey and the board's role while highlighting some of the CMA's recent achievements. Kerri previews The CMA's focus areas for the year, including continuing to future-proof the profession, advocacy, DEI and community building.

00:00:02:10 - 00:00:24:04

Announcer

Welcome to CMA Connect Canada's marketing podcast, where industry experts discuss how marketers must manage the tectonic shifts that will change how brands and businesses are built for tomorrow, while also delivering on today's business needs. With your host, CMAs CEO Allison Simpson.

00:00:24:04 - 00:00:45:23

Alison Simpson

Happy New Year and welcome to our very first episode of CMA Connect for 2024. I hope everyone had an amazing holiday. We have a very exciting and busy year ahead of the CMA and I'm absolutely thrilled to have Kerri Dawson, the chair of CMA's Board of Directors, join us today to discuss the association. Kerri has been very active with the CMA for many years and a member of our board since 2018.

00:00:46:14 - 00:01:10:19

Alison Simpson

Before she stepped into the chair role in 2022, Kerri served as the vice chair and she's also chaired our finance and Audit Human Resources and Nomination and governance committees. Kerri is also the head of digital channels and commercialization for wealth and personal baking at HSBC Bank, Canada, and very much on the forefront of digital marketing, and that Kerri's team was recently awarded to global retail, banking, Digital and Innovation awards.

00:01:11:04 - 00:01:13:12

Alison Simpson

So welcome, Kerri, It's a thrill to have you here today.

00:01:13:14 - 00:01:24:18

Kerri Dawson

Well, thank you, Alison, and happy New Year to you as well. And thank you for inviting me. I'm really thrilled to be here and to be the first conversation of 2024 for CMA Connect. Thank you.

00:01:25:15 - 00:01:32:08

Alison Simpson

I can't imagine a better way to kick off the year, so thank you too. Now, I want to start by asking what attracted you to join the CMA board?

00:01:33:00 - 00:01:55:03

Kerri Dawson

So, Alison, as you mentioned, I joined the CMA Board in December of 2018, and it was Steve Mast who at the time he was the chair of the Nominating and Governance Committee, and he'd come to see me to ask if I might be interested in joining the board. Now, Steve later became board chair, of course, and I was really fortunate to work with him as his vice chair.

00:01:55:07 - 00:02:24:21

Kerri Dawson

Prior to becoming chair myself at the time when I joined the board, I'd been involved with the CMA for many years. I'd been a CMA awards judge and a senior judge. I'd set on what was at the time called the Digital Marketing Council, now known as the MarTech Council. I'd participated in strategy, research and the like, and in my career I'd been mentored by a past CMA board chair and a CMA Lifetime Achievement Award winner.

00:02:25:04 - 00:02:51:19

Kerri Dawson

Her name is Nancy Cardinal, a name some listeners might recognize. So I was very familiar with the CMA and had a strong connection to the work that the CMA does, and I believed that it would be an exciting challenge to advise and guide the CMA's vision and strategies as it works on behalf of the marketing community and to do that as a board director, and that this would be a way for me to contribute to that community.

00:02:51:19 - 00:02:55:14

Kerri Dawson

And that's certainly been true. And it's been it's been very rewarding.

00:02:57:08 - 00:03:12:15

Alison Simpson

Well, I definitely owe both Steve and Nancy a great big thank you for getting you involved. And you've been such an outstanding partner to me, certainly, as I've onboarded to the CMA in the way that you're advocating on behalf of our profession is commendable and very much appreciated.

00:03:12:16 - 00:03:13:04

Kerri Dawson

Thank you.

00:03:14:12 - 00:03:18:00

Alison Simpson

So I'd love you to share a bit about how the board and the CMA staff work together.

00:03:18:17 - 00:03:56:08

Kerri Dawson

Yeah. So generally speaking, the role of the board is to provide strategic advice and guidance and to establish governance and to exercise oversight for the management of a company or an organization. And as chair of the CMA, I help to ensure that this distinction between what the board does vis a vis what CMA management does is clear. So you'll sometimes hear that guidance to board directors described as noses in and fingers out, leaving the management to do its job and to operate the business or the organization.

00:03:56:08 - 00:04:23:14

Kerri Dawson

And, you know, I think our board does a really good job adhering to this distinction. The board is is really interested in ensuring that the CMA remains, as the accountants would say, a going concern and remains financially stable. And, you know, I can say that the board has absolutely no concerns here that the financial position of the CMA is healthy and the controls in place to ensure that position continues that way are very strong.

00:04:23:14 - 00:04:52:15

Kerri Dawson

So and from a strategic standpoint, the board participated in a really excellent session, which you led, Alison, earlier in the year to refine and make clear the CMA's vision and value proposition. And another key area that the board thinks about is leadership and succession for the CMA and for the board itself. And on that front, I can say that the board is extremely pleased with the leadership at the CMA.

00:04:53:05 - 00:05:17:11

Kerri Dawson

And if you'll allow me, I'd like to offer a happy anniversary to Alison. I think the Board was really pleased to have you join the CMA a year ago in December of 2022, and we've just been thrilled to have you at the helm and we've been equally pleased with the way you've you've built your leadership team and with your approach to achieving the CMA, its vision and strategies.

00:05:18:03 - 00:05:37:05

Kerri Dawson

So we're just just thrilled about that. A final point I'll make, though, about ways of working. Is that a strong working relationship between the CEO and the Chair Award is really essential for success and, you know, unfortunate that this has also been true. It's just been a delight to work with you, Alison, over the past year.

00:05:37:05 - 00:05:42:03

Alison Simpson

And I'm glad you're not on video because you're making me blush. That's a lot of it, really.

00:05:42:18 - 00:05:45:12

Kerri Dawson

I know it's a little surprising there.

00:05:45:12 - 00:06:04:17

Alison Simpson

But it's been I mean, the time has flown by. It's been a great year. And the level of partnership that you've brought and the patience as I'm getting fully up to speed and then the really good, important, healthy debate that you and I have and that we have aboard is so central to making the CMA and the profession stronger.

00:06:04:17 - 00:06:16:01

Alison Simpson

So it's absolute delight and I'm looking forward to 2024. Yeah, me too. Now, from the board's perspective, how do you think the CMA has helped advance the marketing profession in 2023?

00:06:17:04 - 00:06:40:20

Kerri Dawson

Yeah, well, you know, that's a great question. I can say with much enthusiasm that the CMA is a team that works really hard to benefit the marketing community in Canada. I mean, truly the CMA is made up of people who are passionate in their support of the community and and Alison, you have your team really well organized to deliver so much benefit on behalf of marketers in Canada.

00:06:41:17 - 00:07:01:11

Kerri Dawson

And, you know, in speaking directly to how the CMA has advanced the profession there, there are really four key strategies that I think demonstrate the most benefit. And the first is the work that the CMA does to futureproof the marketing profession. You know, this is a key priority and it's one that the CMA is making strong progress on.

00:07:02:06 - 00:07:29:21

Kerri Dawson

The CMA knows that through its research that 97% of members and marketers rate it. The future of marketing as their top thought leadership topic. This is followed really closely by emerging trends and how technological advancements are impacting marketing. And there's no bigger trend right now than I, and the board is really pleased that the CMA has introduced its first Gen AI training for members and marketing.

00:07:30:00 - 00:07:53:18

Kerri Dawson

That happened last April, and since then CMA has added three more Gen AI courses and we know that you're going to be expanding on this in Q1 of 20 and this year we need 24 with an on demand series. And it's also great that the CMA has established the AI Working Group rating thought leadership and guidance for four members.

00:07:53:18 - 00:08:16:06

Kerri Dawson

The CMA is councils and committees are also a really great source for thought leadership that's across a wide range of topics the customer experience and creativity and brand and insights, just to name a few. There are over 300 senior members participating in councils and committees and they're contributing to important discussions and debates about the future of the marketing profession.

00:08:17:11 - 00:08:47:13

Kerri Dawson

The CMA also nurtures the next generation of marketing talent with CMA. Next, the program that that bridges the gap between post-secondary schooling and a successful marketing career. And we're really thrilled that the virtual career nights that you ran last year attracted over 600 students from across Canada. It's fantastic. And of course, this podcast is another way that the CMA is is really helping to futureproof members and marketers.

00:08:48:18 - 00:09:12:20

Kerri Dawson

So secondly, mean as the voice of marketing in Canada, the CMA's advocacy work on behalf of the profession is really a source of pride. You know, those efforts cover a broad spectrum of key topics, but privacy has really been at the forefront and the CMA is working hard to ensure any new privacy laws will enable innovation while protecting Canadians privacy.

00:09:13:08 - 00:09:35:23

Kerri Dawson

In fact, the CMA is the only marketing association in Canada that was invited to appear as a witness in front of the federal parliamentary committee studying privacy law reform. That's that's really amazing. And thank you for including me in the group of board directors and members of the CMA's Privacy and Data Committee who recently met with that privacy commissioner.

00:09:36:08 - 00:09:59:16

Kerri Dawson

You know, we met to discuss some of the issues that are important to marketers related to privacy and data. And I was able to observe firsthand how important the relationship is between the CMA and the commissioner's office and to see how effectively the CMA conveys its position on behalf of its members. Really, really great work. Thirdly, I'm going to talk a bit about diversity, equity and inclusion.

00:09:59:16 - 00:10:37:22

Kerri Dawson

It continues to be a top priority for the CMA. The CMA completed its third annual study in 2023 and the board has been made aware of a discussion guide that's been created. We know that guide is going to be especially useful to help spark conversations about creating more diverse, equitable and inclusive workplaces. And the CMA holds itself to account across a number of diversity dimensions, including gender and ethnicity and diverse representation within councils and committees, and even a geographic dimension to ensure appropriate representation right across Canada, not just here in Toronto.

00:10:38:18 - 00:11:05:23

Kerri Dawson

And as a chair, I asked to see a progress against the Commitments, and I'm really pleased to see that the commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion remains embedded in decision making at the CMA. And then finally, I'll comment that a CMA knows how to have a little fun, a lot of fun, and the CMA actively builds community and brings marketing professionals together through the many different events it hosts.

00:11:06:08 - 00:11:40:09

Kerri Dawson

Those events focus on priority topics for the profession, and they're offered virtually and in person, often for free as part of the corporate membership. The board is really proud of the inaugural CMA future proof event in 2023. It was a huge success and it's one we know you will be building on for 2024. And of course you ended 2023 with the CMA Awards and it was really wonderful to celebrate the exceptional creativity of our profession alongside 850 marketers and agencies.

00:11:40:09 - 00:11:49:09

Kerri Dawson

It was it was wonderful. And so all of these strategies, Alison, have gone a long way to advance the profession. Congratulations on all of that.

00:11:49:09 - 00:12:10:12

Alison Simpson

It's very much that a very, very collaborative effort, certainly with our staff, certainly with the board and with the blessing we have and the number of members we have that are actively volunteering and engaged with the CMA. They're such an important part of our ability to deliver thought leadership, and they're also a very important part of our ability to come together and celebrate the profession and have a lot of fun.

00:12:10:17 - 00:12:11:11

Kerri Dawson

Absolutely.

00:12:12:08 - 00:12:22:01

Alison Simpson

The gala was a great way to end 2023 and then, yes, as the board chair, what accomplishments of the CMA and board are you the most proud of?

00:12:22:22 - 00:12:51:02

Kerri Dawson

So I said a few goals when I became board chair and in May of 2022. And the first was to ensure that the CMA has the right leadership and organization in place to guarantee success moving forward. And that's because a key responsibility for a board of directors is succession in leadership for the organization they serve. But, you know, active recruiting for top leadership is not something that all boards get to do very often.

00:12:51:02 - 00:13:21:02

Kerri Dawson

And and we did. And what's especially great is that the outcome has been amazing for the organization. Secondly, I wanted to ensure that the CMA strategy was fit for purpose and and connected to that, I wanted to ensure that a solid 3 to 5 year strategy would be backed by by a five year financial plan, and that strategies in place and the financial plan is is in the works and will be reviewed by the board, the board's finance and audit committee.

00:13:21:19 - 00:13:48:03

Kerri Dawson

And then finally, you know, I wanted to champion a mechanism that would give the board certainty and understanding the CMA's impact on its members, on its membership. So, you know, kind of think a Net promoter score or a regular customer satisfaction survey and that so that the CMA can can tangibly be held to account by the board for effectively serving the needs of the marketing community.

00:13:48:03 - 00:14:21:19

Kerri Dawson

And I'm, I'm really thrilled, Alison, that that's also underway. So as a board working together with you and your leadership team, we've made fantastic progress on, on again towards all of those goals. But I'm most proud as I get ready to hand over the chair seat in May of this year that that you were in place as president and CEO and well supported by a well conceived vision and strategy and with clarity about where the CMA is headed, and that the success that's been achieved by the CMA to date.

00:14:21:19 - 00:14:25:02

Kerri Dawson

Well, we'll continue.

00:14:25:02 - 00:14:41:22

Alison Simpson

Thank you very much. I would not be here without you. And part of a big part of what made the opportunity so appealing was to have you as a chair and have such a strong board, so engaged in helping build the vision for the CMA and really in giving back and helping futureproof our profession.

00:14:42:02 - 00:14:50:15

Kerri Dawson

Well, thank you. That's really kind and it's certainly my pleasure. And I know that's true for for the other directors as well. They, they enjoy the work they do for the CMA. Thank you.

00:14:51:10 - 00:15:10:14

Alison Simpson

And some days I have to remind myself it's volunteer is a you're all in full time jobs, too. So the degree to which you're giving back and committed is really inspiring. Thanks. Now, as we're in the second week of 2024, what do you see as the key focus areas for the year ahead? What what are you most excited about?

00:15:10:17 - 00:15:11:06

Alison Simpson

Yeah.

00:15:11:12 - 00:15:41:16

Kerri Dawson

Yeah. You know, I think yeah, there's a lot to be excited about. I think I think the focus for 2024 continues to be a lot of the same, you know, future proofing the profession, advocacy D and AI and, and community building and really continuing to build on the momentum of 2023. You know the CMA's research shows that the most valued benefit that is offered to members is the opportunity to be part of a community and to learn from other marketers and collaborate and network.

00:15:41:16 - 00:16:08:11

Kerri Dawson

And, and the board is excited that the CMA will be introducing a new way for members to do that with the launch of CMA forward. That's going to be a free online forum for CMA members to come together to debate hot topics, to share thought leadership, and to meet other marketers from right across Canada. And it will include career stage communities in a future focused forum too.

00:16:09:04 - 00:16:38:16

Kerri Dawson

And we're also thrilled that the CMA will be offering even more free, high quality events for members during the year. The research also showed that members want to understand Canadian consumers better, that that's also a really important topic for them, especially as as we're all navigating through these challenging times. So we're excited that the CMA is expanding. Thought leadership in this area and working on an event focused on how Canadian consumers are evolving.

00:16:39:08 - 00:17:08:07

Kerri Dawson

And in May, the CMA is introducing a marketing week, kicking off with a live podcast featuring CMA Marketers of the Year and Lifetime Achievement and Achievement in Marketing Award winners who will be discussing that? The future of marketing and that's a Can't Miss event that's on super exciting CMA Future Proof will be the signature event for the week, and there'll be a CMA Training Day where members can take one of the CMA's air courses for free.

00:17:08:07 - 00:17:42:20

Kerri Dawson

That's really, really wonderful. And Alison, you've brought to the board an evolution of the program for professional development at the CMA. We're thrilled that the CMA is offering an on demand generative AI training series starting in February. It's going to be offered in 30 minute modules, and that's a really smart evolution that recognizes how people are learning these days, and it provides really great training on a topic that is so important for marketers navigating A.I. these days.

00:17:42:20 - 00:18:12:02

Kerri Dawson

So we're also really pleased that you're evolving the Chartered Marketer program. You know, previously marketers can obtain their CMA designation by completing the full CRM course based path or apply for the CRM executive Advanced Standing. If they had more than 15 years experience and moving forward, there is a new advanced standing pathway making completing that designation more relevant to marketers across a wide range of career stages.

00:18:12:10 - 00:18:38:03

Kerri Dawson

So we're excited about that opportunity. And as the voice of marketing in Canada, the CMA is also focused on supporting marketers in transition. So newcomers with marketing experience and encouraging and helping to build the next generation of marketing talent and the CMA is launching a robust upskilling and training initiative to help grow a new and diverse group of marketers.

00:18:38:18 - 00:18:52:04

Kerri Dawson

So that's the focus really across future proofing and advocacy, DIY and community. It's a lot, it's well-planned, it's exciting. It's going to be a great year ahead and.

00:18:53:15 - 00:19:04:12

Alison Simpson

I'm very much looking forward to it. Now, I don't want to let you go without taking advantage of your incredible expertise to have you share one piece of advice with our listeners.

00:19:05:11 - 00:19:32:08

Kerri Dawson

Now, you know, I love the New Year. I really enjoy the opportunity to reflect back on the previous year and look forward to all that that is to come. One of the of the skills of a board director when in the required skills, is that they be able to, as we say, see around corners and anticipate issues. And that's certainly true when it comes to the potential for big changes that that I will bring to the marketing profession.

00:19:32:13 - 00:20:03:23

Kerri Dawson

So I'm looking forward to tracking along with what's evolving in that space. You know, all the potential for use, of course, but also the evolving set of guidelines that are emerging as we marketers and as society generally learn how to use, you know, this new technology for for good, for the good of humanity. And you know, something I've learned from working with really creative people over the years is that a good solid sandbox makes outcomes stronger.

00:20:03:23 - 00:20:26:00

Kerri Dawson

And I think that's true as we navigate this new world of AI with the right guidelines and governance, we can really achieve the right outcomes. So now the practical side of me knows that we are all still navigating through a tough economy and the impacts of inflation and high interest rates are going to be with us for a while longer.

00:20:26:04 - 00:20:57:18

Kerri Dawson

We're heading into a tough year, but I know and you know that the marketing community in Canada is amazing at finding creative solutions for challenges that face them and the businesses in the companies that they help to lead. So my advice is that as a community, let's continue to come together to learn from one another, to share our experience, to understand more deeply the issues that matter to marketers and to celebrate our achievements.

00:20:57:18 - 00:21:08:11

Kerri Dawson

You know, that's important too. So let's continue to stick together as a community in 2024. We've got a really exciting year ahead.

00:21:08:11 - 00:21:24:06

Alison Simpson

Outstanding advice. It's also a great reminder that as busy as we all are, as some of the challenges that we're all collectively managing through, all the more reason to come together and also to celebrate. There was no doubt we as a profession can accomplish a great deal.

00:21:24:12 - 00:21:28:15

Kerri Dawson

Yeah, that's the fun part. That's all about the fun.

00:21:28:15 - 00:21:49:03

Alison Simpson

Well, Kerry, it's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you very much. Especially early in the new year. I know it's a busy year. I really appreciate you taking the time to join us on the podcast today. Share a bit about the CMA. And I really also want to thank you for being such an active advocate and volunteer with the CMA for such a long period of time.

00:21:49:10 - 00:21:53:18

Alison Simpson

And as board chair, you've had such a significant impact on Thrilled to have been part of it.

00:21:54:01 - 00:22:11:16

Kerri Dawson

Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Alison. And on behalf of the board, a big a big, big thank you to you and your incredible CMA team for all that you do to support marketers in Canada. You know, I'm really excited about what's on the horizon and I look forward to continuing to work with you in 2024 and be great.

00:22:13:06 - 00:22:26:03

Announcer

Thanks for joining us. Be sure to visit the CMA. Scott C and sign up for your free my CMA account. It's a great way to stay connected and benefit from the latest marketing thought leadership news and industry trends.

Alison Simpson, CEO of the CMA, and Susan O'Brien, Chief Brand and Customer Officer at Canadian Tire Corporation (CTC), discuss what it takes to understand your customers, staying true to your brand promises and innovative strategies to positively impact Canadians.

00:00:02:10 - 00:00:21:00

Announcer

Welcome to CMA Connect, Canada's marketing podcast, where industry experts discuss how marketers must manage the tectonic shifts that will change how brands and businesses are built for tomorrow, while also delivering on today's business needs. With your host, CMAs CEO Allison Simpson.

00:00:22:03 - 00:00:51:11

Alison Simpson

Today we're joined by Susan O'Brien, who's a chief brand and customer officer at Canadian Tire. Susan oversees a very broad mandate, and this responsible for the brand and marketing for the organization's full family of 13 banners includes everything from SportChek, party city, Helly Hansen, Marks and Canadian Tire Financial, to name a few. So she's very well suited to chat about what it takes to market a complex portfolio through a challenging economy, while also ensuring that she's staying true to the brand and the promises that are made.

00:00:52:10 - 00:01:14:17

Alison Simpson

Now, I've long believed that a real superpower of marketers is our deep understanding of customers and how they can help businesses innovate and differentiate from a marketing perspective, but also across all aspects of the business. I know from our earlier conversations that Susan agrees and is a really terrific example of bringing this super power to life. So thanks so much for joining us on CMA Connect today, Susan.

00:01:14:18 - 00:01:16:09

Alison Simpson

I'm looking forward to a great conversation.

00:01:17:10 - 00:01:20:16

Susan O'Brien

Alison, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here today.

00:01:20:22 - 00:01:33:02

Alison Simpson

Susan, we're going to kick things off knowing that you manage one of the largest brand portfolios in Canada. I would love to hear how you're building business and maintaining strong brands across your portfolio of banners, especially in the face of global competition.

00:01:33:13 - 00:02:07:14

Susan O'Brien

Such an important question, I would say, for all marketers, but in particular, right now for retail marketers, because of the seismic shift that has happened over the last several years in terms of the retail landscape with respect to the types of competition, we're up against being very significantly larger global in scale companies like Amazon, Walmart, Costco, Home Depot, but also there's been such a shift over the last number of years in what I would call the new tools available to marketers to build strong and enduring brands.

00:02:07:14 - 00:02:43:16

Susan O'Brien

So I think I point that out because those who know me know I talk a lot about the shifting role of marketers, that normalization and this idea that because of this shift in the landscape and because of the opportunities provided to us by new tools like loyalty, first party data, deep customer analytics, even emerging technologies like AI, these things are all allowing the customer to be more at the center of the conversation, and not just in marketing, but across all of the decision making in the company.

00:02:43:18 - 00:03:06:02

Susan O'Brien

So I'd point all those things out because I think the question of how do you build brands today as a marketer has shifted so much, and I'm very pleased to say marketers now for the most part have been much bigger role at the executive table. Their ability to influence decision making by using these new tools that help us better understand the customer.

00:03:06:10 - 00:03:32:02

Susan O'Brien

It's real and it's happening and in particular is happening at Inspire. And so I would say given the portfolio of brands we have, you know, there's a million things we're doing to make sure those brands are strong and relevant. But if I could sort of boil it down to sort of what I think is fundamental, if you're a marketer today, will sort of ask yourself some of these questions around, does it start with your strategy?

00:03:32:09 - 00:03:58:03

Susan O'Brien

Does you know the notion of the importance of brand and the importance of customer really reside in your strategy at the top of the house, is your CEO endorsing it? Do you feel like you have partners across the business in doing so? Because it's the domain of marketers to have lots of understanding of the customer, but it has to work in concert with folks who are running the businesses and making decisions every day.

00:03:58:11 - 00:04:23:08

Susan O'Brien

So Canadian Tire, I am happy to report we have a strategy called Better Connected. It was launched two and a half, three years ago and it is, as the name implies, all about connections. And there's sort of three key areas of connections that might plays a pretty integral role in and shifting role of marketers. And how does that translate into building stronger brand?

00:04:23:08 - 00:04:51:09

Susan O'Brien

So the first area I think is really important, which is creating stronger emotional connections as a relatively large domestic player. But relative to our competition, small from a global perspective, we can't do our competition on their core differentiators. We have to focus on what differentiates us and for us. Canadian Tire as part of our better connected strategy. That's about emotional connection.

00:04:51:15 - 00:05:19:12

Susan O'Brien

That is about this relationship we have with mediums that is unique and that allows us to really build what I would call longer term like, like time loyalty. I have a team that spends a lot of time on that. These so everything from the traditional marketing aspects around truly end to end full funnel marketing campaigns for all our various areas, but also things like communications and how does that play a role in creating brand moments that connect with medium?

00:05:19:20 - 00:05:42:21

Susan O'Brien

That's one big area. The second area of connection in our better connected strategy is about customer connections, like literally down to using our loyalty program. It's my portfolio, the unbelievable first party data we get from that and turning that into real insights that allow us to do better marketing and to stay really connected in a way more relevant for our customers.

00:05:42:21 - 00:06:06:15

Susan O'Brien

Right message, right time, right place. And then the third area of connection is within the notion of creating an omnichannel, seamless omni channel experience. Physical meets digital in a way that lets a customer shop when how they want. And I have a team that oversees sort of those assets website and mobile app. And then how does that connect what happens in-store.

00:06:06:15 - 00:06:14:18

Susan O'Brien

So all of those things are what we're focused on as a company to stay super relevant and more connected to our customer.

00:06:14:18 - 00:06:41:05

Alison Simpson

That's such great perspective. Thanks, Susan. I want to go back to one of the things you touched on as far as the marketer toolkit has absolutely expanded and in that expansion, giving us some really powerful tools to support our colleagues at the C-suite and have increased credibility at the C-suite. You also very rightly called out that having CEOs operate around customer centricity is mission critical, and not every organization has a CEO that embraces that.

00:06:41:06 - 00:06:54:05

Alison Simpson

So for those that are listening, that might not have that benefit, is there any advice you can offer as far as leveraging the tools and helping our executive colleagues understand the importance of customer centricity?

00:06:54:21 - 00:07:21:16

Susan O'Brien

Yeah, we are blessed to have a CEO who genuinely believes that. I just said point out that because Canadian Tire has been for 100 years very local in the way we go to market, we have a dealer model, the dealers are in their communities. We are sought based on that community. We have local, you know, activations around charitable causes, etc. and community really show strong community.

00:07:22:01 - 00:07:39:15

Susan O'Brien

It is second nature to us and so we're starting from a place of strength. So that's like I just you need to bring that out. But with that said, when you consider as a marketer that your job is really to be that customer at the table, like that's how I think of my job and that can be that was daunting.

00:07:39:15 - 00:08:00:05

Susan O'Brien

I mean, I think back to early parts of my career, it's daunting because sometimes there's a temptation go, Yeah, yeah, we know the customer stuff. The truth is, you know, the economics would suggest we should do that or this the other thing. What's different now is we have that we have data that can truly enable that sort of credibility.

00:08:00:05 - 00:08:38:21

Susan O'Brien

So when you have a tool kit that includes significant first party data, for example, not just from our loyalty program, but we also have the credit card that is not a store card, credit card that people use outside. There's facts and data that you can bring to the table with sort of certainty and credibility when you have programs in place like Net Promoter Score, which you do across every aspect of our customer experience, there is a fact in there that, you know, at this point there is friction in the customers telling us and by the way, we can see that it's translating into news in sales or lack of conversion or whatever that might be.

00:08:38:21 - 00:09:06:21

Susan O'Brien

So these tools are just giving us much more credibility to be able to have those conversations. The only other thing I'll just sort of point out here is in it's not just that you've got customer data now there's new tools to enable the use of that customer data. So, you know, you think about things like the ability to know a customer better and to be able to offer them something that they need that is relevant at a certain point of time.

00:09:07:04 - 00:09:24:03

Susan O'Brien

That information's not just valuable to marketers, it's valuable to store operations. It's valuable to our merchants who plan assortments based on what customers want. So there's just so many more tools available to marketers that voice the tool.

00:09:24:23 - 00:09:41:03

Alison Simpson

That's great. Thanks, Susan. Now, my next question is a three parter and definitely a topic that I know our listeners are super interested in. So given the current economic climate, growing interest rates, financial struggles for many Canadians, how can businesses and marketers effectively connect with consumers?

00:09:41:13 - 00:10:10:18

Susan O'Brien

This is a massive conversation happening right now. As you rightly point out, it's difficult to even want to use the R word, but let's call it an economic downturn. It goes back to what I just said, to be honest with you, which is if you understand your customers and you understand where they are in their lives. And that's really what I mean by like, there's lots of tools, data, there's the elements for the end of day, the outcome is that you understand your customers where they are and you've got to meet them.

00:10:10:18 - 00:10:35:10

Susan O'Brien

There. And again, we're very fortunate at Canadian Tire because you even just look at what we sell at a single band or let's say cage or retail. We have the ability to, if we understand where customers are, is it? And in what we focus on and what we offer them. With 200 and some business categories, a key insight, we have just gone through that very sort of privileged data.

00:10:35:10 - 00:10:57:20

Susan O'Brien

We have our customer data from our credit card. We have lots of good insights and get them earlier so you can really start to shift. So for example, we saw really early that customers were starting to shift from what we call discretionary into essentials, meaning it makes sense, right? You know, you're feeling a little more constrained financially. You're going to start shifting.

00:10:58:08 - 00:11:18:17

Susan O'Brien

And that's not rocket science. But what is, is our ability to know which customers and which income levels and therefore, what does that mean for our assortment? What does that mean for what we market and what we sort of put out there is value messaging. How do you change your 1 to 1 offers program so that you can be sort of more relevant from a value perspective?

00:11:19:01 - 00:11:46:14

Susan O'Brien

What does that mean in terms of how you assort from a good, better best perspective in your stores? So the ability to really have tools to understand your customer and then to put them into action so that you really can pivot and show up differently when Canadians need you to be there differently. And so that's really been for us especially, we get asked a lot about, you know, how were you, how are you different than in the 2008 recession?

00:11:46:14 - 00:12:04:11

Susan O'Brien

And what we always say is we're just literally a far more resilient company because we have new capabilities that we didn't have back then. And I don't think a lot of marketers and companies have. But you got to want to understand that customer and where they are and then have the tools and ability to pivot the offering in the way you market to them.

00:12:04:20 - 00:12:14:15

Alison Simpson

You're absolutely right. And then even the definition of essentials, depending on where you are in life stage, from an economic background perspective, your definition of essential is fundamentally different.

00:12:14:15 - 00:12:15:18

Susan O'Brien

Absolutely.

00:12:15:23 - 00:12:19:02

Alison Simpson

So being able to drill down on that would be incredibly powerful.

00:12:19:02 - 00:12:19:15

Susan O'Brien

It's amazing.

00:12:19:23 - 00:12:23:09

Alison Simpson

Now, are you seeing any regional differences in how Canadians are responding?

00:12:23:15 - 00:12:53:05

Susan O'Brien

For sure we do. I think one of the biggest aspirations we have is in this fairly rigorous analytical modeling is just probably not a surprise. But again, those with the most debt are reducing the most in terms of spend. And so our ability to understand exactly where that is happening is helping us again, change the way we show up in those in those markets in terms of the offering and the way we market, etc..

00:12:53:05 - 00:13:12:21

Susan O'Brien

So yeah, we're seeing regional differences just driven by the fact that, you know, some provinces, some regions are carrying heavier debt loads. So how do you make sure that you're there for them when they need you in that different way, be it or offers or or value, etc.?

00:13:13:18 - 00:13:22:15

Alison Simpson

And have you seen any new opportunities or new consumer segments emerge as Canadians are grappling with economic pressures?

00:13:23:07 - 00:13:44:21

Susan O'Brien

The way we think about this is are fortunate because we do have such substantial data to be able to segment as required based on that need. So yeah, I mean, what I would say is we have a segmentation that really looks at value in terms of how our customers and what we're seeing is there's this shift. So it's not that there's a new segment, it's that people are shifting within that segment.

00:13:44:21 - 00:14:10:06

Susan O'Brien

So you might have been, you know, someone who would have responded less to our flier, you might have bought more on price, you might have spent less time taking us up on our 1 to 1 offers program and tribal rewards. And you might have bought more national brands, let's say. So there's you know, the ability to go well seeing customer just eating differently in this moment.

00:14:10:14 - 00:14:15:12

Susan O'Brien

And fortunately you know we have a suite of offerings that and and the more they are.

00:14:15:21 - 00:14:38:04

Alison Simpson

It's great and marketers and brand leaders can have a unique opportunity to certainly drive awareness and change for important social issues. So this is a great example. Certainly ESG and I know that this is the case for Canadian Tire, certainly with your commitment to make life in Canada better. So how do you determine which societal areas you want to make a positive impact on?

00:14:38:14 - 00:14:41:19

Alison Simpson

And what are some of the initiatives that you've developed to make life in Canada better?

00:14:42:07 - 00:15:20:08

Susan O'Brien

You know, I go back to our what I call better connected strategy, because that's the strategy. But that strategy was built off of a renewed and evolved brand purpose. But again, CEO support, this was not like the marketers saying we better have a brand purpose or this was our CEO wanting to codify the role we play in the lives of Canadians and the difference in that versus, hey, we should do something like this, you know, driven by the folks in New York, the marketers, whatever you want to call it, is substantial because it formed the foundation of our strategy.

00:15:20:18 - 00:15:47:14

Susan O'Brien

And the idea was every decision has to flow through that lens and not just the sort of call it corporate responsibility decisions. Every decision across the five pillars of that better strategy. Not only do we look at almost every decision we make through that lens, we also actually have a pillar that is focused on that, that notion of, I would say, ESG, but I would say broad broadly.

00:15:48:07 - 00:16:12:00

Susan O'Brien

It's this idea of how are we again, in the context of creating emotional connections for Canadians, making decisions that support Canadians, help build this country. We call it sometimes we call our role as a nation builder like we have. We have an accountability responsibility to this country to make sure that we're operating in a way that is right for Canadians.

00:16:12:11 - 00:16:38:18

Susan O'Brien

And so we've spent a lot of time going through very specific. What does that look like? What does it look like? We call it debate the entire diversity and inclusion and belonging. What does that what does that look like? And we've got substantial progress made in terms of people feeling like they belong through ERGs and sort of courageous conversations and real shifts in how we think about diversity.

00:16:39:07 - 00:17:03:03

Susan O'Brien

When you go to sort of the more aspect of it, the environmental aspect of it, we spent significant time. We even have a committee within our board at it's called the Branded Corporate Responsibility Committee, and they oversee our strategy. And so when you look at the EA, we launched our first ESG official ESG report about a year ago, again, driven out of this better strategy, just launched second one on September 6th.

00:17:03:08 - 00:17:37:06

Susan O'Brien

And there's some pretty big commitments in there. We made a scope, one and two commitment in that we made another commitment around unity with respect to have heard that we have committed 50% of our total sponsorship money to women's professional sports. And then we just recently became the founding sponsor of the Women's Professional Hockey League in Canada. We have doubled down on our crisis sort of interventions due across the country when there's a weather situation, flooding, etc. are released.

00:17:37:06 - 00:18:08:04

Susan O'Brien

From the humanitarian perspective, we have a partnership with Red Cross. So, I mean, I could go on and on and these are literally initiatives driven out of that promise to be there to make life better for Canadians and our beliefs that we have a very important long history. And it is not just to sell stuff to people. And so it just once you've said that people act that way, they come up with ways to sort of deliver on that promise in the most interesting ways.

00:18:08:04 - 00:18:13:17

Susan O'Brien

I'm normally delighted by what I hear happens across the organization in this regard.

00:18:13:17 - 00:18:38:10

Alison Simpson

And building on that point, you are truly making a difference as a brand of business in Canada and having the network of store owners that you do have across the country. I've seen some amazing examples of store owners sort of taking it on their own initiative to live up to that. And there was a snowstorm where literally the entire town was closed down, that the Canadians tire store and our went in and opened it up to support the community.

00:18:38:17 - 00:18:45:11

Alison Simpson

So what are some of the ways that you've been able to get that level of commitment from your store owners as well?

00:18:45:18 - 00:19:23:01

Susan O'Brien

It's probably clever, but I love this company. I believe in what we're trying to do and I think the dealers are we call them our associate dealers, dealers, those store owners. They are the heart of this company. And so when we talk about I said we evolved and codified our purpose, we are here to make life better. When you're doing that for a corporation that has a number of banners and a bank and a whole bunch, things like that, you naturally default to your sort of color, your organizing logic as a company.

00:19:23:01 - 00:19:46:12

Susan O'Brien

And that organizing logic is around the entire retail and community. Retail is built through our dealers and how they show up in their community. So in some ways, I mean, we didn't have to encourage anything. If anything, we built off the legacy that they have in this company being there. So it's the craziest thing. We we have our corporate things and initiatives we have to do and want to do and not to do.

00:19:46:19 - 00:20:13:04

Susan O'Brien

And then we have this like unbelievable sort of on the ground, always on community ambassadors in our dealers, in the stores. You know, I just came back from our dealer convention, which happened, and all our dealers come together, talk strategy and a variety of other things. And we have an award. And every year, I swear to God, it breaks me up for dealers who do things in their communities and kind of blows your mind.

00:20:13:04 - 00:20:34:05

Susan O'Brien

I'm not kidding. It's our secret sauce. It is our ability to be here for another 100 years runs directly through those two or so. You don't have to encourage much. The only thing I would say is we're just really trying to even understand more of what they do, frankly, so that we can make sure that all the best practices and things that we're doing, we understand.

00:20:34:05 - 00:20:39:07

Susan O'Brien

So that's a little bit of work we took on as part of the thing. But we're we're very fortunate.

00:20:39:18 - 00:20:50:13

Alison Simpson

And screwed now as we look ahead to 2024 and unfortunately, the potential for another challenging economic year, how can brands ensure that they're staying true to the promises that they've made?

00:20:50:23 - 00:21:14:03

Susan O'Brien

Yeah, this is a big one. I mean, there's lots out there literature wise. Yes. Painting in terms of importance to companies and is going to be put on hold at I'll just put it out there, I believe amp put on hold. But it does have to be balanced with everything else that has to get done because we can't actually be great at ESG if we're not being successful at business.

00:21:14:16 - 00:21:33:13

Susan O'Brien

And it's like there's not trade offs there. I fundamentally need that now, especially for a company that believes we're going to differentiate based on emotional connection that, you know, the two go hand in hand. You're not trading off some ESG initiative for building your business, but you do need to balance the investments you make. So that's what it's about.

00:21:33:13 - 00:21:53:05

Susan O'Brien

I mean, that is those are the conversations that happen and you make commitments and those commitments need to be felt. So it really is you know, it's that conversation, that belief in your strategy and coming together to say, how do we accomplish? Or then we probably should based on what's happening in the market right now. But we are committed.

00:21:53:05 - 00:22:15:01

Susan O'Brien

Certainly. I think one thing I just threw out there is our Jumpstart charity. I didn't mention it earlier and the long list of things we've been doing, probably because we've been doing it for 15 years now, just celebrating 15 years a long time. And that program we there's no scaling back on that really ever. We have just continuously invested in it.

00:22:15:07 - 00:22:38:21

Susan O'Brien

We've expanded the mandate of that program to not just be about helping kids, you know, who can't get into sports from an economic perspective to how do we help young women become leaders through sport. So we there's no pullback on our part, but there is a balancing and a lot of creativity being used to get to that end game, just given where companies are right now.

00:22:38:21 - 00:22:40:13

Susan O'Brien

I think everyone is headed that way.

00:22:41:06 - 00:22:59:18

Alison Simpson

Thank you on behalf of the amazing company you're working for. I certainly growing up was encouraged to be involved in sports when it wasn't always the norm for females. And I think about the life learning I got from that, the way it helped set me up for professional success. The just the the grit that you develop and being involved in that.

00:22:59:18 - 00:23:12:03

Alison Simpson

So that legacy you have as enabling Canadians who don't have the financial means to enjoy and benefit from that learning and those life skills is absolutely commendable. So thank.

00:23:12:03 - 00:23:13:07

Susan O'Brien

You. Thank you, Alison.

00:23:13:16 - 00:23:25:11

Alison Simpson

Now, absolutely. There are going to be some valuable insights shared today, Susan, and you certainly didn't disappoint. So I'd love to close by asking you to share one piece of advice for the marketers who are listening to us today.

00:23:26:06 - 00:23:59:16

Susan O'Brien

I think it comes back to I put myself in my younger shoes and I think about the times where I didn't feel that I had a voice at the table. Maybe different for some brands, but if you feel like that, challenge yourself and push yourself at the worst thing that anyone could say is no. But if you really believe it, you need to bring that voice of the customer to the table, even when you're uncomfortable, it matters.

00:23:59:16 - 00:24:17:05

Susan O'Brien

It can make a difference. And I feel very fortunate to work for a company that does value that. But I also don't always win. There are there are times where, you know, there's other considerations and again, it comes back to, that's okay, you got to move that penny forward every day, day in day out.

00:24:18:05 - 00:24:34:04

Alison Simpson

And that's such great advice. And as a younger marketer, I also suffered from the will and willingness to be brave enough to speak up. The good news is it does get easier, but you really do have to take that risk and ultimately what you learn as No, it doesn't hurt that much.

00:24:34:17 - 00:24:47:01

Susan O'Brien

It has not hurt that much. Yeah, 100%. You do. And that's that whole sort of notion of test and learn culture. It's okay. It's okay if everything doesn't work. What did you learn from it? Yeah, some.

00:24:47:01 - 00:24:59:16

Alison Simpson

Of my most valuable lessons came the hard way, for sure. So, Susan, I want to thank you again. I know you're incredibly busy and I really appreciate you taking time to join us on CMA Connect today. And I wish you a great rest of your day.

00:24:59:22 - 00:25:08:21

Susan O'Brien

I'd just like to say to you, thank you for all the tremendous work you're doing at the CMA from all the marketers who really benefit from your work. I really appreciate it.

00:25:08:21 - 00:25:19:15

Alison Simpson

So great and blessed to have a great team and a lot of very actively involved members who are volunteering. So I will take the thank you on their behalf as well.

00:25:22:10 - 00:25:36:18

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