North Star Leaders Podcast

Lindsay Pedersen

The world needs what only your business can bring. And as a leader, it's your job to deliver. But where do you focus? Where do you direct your time, your team, your budget, and your emotional energy? We're learning this together on the North Star Leaders Podcast.

In this podcast, I talk to purpose-driven leaders about the choices that they make to create audacious economic value while also realizing their distinctive purpose. I'm Lindsay Pedersen, brand strategist, author of Forging an Ironclad Brand, and host of the North Star Leaders Podcast. Let's get to it. Today, I am so happy to be joined by Cammie Dunaway. Cammie was CMO of Duolingo and Yahoo, among other Hall of Fame companies. She is also a bestselling author and is now a board member and advisor to CEOs. Cammie, welcome to the show.

Cammie Dunaway Thank you, Lindsay. It is great to be with you.

Lindsay Pedersen

It's great to be with you too. Thanks for joining me. Okay, Cammie, to start us off, what is your favorite thing about what you do?

Cammie Dunaway

The variety of how I spend my days. So I'll take yesterday as an example. I had a call with a CEO and doing some advising on business strategy, and then I had a call with a young college graduate just talking about job search, and went on a hike with friends, and then coached another CEO in the afternoon on much more of kind of thinking about making decisions based on values. Then I do a virtual book group in the afternoon. So I just, I love the variety of people and just being able to use my gifts in different ways with different authors.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yes, you get to have a hand and a foot in many different pies all at once. It's a joy. Yes. Well, as a leader and as an advisor to CEOs now, what do you find most compelling about having a North Star or a mission, a brand strategy, whatever you call that North Star? What's the most useful thing as a CMO or even a CEO of having that?

Cammie Dunaway

I think that it gives you filters to use to prioritize. Because for all of us, we typically have tons of ideas for ways that we could grow, for partners that we might want to explore relationships with, for new products that we want to launch. So I don't think the challenge in most businesses is coming up with the ideas. Challenge is focusing your time and your energy on the right ones. So having that North Star really enables you to see, is this going to be of real value to the customers or consumers I care about? Is this consistent with my brand promise and enables that kind of focus?

Lindsay Pedersen

It's like it filters in and filters out without any cognitive effort required. It's like it comes to you already filtered and then there's fewer cycles that have to be run on things that are cool ideas, but not on strategy. I love that. I've heard you talk about the importance of word of mouth marketing and how organic marketing becomes more and more important for growth. I'm curious, what is it that makes word of mouth marketing so powerful? Why is that? What's at the base of that?

Cammie Dunaway

I think trust is at the base of that. That we are bombarded with so much information these days, that it's overwhelming. It's overwhelming to know what to believe. As we've seen, even the news isn't trustworthy anymore. So word of mouth is about people that we believe in, that have credibility with us, sharing positive experiences. That just makes it much more easy to navigate a decision-making process with consumers or customers.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah, it's like the more stimuli vying for our attention and trust, the more we kind of close into who are the people or the voices that we're going to allow in, because it is so everybody wants to get in. Everybody wants to get inside the head of everybody who's trying to buy something, sell something.

Cammie Dunaway

Exactly. What is the voice that we are going to listen to?

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. And it's always been the case, right? But there's something about, it's not like it's never been important.

Cammie Dunaway

Right. But the noise level is absolutely greater today. The number of sources that we have is vastly different than it was when I was a young marketing assistant for a free company in the early 90s. So that's why word of mouth just carries so much more weight with consumers today.

Lindsay Pedersen

It's just the noise, the volume, the sheer volume of other messages. What are the things in your experience that are really successful in facilitating that word of mouth marketing? What do you like or what do you favor for making that happen?

Cammie Dunaway

I think the first thing is absolute obsession over the product or the experience. No one, well, people are going to share if they have a bad experience. They're going to share things you don't want shared, but no one's going to share just a, meh, yeah, it's okay. It met my expectations kind of experience. So, you know, even as a marketer, I put every dime I have early on into creating something that's truly delightful. I think that's job number one.

And then job number two is really thinking about why would someone want to share this and how do I tap into that? So for example, at Duolingo, we realized that the achievements of learning a language and the progress you make, that's kind of like a nice humble brag. Because you feel good about the fact that you're learning a language. So we really focused on making it easy to share badges or achievements on social networks.

In contrast, one of the companies that I'm on the board is a company called Flow, an amazing, amazing app based on our cycles. And we're not going to share that we've started our period, right? Or that we've stopped our period. But what we will share is when we're going through perimenopause, that is so fraught with challenges and questions and like, is this normal? And so building a community where you know you're getting good information, then you want to share and invite other people in to that community. So figuring out what would be a consumer's motivation for sharing and how do I create some viral loops around that? Yes.

Lindsay Pedersen

It's interesting because we're talking about marketing and yet product is one of the four Ps of marketing. It's the foundation. You can't fake it.

Cammie Dunaway

No. And you know, again, as you and I were taught growing up in Frito-Lay, growing up in Clorox, that marketing is about driving profitable sales through unlocking consumer insights. So yes, communications is a piece of that, but so is the product. So is your distribution. So is your customer service. All of those touch points.

Lindsay Pedersen

Well, and it's interesting because organizationally, so for listeners, both Cammie and I grew up in consumer packaged goods. Consumer packaged goods, when you're a brand manager, you own the four Ps. You own product, price, place, and promotion. So it's in your interest, you're incentivized for the product to be a product that has word of mouth, that has repeat. A lot of people who are in marketing don't own the product. It's actually separated out organizationally. So it's a trickier ask to build levers into the product itself that fuel word of mouth marketing. Like there's also like org structure can support or thwart what we're talking about. Am I getting that right?

Cammie Dunaway

Absolutely. It was probably the biggest adjustment that I had to make moving from consumer goods, where I think the role of marketing is very well understood. And actually, as a marketer, you are a general manager responsible for growing your brand. And then moving into technology, where frequently marketing had a more limited set of formal responsibilities and often more related to communications or to kind of product marketing. I remember my first in the move, I would hear these terms like inbound marketing and outbound marketing. I don't know what those things are. What I've learned is when you're in a role or a company where marketing doesn't have direct authority over all of those other aspects of brand, it's really incumbent upon you to use your influence skills, to spend a lot of time educating internally, and to bring to life the consumer through your stories, and through just helping everyone to understand the needs of the consumer or customer. So I did find that my role became more internal storytelling and influencing or a combination of always external, but there was more internal to it than there was when I was in consumer products.

Lindsay Pedersen

So while it might not fall under your job description, and it's not in your purview technically, by kind of imbuing customer empathy for the people who are building and responsible for the product, you can kind of achieve what you would be achieving if you didn't. It's almost cultural.

Cammie Dunaway

It is. Yeah, yeah. One of the things that I always felt really strongly about, too, is that we should never, as marketers in those kinds of environments, say, well, we own the customer. That's a seat at the table. But you would earn a seat at the table by helping everyone in the company to understand the customer and to feel responsibility for the customer and to feel excitement when we served the customer well.

Lindsay Pedersen

If you think about it, especially if you're marketing for a person that you have a lot of heart for, that can be really fun. Like just anecdotes about stories that have come up, anecdotes or even long stories. It's really neat to be able to bring in lights other people up, too.

Cammie Dunaway

I agree. And my career has really been spent with brands that I passionately enjoy as a consumer. So I know that that's not necessary. That's not everybody's story. Thank goodness. You don't have to be the audience in order to understand and communicate and care about the audience. But yeah, I've been pretty lucky about eating Doritos and Yahoo products. Playing with the Wii and doing my French lessons on Duolingo.

Lindsay Pedersen

Oh, yeah. Oh my gosh. You have had such a cool career. All of those brands would be just dream brands to work with. I know that you are the author of a book. It's called Fit Matters. What moved you to write this book? Where did that come from?

Cammie Dunaway

It came out of my personal experience working with Nintendo. Nintendo is a great company that creates magical experiences. But the way that they did business was a little different than my just natural style. I think part of why they create such incredible products is they obsess over every single detail. And there's a lot of layers of checks and balances. Make sure that what reaches the consumer is really perfect. And I'm just a little more loose in my style. I'm more of a test and learn, iterate, trial and error, learn from your mistakes, but kind of move fast, move out of things.

Lindsay Pedersen

Right.

Cammie Dunaway

Sure, sure. Both ways are totally valid in the right situation. But it left me feeling like I had to adjust my style so much. I had to take my round self and really force it into a square peg. So the message of the book is work is such a big part of our lives that if possible, you want to be in a place that fits your talents, fits your approach, that fits your lifestyle needs at different points. So just to encourage people to have the courage not to settle, but to find the work that really is their calling.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. Well, and so embedded in that to such a large degree is self-awareness, right? Like I actually wouldn't have known. I too actually, Clorox, I think was different from Frito-Lay in that it was very risk averse because a lot of its products are practically a utility. And so very risk averse. And I didn't know that I was not risk averse until I was in that environment. I didn't know that, hey, I want to take some more chances until I felt what it was like to be analyzing everything, you know, the 10th time. Gosh, I mean, boy, do I benefit now, you know, many, many years later. Boy, do I benefit from the discipline I gained in that environment. And boy, was it not for me at the same time. It's like both.

Cammie Dunaway

Yes, you can respect. And also, you know, there are different seasons where we need different things in our career. I heard someone say recently that a lot of careers fall into three phases. The first phase is about learning. The second phase is about earning. And the third phase is about returning. That opportunity to really learn at a place like Clorox or a place like Nintendo that is very rigorous. But as you get more experience in your career, you may be at a place where you want to take more risks and have more.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah, oh, my gosh, that's so that I love that frame that there's a time and especially like earlier in your career, it's probably not as large of an opportunity cost to your personal life to really be throwing yourself into the learning part. And that may be making quote unquote mistakes in your career by being somewhere where you're not a good fit. It's OK for that to happen as long as you're learning. But then there's also a point where it's like, OK, life is also short and you want to be lit up by what you're doing on a day to day basis.

Cammie Dunaway

I was really profound for me. My husband at one point at Nintendo when I was at Nintendo said, you know, you work so hard and you make sacrifices and that that means we make sacrifices as a family. And I've always been fine with that when I saw you lit up. But when I see that we're making these sacrifices now and it doesn't seem like you have joy in what you're doing, that just feels out of whack.

Lindsay Pedersen

That's such a wonderful reflection for your partner to say that because there's a larger pattern of influence here that like, yeah, the whole family is sort of in this job with you. And when it's rewarding. Yeah. When mom is happy, it really shows in the family. Or when dad is happy, it really shows in the family. And when they're not lit up, even if you're not making a lot of sacrifices, you feel it. So that's nice.

Cammie Dunaway

And it's I think it's helpful for many of us to have the permission of someone saying that because when we're in difficult work circumstances, there's so much that we tell ourselves about. I'm not a quitter. I've been trained to stick with it. I don't want to let anybody down. Even if I'm unhappy, I need to just keep at it. So having permission to say, no, I quit.

Lindsay Pedersen

That's really hard. Oh my gosh, it's borderline countercultural. And I know Annie Duke has this book called Quit. I'm pretty sure that's the title. It's just called Quit. And it's about this. It's about decision making and when to quit from a kind of game theory standpoint. And I love the thought of it as almost like a life skill. Like it's a skill. It's a muscle. And you can do bicep curls to be judicious in when to stay and when not to stay. And for something that takes as much life force as your job, as your career, that's a really worthwhile muscle to hone. I love that. What do you think makes for a great brand or a really valuable brand? What is it that makes a brand one that we as students of marketing might admire?

Cammie Dunaway

I think it is the clear sense of the promise that we're making to consumers, the job that we're doing, the problem that we're solving. So being very clear about that. I think the great brands do it in a way that's unique and true to them. And they do it very, very consistently across all of their touch points. And I think it's not that common, actually.

Lindsay Pedersen

Yeah. Why is that? Why is it? I agree with you, but I can't really put my finger. Like what makes that so elusive?

Cammie Dunaway

I think that, particularly in the tech space, that there's still a lack of understanding about what brand really is. So a lot of people see brand as branded communications and something that is the role of the marketing department. And one of the things I love to talk to CEOs about, particularly CEOs who are in a startup or still early stage, is their role as chief brand officer.

Lindsay Pedersen

Ooh, I love that.

Cammie Dunaway

And they have got to be the one to really understand what that brand promise is. And they've got to be the guardian of that and make sure that everything they're doing is consistent with what they want to stand for. And I just think that that's still not very well understood.

Lindsay Pedersen

It kind of harkens back to what we were talking about earlier, where in consumer packaged goods, the brand manager is the general manager or the CEO of the business. Therefore, they're on the hook for the valuation of the business, as is the CEO. And so they make it their business to imbue everything that the customer experiences with that brand promise. And that's organizational. And then if the CEO of an organization, or for that matter of a brand, thinks of it as the job of marketing or, I don't know, growth or whatever, chief people officer, whatever. If they think of it as their job, then the customer is actually going to feel it.

Cammie Dunaway

Exactly. And it's going to have this dissonance. Think about a product that is really promising ease, ease of experience. And they communicate that beautifully in marketing and they make their web flows easy, but their customer service sucks. That's eroding the brand. And that's why few people in an organization other than the CEO really are in the position to see all of those touch points and to make the decisions that if this is our promise, this is where I'm going to have to make investment in order to deliver that promise.

Lindsay Pedersen

Because it requires resources. If customer service is going to be best in class, that's a lot more expensive than a customer service that's average. And so somebody needs to allocate those resources and provide air cover to that organization to do what they need to do to deliver on that promise. So I love that as an advisor to CEOs now, you see that as part of what you're conveying and kind of like inculcating in the CEOs as a realization of just how much power they have to deliver on the holisticness of that promise. But it just isn't going to be a great brand otherwise. It might be a valuable business for another reason, I would argue. I imagine you would argue too that there's no business that brand isn't going to increase the value of. But it doesn't mean you can't have a valuable business without that. It's just that there's all this unrealized potential if the brand isn't holistically kind of holding and conveying that promise across everything that the customer experiences.

Cammie Dunaway

I have observed in the past, maybe a year, 18 months, that there is a growing understanding of this among the investment community, where we have gone through an era that as long as you are very, very efficient in your performance marketing and really good at acquiring customers at significantly less than you are monetizing the customers, then that just seems like magic. Even as a CMO, it's like, well, we have unlimited markets. As long as we're showing the absolute financial ROI on every marketing dollar. But people have started to see that that road kind of hits a dead end at some point. And that unless there is something much more substantial and meaningful to the relationship between the consumer, the customer, and the business, that eventually the performance marketing machine just runs out of gas. I think now there is much more discussion about how do you build brand from the beginning.

Lindsay Pedersen

I imagine anyway, among investors who are not just there to flip the company, because if your time horizon is short, that actually makes all the sense in the world to just arbitrage the company, right? Just to build through performance marketing. But if you're trying to build a brand that is going to be around for years, not months, there's a point where growth can't happen without that, especially without margin erosion, without people's willingness to pay decreasing. And you have to have brand in order to get that willingness to pay to be nice and stable and high. So I love hearing that investors are realizing that. Okay, this has been such a fun conversation. I have about 20 more questions I wish I had time to ask you, but I don't. So let me switch into our final few minutes of some rapid fire questions for you. So one word answers. Are you ready?

Cammie Dunaway Ready.

Lindsay Pedersen Okay. What was your first job?

Cammie Dunaway

Greeting card lady at the supermarket.

Lindsay Pedersen

Oh, at the supermarket. That's awesome.

Cammie Dunaway

Way more than one word.

Lindsay Pedersen

If it's hyphenated, you could call it one word. I love it. Okay. What language do you wish that you spoke fluently?

Cammie Dunaway

Portuguese.

Lindsay Pedersen

What do you love to do on a Sunday afternoon?

Cammie Dunaway

Make mosaics.

Lindsay Pedersen

I have to ask you more about that offline. Okay. What is your favorite movie?

Cammie Dunaway

Being there.

Lindsay Pedersen

Also something I want to ask you more about later. Okay. Being there. And finally, what is a memorable splurge purchase?

Cammie Dunaway

Diamond stud earrings.

Lindsay Pedersen

Right. Yes. Love. Cammie, this has been wonderful. How can our guests learn more about you online?

Cammie Dunaway

Sure. You can go to my LinkedIn. It's Cammie Dunaway. Awesome. That links to everything else.

Lindsay Pedersen

It links to everything else. Oh, perfect. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for listening to this episode of North Star Leaders. Make sure you don't miss an episode by subscribing on your favorite podcast app. If you know of a North Star leader whose insights would be valuable for this community, please message me on ironcladbrandstrategy.com. Also on that website are show notes, transcripts, and a way to sign up for our monthly newsletter. I hope you join us again for another episode of North Star Leaders.