Four Marketing Lessons From the Former CMO of ESPN
This week's podcast I spoke with Carol Kruse. Carol is on the board of Valvoline, the former CMO of ESPN, the former CMO of Cambria Health and the former VP of Global Marketing at ESPN:
Here are some of my takeaways from the episode:
Why Carol Practiced Human-Centered Design
Carol's work process revolves around human-centered design (HCD). According to IDEO, a leader in HCD:
“Human-centered design is a creative approach to problem solving and the backbone of our work at IDEO.org. It’s a process that starts with the people you’re designing for and ends with new solutions that are tailor made to suit their needs. HCD is all about building a deep empathy with the people you’re designing for; generating tons of ideas; building a lot of prototypes; sharing what you’ve made with the people you’re designing for; and eventually putting your innovative new solution out in the world.”
Carol believes that many marketing professionals are overly focused on launching. For example, a company would choose a launch date and then begin speaking to users. This is the wrong approach. The product and communication efforts need to go hand and hand. Companies should look at product development as an iterative process.
Find ways to talk and listen to your users. Many companies would create a solution and then have their users adapt to it. Instead, the product team should listen to their users. Learn how they work and create a problem that adapts to their processes.
The most successful companies have product and marketing communication professionals working together towards a solution. They are constantly iterating. It's important to realize product development is a process, not a plan that starts at A and ends with B.
Have a Singular Mission
ESPN has a singular mission: serving sports fans. Every question the company faced circled back to that question. If the answer was no, they wouldn't move forward.
While at ESPN, social media was beginning to take off. One of the decision points was if they should post highlights to social media. ESPN's entire viewership consisted of cable subscribers at the time. There was a big debate, internally, if non-subscribers should have access to ESPN footage. Another decision point was if paying subscribers would be annoyed that footage was available to non-paying subscribers. The decision seemed complex, but it resolved quickly. The team determined that posting highlights would serve sports fans.
Building the Optimal Flywheel for Consumers
As ESPN evolves, it is constantly monitoring how it can serve sports fans. It has built a mobile app and expanded its sports fantasy offerings so fans can continue to be engaged. Since Carol left the company, she has become bullish on eSports — an industry where ESPN is investing heavily. It's a natural extension of their business. It's estimated that the eSports audience will grow to 495M people by the end of this year, a y/y growth of 11.7%.
This also means reaching out to consumers on the platforms they live on. One of Carol's biggest regrets was not optimizing reach out by different social networks. If fans were on Reddit, ESPN needs to dedicate resources to optimize the experience on Reddit. We've seen this approach with companies like Wave. Wave, a competitor to ESPN, has optimized sports content for Snapchat. Gen-Z doesn't watch cable, but they use Snapchat. ESPN needs to be fighting for the next generation of customers. That means creating content in the social channels that they use.
ESPN makes money if fans are using its properties: cable, mobile, web, fantasy and more. If it's not serving the next generation of sport's fans, it'll be left in the dust by more modern companies such as Bleacher Report and Wave.
Sports Are Changing
ESPN can only do so much. Much of the product, live sports, it doesn't control. Yes, ESPN handles the production, but the actual events are in the league. And for ESPN, this is a bit of a problem. The leagues, in their quest for more money, have made the viewing experience worse. Baseball and football games are usually over 3 hours. Most people don’t have patience to sit still that long anymore?