Ep. 214 with Elina Vives, CMO, Chamberlain Group

[Music] You're listening to a media post production. This episode is supported by Wonder Can ads, performance powered by kindness. Wonder Can ads helps brands turn natural brows, paws, and scroll moments into high-performing CTV and display campaigns. No interruptions, just use your first timing that drives real results. Discover more at WonderCanAds.com. Now onto the episode. Welcome to Brand Insider 101. Where each week we sit down with some of the brightest minds in marketing. I'm your host, Erin Everhart, and today I want to talk about unsexy products. Not everyone gets to market products people actually want to think about. Some of us out here are fighting for attention for products that exist in the background of people's lives. Products that live in utility drois next to take out menus and spare keys. Not products that keep our house running smoothly. Products whose purpose is so we have one less thing to worry about. These are products people like in a way they like their dentist. Not with excitement, but with resignation. It's not that they don't care about them. It's that they don't know they care about them until suddenly they do. Like when they stop working and when that happens, that's a situation. And that product becomes the most important thing in that person's life. We all know products I'm talking about hot water heaters, Wi-Fi batteries, garage door openers. Now we as retail marketers, we also love big sales moments. Even if the war rooms, the triggered journeys and the competitive bridge marking breaks us every single year. And one of those is happening next week. Yes, Prime Day starts on Tuesday. What started as this cute little thing that Amazon did for 24 hours to celebrate its 20th anniversary is now a full blown four day commercial event with more moving parts than a circus alay show. That's a huge opportunity for any product. But especially the products that live in the background of our lives. Prime Day can create the consideration moment. And Chamberlain Group is capitalizing on it. If you have a garage, you know Chamberlain Group. You've probably already used their product this morning. They're ubiquitous with garage door openers. And they've expanded to door lock, store bells, and cameras for a complete smart home security system. Infusing technology into their hardware that's already in 36 million households nationwide. And they're using Prime Day as the first real commercialization moment for a reposition brand, a new product story, and a marketing organization that has completely rebuilt how it connects creative to conversion. So how does a 72 year old manufacturer become a technology company? What does it take to market a product people use every day without ever once thinking about? And what does it mean when the consumer journey starts more often than not with a problem they didn't know they had? Let's find out. Please join me in welcoming our next guest, CMO Alina Vivas. Alina, welcome to Brandon Sider, one on one. Hi, Aaron. How are you? Thanks for having me. Absolutely. Alina, welcome to Brandon Sider. First, let's talk about your background. I mean, you spent 16 years at Miller Cores. You had a sit at Samsung. So what drew you to Chamberlain? Yeah, as you mentioned, I kind of grew up in CPG, spent 16 years up through the brand marketing track at Miller Cores, and then made the leap from CPG to CE at Samsung and then signify as a chief commercial officer. And then what drew me to Chamberlain was the transformation. This idea that you started with this notion of an industrial manufacturer making a complete transformation to become a tech company and kind of making the transition from CPG to smart home. I really understood the benefit that the products and services could bring to consumers. And that was really intriguing. And it was great to come out of the commercial organization and back into the marketing. Yeah. So where is Chamberlain in this transformation? Where was it when you started and kind of where are we now at in the journey? So I'll kind of take that question in two parts. So first, let me start with the company at large. As you mentioned, 72 years and industrial manufacturer. Right. So garage door openers, gate operators, dock levelers, fantastic hardware that to your point, which is people took for granted that is always working. About 10 years ago, we started this transformation by way of introducing the MyQ app. So the MyQ app is a platform that opens and closes the garage door opens and closes the different devices that we have embedded in homes and in warehouses and communities. But really the transformation has really started over the last several years. You mentioned earlier to us expanding our ecosystem beyond just the garage door opener to other smart home devices. And this idea of being tech forward and starting to transform as a technology company software as a service and taking the tech and spec sort of out of the front, like the out of the forefront and talking about consumer benefits. So we have 10 million users right now monthly active users of our app, people opening, closing every day and experiencing those benefits. So that's a huge shift for the company right kind of moving into hardware into software as a service. What did that do for the marketing organization? How did that change them? So great question. I mean, when I joined I joined about a year ago and what I found was in the marketing organization, there was a lot of a dis there was much very much a disconnect between marketing and the commercial work. Right. So not from a not from a confrontational perspective per se but just different goals, different agendas. So the first order of business was connecting those two. And really I live by the principle there's no daylight between the brands and the business. So first was kind of restating that mission restating the mission that we are on a transformation journey and that marketing could be and should be the growth engine of this business. And that was about 12 months ago. I mean, the vision, the mission was widely understood by the marketing organization. But along the way we're developing different proof points, different ways of working in order to make that vision a reality. So what pivots did you have to make right like making sure that the brand positioning was always connected to the business bottom line? I think first and foremost, we really had to dive deep into consumer segmentation to truly understand and go back to some of the pain points that either consumers didn't even know they had or our marketing organization really needed to re immerse ourselves in. So that was first and foremost. The second thing is we really had to establish what my queue meant, right? It was we mentioned it's somewhat ubiquitous and in the background, but we're bringing it to the forefront and my queue transcends not only a residential business, but our commercial businesses and our enterprise business and elevating my queue to have a brand proposition that also had commercial feasibility. So we've come up with a brand proposition we call right on queue, which really means that our devices, our services are right when you need us right where you need us when you need us always right on queue. So how did that look like in practice, right? I mean, going from marketing, not just text and specs, right? Like where did you really focus on what are those benefits to the consumer in our everyday lives? So I think it starts it always starts with a use case right so you always have to put yourself in the mindset of a consumer. So first we had to take the marketing organization and remind ourselves that we ourselves are consumers right you start with that human insight. So let's just take a case in point. So we all and this happened to me actually two days ago you forget to close the garage door. You realize you did and you're in bed and suddenly you get an alert the garage door is open while my queue takes that action and closes the garage for you right so something simple as that or you've got maybe family member that's visiting and you're not home but you need to let them in you can give them a custom pin code to get in through your video keypad dog walkers. So just all these different use cases of people coming and going from your home and the unique differentiator for us, a Chamberlain group in my queue is that we can open and close doors and that's exactly what we do. So this notion of keeping access safe and secure is our unique proposition but you can see this proliferate into multiple different use cases across a consumer's like family and life and throughout the day and we're just going to bring those use cases to life. So we take away the tech and spec and we start talking consumer benefit use case plain language and that starts with the brief all the way through the creative execution into the PDPs that we put on Amazon. The plain language I think is a really key point to focus on because do you feel like we as marketers and even engineers we over complicate things we say things that it's like why are we using utilize instead of use as an example right. Yeah, no, I think I think we do over complicate it I always I always think about this too is like we get we get sick of our own language and our own headlines and our own copywriting well before a consumer even sees it right. So I think this there's a constant reminder and discipline to like read the stuff we're writing as if we were reading it for our own our own lives our own families right and actually be comfortable with saying it and then saying it again and then saying it a third time because remember like we get sick of everything before. or consumers even see it, right? I think simple things like that are usually the most impactful because people go, and it actually really is like freeing for most marketers, most copywriters, not feeling they constantly have to iterate, iterate, iterate and get the the Soros just to write a piece of coffee or to launch a campaign or put something on a PDP, you know? - My husband would love this because there's been a number of times where I've like poked him in bed to be like, babe, I forgot the car to the garage door. Like you gotta get up and close it, right? So at the benefits, they speak so well to me. How is this expanding into your other product lines, right? People know you for garage door openers, or you kind of introducing them into the other product benefits that you're launching as well? - Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you mentioned that, you know, our door locks, doorbells, video key pads, but this notion of building a an ecosystem, a so that an access ecosystem that secures the perimeter of your home. So in last January, we launched our three in one lock, which is exactly what it sounds like. It's a camera, it's a doorbell, it's a door lock. Five different ways to enter. And so we're bringing that like the garage door to the front door. We've also got indoor cameras, outdoor cameras, video key pads, and we have some new products launching later in this year. But just this notion that as you, as you start to develop a relationship with consumers, as you start to build trust in your brand, clear language, clear benefits to their lives, consumers start to allow you, no pun intended, in and around their home. And as you build this ecosystem, honestly, the benefits just compound. Because the use cases and the features that we launch continue to be accretive, right? To that person's lives. And like we mentioned, you can start to see more and more use cases as we launch more products, but actually as you become a software as a service, you can start to launch features and push those features into your hardware. And again, the benefit is just constantly compounding. And that's essentially what we're trying to do with Chamberlain and through our MyQ brand. Did this shift into leading with the software, into leading with consumer benefits? Did that require change management internally to kind of like rewire how some of your engineers or products people were thinking? Absolutely. And I think it goes well beyond just engineers. It's marketing, it's sales, it's even our customers. I think this notion of either or was our first battle. Like are we selling hardware or are we selling software? And this notion, it's not binary. Just like the brand and the business is not a forced choice. It's a false choice, right? The two need to intersect and interact with one another. And that essentially was the first order of business to say we're doing both, right? We have to be, we have to have the hardware in order to enable the software. Well, you guys already had the hardware too. I mean, I have Chamberlain Garage Verrupters on mine. I didn't even know it was a Chamberlain until I'm like, oh, wow, yeah, it's what's, it's lift master up here. So you had the benefit of already being in your consumer's household. Now let's figure out how to make it easier for them. That's exactly right. And honestly, I think the more and more as we think about engineering, as you think about hardware, there is a point where you're going to be saturated, right? So you have to continue to add these benefits. And I think being in the smart home space for 10 years, I mean, I've seen this across all the three companies that I've worked for. There is a point where consumers are like, wait, okay, I think I'm good. And therefore you have to continue to earn the trust and earn the place in the consumer's consideration choice and enter software, enter features, features that become benefits. And like I said earlier, become a creative. And then before you know it, like consumers can't live without you. And isn't that like, isn't that the utopia for any marketer? Is when you have this brand love that you've created because you've added benefits to their lives? Not just trying to sell a widget. Yeah. So as you think about these benefits, leading with these consumer benefits, what does that look like back to the business side? You make such a good point of connecting the brand to the business. So what metrics are you watching? So I mean, I think the evolution of a CMO, I think almost every CMO, every marketer is starting to look at it this way. We go from head of advertising to growth architects. It's really the evolution of the position, the evolution of the department. But at Chamberlain, we're looking at LTV to CAC. I mean, that is our number one. The LTV to CAC ratio is super important. We're measuring ourself on unit sales and ARR or MRR. Recurring revenue is, are the metrics that the team is looking at. We're not looking at vanity metrics anymore. We just can't. Things like awareness, while important in the grand scheme of things, yes, but the more important pieces is the creative work that we're producing, translating to conversion, right? And every part of the marketing mix plays a role. There are certain aspects in marketing that are building audiences, that are kind of stoking demand. And then there's other parts of the marketing mix that are closing the deal. But all work in concert with one another to become a flywheel. And I think that's the most important thing is translating that for the team to understand that I'm not just, I'm part of a bigger picture. And I think that's been the biggest, actually, the biggest point of pride for me and in our company is that the team is willing. The team understands it. And they're all rallying around. And Prime Day, as you opened, is the best example of this. I mean, every marketer in this building is aligned to what we're trying to do for Prime Day. Well, and you're almost giving them P&L ownership, right? You're giving them more responsibility to feel like what they're doing is actually making an impact. Absolutely. The best marketers can translate a brief that has P&L impact and take P&L accountability and translate it back to a brief. I mean, this idea that we can be creative and have commercial fluency is something that I'm so proud of in my own career. And I wasn't always like this. I wanted to say that. So the career choice is that you make like taking roles in sales at a young part of my career and walking the talk and understanding, like trying to sell to a customer across the aisle. That was a big humbling moment for me. And then taking those uncomfortable positions to learn the business, but then be able to bring it back to marketing and show how the two can work in concert with one another has been really just such an incredible journey for me. And honestly, the team is really responding very well to it. And this notion that we have one source of truth, one metric, right? The CFO, the CRO and the CMO can all talk the same language. We have one number to hit and just multiple ways to get there. So many people lump sales and marketing together. If you are in sales, you'll be a great marketer, but they have such complementing but very different skill sets, right? I love that kind of position. What did you learn from your time and commercialization in sales that makes you feel like makes you a better marketer today? I think that's a really great question. When I was younger in my career, I met the head of sales and I was presenting a brand plan at the time. And it was one of the most humbling moments of my career. And I have many. But one of the most humbling moments where he said, OK, now sell it to me as if I was 7/11. And I kind of got stumped. And he kept pushing back. And it became this role play of a customer, like these customer obstacles. And what it taught me in that moment is you've got to simplify it. You've got to understand the motivations of the person, the customer, whomever you're talking with, you have to understand what they're motivated by and what's in it for them. And start to tailor your story that way. And having to be in sales after that and actually having to do it myself. And hearing customers just call it like it is. And then being able to pivot allowed me to have what I call street cred. I mean, I'm able to go back into the marketing organization and sit across now from heads of sales and just feel like I get it because I've been there. But then also teach it, teach people to strip away the marketing jargon, focus on the business, think about what we're trying to accomplish as a team, and how your work contributes to that goal. Those were those were just humbling moments. What do you think this shift to P&L responsibility, maybe not ownership, but into like being folks sales focused? What does that mean for the marketers who've always been big picture, right-brained brand position marketers? I think it is the most freeing thing and the most liberating thing that could actually happen to them. And they may not think that way in the beginning, but can you imagine if you're able to take a creative idea and demonstrate that it drove commercial, like commercial execution, but not only that, but business outcomes? Can you imagine how much more freedom you would have to swing big again and again and again? And we're seeing that in my in our own team here at Chamberlain. I mean, the same folks 12 months ago that were creating ads and making videos and were super creative, high production value, super entertaining, have now just taken a slight pivot to have in the forefront of their mind, how am I selling an ecosystem? How am I making it sticky? How am I connecting the red thread of the consumer benefit in this ad? And still with the most creative, just sort of nod and wink and smile that I personally put my pride in. And that is the most freeing thing and to get compliments on creative work from the head of sales. in my view, it's the greatest possible compliment you could get. Well, and you've done it in a way that is very creative, again, for non-sexy products, right? We all rely on our garage door openers, but I talked about it. It's not something we're super excited about, right? Like, anybody can market beer, anybody can market the sexy products. Like, what's the hardest part about marketing something like a garage door opener when people just don't think about it in brand names or the fun side of it? Yeah, I think that's where the creativity kind of comes to life, right? I mean, I think, yeah, you can commoditize a product. I mean, I was in light bulbs. I had a plenty of products at to your point. We're on sexy, but I think you have to find, you have to find the edge. Like, what is the edge? Like, what would, what is the creative tension potentially, right? In the case of some of our new spots, which will air at the end of this week before prime day, is we are starting to personify who my Q is, my Q is a part of your home, a digital door man, if you will, somebody looking out for you and just by giving some personality to otherwise unknown products in your home, just by doing that creates a dialogue, creates interest, creates like unexpected creative execution that makes those unsexy products really fun and entertaining. And isn't that really the beauty of like, right brain, left brain to be able to have like a business mindset and a marketing bias? So for me, like, if you keep the consumer front and center always all the time, like those creative ideas can come to life in many ways, shapes and forms. And that's why use case marketing or just thinking about use cases first and foremost and everything we do. In my view is the way forward. And it's the way to become an, so be an enterprise thinker and be able to execute against marketing programs. What does that creative process look like for you when you're defining the use cases? Are you guys all in a war room and throwing ideas out together? I'm sure there have been use cases that come up that you're like, ah, this probably isn't right for us here, but maybe down the line. How do you find the right ones? I think, you know, to a degree, it's a divergent converge type of work stream. Right? So you've got like this, you've got your product teams who are defining like, what are we trying to do? So they're defining use cases through their lens. And then you have the engineers who understand what that use case is and we start to build it to make sure there's feasibility, right? Desire ability and feasibility. And then you've got marketers who are thinking about segmentation, consumer insights, voice of customer, just scrubbing ratings and reviews, interacting with consumers on social. And so you have these sort of different work streams. I think the beauty is when you converge and you come together and you actually start to build on each other's ideas. And so one of the things we did early on, it was a couple of months ago now at this point, is we sat with the engineers and the product teams and our creative teams and the creatives were actually pressure testing, can I tell a story? Sounds like a great use case from your lens. Sounds awesome product team, but I can't tell a story with this. But guess what? That use case on the bottom of your list. Oh my gosh, I can iterate for days on this. So we added this notion of can I tell a story about that use case in order to prioritize which ones actually came to life? And that was an eye opening moment for almost the entirety of the team, because we realized that we need each other, like the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. And I think that's what makes like an organization really start to work well together. And then the output is just that much greater. Well, and I love that you brought the product people, the engineers into the conversation too, right? They have to feel more connected and almost more responsibility over the marketing. It goes both ways if they feel like their inputs are kind of showing up on the consumer facing messaging. And we're actually doing that more and more. I mean, I know CES feels like it's a long ways away, but it's, it's, I mean, the planning has started. And one of the things that we changed this year is engineers are at the same table as the PR team when we're talking about the CES kickoff. I just think bringing people together more and more for the, this idea of a common goal. If we know where we're going as an organization, we understand the business metrics, like what are we, the KPIs that we're all being measured against and we have one agenda. And then we all can see what our contribution is to deliver the company goal. I mean, the work, Aaron, it is just remarkable how much excitement and momentum and honestly less churn we're getting from just coming together early and often. I mean, it sounds so simple, right? It's like communication solves most of the problems that we have. That's actually one of my sayings too is that 90% of the problem is communication and 100% of the solution is communication. You're 100% right. So you have the story, you have the use cases, you've got the messaging out there. We've talked about it. Prime day starts Tuesday of next week. It's a huge sales opportunity for anyone within the consumer space. Why was this the right time for you guys to go all in? I think it starts with, it's the biggest commercial moment, especially for our industry. I'm in the products that we're selling. I mean, it's a consumer facing moment. As you mentioned earlier, I mean, consumers now are looking forward to Prime Day. Brands are using it as amplification for their storytelling. And obviously it's the biggest sales moment, one of the biggest sales moments of the year. It was kind of a point of, it's also a proof point for us, at Chamberlain, right? This idea of working together, bringing a brand, positioning, and creative work that also translates through the line across every single marketing channel, all with the intention to drive unit sales and subscriptions. It just was this culmination of all the work that was nine months in the making. It's really just a moment in time for us to all celebrate. And we've got the war room scheduled, and we've got the cross functional teams like aligned. We've got Hail Mary's, we've got Brayglass, we've got every possible scenario, and permutation of what could or should or go wrong or happen. And we're trying to be as equipped as possible. And we're excited. And I was just on the phone this morning with the sales director of Amazon just talking about, let's just rally the team. One of the things that's really changed is if you ask any marketer in this building about Prime Day, they know exactly what they're working on, what we're all working on. And I can say, 12 months ago, I don't think we were as dialed in as a marketing organization on Prime Day. Oh yeah, I know it's happening. I delivered the creative, but now it's like, no, no, this is our Super Bowl. Well, and I imagine learnings that you'll take from Prime Day, it'll help set you up for other big shopping events that are coming later this year, right? I mean, Prime Day's basically become summer, black Friday, if you think about it in those turns. Nope, that's true. I think, you know, there's a couple of things that we're doing too, is like post mortems, playbooks. And this idea of simple, repeatable ways of working is also a principle that I've, you know, honestly, I brought through my entire career, but definitely hear a Chamberlain like, what are we doing well? What's working? What's not? And continuous improvement. Some people call it fail forward. I just think this is the idea of continuous improvement, raise the bar, learn from what's working. But you know, what also is that there is to a degree a playbook. You know, if we can also get ahead of planning, like starting to talk about Q4 and Q1 now, I mean, it's the best practice. It's just not always as easy. So because you always have to execute while you're planning and planning while executing. So there is a bit of a muscle. There's a bit of a muscle that needs developing there. But I do think that the more successes that we see as a team and the more high fives around the room and we act and operate as a team, the easier the planning and for new for upcoming holidays will be. Yeah. As you're launching some of this kind of repositioning these benefits first, these use cases, it just makes me wonder like, is sales always going to be the end all measure of success, right? Is that kind of as retailers? It's just the world that we live in. I think I think sales as a measure of success. But if you think about lifetime value for me, that to me is the measure of success because it's not just about sell, sell, sell. Like, you know, the point of sale or the unit sales. I mean, yes, that's obviously important. And I certainly want every marketer understanding what it means. But this notion of lifetime value with a consumer is also, remember we talked about, used to talk about brand love, right? A couple of years back, brand awareness, but then brand awareness became like brand saliency and then it really translates, what's brand love? People that are in love with your brand, like fanatics about your brands. This idea of lifetime value and allowing a brand in your home and as a brand being responsible for, you know, what consumers are trusting you with, I just think that lifetime value for me is probably the real KPI that all of us are measuring against, which has a sales component. It has a brand component. And I think it's something that everyone can start to wrap their mind around. When you're marketing products with long purchase cycles, like garage door openers, like cameras, like doorbells, how do you keep that lifetime value relevant when it may be 10 years before someone else purchases or needs another one of your product? I think that's where you enter our subscription services. The services that we provide, the use cases that are features, like actually software features that become use cases. The beauty of smart home and with the advent of AI technology, we can learn more about the home, we can help understand what users or consumers are using, and then really make those use cases more personalized, make the offers more personalized. I think just building relationships with our consumers is probably the most important thing. So it's not really always a transaction. I think this idea of marketing, when you talk about sales immediately, you like market some marketers shut off. They're like, "Oh, that's very transacted." You know, a short term, I'm all about the long term, and there is absolutely the intersection between the two. I just think it's really about, we don't always have to have a transaction if we want to reach out to our consumers. I mentioned earlier, we have a very loyal user base of 10 million homes, people, humans that are interacting with our platform, and we owe it to them to what are the new features, what's coming down the pike, or just engaging with them and showing them how they can use the products that they've already purchased. This idea of adding value at every point in time with our consumers, to me, is really the job, as opposed to just pushing products. You've had a pretty busy nine months getting everything ready for next week. I'm sure next week will be a huge week as well for you. That's kicking off for momentum. So, Alina, I have to know, what are you most excited about, and what's keeping you up at night? Oh my goodness. I think I'm really most excited about our new campaign, right on cue, and some of the new work that we've put out, because it's launching right before Prime Day. We've been building audiences for the last few months. We're able to retarget. We've got the work out, and also all of the different permutations of the work. So, we've also got new social content. We've got a new brand store on Amazon that's launched. We've got PDPs that just not only are just product, like detail pages, but they're actually showcasing the benefits. So, I'm really excited that the entirety of the marketing mix is all working together. It's not like matchy-matchy. Per say, it's purposeful. It's fit for purpose content for the channel in which it's being served, but it all works together. So, that's number one I'm really excited about. What keeps me up at night really is just the unknown. This is a fast-paced business, right? The pace of change in technology and smart home and what everyone else is doing is extremely, there's a lot of unknowns there. So, I think all you can do is prepare as best you can. So, keeping me up at night is really just excitement and anticipation, quite frankly. I'm not really worried that we're not prepared. I'm just, I'm excited to see like how high is high and how much more can we do. Oh, I think it's going to be a big year for you in Chamberlain. I will keep an eye on everything that's coming out next week with Prime Day. Alina, it has been so much fun talking to you today. You will also be able to catch Alina at our retail summit that's happening in August in Tahoe. Alina, thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. Thank you as well. It was great talking to you. Thank you so much. That's it for this week's episode. Thanks to our sponsor, Wonder Can Adds, performance powered by kindness. Learn more at WonderCanads.com. See you next week on Brand Insider.