Andrea Sullivan — Global CMO, Interbrand
Andrea talks to TheNextGag about how brands managers should develop empathy, how to evolve a brand in the current marketing landscape and why Brandchannel should be part of your morning reading routine.
Andrea Sullivan is the Global Chief Marketing Officer of Interbrand in the USA.
As Interbrand’s Chief Marketing Officer, Andrea Sullivan spearheads Interbrand’s worldwide thought leadership, including the Best Global Brands and Breakthrough Brands reports.
Over the course of her 13-year tenure, Andrea has been instrumental in growing the brands and businesses of both Interbrand and its valued client partners. Andrea is the co-founder of Interbrand’s Corporate Citizenship practice, which she established in 2009.
Just recently, in April 2016, she also co-founded ONE HUNDRED, an Omnicom agency dedicated to the modern non-profit. It seeks to provide non-profits with integrated marketing solutions, ensuring they have a far greater impact when it comes to growing their organizations and influence.
Personally committed to establishing gender equality, Andrea is an active member of Omnicom’s Omniwomen organization and has authored a report with Oxford University on the Women’s Economy. Andrea is a professor in the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts and she is a board member of the Miami Ad School.
A frequent media commentator, Andrea’s thought leadership and marketing insights have been featured in media outlets such as Campaign US, Branding Magazine, CNBC, and Adweek.
Andrea has fostered brand and business growth for numerous clients over the years including Adobe, Apollo, Bank of America, eBay, Feeding America, Fairmont Hotels, Gates Foundation, GE, Harley-Davidson, Hyatt, Johnson & Johnson, Kellogg’s, Marriott International, Nissan, Mars, McDonald’s, Microsoft, NBC Universal, Nintendo, NYSE, PayPal, (RED), The Ritz-Carlton, Thomson Reuters and the USGA, among many others.
A native of Wisconsin, Andrea graduated with honors from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with degrees in both Marketing and Spanish. She also spent time studying at Complutense University of Madrid. Andrea resides in Pound Ridge, New York with her husband and two children.
THENEXTGAG: HOW WOULD YOU DEFINE INTERBRAND AS A COMPANY ?
ANDREA SULLIVAN: Interbrand is the largest global branding consultancy of our kind. And that’s why we love the type of work that we can do, especially around the areas where there is a huge fanbase, like the Juventus. We really try to help companies and organizations find ways to grow, grow their brands and grow their businesses. So, it is everything from strategy and analytics through design and also through execution and activation. It’s a bit broad.
But Juventus is a good example of being able to help a legacy organization bring sort of a fresh face to what they are doing. And then we are now to a point where we are localizing it around the world. We are trying to figure out how do we even bring it to places like New York and have really exciting ways to rally everybody around the world to be able to interact with it.
TNG: CAN YOU TALK TO US ABOUT YOUR AGENDA FOR CANNES THIS YEAR ?
AS: While we are being here at Cannes, we’ve been celebrating our Best Global Brands study. We hosted a panel discussion yesterday that was with a number of the top-growing brands. Last year’s Best Global Brands study, there were a number of companies that had double-digit growth. And what we wanted to learn was “What are they doing differently inside their organizations to drive growth outside of the organization ?”. We are conducting a study where we have conversations with the Chief Marketing Officers of each of those companies and then we are also doing an online study with their teams. Thee themes are emerging:
One is every single company is trying to figure how do they provoke innovation across the company, what do they need to do. And a big part of that is companies don’t understand customers. They are not able to put themselves in customers shoes. So, how do you create empathy. A lot of organizations are doing things where they require employees to get on the phone and listen to customer service lines. They make them go out in the world and do field trips.
Paypal was one of the organizations that we had on the panel yesterday. And I was a part of a day where they had all their user experience designers go on a field trip. And they had either to field for divorce at the Court House to understand the financial ruin that that causes or do a private signup for a mobile phone as a foreigner that doesn’t have credit in the US. Or whatever it is. Just a bunch of challenges to understand these pain points in the name of creating empathy. We had the CMO of Facebook, the CMO of Nissan and the CMO of Paypal on this particular panel. They are all part of the top growing brands.
The other thing that we are finding that, especially in engineering companies, there is a war for top talent. Everyone is trying to figure out “How do I attract the best talent ? How do I retain it ?” There is a lot of things that are going on around purpose-led branding. We are sort of in the age of purpose. We are hoping that CEOs are establishing a vision, but they are actually living it. So, it is not just talking about it. And how do we bring in employees so that they feel like that they have a piece of the rock.
And then, the last thing that we are finding is that everyone is trying to change up the ways that they work. Whether it is inside their marketing teams or even if it is with the agencies themselves. And that is why everyone is trying to focus on speed to market: “How do we move faster ?” So, Facebook is taking this very seriously. They used to have a quality assurance person on all of their product teams. They have taken that person out, because everyone should be responsible for checking everybody else’s quality. They also put an HR person in their teams to be able to make things go faster in terms of the workforce.
TNG WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS FOR INTERBRAND TO ACT AS A PUBLISHER WITH BRANDCHANNEL, IN ADDITION TO THE STUDIES ? IS IT A DELIBERATE STRATEGY TO GIVE OUT SO MUCH CONTENT FOR FREE TO BRANDS ?
AS: What it is for us is that we want to act almost as a talent square of branding. You want to make sure that everyone is contributing to thought leadership or speaking, as much as we are learning.
Brandchannel ends up being a place where everyone can contribute. In the past, we even had competitors that have had studies that we published. We are sort of open-source on that point. The most followed segment on Brandchannel is that “Five questions for”. We try to get more of a behind-the-scenes view. It is not like the standard thing that you read about.
TNG: I APPRECIATE BRANDCHANNEL’S TAKE ON AD CAMPAIGNS WHERE THEY TALK TO CMO’S AND GET A DIFFERENT POINT OF VIEW.
AS: Our Editor-in-Chief, Shirley Brady, is amazing. She actually comes from a long family of journalists. Her mother and her sister are really big names, as well. She is intellectually curious and she is just an avid reader like you are. So she is the one I go to first every time I try to find information. Because she is out there in the universe trying to get the best of.
TNG: WHEN LOOKING AT THE MOST VALUABLE BRANDS, YOU ALWAYS SEE THE SAME PLAYERS. DO YOU SEE THE RANKINGS EVOLVING WITH NEW BRANDS COMING ? FROM CHINA, FOR EXAMPLE ?
AS: We’ve had two Chinese brands, Huawei and Didi, that have come up in the past couple of years. And I think we will continue to see more entrants coming.
In the requirements for Best Global Brands, you have to have a certain percentage of your business in each of the major markets, to fulfill the globality requirement. I think it is at least something like 40% that has to be outside of your headquarters. But, we also have regional brand rankings as well, where we do a deeper dive on: Best Japan, Best China, all those kinds of things. So, we can also track and see what’s going on there.
Because, you are right, it is interesting to see who the global players are. But then in each market, there is a lot of local influence and we are seeing more of a shift of Chinese brands entering in the United States and slowly everywhere else. And even, Alipay has made this huge declaration that they are going to move into North America big time and give a lot of financial companies a run for their money. We’ve seen a number of shifts on the Best Global Brands in the past couple past years and I think you are going to see continue some shifts.
TNG: WHAT ARE THE RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN YOUR DEPARTMENT ?
AS: We have another study, two years in the running, and that we just launched this year, which is called Breakthrough Brands. That’s an interesting one, just because we are starting to chart what the early-stage companies are doing. And most of them are organizations that no one has heard of. We are not going to talk about Uber and the rest. We are trying to discover not only the brands, but different patterns of what we are saying. And how it bubbles up. And it ends up being really important, not only to early-stage companies, but to our big enterprise brands as well. Because, everyone is trying to change up what they are doing.
The retailers are trying to go into ecommerce and the ecommerce guys are trying to go into retail.
TNG: DON’T YOU AGREE THAT WHEN YOU ARE ONE TOP BRAND, IT IS EASY TO STAY ON TOP ? DO YOU BELIEVE THAT THE BREAKTHROUGH BRANDS ARE GOING TO CHALLENGE THE MOST VALUABLE BRANDS ?
AS: The interesting thing is scale and how you use brands to continue to scale. Amazon continues to acquire now. And Walmart too. It is interesting. So, Walmart isn’t on our list because they haven’t balled up all of their entities under the Walmart name. And so they don’t meet the global requirements. as a result. It is sort of interesting. But, I read that Walmart just bought Bonobos. That one is a little bit odd to me. It is just a different segment. That’s more premium. But I guess they are trying to learn what’s going on in e-commerce and figure that out as they go. And Amazon has been going more into retail. It is interesting to see everyone pivoting. Now, with their most recent acquisition, which was Whole Foods. The retailers are trying to go into ecommerce and the ecommerce guys are trying to go into retail. We will see where it goes.
For the Breakthrough Brands, it is less about the economics — we don’t even consider that as part of it, we don’t have access to that information because it is not public — it is more about the things that are going on. Especially customer experience and how are people changing category norms in different sectors. And that’s what all the financial services, automotive and mobility companies are all about.
TNG: DO YOU HAVE TESLA ON THE LIST ?
AS: Yes
TNG: IT’S FUNNY TO ME THAT AT THE SAME TIME THAT TRANSPORTATION MODES ARE CHANGING AND UBER IS THRIVING WHICH MEANS THAT AUTOMOTIVE BRANDS ARE SUFFERING, TESLA’ S BRAND IS SKYROCKETING. DOES IT MEAN THAT TO BE A COOL BRAND YOU HAVE TO BE NEW AND NOT HAVE A 100-YEAR LEGACY INSTITUTION ?
AS: Yes. I think it is interesting. Nissan talked a little bit about that yesterday on the panel. There are different things that are important to customers and being new and cool isn’t the only one. Trust is a huge part. Nissan is responsible for having zero-fatalities and zero-emission ambition. That’s what they are all about. With the Leaf, they have something. I think it is the highest-selling car in that hybrid space. What they would say is that it is important that you are building that trust overtime.
The interesting thing is to look at the stock valuation. Tesla’s valuation is at a level that supersedes that of all the others. But everyone is saying that there will be a correction. The market will be down.
But I think you are right in the sense of people are starved for these leaders that see things differently. Elon Musk sees something and won’t take no for an answer. Almost to the point where he creates this cultures that are intolerable for somebody else in another company. Because he won’t stand to dealerships or whatever it is. He wants to make sure that every single thing that he is thinking is done. It takes a great deal of courage. Because all these systems that have been created overtime are really hard to dismantle. Because there is a lot of money involved, there is a lot of jobs at stake and there are complicated.
From a brand standpoint, there are different ways of breaking through to people that are fans of one thing or another thing. But it is harder for these Breakthrough Brands, because there is so much attention. You noticed Tesla. Now, it is on our Top 100 list. So, it has really broken through. It is challenging for all enterprise brands at this point to continue to make sure that they are relevant and differentiate.
TNG: IS THERE A BRAND THAT YOU REALLY LIKE AND THINK THAT THEY ARE DOING THE RIGHT THING IN TERMS OF BRAND VALUE ?
AS: There is a brand that sometimes is underappreciated right now, which is GE. To me, their stock performance hasn’t been rewarded for every thing that they’ve done. The fact that they have a commitment to Eco-Imagination and they driven it into their business and they require all their suppliers to meet certain standards and thresholds. And they have been able to create a much bigger difference in terms of the impact that they leave on the outdoor world.
They also have a huge commitment to training and developing leaders, whether they are young leaders, whether they are female leaders. They encourage people to cross-pollinate their knowledge in the organization. You may be working in marketing one day and in operations a couple years down the line. Or maybe working in Paris and then move to Moscow … Those kinds of things. To really encourage people to grow and to learn.
And then the way that they connect on an advertising side. They are an industrial company that is really digital. And it is hard for a BtoB brand trying to become kind of cool. Even in the mind of people like my son, who is seventeen. I think it is pretty hard. They have done a really nice job and they continue to evolve overtime. And we will see now that they are going to have a new CEO, a new leader. It will be interesting to see what happens then.
TNG: INTERESTING CHOICE. I WOULDN’T THINK OF GE AS BEING ATTRACTIVE TO MILLENIALS. I STILL SEE THEM AS THEIR DEPICTION IN 30 ROCK.
AS: The fact that they use self-deprecating humor in their ads, that’s take a certain confidence as well. It feels like it is in keeping with the humility that they had in some way.
My son, who is going into computer science, would not have normally consider GE as an option, but he does now. And it is largely because of that advertising.
Andrea Sullivan
Global Chief Marketing Officer
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