Moment 77 - Nike CMO: Three Steps to Genius Marketing: Greg Hoffman

In this moment, Greg Hoffman breaks down why you should sweat the small stuff. A big believer in setting team values, the best teams have a code that they operate by whether the team leader is present or not. Getting a strong sense of culture in those teams is no easy task, but in this moment Greg breaks it down step by step. Greg explains how he wanted his team to be known for ‘Empathy, Curiosity, and Courage’, guided by the philosophy of seeing what others could see, but finding what they couldn’t. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/sxP6K2iUJtb Greg: hhttps://www.instagram.com/ghoff70/ https://mobile.twitter.com/g_hoffm Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  I'm really compelled by, and I talked to my team a lot about this, about this, and you've mentioned it twice now, this, the importance of details. From your 30 years at Nike, how did you make sure teams cared about the detail? Is it just continually reminding them? Is there something else we can do to make sure that our teams and the people we work with, and ourselves even, are really valuing the smallest of details?

• 0:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do, I do believe in publishing, whether it's, you want to call it an ethos, a manifesto, a set of principles, where you clearly articulate what your design standards are, or your creative standards. I've always believed that. And they, they can change over time, but I'm a big believer in publishing thought, publishing ideals that, that you have. And I'll go even further, because what I learned over the years is, I was doing a little bit too much self-authorship. When I really started to manage teams, I'd go away and I'd come back and it's like,

• 1:10Speaker 01

  here's the six principles of, of, you know, obsessing the details that we're going to focus on this year. But I didn't involve them in authoring those. So it's like, publish what you believe, invite folks into the process that have maybe slightly different opinions than you do. And then complete this, build the consensus, and then make sure everyone has it so that, clearly as you drive down the road and you're looking at restaurant architecture, you know, business building architecture, it's pretty clear that people just decided like it was good enough and...

• 1:53Speaker 01

  No one will ever, you know, who cares if it's gonna win an, the point isn't to win awards. The point is to take something as far as you can to contribute something great to, you know, to society, whether it is a building or a book or this bottle design. You know, the amount of thought that went into that, I think that's the typeface Helvetica, I believe. And the choices made to go upper and lowercase, like that's all intentional. You know, to have it black on white.

• 2:31Steven Bartlett?

  The name, human fuel?

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, and that's the thing. I mean, you have to start with naming, right? And one of the hardest pursuits is naming a product or naming a company because it's such a crowded space. But man, if you get the name right, it will save you millions in marketing.

• 2:51Steven Bartlett?

  So if I was to ask you now and I used to say, right, I have a team of a hundred thousand people and I want them to be great marketers, but we're only allowed to give them three guiding principles, which they will take with them. These can just be philosophies, ideas, whatever. But we can only give them three guiding principles to hope to make them successful. What would those top three guiding principles be?

• 3:13Speaker 01

  I'll start with the three characteristics that I would say. It's like, we're gonna, we're gonna have the dominant traits of empathy, curiosity, and let's call it courage or risk-taking. Like those, those three traits is what we're gonna be known for. And for empathy, you know, to me, within the marketing process is, is, you know, the principle that I talk about in the book is, you know, see what others see, find what others don't. The best marketing teams and the best communication teams are able to peel back the layers, get under the surface of a human being, a city or a community,

• 3:54Speaker 01

  and find the deeper insight or truth that resides there. And then they reveal it through storytelling. It's back to the Michael Jordan example. How many, how many more? Ads could you do about him dunking a basketball? So empathy is like, go deeper. Whether you're designing a product, it's like, you know, you're, you're, you're revealing the, the, the true problem that needs to be solved. You're not just observing some behavior and making, um, you know, uh, a, you know, hypothesis off that. You're actually spending the time to go deeper and deeper into that. And that's that idea of see what others see, find what others don't.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Curiosity is that idea of getting outside yourself. Um, because it's one thing to have the insight, right? And the problem that you're going to solve and you're clear on that. But now you need to reveal it to the world. And oftentimes you need, uh, points of inspiration coming into the process. And that's why you look at Nike Air, probably the greatest innovation in the history of, of sneakers. Right? Uh, air, air, um, airbags and air cushioning in sneakers. Well, that came from, uh, an engineer at NASA who was experimenting with creating

• 5:18Speaker 01

  an innovation for astronaut helmets for space exploration. And he brought that to Nike and that led to Nike Air. That's my point about finding inspiration outside of your sector. And that's that idea of bringing the outside in. So that's the curiosity thing. Outside, uh, get outside yourself. And then, you know, finally is that idea of, of, you know, we don't play it safe. We play to win. Um, we wanted to, we, we're not comfortable with the status quo. Um, and we want people comfortable kind of pursuing what's next.

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Not just getting complacent and delivering, um, products, services, stories in the way everyone else is. So we also want to be a team that, that is obsessive about, um, every aspect of.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Branding, you know, and so think of how powerful that can become is if you have a team and that they're deeply empathetic to who they serve, like they get great at learning and asking questions. They're unbelievable, unbelievably curious and always looking beyond what's in front of them to see what else they can, because so much of innovation is about transference. You take something from here, you bring it into your sector and you, you, you change the game. And then, and then, but, and then the risk-taking thing is not feeling like you have a team that has to ask for permission to use their imagination. I think

• 6:57Speaker 01

  that's really important because if you're in a, if you develop a culture where people have to ask to think, people have to get approval, then you're not, I, I don't believe you would be known as a leading innovator in, in your space on that. So those are just a few, but I, I just think it's also, I'll, I'll tell you this, when I was CMO, I did an informal poll with my, the marketing leaders. And I'm biased, of course, but I felt and I believe this is the best marketing team in the world. I said, what are the top two

• 7:37Speaker 01

  characteristics you look for in any marketer that you're interviewing for a particular job within the Nike marketing team? And the top two traits that came to the top from everybody was curiosity and collaborative. I mean, to a person. And that was kind of tied. I want someone who's always searching for inspiration and is curious about, about their teammates, about the consumer, about technology, entertainment, art. And then I want someone who, who can play with others, right? And that you can feel that sense that

• 8:21Speaker 01

  this person is, has conviction, you know, believes in themselves, but can play within a, in a, in a team. And those were the two that, that rose to the top. And, and, you know, and I, I think that's true today.