Community-Driven Disruption Forum | SPECIAL EDITION

At a recent MTM Forum held at Chime's Headquarters in San Francisco, four Visionaries throwing out the old advertising playbook came together to write a new one, and it's all about igniting your community to disrupt the status quo. 

In this special episode, Vineet Mehra, CMO, Chime, Jamie Gersch, CMO Rothy's, Michelle Taite, CMO, Intuit Mailchimp, and Kory Marchisotto, CMO, e.l.f. Beauty and President, Keys Soulcare, created a community-driven disruption playbook, instead of relying solely on celebrities or influencers

Make sure to check out the article recap, where you can also find the videos of the campaigns mentioned in the podcast:

·       Chime Case Study: Igniting Your Community as Your Best Spokesperson

·       Rothy’s Case Study: Knowing When to Embrace Your Community’s Feedback

·       Mailchimp Case Study: Engaging with Community Wherever They Go

·       e.l.f. Beauty Case Study: Giving Your Community the Keys to Drive the Brand

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Transcript

Chime Forum Podcast

[00:00:00] 

[00:00:40] Nadine Dietz: Hi, everyone. We've got an amazing forum for you today. It's going to be so much fun. First of all, I just wanted to make sure I say a big, big thank you to our host here at Chime.

This is a gorgeous building. Thank you for inviting us. I'm so, so grateful I'll be able to introduce our four speakers. They've put a lot of work into this. We're going to be [00:01:00] talking about community driven disruption.. I am Nadine Dietz. , I am the GM of Marketers That Matter.

And EVP at 24 7, which is our parent company. We have folks from Markers at Banner and 24 7 here for you today. , we're a community of marketers. Many of you have been to our events before, so welcome back. I see a lot of very friendly faces. , And for those of you who don't know who 24 7 is, they are a talent company helping with marketers and creatives for all. Okay, with that, I'd like to invite our amazing speakers to join me here on stage.

 So, Vineet, you're our host, so why don't we start with you.

Tell us about you, your role, and why you 

[00:01:37] Vineet Mehra: took that on. Yeah, so, hi everyone, thanks for joining. , I'm Vineet, I'm the CMO here at Chime, and , it's awesome to have all you guys in our office. I also saw a bunch of first republic friends. So welcome as well. We look forward to getting to know you tonight.

 What I look for in my career is I look for things that are new to the world, like Disruptive, mission driven [00:02:00] companies that I feel we can use our marketing powers for good, right? Marketing has a big responsibility, like, we have the ability to influence people, , to whatever cause we want.

That's really our superpower. And the question is, how do we use it? So , I try to connect myself to those kinds of companies. I started my career, , on the CPG side. , so about... I spent my first 10 years at P& G and then J& J. Ended my life there as the president of our global baby division.

And then I was like, I'm done, , with CPG and I moved to tech. , the last kind of 10, 12 years. And I've been all in tech companies. , was part of Ancestry. com when we... , right before we sold it and had the whole consumer genetics revolution. Hopefully, some of you guys have found out who you are and where you're from over the years.

But that was like a new to the world thing. I mean, we were building supply chains for spit and saliva and trying to... Change the way people saw themselves. And we were trying to show people that we're actually much more similar than we are different. [00:03:00] And I think that really created a movement. After we sold that business, I went out to Chicago for three years and I was a global CMO for Walgreens and boots, which are two of the.

largest retail pharmacy retailers on the planet and just happened to be running that business during COVID, which was insane. Literally we were trying to vaccinate America and the UK and all over the world. So just talk about, purpose driven The kind of work we were doing and our front line was doing every day during that moment.

And then came out, back out here. I have a 10 year old son. I actually have to leave at 3. 45 for a parent teacher interview, so I'm sorry. I'll step out for a bit. It was the only time they gave me. But yeah, then came out to QIIME and deeply believe in our mission. For these guys that don't know QIIME very much our mission is to essentially unite everyday people to unlock their financial progress.

And the reason QIIME exists and the reason we've been so successful is frankly, there is 65 percent of America that are really like everyday people, probably like many of us grew up, who are [00:04:00] paycheck to paycheck. That doesn't mean you're poor. That means you might be making 100, 000 a year in some cities, right?

And they're just not served by the large banks. The large banks, business models and structures and operating costs. Don't really allow them to serve the vast majority of Americans and so they serve us, right? Like I don't pay interest on my credit card, I have enough of account balance where I don't pay fees But the vast majority of Americans don't have that pleasure, and so they get charged by fees by a lot of the big banks.

And so we essentially started to innovate against a huge TAM and democratized access to great banking services. So we brought in innovations like fee free banking. A couple years later, we brought in free overdraft. We call it SpotMe, 200 fee free overdraft, which is a really big deal.

After that, we brought in Get Paid Two Days Early, which is now being copied by everyone. And then we brought in Credit Builder, which is a credit card where you can build credit without any risk of going into default, [00:05:00] which is such a problem for so many Americans. So essentially we're giving people liquidity and credit building options without any fees, any punitive sort of chance of happening.

And I think that's what made us a really hit kind of product, really disrupting the category and really meeting the needs of a lot of Americans. And so those are the kinds of companies I look for. I'm really proud to be here at Chime and thankful for all of you to be here. 

[00:05:23] Nadine Dietz: Amazing. Thank you. We're going to dig in deeper to some of those examples in just a bit.

Jamie, how about you? Tell us a little bit 

[00:05:29] Jamie Gersch: about yourself. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. Well, hi everyone. Thank you for having us. So I actually, when you said, you worked during COVID for vaccines and vaccinating, very important work. I'm like, I sold jeans and t shirts for a really long time at Gap and Old Navy.

Also important. Also really important. So I 

[00:05:48] Kory Marchisotto: do whatever 

[00:05:50] Jamie Gersch: I used to say. It's I'll get to what I did. But I used to say it's all gonna be okay. We sell jeans and T shirts. It's all gonna be okay. But I had the fortune of [00:06:00] spending a very long time at Gap Inc. I worked on the Gap brands for, 12 years.

And what I love about my experience over the course of the years at Gap and Old Navy, and I'll get to Old Navy in a minute is just I really learned how to build A brand and an iconic American brand and work on two of the best of them out there. But also, I've obviously been in retail a really long time and feel so fortunate to have done pretty much every job in the marketing department and worked my way up from the very Bottom all the way to CMO of Old Navy doing every single job.

And so what I feel fortunate of is that I really understand what the team is doing every day. Whether it's driving the retail part of the business or driving the brand. And how does it all connect together? So, I actually just got to Rothy's not even a year ago. So it will be a year Cyber Monday.

In retail, that's a really big deal. [00:07:00] And I was fortunate last year to not work on Black Friday, which, by the way, was the first time in like 25 years I actually had Thanksgiving with my family in a very meaningful way. So that was nice. But, when I left Old Navy, I, was in the CMO seat for six years, feel so fortunate again to work on a purpose based brand and was there for so long because I was so aligned to the purpose and the mission of the business, which is actually really similar to chime and the belief that everyone And deserves access to amazing product at an amazing price.

And the brand was founded on this idea of democracy of style from day one. And that idea of democracy of style started with socioeconomic levels and then just expanded the idea of inclusivity, whether it was. Size, race, gender, you name it. And it just kept expanding over the years of what resonated and what Americans were asking us for.

So when I thought about what my next role would look like, [00:08:00] obviously working for a purpose based brand was very, very important, but I wanted to do something different. I didn't want to go to another big retailer, big brand and wanted to. Dipped my toe into building something and I met Steven and Roth Roth's and I see one over there.

Thank you. I can spot them . aNd they, tell their story and their story is just so incredible because they just believed that. Anything was possible and that there was a better way. They truly believed that they could deliver on a stylish product that was also comfortable, but by the way, made much better than anyone else out there.

And that has held true since the beginning. They started their journey back in 2011. And here we are today and still delivering on that premise and continue to push that idea. Of what is possible and how can we innovate and what's amazing is they were not in this industry whatsoever They were two guys that just said we think there's a [00:09:00] better shoe out there And they met in a mom's group their wives were in mom's group together So it came out of nowhere and this just Uncompromising, optimistic spirit and belief that better things were possible in what we wore.

And so completely drawn to the purpose based idea and obviously love being in retail. So feel so fortunate to be able to bring the stuff I learned and now learning a ton of new things building from the beginning. So, thrilled to be here. 

[00:09:30] Nadine Dietz: Amazing. Okay, Michelle, I can't, I cannot resist, because we were just talking about all this goodness, and the first time you started describing about your role, you talked about it as the dark side of marketing.

[00:09:43] Michelle Taite: My design friends still call it the dark side of marketing. So, my background, I'm originally from Israel. I Spent two years in the IDF and then got into law school and something felt off. And so I said, I'm not going to do this. I really want to do something more creative. And so I decided I would leave [00:10:00] to the UK, to London.

My dad's British and study product design. And my parents were like, what? The F. Are you doing right? And I was like, I got this. It's fine. My then boyfriend, now husband. So that worked out was that P and G. So we had like one salary. It was fine. And I made it into design school. I spent four years in London and then went to work for New Balance designing shoes.

So I scanned everybody from the bottom up. I'm sorry if that's what I do when I meet you, but yeah. We got it. 

[00:10:29] Vineet Mehra: Now I'm very insecure. 

[00:10:30] Video: I, 

[00:10:31] Michelle Taite: that's why I was like what is that shoe over there? And then I joined New Balance in Boston. And for someone who's grown up in the sun, that's like a pretty decent change.

And what I realized was I loved learning about commercialization and bringing products to market. And the more I learned about marketing and sales and PNLs and brands, the more I just wanted to move to what my design friends then, and sometimes now, call the dark side of marketing. And yeah, and so I then went [00:11:00] to work for a CPG company, which is also a little bit of a competitor to P& G Unilever, and spent quite a lot of time there on iconic brands, on new brands, Launch Magnum Ice Cream in North America.

So you've got me to thank for all those calories and goodness and spent the last three years there working on Dove Body Wash on the global team and really loving the mission and the values and just the work that we were doing there was a little bit concerned at the time that CPG wasn't moving fast enough from a digital perspective and so really wanted to make the move but was Really concerned about going somewhere that really mattered in terms of mission and changed lives and something that's been consistent for me is Making connections, but also making sure that we serve as a better a bigger value but a bigger good my Grandfather who was super creative and was like the one person that was like you're going to design school cool Is actually was actually a serial entrepreneur.

And so when I talked into [00:12:00] it and found out a lot about what QuickBooks was doing in the small business group was instantly amazed and joined them to lead QuickBooks on the global brand team on content, then took over product marketing over time as well as market research and about Two years ago was brought into the acquisition with MailChimp and I, I looked at this business and was asked to lead the marketing function end to end and it was a dream come true because as a marketer watching MailChimp for so many years, bringing the creative and design side that I had and the marketing side together was just really fun and to market to marketers, which are a skeptical crew, it's really.

Enticing. So that's just been my journey 

[00:12:43] Nadine Dietz: to date. I love that. I love that. And certainly not least by any means, but last, Corey, let's hear about your background and then let's keep rolling with you because I think you've got some cool stuff to share with us. 

[00:12:54] Kory Marchisotto: Hi, everyone. I am Cori Marchisotto. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer of Elf [00:13:00] Beauty. And I go by a lot of names. I actually don't know anybody who calls me Cori. So, maybe that's a good place to start, because I will love you all dearly, and you'll be my peeps until you spell my name with a C, and then it's all over.

We're breaking up immediately. Because K is the best letter of the 

[00:13:14] Michelle Taite: alphabet, 

[00:13:15] Jamie Gersch: right? K Boss. So, 

[00:13:17] Kory Marchisotto: my team calls me K Boss. Before I started Elf, I was known as Special K, so I think we can see a bit of a pattern here. K Boss stuck, and then recently I was named the Wizard of Elf. I also really love my third name, which is Chief Mother Elfer.

So you are free to decide if I am K Boss, the Wizard of Elf, or the Chief Mother Elfer. And Michelle, I am gonna have to ask you to change your F bombs to Elf bombs. They're much cleaner, like our products, really clean. Let's go with the Elf bombs. Sound good? So, what the Elf? I would love to know from everybody in this room, how many of you today started your [00:14:00] day?

With either a body product, a skin care product, or have makeup on your face. Any one of those things. All my people are here! I have been in the beauty space for 25 years. And, many people who are in the beauty space, when I interview them, they're like, Oh my god, I grew up dying to work in beauty. It was a dream of mine.

I'm a beauty junkie. And I'm like, Was that a prerequisite? Because that was not me growing up. Actually, I wanted to be in marketing for a financial institution. So imagine a kid who grew up and was like, I want to be a business person. And my parents were like, what does that even mean? I'm like, I don't know.

I just. I just saw Uncle Louie walking around with a suit and a briefcase, and I never met anybody else who walked around with a suit and a briefcase, so that looks pretty damn good to me. And they're like, yeah, well, he went to college, and, we don't have money for that, and nobody in our family went to college, and I'm like, that's good, so let's start by disrupting norms, and I'm gonna be the first kid in the family.

To go to college. So I realized that for me [00:15:00] to break the mold of my family and take things in a different trajectory, that I was gonna have to start doing things very differently than how I saw them. I grew up in a very small suburban town outside of New York, and I am still, to this day, a kid with a ton of grit and big dreams.

So, my career path took me to Pace University, which was parked in the financial district of Manhattan because I wanted to be a financially driven marketer. So isn't that what you do? And it was parked next to all the big financial institutions and I needed to get an internship so I could get a leg up.

So I started interviewing for... All the big companies, Smith, Barney, Lehman brothers, you name them at the time. I'm pretty old. This was a long time ago. And as I'm walking the hallways going on these interviews, I was like, Whoa, your dreams just start shattering door after door that gets closed.

And you're like. I've spent my whole life dreaming of this moment and it's cold and it's dark and it's sterile and I don't like anything about it. So [00:16:00] here I am in a skirt suit because I was told when I was gone through the interview classes that women don't wear pants. So I had to go out in a skirt suit so I already didn't feel like me and now I'm in all these interviews and none of that felt like me.

And my dad called me after he knew I was on the interview circuit for a couple of weeks to check in on me and he said, how's it going kid? And I was like, I started hysterical crying. The parent asks you the question, you just start crying. My dreams are shattered, it's awful, I hate everything.

And he's like, well, one of the clients in my family's small beauty salon in East Meadow was the vice president of Givenchy, which was a division of LVMH. And my dad said, they're looking for somebody. Why don't you go interview? And I was like, I don't need your help. I can do this all by myself.

Stop trying to help me. And eventually I was like, oh, maybe I should look them up. Maybe there's a good idea here. I don't know. Let's see. So I gave Debbie a call and she said, come in for an interview. We have this job open. And I went to, at the time they were on [00:17:00] Park Avenue in. Manhattan, with this gorgeous tower.

I get in the elevator, I get to the fourth floor, and it's, I'm getting all the feels, it's warm, it's fuzzy inside, I'm feeling like myself. I'm not wearing a skirt, I'm like, this is fantastic, this feels really good. And I get up to their office, and it's all black lacquer and mirrors. And there's this gorgeous woman at the front desk with this short, severe haircut and these gorgeous red lips, and the phone is ringing and she's trying to do too many things at the same time, and she pauses me for a second, picks up the phone and goes, Parfum Givenchy!

And I was like, Okay, I need this job. And that's how I got into beauty, and 25 years later, here I am. 

[00:17:34] Jamie Gersch: Love it, love it. Well, 

[00:17:35] Nadine Dietz: Corey, take us a little bit further to the journey, because we're going to hear from all of you now. Like, what are you doing to disrupt the industry, especially having it be community driven?

I think you've all brought some amazing examples. So, Corey, you're going to kick us off. I'm going to get out of the screen way and come 

[00:17:50] Jamie Gersch: sit next to you. 

[00:17:51] Kory Marchisotto: I like to say e. l. f. is a brand of the community, by the community, for the community, created With the community. We are not here to [00:18:00] decide or determine what elf is.

I'm actually here to shape it based on what I hear from our community. And that means I've got to be tapped into their unique needs and wants and desires tapped into what problems can I help them solve and never operate from a place that's an ivory tower. If you want to understand your community, you need to be your community.

You need to think like them, act like them, because guess what? You are them. We are all shoppers. We are all part of this thing that we are thinking we're pushing out into the universe. It goes the other way around. So I'm pulling from the community to shape the brand. So what do I mean by that? When I started this company about almost five years ago now, I realized fundamentally that nobody actually knew what ELF stood for.

And in fact, they didn't even know how to pronounce it. Do I say ELF? Is it elf? Is it a little green creature living in the forest? Is it a little, is it a little Santa? helper up in the North pole. Nobody actually knew what the [00:19:00] brand was. All they knew was an acronym. So the first campaign that I did was actually a Tik TOK campaign.

So at that time, nobody even knew what Tik TOK was, and we busted into the platform in a very disruptive way by creating an original music track. Also the first time that ever happened, inviting people to express. Their eyes, lips, and face. So we actually brought the brand to life through a song and then invited people to express it on their terms, their way.

Fast forward, we are now in a place in the UK where we want to start doing real brand building. Awareness drivers. So we went back to that same playbook and we said, Okay, we've been in the market long enough now that we know people are buying our product. But do they know who we are? Do they understand what our brand stands for?

And are we able to shape our brand together with them? So we set out to the community to ask them, What does elf mean to you? And that was a question that [00:20:00] sparked a campaign that created a movement. And that's what I'd love to share with everybody. 

[00:20:04] Video: What does elf stand for? I live space. Every layer. Fresh. Every life. Free. Everyday luxury. Finally. Eyes like... Bitch. Echoing lips. Fearless. Enter looking fabulous.

Exit. Look in the face.

Earthlings. L. A. Fantasy. East Furniture Fabric! Every little feature. Euphoric luminous spheres. Explosive 

lines flow. Epic lashes 

fall out. Is that a sheep? [00:21:00] Elevate looks. Thoughts. What does elf stand for? Eyes. Lips. Face. Express your elf!

[00:21:14] Kory Marchisotto: And my favorite part of that campaign is the people in it. And what you should all know is they were street casted. Some of those people we found two o'clock in the morning, rolling out of a nightclub, and, were like, Hey, what do you think about Elfday? Like, say what? You want to be in our campaign.

And what was really amazing is actually seeing them follow the billboards and the tube stations and being enamored that they... We're part of this campaign. And what they all told me is normally when they're asked to do any work ever, they're always told what they can't do, how they can't show up. You have to be this way.

You can't dress like that. You can't look like that. And this was the first time that the brief was come as the best version of yourself. They picked their outfits. They showed up who they are, how they are, and how they wanted to [00:22:00] be. And all we were here to do was. Give them a stage to express their 

best selves 

[00:22:06] Nadine Dietz: amazing.

And by the way, I just saw your post now 19 consecutive quarters of growth that's unheard of so congratulations

Michelle I think Cory's set you up because we're gonna talk about London in some of the things we're gonna talk about right? Yeah 

[00:22:26] Michelle Taite: ? We think very similarly about community and disruption. We think, first of all, consumer obsessed or customer obsessed.

For us in the last couple of years, we've been going upmarket. And what that means is that a brand that was historically engaged with solopreneurs and small businesses and really empowering the underdog is now taking a little bit of a more sophisticated approach to say, Hey, we're going to provide radical momentum for every ambition.

We're going to provide advanced marketers with the tools that they need. That only perhaps enterprises have had with [00:23:00] really sophisticated marketing teams beforehand. And so what we've done is twofold. One is we have a customer advisory board. They're called cab, which are very similar to you. We listen to our customers and their needs.

We work with them day in, day out. All of our product teams and our engineering teams, our marketing teams are constantly on calls. We were on one this morning really to understand what is their pain point? Where are they doing really well? Where can we? And I think it's really important that we add value to them and where can we make their lives so much better so that we make them feel and look great and grow their business so much faster and you as any marketer?

No. Now is the time to do a lot more with a lot less. And so Email marketing, best ROI. But uh, it also took us on a path where we know marketers care about two things. They care about business and results, and they also care about creativity. And so in their free time we see them look at inspiration from music and from the arts and from design.

And that's where we [00:24:00] intend to find them and enable some of that inspiration and be part of their process. So we can run the video and show some of the work we've been up to. Let's do it.[00:25:00] 

[00:25:24] Video: So 

[00:25:25] Nadine Dietz: cool. . But what I love about this is it just feels like B2C marketing. So can, how do you, like how do you think about this? Yeah, 

[00:25:35] Michelle Taite: we think about finding people where they're at and as a creative brand we're able to play in all these creative places where a lot of our competitors can't.

But we showed up at New York Fashion Week and very much aligned with our values of democratizing access to audiences and tools and education. A lot of our marketers wanted to know, like, how do you help someone just burst into New York Fashion Week? And so we took five up and coming black [00:26:00] entrepreneurs and creatives and we created a capsule.

Well, they created a capsule, and to your point, it's created by the community. And we just enable or curate the access to those different stages. Similar to the work that we did with Bloom Season, which is essentially an an online editorial. The first season was for black entrepreneurs and marketers.

The second was for the LGBTQ plus community. And it was us curating, but really giving a platform to all of these marketers and entrepreneurs to say, we can't fake it and say we know the answers. So we're going to give you the stage, and we're going to help you talk to this audience and enable them to prosper and bloom with their businesses.

[00:26:39] Nadine Dietz: That's amazing. Thanks for that. All right, Jamie. How many people are wearing mouthies in the room? Did you find that out yet? I see two. Anybody else? She works for you. 

[00:26:50] Michelle Taite: She should be wearing 

[00:26:51] Video: Rothies.

[00:26:55] Jamie Gersch: But thank you, too. So, I'm going to start with A lot of you, well, some of [00:27:00] you may remember that Meghan Markle, back when the brand was launched wore the point. Kristen, and you are wearing and that is really what put this brand on the map. It was the point, the original shoe, it was one shoe that was made from plastic, recycled water bottles, still to this day are and was this stylish, comfortable.

Better for the planet alternative, and that was launched in 2016 and through the years, the community has come together outside of Rothy's trying to build the community. And we have a group on Facebook because it was Facebook back then. There are 30, 000 women strong there. They've named themselves the Rothy's addicts, and they are.

passionate about the Rothy's brand and products, and they tell us everything the good, the bad, what they want, what they love, what they want more of. And over the years, we were [00:28:00] hearing from them. We want it to be more comfortable. We want it to have a better vamp flattering fit. My terms. We don't want it to rub in the back.

And over the years, we were like, Okay, and the design team started working. We're hearing you were hearing you, but it takes a really long time to make a shoe. I've learned that takes, 18 months at the very least to perfect a shoe. So it took us about two years to take all of the feedback that we were hearing from this community.

I mean, it wasn't just us. Having fit testers come to the office. It was truly from the community hearing from them what they wanted. And finally we felt like we had a good model to go out with. But we realized that we could never take away their favorite, the original. Because this community was founded on the love of this original shoe.

And we were really struggling. I came in right when we were talking about how are we gonna actually introduce this in the market without making the community feel like we're taking away their favorite. [00:29:00] Cause even though they were asking for things we know they still buy, love the original. And so we figured out a way to get enough samples and we seeded the product beforehand to this community.

We had them try it, we had them give us reviews, we had them Really tell us what do they love? What do they not love? And even if there were things that we couldn't fix right up front, we knew we would address them later. The good news is, they loved it. And what that helped us do was it galvanized the community beforehand.

And then it galvanized themselves so that it caught on. But then we also used all of their feedback in what we went out to introduce the shoe on. So it was a very much, we heard you, we listened, we heard you. We have perfected this shoe and here's why and a lot of the content and you can pull up the slide because you can see the community posting.

My favorite is that the middle woman where you see the in [00:30:00] the soul of the shoe, she spends about like five minutes just going through. every detail she posted about. She didn't want to love the new one, but she loved it so much. And then, her followers who are all the Rothy's addicts start to see that, and then they need to check it out.

And then her friends need to check it out. And so it was this, how do we do this and balance the yup. We want to go to the market with meet our new shoe. We love it with, but we haven't taken away. Your original and we listened to you and heard you and so, you know We used so much of the content from the community in what we shared back with them To even new customers to say we listen to the people who already loved us now come try us And we're super proud of this and galvanizing them and using them And we continue to do that today and there are things that they tell us that they don't like often and we take it and we say, okay, how do we make it better?

[00:31:00] Or how do we make sure we don't take away what they love because they tell us, make something new, but don't take this away. And so I think it is about tapping into this community and I think has been amazing for me. Even joining the brand is to see this community. We are opening stores. This community comes together.

We just opened a store in Raleigh, North Carolina. They meet up at our new store. They themselves go to the store and come together because they love this brand. And it is that authentic connection to the mission and values of this brand that has sustained us and continues to make us grow. So super proud of this one.

[00:31:39] Nadine Dietz: Great. Thank you for that. , Vaneet, I'll pass it to you. Tell us about Chime 

[00:31:43] Vineet Mehra: Disruption. Yes. First of all, those are all amazing examples. I guess the way I guess the other thing I'll add is that I think one thing not talked a lot about in community driven disruption is how does your company actually make money? Is your business [00:32:00] model aligned with your community's interests?

Is your growth strategy aligned with your community? And is your product aligned with your community? And so I say the first bucket for us on this area is... One, we've purposely built a community centered business model, so we literally don't make any actual dollars off of our members which we call our chimers.

They're essentially only paying they're paying us zero fees. And the way we make money is off the interchange, when they actually swipe their card. So our business model itself has created a world where we don't actually profit off of our members. Our members use us if our product meets their needs.

And only then do we make dollars, right? So I think one of the first things to do... Is to connect business model to your community's needs. The second thing that we do is we do a lot of I think the best brands, and if all of you want to be successful marketers in the boardroom, ask [00:33:00] for less money, not more.

And people who work for me will know that I'm constantly saying I want less money, not more in my budget. And the way you do that is by igniting your community. To be your biggest growth engine. So 45 percent of all of our customer acquisition comes through referrals. That means that we have a community that loves us so much that we ignite them to actually turn on referral programs.

And in some ways we actually pay our community. To actually bring in the rest of our community. So when 40 percent of your growth is coming from referrals from within your community, and you're actually not paying Facebook and Google, sorry. That money, that's an amazing thing because not only are you growing, you're growing through your community and your community is profiting through growth, right?

So that's the second thing. And then Lauren, if you put up the third thing. It's also, it's community built into your product, and I think we all heard amazing examples here of where it is. We launched a product called SpotMe Boost, which is actually [00:34:00] completely, not like, now just think of us like we're competing against the J.

P. Morgans and the Chases and the Bank of Americas. So put that in the back of your mind as I take you through these examples. SpotMe Boost is an example where... We actually trend number one on Twitter regularly. We're at the end of the month when people are short on dollars or at any point in the year or any point in the week.

People are just running short because they're paycheck to paycheck. They'll go on to Twitter or Instagram or some of our community channels, and they will actually ask someone else to cover them or spot them that month for like 20 bucks. And that is all facilitated through our product, through our sort of, the way we facilitate risk.

And we've actually built ways for the community to help each other. Like that store opening, right? But this is in a... A digital space to actually get people to cover each other's overdraft, which historically the rest of the banks are actually charging people, 30 bucks for a 2 overdraft.

Right? And here we are. No, just spot each other. It's cool. It's free. Like you've got each other's back. So this idea of [00:35:00] business model. Product and growth alignment to the community, I think is something that's super important that allows your brand to be super authentic. Go to the next slide. The second way is like, we try not to, and all of you had examples of this talk to our member or at our members, but with our members.

Now, if you look at this, like we talked to our members in memes, we've talked to our members in emojis. We try to like really imagine we're like a pretty major. Banking services company, and this is how we connect with our members in social. It's pretty powerful and it's led us to a point where our community on Instagram is 2x, 3x bigger than any of these giant banks that have been around for a really long time.

And that gives us a forum and a kind of platform from which to activate our community regularly. I think we have like two times as many followers as like cult brands like Popeyes and all this kind of stuff. We have turned banking into a socially cool sort of thing to do, and it's because we don't talk at our members.

I always thought like, we don't use [00:36:00] stock talk, right? We really go in a very authentic way, in a way that our members want to be spoken to. I think that's the second thing. The third thing, I'm just reminding myself of the slides, is the other thing that happens is communities, I think sometimes we treat our communities as monoliths, right?

Like everyone in our community is the same. And the truth is, I don't think everyone in our community is the same. There's actually sub communities. And so, we talk to, when we talk about community, we actually talk about sub cultures in our community. And we actually do our community brand building through sub culture marketing.

So if you play the, this video. This is actually a partnership we did with a shoe surgeon and created a Chime shoe, which I'll show you in a second.[00:37:00] 

Alright, you guys get the point. So, essentially, shoe, the shoe surgeon is a,

the shoe surgeon is a mass, has massive Instagram following. And one of the things we discovered about our community is we have a massive shoe culture, a sneaker culture in our community. And so we actually found the biggest influencer and actually created a Chime shoe that actually has a slot for your credit card.

Right here. These are actually signed by Luca. You guys know we're Dallas Maverick sponsors. So it's a very valuable shoe, actually. But it's things like this where imagine just step back. We provide we're a bank, right? And we're out doing deals with a shoe surgeon creating custom shoes.

Tim Hardaway Jr. wore them. We gave him to 21 Savage, and we started to talk to our community in the places where they are, which is something that Michelle talked about. I think the other part is, if you go to the next slide we, in a past company when I was at Ancestry, I had a [00:38:00] rule, I haven't gone this far here yet, but no more actors and ads, kinda like you, you brought people out of these nightclubs and stuff like that.

I just think advertising is dead, like people hate being advertised to. And the core tenet of advertising is actors pretending they like your shit, right? And so. Essentially what we have is we we put at least 80, 90 percent of our media weight on member driven creative. So, when we put out a casting call, we get, we've gone 25, 000 like entrance.

We get all these people shooting videos to get in our commercials, we've actually activated our community to actually be our spokespeople to actually be in all of our advertising. And I think that's a really key thing when people see your ads and go like, Hey, like that's not an actor. People can tell these things now, right?

This next generation, you got to get over that and see how does your community become your best spokesperson. And that's something we very much try. And then lastly and this is the one I'll leave you with. [00:39:00] Well, I'll leave you with I don't think we have to show this one, but we talk about this, we actually meet our community on their block, right?

So we have this program called Chime Changemakers, where, we have an amazing community, I'm sure many of you do too, where you, like, find the generosity of your community and how they actually support each other. So I won't play this one here yet, but Essentially change makers are members of chime that we actually find and they're actually trying to transform their community.

We talk about meeting our members on their block and essentially I won't play this specific video, but this video is one where there was a change maker who actually is trying to find jobs for people in his community that he is now being able to like socio socioeconomically graduate out of. And we actually celebrate our members and we actually put those stories out in the world to actually share the generosity our members have with each other.

And this is a really big part of our brand building as well. And then lastly, and this one I will show you there's this whole phenomenon right now I think of renting culture, right? Brands [00:40:00] that sort of. I don't know, hire a spokesperson to do a tweet or they like, you can just tell, right, you can tell when like Kim Kardashian got paid a lot of money to tweet something right.

Like it's just super fake, super not real. And I just don't, I think P again, brand building is so different now. It's all about. Authenticity. So what we try to do is we work with a lot of celebrities and influencers, but we're not like one celebrity a week kind of thing, right? We're trying to build these deep relationships with our influencers and we do them over multiple years.

And to pass our tests, not only do they have to be very influential, they also have to have proven background in wanting to improve financial progress in America for Americans, right? Like we're very The bar there is extremely high. And so I'm going to show you a quick video here. This is MD motivator.

I don't know if you guys know men know him, but he is known for for like these sort of give back programs that he does, where he's a generosity influencer, think of him that way. Just for context, this video, I think we put it [00:41:00] out. It got 150 million views within just a few days.

And when you find that connection between authenticity of an influencer and your mission, I think that's what really gets you going. So why don't we play this one and then call it a day. Excuse me? Yeah? I'll sell you this jersey for 0 if you tell me which player wears this.

Are you a fan of basketball? 

[00:41:21] Video: We're here to play! That's why we're here! What do you mean? It's the AAU tournament this week. Where are you 

[00:41:27] Vineet Mehra: guys from? Long Beach, California. When did you guys get here in Vegas? 9 o'clock this morning. Who's your favorite basketball player? Kali Ryan. What's your name? I'm Zach, nice to meet you.

What was your name? Carla. Carla, I'm Zach, nice to meet you. You want to try the jersey on, see if it fits you? What's your dream? To be an NBA player. If you got a thousand dollars, what would you use it 

[00:41:42] Video: for? If I had a thousand dollars at this moment, would I use it for my payment rent? You 

[00:41:47] Vineet Mehra: like basketball, right?

Yeah. 

[00:41:48] Video: You want to see another surprise? Okay, let's go! My son's autistic he's 

[00:41:52] Nadine Dietz: not a man of many 

[00:41:53] Michelle Taite: words, very 

[00:41:54] Nadine Dietz: short, but he's 

[00:41:56] Video: very expressive and he's very passionate in other [00:42:00] ways. Yo, Javel!

On behalf of Chime, 

[00:42:12] Vineet Mehra: Javelle, and myself, we wanted to surprise mom too. We had this for you. Gotta open 

[00:42:17] Video: this up. You guys are so awesome. Aw, look at this. Thousand bucks cash. Oh no, we needed this. We needed this, baby. We needed this. 

[00:42:29] Vineet Mehra: And then if you're here for the tournament, you might as well come see the Summer League.

You wanna go to the Summer 

[00:42:32] Video: League with us? Yes, we do. And that's the final surprise. Let's go! Thank you, Chime!

[00:42:40] Vineet Mehra: Just simple things like that where the end, the mission of that influencer and people know it, right? They know people know their influencers now, right? And if you like fake it, people will figure that out and things like that really resonate with our community. So those are all parts of how we build our brand through our community.

[00:42:57] Video: Wow, 

[00:42:57] Nadine Dietz: okay. I'm learning a lot. Are you guys? [00:43:00] This is a very informative. I know we are so short on time, but I need to ask you all. One last question, and then we're going to go into breakouts. I'm going to start with you, Cori. I'm going to collapse like the 18 questions I had for you. And, how do you sync community and company?

[00:43:17] Kory Marchisotto: So, I'll take you on the journey of the Jelly Pop investigation. Does anyone in this room know what Jelly Pop is? So jelly pop is a sticky watermelon primer. And for those of you who don't know what primer is, it's like, you go to home Depot, you've got to paint your wall, but you've got to prime the wall before you paint it so that the paint sticks.

I have to talk to my investors like that. How am I doing guys? Do you get it? Okay. That's what people do to get their makeup to have a long wearing effect on their face. So like a lot of beauty companies, we did a seasonal collection. We made it about watermelon and we put this jelly pop primer in it. It was only intended to be a limited edition, so it came in and went out.

The community lost their minds that we took it out of the marketplace, [00:44:00] because they just fell madly and passionately in love with this item. So we said, okay, well, what do you love about it? Well, we love that it's a sticky primer that has grip. And we had a large contingent of the community that actually didn't like that it had a watermelon scent.

So we said, okay, great. We will make a sticky, grippy primer that has no fragrance in it. And we called it Power Grip. Power Grip became an absolute sensation. It is the number one selling cosmetic product in all of America. And it. Is not really supposed to happen because a primer is a category 13, meaning it's the smallest, the 13th smallest category in beauty, number one and number two are foundation and mascara.

So for a primer to take the number one cosmetic chair in all of America is already disruption. Like it doesn't happen. It doesn't exist. Everybody will tell you when it's impossible until you make it possible. But we're still hearing this undercurrent of we want jelly pop. We want jelly pop. We want jelly pop.

So then this jelly pop community started to form. [00:45:00] And every time we would post anything, anywhere on any platform in capital letters with exclamation points, it would be bring back jelly pop primer. So the team keeps calling me and saying, K boss, we got to talk about jelly pop. I'm like, why we got to talk about jelly pop?

We did power grip. Yeah. But the community wants jelly pop. I'm like, yeah, but we did power grip niacinamide and it's a pink version and they're getting the pink thing. No, but they want jelly pop. So I go, all right, let's get on Tik TOK live. So I personally. When on TikTok live, 5, 000 people showed up and I had a jelly pop conversation.

Help me understand this thing that's going on with jelly pop. Why are you all screaming at me with exclamation points and capital letters about jelly pop? And they said, because we want a sticky primer. And I was like, perfect, go use Power Grip. No, but Power Grip's not pink, it's green. I go, great, get the Power Grip Niacinamide, it's pink.

And they're like, no, it doesn't smell like watermelon. So I'm like, okay, it's really the watermelon fans. I got you. I'm like, okay, but I need you guys to understand that it's not [00:46:00] so easy as you ask me to make it and I go make it happen. So let's make a deal. If you want Jelly Pop, I need you to convince my C suite.

To make you jelly pop and we went on a jelly pop investigation. What does that mean? I brought the community through Tik TOK live to my CFO's office, our head of operations, our head of R and D, and the last stop on the train was our CEO. And what was really amazing about this is when you think about what ELF stands for, right, we make the best of beauty accessible to every eye, lip, and face.

Well, accessibility is not just about a product. Accessibility is also to our boardroom, to our key decision makers, giving them a seat at every table where decisions are happening. So as we went along this journey, and the screams for Jelly Pop got louder and louder, we eventually end up at our CEO's door, and I said, alright, here you go, you got the CEO, it's your time to convince him about why you want Jelly Pop.

[00:47:00] How, I mean, it took him 30 seconds to fold. He was like, give him jelly pop. Why, why are we even like, they want jelly pop, make them jelly pop. So we decided to put it, run the supply chain and the production lines and all the things and bring back this long awaited jelly pop. And I just want to play a video to give you guys a sense of uh, how this went down with our community. [00:48:00] So, so to answer your question, the way you sync your community with your company is to seamlessly integrate the two. Bring your community into the boardroom and bring your boardroom into 

[00:48:18] Michelle Taite: the community. 

[00:48:20] Nadine Dietz: Wow, that was pretty cool, huh? Yeah, awesome, awesome. . So, Vinny, you're probably one of the most articulate. Left brain, right brain marketers, I know, in that you've always had and weave together the art of storytelling with the velocity of performance marketing.

And you've been quoted a million times about looking for unicorns and developing unicorns. Now that we're community driven, yet another phase of marketing, what do you think about skill sets and careers and how can people path to be masters of this skill? 

[00:48:54] Vineet Mehra: Yeah, so couple of hot takes that I'll give you at least my points of view.

I, I think the [00:49:00] first thing is we in marketing have created our own issues in our industry. I think when we talk about performance marketing and brand, there's just like East Coast, West Coast Tupac Biggie thing going on in our industry and we've acted like it's separate. And the truth is you need the.

Full stack, the full funnel to actually do the things of these amazing marketers up here are doing. And, my term for that is I call it performance storytelling. And that's the words I use with a board, with our investors, with, internally, that's something that, I've used a lot.

And essentially what that means is it's. It's crazy to call something performance marketing and brand not, right? Everything should be performative. It should just be performative in its own way, right? And doing the right things. So for example, direct response or performance marketing has taken a huge upswing right over the last decade.

But the truth is the secret of direct response is all you're really doing is bidding [00:50:00] on intent. That exists today, right? And that's really important and you need to do that. But at some point, you hit what I call the CAC valley of death, right? Which is essentially, the intent, the entire intent people start to shrink.

And then you have all the same companies bidding on a smaller and smaller pool. And eventually the CAC goes up. So the only way out of that is you have to stay ahead of that by building brand. And what brand does is it creates future customers. And continues to grow the pie that you then pull through with direct response and performance marketing.

And this is all mathematically true. I won't get into it now, but this is I think the first thing is like, we all have to adopt this performance storytelling mindset and understand how everything goes from the top to the bottom of the funnel in a very connected way. I think the second thing I'll share with you, and this is a hot take in terms of like careers nowadays.

I think most of the future CMOs, sorry to everyone, is going to come out of social. Right. The people who are really [00:51:00] killing social storytelling and content today, because that is so performative, measurable, analytical, but also creative, it's like your design background, right. With marketing combined.

I think that's really where a lot of our future CMOs are going to come from. But the key is, even if you start there. Go and do a stint in performance marketing. Go and do a stint in brand. Do those things early in your career where the tradeoffs you have to make later get less and less and less. And so that's my take is I think we're entering a world where the separation is no longer helpful, nor do I think it's how you build brands.

The key is how do we build. All of you and all of our talent to be full stack in nature and really become performance kind of storytellers as CMOs and have as many experiences as possible. So we're really focused on a lot of those things. But I think the way you think about careers in marketing, I think is totally different than it was a few years ago.

And I think we've got a, got to make sure we fix that as an industry. 

[00:51:58] Nadine Dietz: Thank you for that. I know [00:52:00] you've given us so much career advice over the years, just a lot of the things that we've talked about. If anybody's interested in hearing more from Vineet, just I want to point out that he is on an earlier Visionaries episode and pretty much tells people why you decided to like split your income down to like an eighth of what it was to take a risk.

So smart move. So, I know you're going to run, Jamie. And. So I'm going to ask you similar questions, but just to close this out, this concept of always on and Knowing when to lean in when not to there are so many things in front of you Like how do you make the choices on where to lean in Jamie?

I'm gonna start with you and Michelle I'll have you 

[00:52:37] Jamie Gersch: close this out yeah, it's actually a great segue to my last example because Obviously speaking of communities and subcultures within communities. Obviously, we have a passionate community around Making better products for the planet and we know that our communities believe and know that plastic is [00:53:00] the enemy, but plastic isn't going anywhere, right?

So until plastic is going away, how do we create value with the plastic? And so we were listening to the community, understanding how they felt and came across this other community of, will you? Oh, oh yeah, there it is. Of what's called informal recyclers in New York and the informal recycling community.

There's a nonprofit called Sure We Can, they're Outta Brooklyn. And the informal recyclers are those individuals that you see collecting bottles to make their living wage. They, that is their job. They have not gotten a raise in 40 years. So the insight was that. It's five cents a bottle since 1982. We know our community cares about the value of plastic.

They buy recycled shoes made of plastic water bottles. So how did we tap into that? We went out and said we need to advocate. And we found out that there was a bottle [00:54:00] bill being presented to New York legislature to give bottles a better value to make it worth 10 cents. That helps not only the planet, but that helps this community of informal recyclers who deserve to make more money than they did 40 years ago.

And so you can see Stop Recycling, like it's 1982. We used our store in Noleta to stand up an advocacy platform and went out and said, how do we use our platform for good? And went out and have been, we literally called the New York legislature and we still are doing that today. So we have another.

Push for Nash at the Brooklyn Museum in two weeks. We're super proud of it. And it is this idea of, back to what is the business care about? What is the community care about and really tapping into that? And we're not gonna stop until we're done. And we believe there's until plastic goes away.

We have to put a better value on it. The community deserves it, and the world deserves it. So super proud of this one, actually. Being able to be [00:55:00] advocates without being or just being able to be advocates for what you believe in and what the, your community and the business stands for has been a huge unlock for Rothy's.

Thank you, 

[00:55:10] Michelle Taite: Jamie. Michelle. Yeah, I think for us, it's been about the small unlocks. And playing in pop culture is what we found is part of that small unlock. So I'll give you two examples. One is the most recent. We just hosted a an exhibit at the London Design Museum called Email is Dead. Just to be clear, it is very much alive.

We can talk later. And the reason we hosted it was because around this time of year around the holidays, we get a lot of questions from reporters and from our customers to say, Is email dead? It's been around for 50 years. Is it really the season? Shouldn't we be moving on to some other stuff?

And the answer, I mean, we just laugh because It's so valuable and we can talk about the history some other time and the effectiveness. But we just said, Hey, we're making a splash in the UK. It's a really important market to us. What we know [00:56:00] about marketers there, and this is about knowing your community up and down, right?

We know that they spend a lot of time in exhibits on their weekends. It's their form of, like, creative intake. And so we said, well, why don't we host an exhibit at the London Design Museum that talks about the cultural power of email and talk about what the e. l. f. moments. When we talked about this as a team for the first time, my team was like, Why?

Like, how are we gonna do this? And who would come? And so we formulated, what is the storyline? This wasn't a gimmicky, let's sell MailChimp to the mass marketers through an exhibit. And by the way, the London Design Museum would not have taken us seriously had we done that. And so we formulated really a great storyline around the history of email that was very much in In our expert absurdist character, so it's a little bit funny, really really brings expertise as it relates to the history and the cultural relevance of email, but also gives you a little laugh and some interactiveness.

And we formulated this exhibit not only to [00:57:00] provide a view on the power and the staying power of email, but also to say to get more. And this is what we do with all of our brand activations to get more first party data. So think about moving your, we, to Vinny's point, we often think about, Hey, we're going to do this brand act or we're going to like run performance.

We actually have changed all of our brand activations to fully be aligned to the first KPI being first party data. And how do we do that in an exhibit? We formulate the exhibit so that there are interactive moments where if you, if we provide you value, will you provide us with your email and we can get to know you and nurture you over time.

Another example and that actually really worked well for us. It was the first in that market for such a big brand to take an exhibit such a big brand, not from the design or sort of luxury industry to take an exhibit there. And we had about 80 million owned impressions on, like, really top tier news outlets in the first 72 hours.

So the BBC was talking about it, the Financial [00:58:00] Times was talking about it, and we really started a cultural conversation around email. We actually saw that the museum had 50 percent more attendees, or visitors in those four weeks with our exhibit. So it was really good learning for us, but also a way to bring it into pop culture.

The second example And this is really about, I would say, shared courage, so this idea that, there's, if you think about courage as the intersection of fear and confidence, and an act of courage as you taking one more step than you're comfortable doing, like we did with the design museum We were in Boston, one of our big competitors who very much owns the sophisticated marketers market and I, they shall not be named here was having a conference and we were like, all of our prospects are going there.

How are we not there? And what we realized was that nobody had bought the out of home of all of the conference in Boston area in that period. And so three weeks before, We bought out all of the out of home. We colored that area all yellow and we are [00:59:00] very much a very bright yellow and a sea of blue and greens that is B to B in trying to be less boring to boring and more breakthrough and brilliant.

And we wrapped cabs in our in our marketing and in our colors. And we took people from their hotels to the conference for free. It helps that it was cold and it was rainy and we gave them swag and we showed them videos that were It's partially fun, partially educational, and we got them to interact with us through a QR code with some swag.

And that allowed us to have a really, very targeted experience with these customers and start to nurture them and start to change perception about who we were, the number one email and marketing platform that they weren't aware of because they were going to this other conference. And it got our competitors a little bit angry, but that's okay.

 Great, thanks. So I just want to say a big thank you to MTM and Nadine and her whole team. What you guys don't realize, and the reason people like myself and my peers, we support this and we care about it [01:00:00] is, it's a reason to bring marketers together and support each other, and just build networking community.

[01:00:07] Vineet Mehra: That's really what this is about. I mean, we, it's marketers supporting marketers. Developing our skills, developing sort of the future of the industry.

Nadine and MTM also do a whole bunch of stuff around think tanks and how to think about kind of playbooks for the future. So just, I want to give a huge thank you to Nadine and she has an amazing team. And for all you guys do for us marketers.

 All right. Thanks guys. Take care.