This week, Marketing contributor Stephan Argent reaches out on to the vice-president of marketing at Boston Pizza International to see how the restaurant chain is navigating its way through the digital revolution in marketing.
What’s your vision for the future of digital in your organization?
Green: Our vision is really around evolving digital from just a better means to communicate with our guests, to leveraging the power of technology to really start to differentiate and improve the core guest experience. It’s using technology to fundamentally change and add value to what our guests want from us as a brand. For Boston Pizza it’s about that food, service, atmosphere and experience. The real challenge for us as marketers is trying to figure out how we can add to that and unleash new potential in that experience, based on new opportunities that technology can enable. And that can be anything from a more seamless, frictionless commerce experiences – through to an an amazing digital menu experience – things that weren’t possible before that are really focused on adding value to that core experience vs. just finding a more efficient way to push a message out.
Agencies need to more clearly define their role around the digital guest experience.
Alex green, Boston Pizza
What areas of digital do you do in-house vs. outsource – and why?
From a digital marketing perspective we outsource the majority of it. When we think about our core competency as marketers – we’ve got a great understanding of our brand and our offering and we’re very focused on our guests and the insights that drive their engagement with our brand. But at the end of the day, we’re not technologists. So for us we’re looking at finding those partners that bring that best in class expertise, experience and insights in terms of how we can leverage technology to create those better guest experiences.
There are core aspects that we think are critical to own. For example, we’re focused on owning all our guest data and focused building expertise and competence around mining that data to get to the insights, because that’s a huge driver of marketing overall and our success. So we’re looking for those right partners to bring around the table to help us build out those better experiences.
At the end of the day we’d rather rent than buy whenever possible because technology is moving so quickly, that by bringing the right partners to the table we’re able to adapt and evolve faster.
Do you look to Taxi to be a technologist?
This is one of the key challenges marketers and agencies are facing in this area. There’s a big difference between being an agency that understands a brand, understands the guest and building powerful communications and engagement strategies. But it’s a very different skill set to be able to understand the type of infrastructure and technology that you need to build to enable some of these experiences – especially as you’re shifting away from more of a communications approach to really engineering and leveraging technology to fundamentally change the guest experience.
On one hand more sophisticated CRM strategies are part of that, but then you also think about full e-commerce builds and the ability to manage an e-commerce experience – and push that even further to say that when you’re starting to build platforms around products like iPhone apps or Andriod apps, the level of technical expertise and sophistication gets increasingly high. So I think the challenge the both marketers and agencies are working through is where does one partners accountabilities and core skills begin and where do they end?
Do you use a one-stop agency or split out digital separately?
We’re still very focused on having a core agency that’s really helping us define that overarching brand strategy – our brand positioning and that articulation of how we emotionally connect with our guests based on our offering. That is articulated in many aspects of our brand from the visual language and the design through to the more traditional communication set. But no matter what, you’ve got to engineer that into the new digital experiences, so we’re still very much looking to our core agency to help us define that strategy and help steer and direct it. But we’re partnering that up with these best of breed partners who have deeper expertise in particular areas – and for us that’s around deeper CRM strategies and some product development around mobile apps and e-commerce.
How has digital impacted your marketing org chart?
Yes digital has absolutely affected our org chart. At Boston Pizza we’re really starting to respond to the growing needs around product management – e-commerce channels, iPhone and Andriod apps, as well as the demands it’s placing on analytics and the management of data to further drive the business. So we’re continuing to adapt and evolve so we have the right skill set around the table to manage some of those opportunities in balance with finding the right partners that balance the core competencies of the team.
Do you do analytics in house or outsource? – Right now we’ve centralized our guest data so we have our data mark and we run our own analytics. We’ve made it a strategic priority to own all of our guest data and want to be able to mine the insights on that data to be able to drive the business forward.
What are the biggest challenges you’re facing from a digital perspective?
One of the biggest challenges is making sure you have the right people round the table. As the opportunity with digital grows – it’s also getting increasingly complex – so it’s pushing marketers, marketing departments as well a lot of agencies beyond their typical comfort zone. So one of the key challenges is making sure you have that right group of people – both agencies in terms of right expertise – but also the right individuals from those agencies.
What are the key expectations from your (brand) / digital partner?
We need a group of individuals and partners to clearly understand where their core competencies lie and where they don’t lie. so that we can create a cross-functional team that can actually execute against key projects. So they have to play well together in terms of defining that strategy but more importantly simplifying an execution plan that allows brands to capitalize on these opportunities in a cost effective, manageable, scalable way.
What’s key lessons have you learned as an organization when it comes to digital?
You have to get the right people around the table. As a marketer we’ve been doing a lot of things in a relatively consistently way for a long period of time and there’s a very defined process to manage them. And as marketers we’re very good at that and most of our partners are good at that as well. But the power of technology to transform a brand and a guest experience is demanding new skills and new expertise. So one of the most important things is making sure you have the right people around the table – for us at Boston Pizza, that’s really taking a look at how marketing and IT teams work together and how they can support each other to bring these initiatives to life. As well as us looking at if we have the right partners to enable some of these new strategies to connect with our guests.
We’ve also learned that we need to be brave and think big about the business and the opportunity. But we also need to be very disciplined about finding ways to take small steps and not get too caught up in trying to solve all the world’s problems in a single quarter. We’re learning to be more adaptive. As marketers we need to be more open and fluid in the way that we think about the business, our partners and the role technology can play in terms of influencing and improving that guest experience. But it also means being more agile about how we manage the plan – although we can have loose road maps for technologies over 12 – 24 months, we need to allow that plan to be a little bit more fluid and a little bit more accepting of some of the risk that goes with that, otherwise you the have the potential to be paralyzed and not move the brand forward.
Do you decide how to allocate budget between “traditional” initiatives and digital?
At the core we have a lot of experience behind what would be defined as traditional marketing investments and we know we need to continue to invest in those to drive the business. We know that with emerging technology, very quickly areas of digital investment that were defined as new and or emerging are quickly becoming traditional. We’ve been progressive in investing in those and proving the business case out of those.
The last piece is having the flexibility and resolve to face the risk associated with making strategic investment in new technologies and new areas. I’d like to say we’re very protective of that core that we know is driving the business – so that’s 70% of our spend, and we’re allocating 20+% in what we think are more emerging but proven areas of digital and technology. And we have the license and we give the team the freedom and permission to fail and to push 10% of the budget into new areas.
Do you assign a fraction of the budget to responsible experimentation?
It’s not that clearly defined. Like all brands and marketers we’re accountable to delivering certain results and we want to make sure a good portion of the spend is going to deliver against those. But we also know the historical go-to market approach is not yielding the results that it has historically so we need to invest in those new areas of opportunity to refine our strategy and to prove the path forward. The great thing about Boston Pizza is that it’s an entrepreneurial culture – so we embrace the idea in investing in new ideas and proving them out.
How can agencies be more effective to you and other marketers in their digital solutions?
Agencies need to more clearly define their role around the digital guest experience. I think the digital space is evolving so quickly and the role of technology is changing in a way that brands engage with their guests. It was relatively cut and dry when digital was another channel to communicate with their guests. But when you get into real guest engagement and the ability to leverage technology to transform a guest experience, it runs much deeper than communications.
I would say that traditional agencies need a more fluid approach. As marketers we had a pretty defined approach to building a campaign, selling in a strategy and executing a campaign. It was pretty linear and it was a pretty traditional waterfall approach. But it gets harder and harder to that with some of these initiatives – they tend to be more fluid, you have to be more responsive and they can get a little more unstructured. It requires all agencies to be very good at collaboration and working with other partners as well as building cultures that are very responsive and adaptive to the way these projects can evolve over the course of a project plan.
And the ability to balance real thought leadership – those ideas we love to getting from agencies – those inspiring stories about where we can go as a brand and build those amazing guest experiences – balanced with a real entrepreneurial practicality. While technology is amazing because it’s almost infinitely powerful in terms of what it can do – it can also be infinitely expensive.
What’s the one thing you’d like your [digital] agency to do better?
Entrepreneurial practicality! Inspire us on the power of technology to transform our brand but close it with an entrepreneurial practicality on how we can make it happen.
Alex Green/Boston Pizza Snapshot
1. Alex Green, Vice President Marketing at Boston Pizza International
2. Boston Pizza in Canada – $1-billion in sales
3. Number of Employees in Canada: 22,000
4. Size of Marketing Department: 29
5. % of Marketing Spend/Billings tied to Digital: About 15%
6. Agencies/Digital Partners: Taxi is agency of record. Olson and Exact for CRM; Pivotal Labs for Apps and Oneses for e-commerce
7. Management Style in 3 words: Inclusive, supportive and, on a good day, adaptive, or a a bad day, variable.
8. Company Culture in 3 words: Entrepreneurial, collaborative and fun
Stephan Argent is president at the Argedia Group
