Joe Jackman: Reinventing How Brands Embrace Change
Transformation expert Joe Jackman explains “the human how” of fighting the status quo.
“When I was growing up, this notion of ‘the future’ was going to the moon—it was this far off place, and it would come someday. The truth is, the future arrives daily. And you need to be part of it and actively hands-on shaping it for yourself and your business.”
Not many people—or brands—love change as much as Joe Jackman. As CEO of Jackman Reinvents, he’s been a valued advisor on transformation to major retailers, consumer brands, and B2B companies. Jackman acknowledges our very human predilection for the status quo, but believes that it’s a deadly choice for companies.
In counseling clients, Jackman applies insights from trends and consumer behaviors to drive change for the greater good. And, given our current environment of both a pandemic and a values-driven economy, he believes there’s no time to waste: Change is “coming fast and furious,” and it’s adapt or die.
To the envy of any who have ever experienced “imposter complex,” Jackman has confidently embraced change personally and professionally, moving from city to city with his retail executive dad, and from creative to CMO to author, admittedly making it up as he went along to many of the stops along the way. That self-reinvention led to coining the word “reinventionist” and a whole strategic philosophy, which he shared—along with specifics on influencing consumer choice and the marriage of brand and demand—in this conversation with The Continuum’s E.B. Moss:
What comes to mind for you when you think of the word “change”?
“Essential.” If you're not changing and evolving then the best-case scenario is that you’re stuck. But more likely you're moving backwards or, in business terms, waning or dying. Change is, as never before, essential for us just to stay with what's happening.
I grew up in a family with five siblings, and not one of us was born in the same city because my dad was opening new geographies for Sears. So, I think I came by the comfort with change from that. That experience is a really valuable life skill as you're forced to adapt and figure out, “How do I thrive here? How do I connect with new people?”
While change has been coming fast and furious for many decades, we've never seen anything quite like how the pandemic is compressing the timing to do something in a different way now. It's certainly shaping not just people's lives, but the dynamics of the marketplace and, in lots of ways, for the better.
After moving around as a kid did you move around professionally?
In my own career, I gravitated towards creative director and became one, basically by starting my own business—and then said, ‘Why can't I be a brand strategist? Who do I need to learn from?’ And then when I was an executive with Loblaw Companies, I got to launch Joe Fresh and had to figure out how to create real marketing and insight capabilities.
Next, I was excited by one of the laws I read in the book The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, by Al Ries and Jack Trout, that if you can't be first in the category, create your own and become the leader. In a way that led me to create Jackman Reinvents, in a category I invented: the reinvention category. As “strategy-into-action-now” people, we're in our own category of one.
What exactly are reinventionists?
It’s a word I made up, but a reinventionist is to just be really good at making change happen and to great benefit... and in the mindset of making change.
There are a couple of things embedded within the term, which I love: The first is the invention itself—the vision that started a brand or company, and there are usually strands of its DNA that made up its belief system. So, the act of reinvention is to make that relevant again.
You literally wrote the book on it: The Reinventionist Mindset.
Thank you for the book plug! It’s based on repositioning the idea of change in our minds as a positive force, as creating the next best, most powerful, relevant version of you or your company. Instead, change is usually seen as something negative. If you want to resist change, have at it, but the world is moving, consumers are moving and you really need to keep pace and find your place within that where you can thrive.
When I was growing up, this notion of “the future” was going to the moon—it was this far off place, and it would come someday. The truth is, the future arrives daily. And you need to be part of it and actively hands-on shaping it for yourself and your business.
Business-model life cycles, tenures of executives, the length of brands and their relevancy and vibrancy—they’re all compressing. This is not guesswork. This is in data. So, you either get pro-athlete good at it, or you have it done to you.
“Success is a very seductive force, sponsored by the status quo.”
You’ve been warning for years that retail needs new concepts. I want to applaud you for things like your work with Staples, where you did some trial stores that were a hybrid workspace and product sampling destination, and even added a podcast studio! And before that, in 2012, you helped Rexall in Canada literally reconfigure itself to be the first chain to offer immunizations. Can you speak to those?
In the case of Staples, we discovered that the emotional attachment to office supplies is very low. But there's high emotional engagement in how office supplies and related services are all in the service of achievement, learning, and growth—and as an office supply superstore, Staples played a fairly central role in helping people achieve their goals. Those insights changed everything.
The Rexall strategy work and insights made it clear that the customer wanted a partner, not just in prescription medicine but in health and wellness. That took us right to services. What was so stunning about that reinvention and the execution was that Rexall had about 20% of the footprint of its much larger rival. And it showed that scale and size versus competitors has no bearing on your ability to achieve. Every retailer has to consider “what’s our potential—and how can we be 100% committed to pushing the edge of what's possible?” It's just remarkable what can be achieved then.
So, what prescription would you give any physical store today to help them in these downturn days of in-store shopping?
Get 100% committed and excited about pushing the edge of what's possible. Retail in general sat and was lacking innovation, witnessing the coming e-comm revolution and choosing to slow walk it. A lot of disruption was enabled by that sense of ‘Oh, maybe one day we’ll evolve, but stores are the thing now.’ If retail leadership was prescient, Amazon wouldn't exist. Casper wouldn't exist. Netflix wouldn't exist and there’d be a streaming service called Blockbuster.
But success is a very seductive force, sponsored by the status quo. So, retail better not do the calculus of ‘Well, we'd have to write off these assets’—or—‘That would cost so much to transform from what we are today.’ It's just a mindset.
How do you get to those strategies, or insights, as you mentioned?
Insights is a term often confused with research. And it is really an art and a science to find those nuggets that you can actually hang a strategy off of. Many companies say ‘We have a strategy,’ but I'll ask what it is and it'll be crickets. But, there's probably only one rule in all of this work in transformation: You must understand who your customers are and what they care about most. Beyond function, into the world of emotion. Most marketers focus on the ‘means’ but you have to understand what the ‘end’ is.
What can brands communicate that's going to help build empathy and trust?
It actually starts with the definition of a brand: A brand equals purpose elevated to experience, delivered consistently.
So, purpose: Why do you exist? Who are you to whom, and what do you stand for to them? Most companies haven't got that very well defined. Yet if you look at the evidence, purpose-led companies tend to outperform their peers.
“Elevated to experience” is about everything that you do; every communication, every touchpoint, everything experiential—from having a conversation with a customer service associate to inbound advertising—all tied back to who you are and why you are unique. When it comes from the same place, it’s easy to make it cohesive, more powerful, and more efficient.
And lastly “delivered consistently.” In a quarter by quarter world, where every marketer or peer on a leadership team feels pressure, it's tempting to say, “Let’s try this. Let's do that.” Particularly in a performance world.
“You don't want your brand or business to be like a great aunt: fondly thought of, but never visited. You want to be able to have conversations with younger customers that are relevant to them.”
That brings us to your perspective on brand and demand marketing, and elevating that conversation is our “purpose” at The Continuum!
Performance marketing today is important—because it’s data-centric and it’s measurable, and we can adjust it. So, I'm all in favor of tactics of that kind as long as they ladder up to some higher order of purpose. If there's no red thread that links these things, and it feels like I'm dealing with a different company today than the last quarter or the last year, then you can't build trust.
And a maybe more human perspective is looking carefully at filters given that today's measure of success is, “Is this truly a relationship I have with this brand? Do I feel like I'm part of the same community?” If I'm starting to build a deeper relationship, I'm going to want a certain level of respect and empathy. I find that a lot of the automated world of marketing is just completely tone-deaf. If I’d just met someone I'm dating and they sent me five messages in the first week, I'd say, “Oh, okay, maybe this isn't going to work out.”
Brands need to behave in human ways and that takes making sure that you come across as genuine and true—and always the same consistently at the core. You can certainly evolve your communications and what you talk about, but being very true and uniquely yourself is how you build relationships.
So, build a foundation on the brand DNA of values for your awareness marketing, and then you can use performance or demand marketing to reach that target audience over and over in different ways.
Yes. And since today we have so many tactical ways to connect, let's be thoughtful. Let's do it well with real linkage between ideas—because if it's all demand the risk is that it won't add up to anything.
You’ve also said that we're in a values economy. Will amplifying those values help brands overcome our cancel culture?
There’s been a shift from how consumers historically made purchase decisions. There's an enormous body of evidence that shows consumers are choosing the brands that they associate with, and the products and services they buy, on the basis of values. Values might come in the form of, “I really like this company, I get quality over price and that ticks the box, but don't think they keep their employees safe in a pandemic,” or, “I've been reading articles about how they underpay them and overwork them.” There is a lot of de-selection going on today on that basis.
We've long talked about environment and sustainability, and I'm involved with a sustainable water—Flow Water, a certified B Corp. Consumers might like Fiji or Evian, but don't want to choose plastic bottles or glass bottles shipped from the other side of the world any longer. And so, they may de-select them and choose an alternative like Flow in sustainable packaging on a values basis.
There are trends that have been going on for a better part of a decade but are noticeably arising now in our pandemic context. These trends are things like, “I need to know who you are and what you stand for. I need to understand if you have values and pursuits compatible with mine, that resonate with me. I need to know that your footprint, in all regards, is reasonable.”
In a world of infinite choice—which is what the internet did to retail and retail was relatively slow to adapt and adopt—when everything becomes equal, there are only two tiebreakers. One of them is price, which, unless you're the low-cost player, is a problem because you'll just get commoditized, and your margin disappears.
But the other tiebreaker is how you feel about the brand. And every indicator today points to being more and meaning more to people, and you'll ultimately sell more.
The Reinventionist Mindset offers a framework of five keys to change. How did they evolve?
After helping more than 50 companies I noticed something very deeply human in transformation leadership teams under pressure, whether a Walgreen's, or a Hertz, or a Duane Reade. We’re wired to dislike change. So the cutline underneath the title is, "Learning To Love Change, And The Human How Of Doing It Brilliantly."
Each "human how" is two or three words that simply get to a mindset of how to become great at change. The first one is: Seek insight everywhere. We tend to get very insular in our world. Look at Uber which impacted our expectations around customer experience and transparency and ease of interface. It changed everything: banking, supermarket shopping expectations, etc. So, widen the aperture and pay attention to people that you're maybe not focused on.
For example, it’s practically a marketer’s religion to pay the most attention to the customers they do the most business with. That’s a great discipline but you also need to pay attention to the customers coming up behind them. I've heard the same refrain over the years when mentioning a brand to those customers: “Oh yeah, my dad used to take me to that brand.” Or, “Yeah, they used to have all sorts of great stuff back in the day. I haven't thought about them for a while.” If you're not seriously paying attention to younger people and showing them how you’ve evolved, you're basically at risk.
You don't want to be a brand or a business like a great aunt—fondly thought of, but never visited. You want to be able to have conversations with younger customers that are relevant to them. So seek insight everywhere—magazines you’d never normally pick up, movies that younger people are watching, just to learn the nuances that matter. That's currency in the cultural sense, but also currency in the financial sense.
“Brands need to behave in human ways and that takes making sure that you come across as genuine and true and always the same consistently at the core. You can certainly evolve your communications and what you talk about, but being very true and uniquely yourself is how you build relationships.”
That’s also the excellent rationale for diversity, equity and inclusion. Those different mindsets help inform a broader perspective and help us communicate to a broader swath of people. Joe, one last question: Pandemic aside, what would you most love to see change in the world?
I'll take a page from one of my own podcast guests, Maryam Banikarim, a long time marketer. Her answer to that question was “democracy itself,” apropos your question on cancel culture and the polarization of society. It’s the degree to which we are pulling apart rather than coming together. And it is fundamentally rooted in, I believe, a feeling that change is hard, so better to protect what we have. It’s essentially people [being] fearful and trying to protect something they know.
So I think we need to find a way to reinvent democracy so that there is a stronger love and appreciation for the value of it—and, and a way to engage in it that is just different than what is happening today.
And personally and professionally, I'm very serious about finding opportunities to do things that count in regard to climate change. It’s real, and we have to start to make a difference. So, I’m super excited to be at least part of the solution as best I can.
Ed. Note: To hear the full interview with Joe, check out the full podcast at Insider Interviews with E.B. Moss:
October 19, 2021
