The power of actionable insight
How Phil Malcolm’s marketing equation has helped legacy brands like AAA Auto Club Group, Disney, Walmart, and Sam’s Club optimize their marketing strategies and foster a customer-driven environment
Phil Malcolm is a marketing executive with over twenty-five years of experience in multi-billion-dollar retail and entertainment brands. With a history that spans well-known brands like Disney, Sam’s Club, and AAA Auto Club Group, Phil has proven his ability to develop and foster a customer-driven environment that unifies cross-functional matrix organizations to optimize planning, innovation, integration, execution, and results.
The Continuum recently spoke with Phil about marketing legacy brands and what he learned from his time as part of the Disney “cast” assigned with carrying on the brand’s history and traditions. He also offered us his own personal equation for marketing success: Actionable Insight = IQ^2.
Your first marketing gig was for perhaps the most well-known brand in the world: Disney. What did you do for them?
I actually started my career in sales at IBM and then pivoted to become a financial analyst at a regional bank that was eventually acquired by Bank of America. Marketing was a part of what I did in both of those roles. The sales training for IBM, for example, helped me hone the marketing skill of identifying your target audiences and understanding the key benefits you can provide to each. However, Disney was the first time I was hired to focus specifically on traditional marketing and branding strategy development.
Initially, I was in charge of the branding of Downtown Disney, which is now called Disney Springs. It’s a nighttime entertainment spot that features other brand partners like Planet Hollywood, Cirque Du Soleil, and the Rainforest Cafe. There was also a ticketed venue called Pleasure Island that had eight different themed locations, which included BET Soundstage, Wildhorse Saloon, a comedy club, a jazz club, and others. People would pay one price and be able to go in and out of the different clubs all night.
My job was to come up with a cohesive marketing plan that would drive traffic to these businesses, both from tourists who were going to the parks all day and from locals. This was before the parks had a lot of nighttime activities and fireworks, so our primary objective was to provide adults an option on property for their shopping, dining, and entertainment.
My favorite campaign that I developed was “Carpe PM – Another Excuse to Party!” We had a concert every week with headliners like Christina Aguilera.
Was it an actual island?
Yes, it was literally an island in the middle of the Downtown Disney area. It’s still there, but it’s not a ticketed venue anymore.
Disney is known as a mega branding machine. What was it like to step into that?
Disney is a marketing organization at its core. There was definitely some separation between the parks and the movies and merchandising, but marketing was king during my tenure. I started out working with a lesser brand; Downtown Disney was not core like Magic Kingdom or Epcot. Even so, there was a ton of training that I had to go through before being able to start.
The onboarding training was called “traditions.” I learned the history and traditions of Disney, and I learned the importance of nomenclature and positioning. Our internal ad agency was called “Yellow Shoes” in honor of Mickey Mouse’s oversized footwear. Our ride and park creation team was not called engineering or operations; it was called “Imagineering.” I also learned that the whole Disney experience was supposed to be a fantasy. Even as a behind-the-scenes marketing person, I was considered a cast member. Cast members were a part of the show and were supposed to help suspend reality for guests so that they could remain in a state of fantasy. If there was a kid who had just dropped their ice cream cone or looked like they were having a bad time for any reason, it was the cast member’s job and responsibility to do something to turn that experience around.
I actually got in trouble once because I brought my kids into the underground tunnels that cast members use to get around the park. I was ushered out gently by other cast members who told me that bringing kids down there was like showing them a peak of Santa without his suit: it ruins the magic.
I loved all of this because I’m a brand guy. I love consistency and traditions, and I've done my best to emulate this in my own teams at my subsequent organizations, admittedly with varying degrees of success. I think the lesson is that in order to project an external image, you have to focus on your internal identity. The beauty of Disney was that the focus on the small details always lined up with the broader vision of fantasy.
Another quick example is the Disney Animal Kingdom Theme Park. When I led the brand marketing for this park, we developed the “Nahtazu” campaign to connect to the vision of fantasy for that experience. We had to make sure that our guests clearly understood that we were a full-blown, out-of-this-world theme park and “not a zoo.” That repositioning campaign was very successful, and I have seen it being leveraged many times by Disney since our initial campaign more than 20 years ago.
Other brands talk about their true north, but Disney embodies it. For Disney, keeping folks wrapped in a fantasy for as long as possible is the true north.
“I think the lesson is that in order to project an external image, you have to focus on your internal identity.”
You came up with your own marketing equation while you were at Disney that you continue to use. We don’t usually have math in the Continuum, but can you explain it to us?
My banking and college friends who knew me before Disney understand how much I love math. They wondered how I’d survive the subjective world of marketing, but I convinced them that there’s actually math and data in real marketing.
At Disney, I learned about the importance and power of data. The beauty of Pleasure Island was that I had data around all of the guests who were primarily passholders. I was able to tell which percent of the guests were tourists versus residents, when tourists came, and which businesses various groups visited.
I used this to fine-tune our marketing strategies. I believe you can find insight in deep dives into data and that those insights help to move marketing from art to science.
Of course, that insight can’t just come from the data. The quantitative info tells you exactly what’s happening, but you need the qualitative information as well to provide more context. There’s also an important perspective that comes from being on the ground and interacting with people on a daily basis. I realized that even when you have the data, anecdotal is not a bad word when the intuition driving it is based on experience.
The equation that I live by is Actionable Insight = IQ^2 = Intuition + (Qualitative x Quantitative).
Your next job at Sam’s Club, which is owned by Walmart, was all about data. Can you explain?
Unlike Disney, which was a giant marketing machine, Walmart was focused on operations. Their objective was to figure out the logistics of getting products where they needed to be as inexpensively as possible. The ultimate goal was to provide every product at the “Everyday Low Price” by being as efficient as possible and squeezing every penny out of the process of delivery. Even merchandising was secondary to logistics. The belief was that people were going to come to the store and buy what we had because we consistently had the lowest prices.
Sam’s Club was also focused on operations and logistics, but we shifted it to focus on the consumer through member segmentation. We had about 42 million members at the time, but we sliced and diced our member base into eight different segments. There were four consumer segments, like Mom CEOs, who were shopping for their home and family. There were also B2B segments like convenience stores, which would buy tobacco products, alcohol, and candy that they would resell. Another B2B segment was hotels and motels, which would buy furniture and cleaning items and also resellable products for their sundry shops.
We really needed to understand these separate groups of members so we could create a brand identity and marketing campaigns that were relevant and compelling to both of them. We leveraged the mountains of data we had to develop actionable insights to drive internal and CPG partners to cater to each segment to meet their specific needs. It was my IBM training revisited.
“There’s also an important perspective that comes from being on the ground and interacting with people on a daily basis. I realized that even when you have the data, anecdotal is not a bad word when the intuition driving it is based on experience.”
You left Sam’s Club because you wanted to be back in Florida and closer to family. Tell us about your current role at AAA.
When I was at Disney, all kinds of family members came to visit all the time, but then I moved to Bentonville, Arkansas, which is where Walmart is headquartered, and no one came. We were there for almost six years, and I think my parents came to visit once. Our parents were getting older, and my wife and I decided we needed to be near them again.
AAA was actually one of my clients way back in my IBM days, and it was nice to come back to Florida. AAA has a national reputation, but it has always been made up of a whole bunch of local clubs. In recent years, these clubs have merged into four large holding companies. There are approximately 64 million AAA and CAA Members in North America, and our club represents about 15 million of them. Originally, I joined the club that covered Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee, but I am now in a club that represents Quebec and 14 states, primarily in the Southeast and Midwest.
I’m in charge of brand and loyalty marketing for our club, and this role truly does connect the intuitive, quantitative, and qualitative elements that I’ve always talked about. AAA has a reputation for going the extra mile. I hear stories—anecdotes, if you will—all the time about people who were pulled over in distress and had AAA tow-truck drivers help them even if they weren’t members. Part of my job is to make sure our employees know that this is our point of differentiation so that they continue to deliver on this expectation and our promise – Expect Something More™. It’s not being a Disney cast member, but living up to this expectation is equally as meaningful to our AAA Members and consumers in general.
The other thing I need to do, though, is remind people that AAA is more than roadside assistance. That’s our identity, and our satisfaction rates and renewal rates are 90% or more because we’re good at it. AAA is synonymous with roadside assistance, but we have all of these other programs—from an insurance and travel agency to a huge discount program—that are not top of mind when somebody says “triple-A.”
We're all about saving money and navigating safely through all areas of life, not just on the road. That is the second meaning of Expect Something More™, and we’ve been working on getting that message out through all media options to reach our traditional members and younger consumers since we have so much to offer them.
Before we go, you’re one of our first interviews of 2024. Do you have any advice for people in the New Year?
I would say what I said in my end-of-year letter to colleagues as they are words I try to live by, “Make sure that each day you give more than you receive, listen more than you talk, and think of others more than you think of yourself, and you will not only have a good year, but a great life.”
January 9, 2024
