TOP CMO: Louise Barber, DHL

Lou Barber - DHL  0:00  

We do like to talk about our products. We do like to talk about how big we are. But this was one time where it was really important to listen

Ben Kaplan  0:07  

today on top CMO, we're chatting with Luis barber who heads up global marketing for DHL supply. He's an expert marketer for the logistics industry, one of the industry's most affected by the global pandemic, free to these viral great ideas packaged a certain way want to spread, they want to be told to someone else positioning, branding execution to spread your message one across our brands to spread it would be simple, surprising, and significant. This is top cmo with me, Ben Kaplan. This is the podcast where we go around the globe to interview marketing leaders from the world's biggest brands, fastest growing companies and most disruptive startups. Today on top cmo we're chatting with Luis Barber of DHL supply chain Hello, welcome Luis barber who is Global Head of Marketing at DHL supply chain. Luis, welcome to the show. I think everyone calls you, Lou is that are you? Okay? Absolutely. Very good. And, and your role is a super interesting one during the pandemic right now, because you're a Global Head of Marketing, that's a big job, certainly for a company like DHL supply chain to begin with, but also supply chains and thinking about that and thinking about how things move around the world, you know, is a major issue right now, given everything that's happened the pandemic so so first of all, are you sleeping at night? What are you What are you staying up worrying about? And what has been the nature of your role over kind of changing and your focus over the course of the pandemic?

Lou Barber - DHL  1:39  

Well, firstly, thanks for having me, Ben, it's a real pleasure to talk to you today. How is my role changed over the course of the pandemic? Well, I guess, when the pandemic started pretty much like everybody else, I've got to be honest, when when I first heard about it, I was in Indonesia, with some colleagues on a on a site visit. And lots of people were saying Are you still going to go, there was no indication either from our business or from any of the governments involved to say that we shouldn't go. But pretty soon when we were at the airports, we could tell there were people who were a bit more nervous than perhaps they would normally be. Nobody felt that we were under any threat or there was any specific danger. Once we were there, we started to get some emails that said, look, here's some trends that we're seeing across the world, here are some things that we perhaps ought to start thinking to do, we should do differently. And I have to say DHL was very, very quick to respond with tasks, forests set up very, very quickly to understand how our customers were feeling, what the impact of supply chain was likely to be, how these things were likely to pan out, right across the world. And because we're global, we could almost see it moving or experience in one area of the world.

Ben Kaplan  2:52  

So So even before you're dealing with marketing, you're just talking about the early days of the pandemic, you're listening, right, you're just trying to figure out the nature of of the problem. So that was happening. How long did sort of that take to get it get a grasp on this? Because I know a lot of people, you know, took, you know, very unclear about what was happening. If you go back to March, April 2020. Well,

Lou Barber - DHL  3:12  

not very long. I mean, I remember being a bit of being then at a conference in the UK and getting a call to say you need to be on a taskforce call tonight. And that was it. We were in that was midway through February. We were in we were having taskforce calls, it started off twice weekly, then ended up being daily. And really, that's where the marketing kicked in. It started off as customer communication far more than marketing. And this was about collecting inquiries that were coming through from customers, questions that were coming through either into our own operations or through our web channels, or things that we were picking up through social media, really collecting all of that.

Ben Kaplan  3:51  

Was there anything surprising like that, that surprised you that shifted how you would start thinking about marketing coming up anything that you didn't expect it to that people were asking.

Lou Barber - DHL  4:03  

I must admit, I was quite surprised at the tactical nature of those inquiries. People were saying, you know, how are we going to get our supplies? What business continuity plans do we have in place to make sure that our supplies are not at risk, and we quickly went to business continuity planning, but that's how it felt right? It seemed to go from nothing to really, really serious. So we were in that BCP thing almost straightaway, and different countries were in different phases of it. So as I say, we were kind of learning one country for the next unable to share that best practice based on experience that we've had. From a marketing perspective, it was awesome, really, because we were able to see what happened in one country and apply that logic and that learning to the next so they could benefit from it.

Ben Kaplan  4:44  

Okay, so So how was that reflected in marketing? Like what channels did that for me? You have like some kind of insight coming from one country you're doing work. It's informing other countries. You're trying to broadcast what what kind of channels were we talking about? Like what were the avenues and were you producing? Webinars and talks on this were you doing white papers on this. Were these just like articles and blog posts? Were you having email communications that were going out to your existing people? What were you? How was it spreading around the world,

Lou Barber - DHL  5:07  

all of those things to be honest, Ben, and it's quite interesting, I suppose b2b is quite networking anyway, you know, we do like to do a bit of network, we do like to do a bit of dialogue rather than all Broadcast Communications. And I don't suppose we're any different to any other organization in that we do like to talk about our products, we do like to talk about how big we are. But this was one time where it was really important to listen, and to respond to customer needs, and to anticipate customer needs, and to start to talk about customer needs, and how we might be able to help them. So we actually launched a campaign that we called, let's talk to give customers the opportunity and encourage them to talk to us to come forward with their questions either on our web page, through through Twitter or through LinkedIn, and give them access both the information to all of those things, you've just talked about, you know, white papers, access to our experts to talk about the things that were bothering them, whether they're big strategic things about, you know, what is this going to mean to my warehousing capability in the future? Right down to? How do I make sure that my supply chain can deliver enough toilet rolls to, to meet customer demand? All of those things were open for grabs on through let's talk,

Ben Kaplan  6:16  

what would you go back? What would you what will you change? What what was confusing that you didn't realize it's important that was only later that you're like, Okay, well, this is important. And we've got to course correct. Were there any pivots along the way,

Lou Barber - DHL  6:28  

perhaps getting the balance around. Some customers were coming out of the pandemic, while others were going in. And perhaps we weren't quick enough to respond within each individual region. I think I might look at that differently in the future, and make sure we weren't holding some areas back as they were moving towards a more of a steady state more of living with the pandemic rather than responding to it.

Ben Kaplan  6:50  

I see well, and so you're a global company, it's a whole other set of challenges, when really you have a global crisis that is everywhere. How did you figure out where to sort of spend your time? Or was it literally chasing the virus around around the world as it spreads, or was there some other way that you can kind of manage and prioritize this because I think it's rare for global marketers to be like we're activating in every country in every continent at exactly the same time, with a great deal of urgency, that doesn't happen too often,

Lou Barber - DHL  7:18  

we've got really interesting models. So we've got a central team that supports all our regions, but every region has their own local marketing team and local marketing experts. So we were trying to produce collateral information share best practice globally, that we then sent out to the regions and they execute in Region trans create in region to make it very specific to their point in time and where they were, in terms of their experience of the pandemic right here right now.

Ben Kaplan  7:46  

So you're making templates that are for global, and then you're empowering regions to like, adjust those sorts of, of templates. And and are you you know, on this big an issue? are you controlling? Are you approving everything that they do? Or do they have some autonomy?

Lou Barber - DHL  8:02  

Absolutely not, we basically put a framework in place. And our mantra is, as long as what they do is on brand and on strategy. And on policy, they can pretty much do what they want to meet their plan and be on plan. So it's almost a franchise model, where you know, DHL, obviously, we have our brand guidelines, but within reason, do what you want to trans create that in your region to give that message in a very personal way to your market at that time.

Ben Kaplan  8:28  

I see. Okay, well, moving out from like the specifics of just dealing with the pandemic. I mean, one of the things you've talked about is how treating customers well, during this moment of crisis, or listening to customers is a good strategy, not for the short term, right? I mean, the short term you just got to get through next Tuesday. But the long term is, you want to build deeper relationships, build more trusting relationships, certainly going through a difficult experience as a way to get closer together. How does that sort of as a marketing strategy set you up for a longer term view? You know, when the pandemic hopefully is is a distant memory?

Lou Barber - DHL  9:02  

That's a really great question. And I think, you know, as an organization, we absolutely believe in trying as hard as we can to be customer centric and genuinely believing that if we give great customer service, customers will want to stay with us longer and probably buy more from us. I read a bit of research the other day, actually, I think it was from SAS Analytics. And it was talking about the fact that there was a customer survey that said 61% of customers will be prepared to pay more to customers you treated to businesses who treated them well during the pandemic. And I thought that was quite an interesting statistic. We certainly saw a rise in customer satisfaction during the pandemic from a marketing perspective. We saw more engagement with customers during the pandemic with the just over double the amount of engagements with customers, and 34% of that actually related to issues around COVID-19 and the impact of COVID-19 on their supply chain. So it was definitely something that people were interested in, but it was wasn't as you say it wasn't just just tightly tightly knitted to that it was about how they might move forward with us in general. So I think, as you rightly say, when you've been in the trenches with someone, when you've struggled together, when you've worked through a problem together, you do automatically get a bit more affinity. And it does build that deeper relationship. And I think we will see that over time for sure.

Ben Kaplan  10:22  

Where are we with supply chains? Now? What are you telling your customers now for what to expect given that vaccines rolling out? We don't know at what speed? There's variants forming all over the world? How do you think and what do you think will be the impact on supply chains worldwide moving forward?

Lou Barber - DHL  10:40  

The problems that we're seeing from customers or the challenges that our customers are facing or around, you know, are there going to be increased costs for their supply chain management going forward? What's the impact of increased complexity? Or any of the things that we've seen change like the income of E commerce? Is that ever going to move back? How do you manage resilience? How do you measure resilience? And how do you ensure resilience for the future? So for me, one of the things that I'm starting to see is far more long term view of the supply chain, rather than just you know, I need to get this quickly. And I need to get this now it's less tactical than I feel, perhaps it was perhaps even a year ago.

Ben Kaplan  11:19  

I see. And so so people thinking, what this is cause and maybe they sort of read between the lines here is that let's not just focus on getting things from point A to point B. But let's strategically look at the whole process a little bit. Because this causes us to revisit everything this causes rethinking everything if we can, if we might face this in our future, if might there might be a new world order, we better be prepared. Sure, the pandemic highlighted new challenges and opportunities for businesses. But there are also some tried and true issues that always playing businesses of any scale, such as the silos that form between departments like marketing, sales, and customer success. I want to know more about how a big organization can break down these silos. What's the issue? What's the challenge, and what is bridge building between sort of silos often in a company?

Lou Barber - DHL  12:13  

I think the first thing to remember is customers don't see us as department. So they see us as a brand customer buy from a brand they buy from a business, they don't sit there and think, Oh, well, listen, I've received this communication, because marketing have sent it. And now I'm getting this communication because it's coming from sales. And there is nothing worse than a consumer, if you can feel that difference of departments with an organization that you're interacting with. So we try very hard not to do that, I think the days of that kind of funnel management with marketing at the beginning, and then you hand over to sales, then you might hand over to operations, and it might go back to sales, if you're in a renewal situation, that those days are gone. We know that something like 78% of customers of our own research are saying that they do research way before they meet a salesperson 78% of them want to do that research, we know there anything between four and 16 touch points in that research phase. And that's before they've met anybody from our sales team. So we know that marketing has to do that job to get them to the stage where they even want to make a decision about being in a relationship with us. And I goes in sales equally get that we're very lucky again, with our structure, our structure really is quite forward looking. Where we have a growth engine, I sit in the CTO, the Development Office of our business marketing sits there, there's a sales function there, there's a product development function there, there's a customer experience function there. And we all sit together, and we try our hardest to think about the customer needs rather than the product sell. And we put that at the heart of what we're trying to do. If we can solve those problems. Marketing can talk about it, often through digital marketing, sales can talk about it face to face, we can measure that through customer experience, and it helps us build great sector strategies.

Ben Kaplan  14:00  

So what's the example that like, what is something where if you hadn't had this sort of customer centric approach, you would have approached it one way, but because you're thinking of a customer, you approach it a totally different way, either in marketing or sales, or somebody else, there's something that sort of, like you see is shifted by taking that approach.

Lou Barber - DHL  14:20  

Where as good as the next person is thinking about, we've got all this great stuff, how can we get it out the door and show it to customers? And often there are occasions where customers not what customers want to buy at all. And I mean, you know, not not to drag us back to the pandemic, but but in the pandemic, you know, people weren't interested in what we want to sell in what what our most profitable service lines are. They literally wanted to know, you know, can I get some extra space because I've got all of these toilet rolls landing. So you really had to listen to the customer. And if our marketing was going out talking about, you know, whatever, subject matter that we wanted to talk about that month or at that part of the year, and that didn't align with the conversation or Customers are trying to help with sales. It's just disingenuous, to be honest. And it wasn't about profiting at that time. It's about trying to deliver against the customer needs. Some of these guys really needed us to help them stay in business.

Ben Kaplan  15:13  

I see. So this idea of, you know, very typical marketing playbook of like, let's have the editorial calendar for the year, right? It's June. So June.

Lou Barber - DHL  15:23  

I hear that. Yes.

Ben Kaplan  15:24  

So you think one of the offshoots of what you were doing but also even the pandemic is this need for more rapid response to what the issues are? It's what customers care about, as opposed to being like a little bit you first rather than me first, right? It's you first, your agenda, your needs. And then if I support those, then I earned the right to sort of get my message or my my agenda I have business needs to, but you've got to do you first before me first, whereas a lot of marketing is me first, what do we want to say? What are we releasing? What's the new product, they

Lou Barber - DHL  15:54  

all about the broadcast? Yeah, and look, I can think of one example where marketing sales or operations team, customer experience, literally all came together for a retail customer who was quite frankly, in trouble because everything had gone online, and they had no online presence whatsoever. And we stood them up an E commerce presence in less than a week. Now, that was doable, that was achievable. We did it, we helped them out, we all worked together and made it happen. If we did that outside of pandemic, you know, for sure that would have taken six months, we'd have we'd have written a project for it, they'd have approved it, we'd have put a commercial plan behind it. But that urgency that came with the pandemic really made things happen. And some of those silos between the departments that you talked about a minute ago, just didn't have time just did not have time for that sort of silo mentality.

Ben Kaplan  16:46  

No matter how good a marketing strategy you have, or how centered on your customers you may be, you can't execute if you don't have the right talent. For workers in a field like logistics, however, the current talent pool might not be exactly what you envision for your future workforce. And what is the role of sort of having the right talent, the right organization structure in place to be able to execute this number one, and then number two, specifically, you've emphasized on emphasize attracting female talent to a male dominated industry and the value of that what that brings to a business. So as marketing leaders, we often you know, we're also just people managers, talk about the people side of this and how you structure that and specifically, sort of, like, you know, female talent in male dominated certain industries, like like the one you're in?

Lou Barber - DHL  17:37  

Sure. Well, I mean, just to throw some stats out there globally, there's 125 million working in logistics, 2% are female. So that focuses the mind right? Now, it varies regionally. In DHL, just over 34% of our workforce is female, that drops a bit in leadership roles is only 22% in leadership roles, and we've set ourselves a target of getting that to 30%. But we're very much committed to, to having a diverse workforce, but making sure that we recruit people with the right skills into the right roles so that they can succeed and we can succeed. So we don't want to, you know, gender equality is one thing, but we don't want to bias it the wrong way any more than we have to. So we can attract females into the workforce, we try to do that by leveling the playing field. So for example, in our recruitment, we try to remove gendered words, we probably won't talk about aggressive targets work too hard on words like competitive edge in our adverts. Were transparent about their being flexible working or part time working, wherever a candidate might want that. We try to remove some of the barriers of entry to global roles by not talking too much about expectations of travel or international experience, because we want to attract talent from all walks of life, not just those who perhaps don't have families or who aren't committed to care as females tend to be

Ben Kaplan  19:05  

and then do you feel then that the the bottleneck is at the beginning meaning you're talking a lot about the job the job advertisement, right where it's like someone just might not apply for that job because they see it or or or they're bottlenecks elsewhere? Or do you focus on the bottleneck at the beginning just to get people into the field?

Lou Barber - DHL  19:22  

We try and do it all we have noticed there's a bottleneck at the beginning in logistics we absolutely have noticed that and it's something that we're looking at to try and understand it. Is it about our adverts or is it something to do with when we get people in? Is it about the interview stage? Do they just not like it when they get to work with us? Because let's face it, a lot of logistics, operations aren't that glamorous. Let's be clear the days of you know sheds and trucks are gone. It's there's a bit more to it than that. There's a lot of analytics there's a lot of science behind it. You don't always have to work steel toe caps obviously you do if you're on site, but it's it's not quite as male focused as it used to be. There's a lot more thought around There's a lot more science around it, a lot more innovation around it. But we really do want to understand what those barriers are to entry.

Ben Kaplan  20:08  

For people listening that are we have lots of different listeners who are, you know, heads of marketing and CMOS, but we also have those who are aspiring marketers who are early on in their career. What as someone who sources and finds and hires a lot of talent, what can that earlier stage person do? What separates them out what is in short, you know, I have my comps, by training with you says anything that has like high demand and low supply is valuable. And if people want to maximize their value, what are the things as a marketer, but specifically to a marketer, in a field like logistics that they can do to separate themselves out? What do you look for?

Lou Barber - DHL  20:48  

I look for creativity, and I look for authenticity, and you can smell it on my CV. You absolutely can when I've done that thing, when I've applied for jobs, when I've looked to see what that what the words are, that are in the job ad, and I've mirrored them on my application. And sometimes that works. And sometimes that just comes off as inauthentic. I think if you can't be yourself in your application, and in your interview, it's going to be very difficult to be yourself when you're in that role. So find a way to get excited about the role, do your research, really understand the how you can make a difference within that. We've done a lot of recruitment in the last year. And we've got some really exciting young candidates that have joined us that have come from all walks of life, you know, we've got one that's come from an agency background. Now, I came from an agency background to DHL, and people have said to me, what are you doing? You're going from advertising to trucks and sheds? What are you playing that is one of the most well, it's my best job of my career easily. I love it. And part of what I love about it is the challenge of making something like trucks and sheds interesting. And I think if you could bring that to life, if you can bring a bit of passion out on your CV, however you choose to do it, then that really does that really does stick out to a marketer.

Speaker 3  22:03  

And you know, from from a sort of a branding perspective, or a messaging prospective, if

Ben Kaplan  22:06  

you're trying to make as you describe the trucks and sheds. But there's a bit more to it now. And you're trying to make that for lack of a better term, like kind of, like sexy again, but that's actually a trend from Silicon Valley where a lot of like, like core like industrial type industries, like the so called boring industries are actually sexy. Again, they're getting a lot of funding, they're getting a lot of growth, they're getting a lot of support from private equity and venture capital. That is a trend. How do you start to message about it in a sexier way? Given that? I don't know how many times I've had own clients, like you know, b2b companies say we're a b2b company, but we want you to market us like a b2c, we want to be a lifestyle. We want to do this right? How do you that's a common thing. So how do you do that in a field like that, just

Lou Barber - DHL  22:49  

to a certain extent, we let our brand do the talking. So the purpose, our brand purpose is connecting people improving lives. And to be honest, when I first read that, I thought, well, that's that's a lofty statement for a logistics company. And then something like COVID happens, where there is no doubt that what we did during COVID was connect people and improve lives. There's a purpose that sits behind what we do, that a lot of people naturally want to buy into and are very proud of. So we let our people do the talking. But there's a lot of people talk on social media about how proud they are to deliver. We allow our people to take part in our adverts to talk about what they do. And they do that with great pride and great passion. And I think when you can get that out, then then it's infectious.

Ben Kaplan  23:35  

In the end to be a great marketer, you've got to differentiate yourself from the competition. To paraphrase legendary Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter, either you do what everyone else is doing, but spend less money doing it, or else you do something no one else can do. But then as marketers, we need to message This effectively. So our audience can understand the value we create. Here's how DHL supply chain does it at top, my agency, one of the things that we do is we do a lot of branding exercises. And you know, you do stakeholder interviews, and you kind of get at the core values and kind of lock people in a room and do these, you know, sessions where you kind of try to pull out what's the sort of the truth of the company. And then you do a lot of social media and mass media listening. So you do all of that. And one of the I think challenges for a lot of companies I'm interested to get your take on logistics is that you do all of that you're in a competitive industry, there's other competitors, and they do a similar process. And over time you start sounding a little bit similar, right? You go through the same sorts of exercises, you're like yeah, okay, we deliver things okay, we connect people, we do this and it starts to sort of sound the same and yeah, so how do you approach that you're in a competitive business. It's not DHL by itself. You got a lot of other people and in fact, around the world, five different competitors in different markets that are more important. How do you avoid sounding like everyone else so that your words don't have any more meaning?

Lou Barber - DHL  25:00  

goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning. To be honest, Ben, it's about understanding the customer needs, our job is here, to support our customers, and to make sure that they can be successful in their fields of business. If you really understand what the customer need is, then we can deploy our people to connect those people and improve those lives. So having that clarity of purpose around what it is we're doing for the customer here is essential. And it starts at the top, you know, from our, from our corporate CEO, to our business CEO in supply chain, these guys really believe it. And they live our brand every day of the week, they're connected to what they do their operation specialists, they get their hands dirty, they can talk operations, they're really authentic, authenticity is absolutely essential in our business.

Ben Kaplan  25:48  

What do you mean by that authenticity? Because like, you know, I can imagine someone hearing this and saying, like, Okay, I gotta be more authentic, like, what can I do to be more authentic, how is authentic is supposed to sort of come innately from it you've talked about is something that you can smell a mile away, how does one sort of embrace their authenticity as a marketer or just as, as a person in a large corporate entity,

Lou Barber - DHL  26:11  

connecting what you're doing to a customer need is one thing, and really believing that you're adding value. You know, there are so many companies where I've worked in companies where I know that what I'm doing on a daily basis is making rich people richer. That's, of course, look, we're a business, we're here to make money. But we're actually also here to add value to customer lives. And I truly believe that's the case, I truly believe that my leaders believe that. Now we're a good organization. And that's at the heart of what we do.

Ben Kaplan  26:41  

To kind of wrap up one of the things that that we still have to think about and talk about is this notion of connecting pain points to what we call defining moments. And a pain point is something that you've talked about, which is like understanding customer need, and and then isolating a real pain point they have, there was a lot of very specific pain points for COVID. Of course, a defining moment, in our definition, is that moment where your brand has the highest perceived value, where are you where your customers like, oh, my gosh, you know, Lou, if you weren't there, you know, I don't know what we would do. It's like, it's such a clear delivery of value, that, that it becomes a rallying cry that you can rally around, like, you're not just moving things around. But you're like this defining moment, this is what you're about. So are there any defining moments that come up, whether it's COVID, or whether it's otherwise, that strikes you as this moment where your brand value was at its highest was at its peak?

Lou Barber - DHL  27:37  

I think COVID is the most obvious example right now, because so many businesses were stuck, and just didn't know how to move forward and knew that if they didn't move forward, they had to move back. And they relied on our people who often know as much about their business as they do themselves, to move things forward. So you know, the example I gave you a moment ago, a work around where we help that retail customer move into an online situation, there are lots of examples like that. Lots of examples where, you know, we had to call people in to, to double the amount of groceries that were being called out of supermarket warehouses in the UK, or put together care packages in a pack that literally on a line stuffing, stuffing boxes to get to people who otherwise wouldn't be getting food deliveries. And there are so many examples on social media where our customers have said, you know, this was a true partnership. This is where we came together for the greater good and it worked out. You know, that's where that passion comes in. That's where that pride comes in. So many of our people put themselves on the front line every day of the week to make sure that we deliver that way for our customers, so they can deliver for this.

Ben Kaplan  28:48  

Well, well said, and how does your background and you came from, like advertising agency world into this? How does that you weren't someone that was like career in logistics? How does that sort of inform you now? And should people be more considering of jumping between many different career tracks or channels, or at least industries and not being afraid to make that leap? How does that background experience sort of help you today?

Lou Barber - DHL  29:15  

Do you know what Ben, nobody is more surprised than me that I've ended up working for DHL. It was a full back application. I was applying to three jobs at the time. And this one was, you know, I thought they will have a really robust recruitment process. I'll go through the process. And this is the one I wanted. And it was for a number of reasons. One, one of the guys that interviewed me, was quite inspirational, and has such a deep rooted belief in what he does, that I wanted to be part of that it was infectious. One is that is the marketing, the fact that we've got an awesome tech stack and ecosystem. I'll be really honest about it. And I thought I wouldn't I wouldn't mind playing with some of that. Everybody I met has that passion about something that I didn't really understand and I thought God if you can be passionate about Trucks and sheds. There's something quite special going on here. And there is you know, I've been here it'd be three years, three years tomorrow, I joined DHL. And I'd love it is the best job of my career. I could not be more passionate about it. If you cut me I bleed yellow and red. Well, it's been

Ben Kaplan  30:17  

a delight to chat with you, Lou. Barbara. Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you for your you're passionate about logistics and sort of customer driven marketing. I really appreciate it and it's been a pleasure to have you on top CMO.

Lou Barber - DHL  30:29  

Thanks, man. It's been great talking to you.

‍