The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - Moment 77 - Nike CMO: Three Steps to Genius Marketing: Greg Hoffman

Episode Date: September 30, 2022

In this moment, Greg Hoffman breaks down why you should sweat the small stuff. A big believer in setting team values, the best teams have a code that they operate by whether the team leader is present or not. Getting a strong sense of culture in those teams is no easy task, but in this moment Greg breaks it down step by step. Greg explains how he wanted his team to be known for ‘Empathy, Curiosity, and Courage’, guided by the philosophy of seeing what others could see, but finding what they couldn’t. Listen to the full episode here - https://g2ul0.app.link/sxP6K2iUJtb Greg: hhttps://www.instagram.com/ghoff70/ https://mobile.twitter.com/g_hoffm Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. I'm really compelled by, and I talk to my team a lot about this, about this, and you've mentioned it twice now, the importance of details. From your 30 years at Nike, how did you make sure teams cared about the detail? Is it just continually reminding them? Is there something else we can do to make sure that our teams

and the people we work with, and ourselves even, are really valuing the smallest of details. Yeah, I do believe in publishing, whether it's, you want to call it an ethos, a manifesto, a set of principles where you clearly articulate what your design standards are or your creative standards.

I've always believed that. And they can change over time. But I'm a big believer in publishing thought, publishing ideals that you have. And I'll go even further because what I learned over the years is I was doing a little bit too much self-authorship. When I really started to manage teams, I'd go away and I'd come back and it's like, here's the six principles of, you know, obsessing the details that we're going to focus on this year. But I didn't involve them in authoring those. So it's like, publish what you believe, invite folks into the process that have maybe slightly different opinions than you do, and then complete this, build the consensus, and then make sure everyone has it so that clearly as you drive down the road and you're looking at restaurant architecture, you know, business building architecture, it's pretty clear that people just decided like it was good enough and no one will ever, you know,

who cares if it's going to win. The point isn't to win awards. The point is to take something as far as you can to contribute something great to, you know, to society, whether it is a building or a book or this bottle design, you know, the amount of thought that went into that, I think that's the typeface Helvetica, I believe, and the choices made to go upper and lower case, like that's all intentional, you know, to have it black on white. The name Human Fuel? Yeah. Well, and that's the thing. I mean, you have to start with naming, right? And one of the hardest pursuits is naming a product or naming a company because it's such a crowded space but man if you get the name right it will save you millions in marketing so if i was to ask you now and i used to say right

i have a team of a hundred thousand people and i want them to be great marketeers but we're only allowed to give them three guiding principles which they will take with them these can just be philosophies ideas whatever but we can only give them three guiding principles to hope to make them successful. What would those top three guiding principles be? I'll start with the three characteristics that I would say. It's like, we're going to have the dominant traits of empathy, curiosity,

and let's call it courage or risk-taking. Like those three traits is what we're going to be known for. And for empathy, you know, to me within the marketing process is, you know, the principle that I talk about in the book is, you know, see what others see, find what others don't. The best marketing teams and the best communication teams are able to peel back the layers, get under the surface of a human being, a city, or a community, and find the deeper insider truth that resides there. And then they reveal it through storytelling. It's back to the Michael Jordan example. How many, how many more ads could you do about him dunking a basketball? So empathy is like, go deeper, whether you're designing a product, it's like, you know, you're, you're, you're revealing the,

the, the true problem that needs to be solved. You're not just observing some behavior and making, you know, a, you know, hypothesis off that. You're actually spending the time to go deeper and deeper into that. And that's that idea of see what others see, find what others don't. Curiosity is that idea of getting outside yourself because it's one thing to have the insight, right? And the problem that you're going to solve and you're clear on that, but now you need to reveal it to the world. And oftentimes you need points of inspiration coming into the process. And that's why you look at Nike Air, probably the greatest innovation in the history of sneakers, right? Air bags and air cushioning and sneakers. Well, that came from an engineer at NASA who was experimenting with creating an innovation for astronaut helmets for space exploration.

And he brought that to Nike and that led to Nike Air. That's my point about find inspiration outside of your sector. And that's that idea of bringing the outside in. So that's the curiosity thing, outside, get outside yourself. And then, you know, finally is that idea of, you know, we don't play it safe. We play to win. We're not comfortable with the status quo. And we want people comfortable kind of pursuing what's next, not just getting complacent and delivering products, services, stories in the way everyone else is. So we also want to be a team that is obsessive about every aspect of branding. And so think of how powerful that can become is if you have a team

and that they're deeply empathetic to who they serve, like they get great at learning and asking questions. They're unbelievably curious and always looking beyond what's in front of them to see what else they can. Because so much of innovation is about transference. You take something from here, you bring it into your sector and you change the game. And then the risk-taking thing is not feeling like you have a team that has to ask for permission to use their imagination.

I think that's really important because if you develop a culture where people have to ask to think, people have to get approval, then I don't believe you would be known as a leading innovator in your space on that. So those are just a few, but I just think it's also, I'll tell you this, when I was CMO, I did an informal poll with the marketing leaders. And I'm biased, of course, but I felt and I believe this is the best marketing team in the world. I said, what are the top two characteristics you look for in any marketer that you're interviewing for a particular job within the Nike marketing team. And the top two traits that came to the top from everybody was curiosity and collaborative.

I mean, to a person. And it was kind of tied. I want someone who's always searching for inspiration and is curious about their teammates, about the consumer, about technology, entertainment, art. And then I want someone who can play with others, right? And that you can feel that sense that this person has conviction, believes in themselves, but can play within a team. And those were the two that rose to the top. And I think that's true today.