Kalev Peekna - Digital Marketing in the Current Environment
Phil Rowley connects with Kalev Peekna, managing director and chief strategist at One North Interactive, about One North and BRG’s collaboration to revamp the BRG website. They discuss the process, understanding the impact of COVID-19 on digital marketing, and best practices to help reach a target audience.
TRANSCRIPT
PR [00:05] [music] Welcome to Intelligence That Works. I'm Phil Rowley, the executive director and chief revenue officer of global consulting firm BRG.
Intelligence That Works is more than the name of this podcast. It's what makes BRG tick. We're questioners, challengers, even truth seekers, committed to uncovering the substance beneath the surface of the biggest issues and challenges facing business leaders today. We meet some innovative individuals along the way, and in each episode, I'll speak with one of them about change, leadership, and the possibilities that lie ahead. This podcast, like BRG itself, is about harnessing our collective expertise to deliver inspired insights and practical strategies that help organizations stay ahead of what's next.
Greetings everyone. In this episode, I'm excited to speak with Kalev Peekna, managing director and chief strategist at One North Interactive. Kalev played a pivotal leadership role on the One North team in the revamping of BRG's website. We'll speak to him about that process and, of course, the end result. I want to get a little feedback on how we did as a team. And of course, in today's time, we'll have to understand the impact of COVID.
Thanks, Kalev, for joining and also thanks so much to the One North team. The audience would really like to hear about your background and your role at One North.
KP [01:50] Thanks so much for having me, Phil. I'm also excited to be here. So my background is pretty varied. I realized that I have worked for more than thirty years. My first job, when I was fourteen, was working on development tools and setting those up for a mainframe software company. So I definitely have a technical background.
I've also worked as a designer, and I've worked on the business side, coming up within project management. I was one of the founding partners of One North in 2012. At the time, my task was to create and set up a UX design team, a user experience design team, and I did that for a number of years. And then a few years ago, I pivoted, handed off the UX design team to my first lieutenant, and created a new group, the digital strategy group, which is the one I run now. The digital strategy at One North really helps clients make the most out of their digital activities, their digital channels, and we do it for three dimensions. We look at the overall experience and set an experience strategy that tries to integrate marketing into the operations or into the actual work that people do with their customers or clients. We also take a look at the data that help us drive those digital experience, as well as the technology that underpins them all.
PR [03:06] We definitely benefited from that diversity in your background. And really looking at this from several different angles, beyond design: what's the business, what's the data. So that was a very important part of working with your team. As you lay out that process, what are the first things that you think about? Is it setting goals? Is it identifying stakeholders? Walk us through the process of taking on this type of a project.
KP [03:33] Those are excellent questions. I would say the very first thing we do is we look for certain prerequisites, meaning trying to assess whether somebody is actually ready to take a look at their digital strategy. And certain things are a lot easier if they're in place. The first is a strong brand platform. And by that, I mean so much more than just the logo, the color sets, the typography that will drive a visual look and feel. Those are important. As someone who's worked within marketing for a long time, I think they're important.
But when I talk about a brand platform from a strategic point of view, it's really understanding the core essence of your identity: having a really crisp statement of who you are as an organization and why you exist is really the simplest way to put it, and how you want to position yourself in the market, particularly, it needs to be—any competition. So organizations that have that in place really have a huge head start over those where that might need work or is weak or is, sometimes, actually just missing when they start looking at what to do with their digital. If you have something like that in place and you have a good go-to-market strategy that comes with it—I think the first sets of questions to digital strategy really start outside the organization itself. It's: Who are you really trying to target? Who, actually, are your users? Both the ones you have today and then, because it's strategy, the ones you want to have in the future.
And all good digital strategy engagements start with a certain amount of discovery, which is our term that covers sort of a research and assessment phase, and we want that research and assessment not to focus inside the company. We want it to focus outside. So we'll start taking—our first questions are, who can we talk to, whom do you want to connect with, what do you think you know about them right now—which sets the hypothesis that drive the research, and how can we either confirm that or expand upon that knowledge?
Some of the things you mentioned, like identifying internal stakeholders, those are certainly important and easy questions. They very much have to do with setting up a well-structured and well-run project, looking forward to structuring approvals, who's going to take a look at the output, who's going to actually make certain strategic decisions that come up. It's that research that almost always leads into a phase of ideation and prioritization that require decision makers' attention.
PR [05:52] Yeah. Kalev, well said. And where I thought One North was particularly effective was helping us really think about who [the users] were. Where in professional services, oftentimes, we are just projecting what we want to tell people. Do you find that that's common across professional services and compare and contrast to something that might be more of a consumer product?
KP [06:13] Yeah. It's pretty endemic to professional services, to be frank. I mean, it's a little blunt, but I think of the various industries that I work with, they're probably not just the most inward looking. In fact, a lot of industries suffer from being inward looking. I think insurance is like that. I think healthcare is like that. They like to look inside themselves. It's endemic to us as people. We all like talking about ourselves. [laughter]
PR [06:35] Yeah.
KP [06:36] So we all do it, and it's always a challenge to really step outside your own shoes. The one thing with professional services that is a pretty consistent obstacle to really being strategic is how peer-sensitive they are. So what I think marks professional services as different from other agencies is not only are they inward focusing, but they're really focused on what I like to call the folks next door, right? They're always looking at the people that they consider to be pure organizations and judging, "Should we do it? Well, let's go see if anybody else is doing it. How should we present ourselves?" They are constantly looking to their most direct competition, which, frankly, if you are a marketer coming from outside professional services, is somewhat shocking. I've seen people who've made that sort of career move, because it leads to a lot of copying, and that actually undermines differentiation, which is of course one of the core goals of marketing overall. So sometimes, people come in from marketing from the outside and are a little mystified as to why everybody is so strongly intent on copying their direct competition.
PR [07:41] No. Agreed. And we certainly struggled with that. And as you and I went through some of the materials, everybody's language, it all looked the same. So it was very helpful in this process to really think that way of what's that buyer experience, what's that user experience.
KP [07:57] Yeah. Well, I do have to give you at least one compliment. I mean, when we did set a competitive review set, the BRG team did choose some direct competitors, which is wise especially in an assessment phase, but also chose some adjacent and aspirational competitors, and I think that that's really helpful anytime you're going to do an exercise where you're going to ask like, "How are we doing vis a vis the marketplace?" And I think you guys did it the right way in that you've chosen people that are, perhaps, expected, but you also chose to throw in organizations of a much larger scale, configured in a much different way from BRG, but who offered really good examples about what was possible within digital and sort of set that aspirational mindset.
PR [08:41] Yes, absolutely. We were also at, really, an inflection point about really becoming more digitally savvy. And in emphasis, how have you dealt with other clients? Where are they on the maturity scale around digital, especially now with COVID? How are you addressing those types of issues?
KP [08:58] The first thing I'd like to tell people is nobody is as far along as they want to be. We're technically within B2B and professional services, and that's good for me. I'm not sure I'd have had much of a career if everybody [laughter] was really far along the maturity curve.
But jokes aside, what I think is interesting about professional services is that they are advanced in certain dimensions, and they're often shocked when they hear that, but they're pretty far behind in terms of taking advantage of the data that they already have. There are some technologies that really have been around long enough—it's not really fair to even call them emerging, such as using a lot of personalization, a lot of automation within the digital marketing experience. Those tool sets have been out and been used really even in a wide scale for about ten years. But the areas in which professional services are more advanced is often really having to do in and around content marketing.
PR [09:52] Yes.
KP [09:53] When you work with the firms outside professional services, even within broader B2B, they really struggle with the basics of content marketing, often just struggling with producing content. They never seem to have enough content. They really struggle with getting it and producing it within professional services.
Like BRG, you have tons of content. You're publishing content all the time. And that means your marketing team is actually a little bit more familiar with structuring and campaigning around a piece to all the different digital channels that can go and help with it, what it takes to promote a piece of content, how to capture leads that come out of it. So on that dimension, actually, a lot of professional services are pretty far down the maturity curve in terms of what's possible.
PR [10:33] Yeah, I think you're right there. We talk about that: The website is just the most obvious manifestation of your brand and your values. Also, your team talked about it. It has to be dynamic, almost a living type of organization. How do you do that? When you're advising clients, how do you keep it dynamic?
KP [10:51] That is a really core problem. We actually have a term for it at One North: We call it the “bimodal problem.” It basically comes down to most of our clients are either working on their website, or they're just not. And sometimes, years go by in the periods between when they're updating and taking care of their digital channels, their digital presence. And of course, what that leads to is, it starts getting old. It starts, sometimes, even technically, getting a little bit buggy.
And generally, organizations get so frustrated with it that they throw the whole thing out and create a completely new one, and they do this on a cycle of about five to seven years. And it's also not how products and projects in many other industries are handled. It's not how digital is handled by the companies that people say are the best at it.
So if you look at like an Apple, if you look at an Amazon, they never throw their website out, and they never completely redesign it. And the answer to a simple question—when was the last time Amazon did a redesign?—is really either never or always depending on your mindset. They're just always continually updating it, which is the mindset that they've adopted.
So we're working with BRG and a lot of other clients on how to shift into that mindset, and it basically does mean taking a few lessons from Agile. I don't often bring that fully up because it's not necessary actually to go through the entire methodology. But a few quick lessons, which is to start with something small and possible, to start with an MVP, to not try to solve everything at once, right? If you have a lot of goals—that most people when they approach their website with us, they'll have about three to five years’ worth of goals. And one of the first pieces of advice is to say, "Well, let's not try to do this all at once."
PR [12:34] Yes.
KP [12:34] “Let's try to do the core. And then let's create a road map that you can execute and also change over time to suit different market conditions," right? And that makes it a lot easier to get through to that initial project. It does require our clients and our customers to make commitments to continuous improvement, right, to take a little bit of inspiration from an Amazon or Apple and say, "Okay. Well, the key to this approach is once I'm done, I have to realize I'm not done. In fact, I have to realize I'm never done, right? The project never really fully ends. Once it's launched, I have to make sure that I can find the budget and the effort and time to do updates on a reasonable basis,” whether that's on a quarterly basis or whatever rhythm works for you.
PR [13:19] Our project was interesting in that we did have the benefit of pre-COVID, a lot of great working sessions in person with the One North team. We finished in COVID. How is your application and strategy and advice? How has it been impacted by COVID? Because, again, I felt we really benefited from that interaction with you all.
KP [13:41] The designers of all sorts—and I still consider myself a designer; there's a lot of designers on my team—we're very much used to in-person work. And even if you've never been part of a design-thinking workshop, you've seen all the Post-it Notes up on the board. Phil, you remember that.
PR [13:55] Yes. [laughter] Yes.
KP [13:55] There was a lot of Post-it Notes over the course of this project. Sometimes, I think 3M owes me a royalty back. And it required a different sort of way of thinking. In fact, we had to kick off a very similar project with a completely different client two days after Chicago went into full lockdown. So we had to pivot pretty hard and make sure that we could continue to collaborate.
I would say on the one hand, One North, I suppose, has always had a global client set, so we were used to talking to people over web conferences, over video, over audio. But where we really had to rethink things were those key moments of collaboration that you're bringing up, the moments when we got everybody into a room and said, "Okay, let's come up with some new ideas. Let's try to work through this. Let's try to make some decisions." We adopted some new tool sets and digital whiteboard tool sets and cloud-based tools that made things easier.
I think the big change that we had to realize is: gone are the days of being able to say, "Okay, give me one and a whole day of your time a month out, and we'll just punch through and get everything out in a day." That, I have to admit, just doesn't work anymore. And so instead, we're shifting. We're splitting that one day into, maybe, four or five ninety-minute sessions. We try to keep them in close progression, but we recognize it doesn't work. People are fatigued. Their kids are home, right? That's also part of this remote context. "Let's split this up into ninety minutes. Let's take this day, let's chunk it up, and just try to do it in quick successive chunks." And that's worked pretty well. So we've been able to keep things forward and, I think, do some really good, creative, collaborative work even while we're all still stuck at home.
PR [15:33] Yeah. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Kind of in closing, is there anything you would've advised us to have done differently? Are you pleased with the result? What are some lessons that I should have learned or our steering committee should have learned?
KP [15:46] My team, we're so pleased with the launch. One of the things that sometimes happens when we do—especially when we do design or creative work is that it takes time to launch, right? So by the time it launches, it may be six months old, right? And you get very used to it, and that wow factor goes away.
But for a number of us, when it launched and it came up, that wow factor was still there. So I think the visual design and just the sort of natively digital feeling of it that comes out from some of the micro-interactions that you can see, that sort of small animations that happen across the site as you use it, really give a feeling that it's very tightly built, that it's natively digital, that it's professional. It has polish. And I think that works really well.
And a big part of that was due to the fact that you guys had done some significant brand and go-to-market strategy work, structuring your services prior to starting this effort, and that made things so much easier. It's so much easier to do a really good design and to structure a good website when those pieces are in place.
PR [16:47] It was almost therapeutic that we went through that. We went through that exercise and realized we have much more in common than differences across the practices.
KP [16:55] Especially in the go-to-market work, you sell some really tough problems, because you have practitioners who derive value from being part of the same firm, but whose work looks and feels very different on the ground, right—
PR [17:06] Yes.
KP [17:07 ] —the sort of expert witness side, the more consulting side. These are colleagues that work well together. But the truth is their work is not very similar, and it can be hard to sort of come up with ways that make them feel and seem unified. So I think that that critical work you did at the beginning put you in a position to do that credibly.
One area which is, I would say, for BRG, that I wish we had examined more closely, is really about your values as an organization and using the website as a way to articulate how they come through in all of your work and how you actually live those values. And of course, I'm thinking about, with a lot of challenges that we hit, in particular, this year. I'm also just thinking about core values that you may have as an organization that are often part of that brand.
I think with our work at One North, we often let the client drive the level of interest and the degree to which that stuff comes out in the design, but often has to do with, I think, a sense of where their brand is at and their level of readiness to move those values into the core of the message. And we sort of take the temperature from them. At least, we have until this year.
I think what we're realizing as advisors in this space is that to a certain extent, it's our responsibility to push our clients a little harder on that. I think everyone is expecting organizations to articulate their values, whatever those are, and to demonstrate how did they live those values out in their works, not just what organizations are they donating to, what kinds of volunteer work do their employees do, but, really, how does it come out in their work. And that's one thing where—yeah, hindsight is 20/20; cliché, right?—I wish we had given more focus on.
The good news is we've already decided in this session that the website's not done, right?
PR [18:56] That's right. [laughter]
KP [18:56] And that it's never fully done. And I have to say, it is actually a great thing about digital. If you are old enough to have worked in marketing, where you're producing a lot of print materials, brochures, that sort of stuff, I mean, there can be a bit of a panic. Once that thing goes to press, it's done. And if you want to change it, suddenly, you're throwing out ten thousand brochures and spending a lot of money reprinting them—
PR [19:16] It's outdated in three months. Yeah.
KP [19:18] Yeah. The wonderful thing about digital, and what I often tell clients when they're close to launching getting nervous, it's like if you find a mistake—guess what?—you can just fix it.
PR [19:27] That's right.
KP [19:27] It's amazing. It's incredible.
PR [19:29] That's right.
KP [19:29] And if you decide you don't like it later, you can just change it. Welcome to digital. It's amazing.
PR [19:35] Well, Kalev, I really enjoyed this session. I enjoyed the process, but enjoyed this session and some great counsel on: focus on your brand and on your values. Understand that. Accept that it is a dynamic medium, digital. It can be changed and it can be corrected. And just having all the stakeholders involved and really working with them and the fact that you've kind of figured out a way to make that in person, in the conference room, with the Post-its, to do that remotely, I think, is really important for the process. So thank you so much.
KP [20:09] You're very welcome. Thank you.
PR [20:14] [music] This podcast is brought to you by BRG. You can find episodes wherever you get your podcast or on our website, thinkbrg.com. And please don't forget to give us a review on iTunes. I'm Phil Rowley. Thanks for listening.
The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the participants and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, position, or policy of BRG, its employees, or affiliates.