Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Morning, Dylan. How are you?
[00:00:02] Speaker B: I'm all right, Chris, how are you?
[00:00:04] Speaker A: Yeah, really good, thank you. Thanks ever so much for, for joining me today, Sam. It's really good to see you.
[00:00:12] Speaker B: Good to see you too, Chris, and looking forward to today.
[00:00:15] Speaker A: Good stuff.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: So.
[00:00:17] Speaker A: So look, let's jump straight into it, Dylan. You know, I'm, I'm really excited today to be joined by Dylan Lees Jones, European recruitment marketing manager at Wipro.
So, on this episode of Employer Bland, we're going to be talking about a topic hopefully, you know, quite a number of people are interested in and may have been having in their own, you know, kind of, you know, group forums across recruitment, marketing and employer brand. But we're going to be talking about rethinking leadership buy in.
But before we go into that, Dylan, my introduction definitely did you no justice whatsoever. So it'd be really nice if you could.
Yeah, for anybody that doesn't know you, and I know lots of people listening will, but for anybody that doesn't, can you give us a bit of an insight to who you are, your job, role and, yeah, just anything that you'd like to share about yourself?
[00:01:11] Speaker B: Sure, no problem. Okay. Well, as you said, my name is Dylan Dilles Jones. I'm the European recruitment marketing manager for Wipro. Coming up to four years working for Wipro, and I've really enjoyed it.
Prior to that, I studied marketing at university. It wasn't just a fluke that I ended up in marketing. It was something that I always wanted to do. I was fortunate to know that I wanted to study it and then went on to develop a career in it. But we'll talk today a little bit about my background in terms of consumer marketing and B2B marketing. And that's where I cut my teeth, like we all did. And we'll talk about the concept of employer brand, which is still quite relatively new. So I've been out there since about 1997, showing my age. Now I've worked in employer branding, recruitment marketing, call it what you want, for about eight years now. Thoroughly enjoy it and, you know, love doing these podcasts, webinars, if you like, where we can all talk about employer branding and how we can move the shift, if you like, towards employer branding becoming something more of a strategic function within marketing teams.
[00:02:17] Speaker A: Absolutely. And that beautifully kind of segues into the, you know, into the main topic. So, as I mentioned a few minutes ago, Dylan, we're going to be talking about rethinking leadership buy in. So, you know, if we first look at, you know, why board level leadership can often still see employer brand as a nice to have.
And this, you know, that isn't a sweeping statement. Obviously there are some, you know, boardrooms that take it incredibly seriously. There are some on the complete opposite end of that spectrum and there's many in the middle.
It of course, kind of varies from org to org. But you know, if we can look at how to kind of reposition employer brand as a performance lever. So for you, Dylan, you know, I suppose in my mind, you know, marketing teams, traditional corporate marketing teams, rarely have to fight for budget in the way employer brand does. You know, so from where you sit and your just general observations, you know, not necessarily where you work currently, it could be where you work currently, but also general observations of the market that we're sitting.
Do you think that that gap still exists and what's actually worked in shifting the conversation there?
[00:03:31] Speaker B: I think you make a really good point. I think it depends on the employer that you work for. I think for some smaller businesses, they're a bit more agile, so that's maybe that's their area of expertise. So they work with businesses who really want invest in employer branding.
But at the same time for larger organizations, they are so challenged by multiple things that they have to invest in. And I think to start answering this question, I have a lot of empathy with a lot of businesses because there's been such a shift in the past four or five years, maybe a bit longer than that.
So to answer this question, we look at Covid. Covid was a massive thing for a lot of businesses. You're trying to demonstrate growth, you're trying to demonstrate profitability. And Covid comes along and then we have the great resignation.
The growth didn't come about. We've obviously had to deal with geopolitical situations in the Ukraine and now more recently we have the challenges in Iran. And then there's this whole matter of AI investment. So I think to answer the first part of your question, I've had a lot of empathy for a lot of businesses recently because they're under pressure and here we are as employer branders saying we've got to invest in this. You know, we're trying to win that war on talent. It's becoming a strategic battleground now. It's not something that we can treat as a nice to have. But the thing is they're under pressure to demonstrate growth, profitability to their shareholders. And the thing is we have to stay relevant. And if we're not investing in things like AI, your business almost goes bust. Overnight, especially if you're that type of business that is expected to invest in it. So I think to answer the first part of the question, I have a lot of empathy for a lot of businesses, big and small.
To answer the second part of your question, I think when I studied marketing, I touched on it earlier, I studied marketing and I always knew that I wanted to be a marketeer. And the one thing that I learned in that was marketing goes back a long, long way in some cases. You can see the first example of marketing maybe three or 400 years ago. Okay, it wasn't as widespread as it is now. But the thing is, when you do look at marketing, some of the most successful brands, like the likes of the Coca Cola's of this world, you know, that is a brand that's well over 100 years old. And the thing is just grown up with knowing those sorts of brands have always invested in their marketing. And the same for B2B. Not just consumer, but B2B as well. But when you overlay employer branding on that, employer branding is a very, very new concept.
And I remember my first ever role that I saw was back in, when was it? 2012. I saw a job for a recruitment marketeer and employer. Brandon. I thought, what's that? And yeah, we all grow up, don't we? Hearing of consumer marketing, corporate marketing, B2B. But we'd never heard of, I've never heard of employer marketing for wanting better term.
So I think going back to the original point, it's a very new concept with the challenges that we faced to try and demonstrate to a business that perhaps hasn't necessarily invested in it, saying, look, this is what we want to achieve, this is what we believe it can do. And asking for substantial amounts of investment is probably never going to work. So for me, those are the challenges that we faced in terms of the current situation or perhaps the last few years. And then also I think as a concept, Chris, you know, employer branding, recruitment marketing is still something relatively new, particularly to some larger businesses as well.
[00:07:12] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a really good point, Dylan. I think the other thing that we're working with an employer brand are a lot of kind of aspects that aren't so tangible, you know, certainly not as tangible as a lot of the metrics that corporate marketing can work with. So when we look at things like, you know, candidate experience as a, as a, as a prime, prime metric, it's quite difficult, isn't it, to measure all aspects of candidate experience. Because candidate experience, it starts way over here, finishes way over Here then it kind of transitions into employee experience. Still very much kind of owned by employer brand in my opinion as well.
But so many different touch points.
There's an awful lot going on in that spectrum.
Not all of it is, is so tangible. When I look at traditional marketing, there can be budget spent on a campaign, there can be kind of sales generated, often instant gratification, two or three points that need to be connected.
You can very quickly see, oh, we spent 400 grand on that marketing campaign. It's generated £1.5 million worth of sales. Marketing works. Marketing is great.
In employer brand, you can spend the same amount of money, it can be incredibly successful. But sometimes really difficult to pin the tail on the donkey. Isn't it that? Did you really bad analogy by the way. I'm not going to use that donkey.
Get the analogy. Yeah, but what are your thoughts about that? Like, you know, traditional marketing has got the benefit of it often just needs to get, you know, marketing spend versus sales. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's quite a quick and easy kind of thing to an apples to apples to compare, isn't it? Do you think we come up against that as a bit of a battle?
[00:09:09] Speaker B: I, I think we do. But you make another really, really valid point. And the point that I was going to touch on was, you know, ever since I started cutting my teeth in marketing agencies, running around getting people to sign things off and getting designs, you know, you're following that process. So I learned that from a very early age about the attention to detail. And one of the things that I did notice is some of the most successful companies and brands I work for is before we did anything, we knew that outcomes and delivery was crucial. But what they did is that they scoped everything from cradle to grave. Okay. So the whole point was they knew what we could measure, what we couldn't measure. So we always said, used to say to ourselves, how do we know that this campaign or this initiative will be a success?
And unfortunately we are just inundated with so much data now and so many platforms. But we don't do that initial work at the start to say what are we going to measure and how we going to measure it and how we gain some resource and implement it. So when we go live and can deliver it, which most organizations can do, I want to be able to go back to my senior managers to say this is what we achieved and here is the data. And the one lesson I learned on sometimes we're under pressure to deliver on a given point. But I think if you can build those relationships with very senior people to say, look, I'm happy to do that, but it's going to take time for me to be able to demonstrate to you what success looks like. But if you can give me more time, I want to be able to give you that data in real time on day one, where I can measure everything from that employee experience all the way to, you know, why that person got hired, et cetera. So, so for me, as you say, there are so many metrics, but I think sometimes we don't know what those metrics are. We end up just delivering something without actually realizing what is it that we're trying to track and measure. And how can we demonstrate, how can we demonstrate to senior managers that this has been a success for this reason? So it's all about that preparation at the start, I say, such a good point.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: I think one of the frustrations that I've got on this delivering ROI topic generally, Dylan, is that I think so much great work gets done in our industry and we know so much impact is being made, but there seems to be a breakdown in, in, in, in systems and, and communication between systems. And what I mean by that is you see so much great working work happening around. Awareness, attraction, engagement. The right people are coming into the funnel, the right people are being screened, moved into, interview, final stage, offer on board.
That's kind of obviously that, that, that part that I've just kind of outlined there is extremely fundamental part of the process in talent, attraction and employer brand.
But for me, employer brand, like the true value of it is then understanding, like what the next 6, 12, 18, 24, 3, 5 years beyond in an organization. So if a high performer is onboarded, there seems to be a real breakdown of like internal systems communication of actually understanding, okay, so that person that's now been in the organization for 2, 3, 4, 5 years, extremely high performer, maybe in sales, but maybe it's in marketing ops, you know, payroll, whatever it might be, but then starting to connect the dots to figure out, okay, so how, how did these high performers hear about us in the first place and what you know, and obviously that's quite a long journey sometimes. We're now talking about stretching a journey from two or three months to two or three years.
But I can't help but feel the true value and employer brand will really start coming through where these systems can talk to each other and we can retrospectively look in the rear view mirror and, and have all this data to figure out where did these super high performers come from, how did we get them and how can we do more of that moving forward?
Do you agree that there's a little bit of a breakdown in that?
[00:13:26] Speaker B: I think, I think, I think that I. I think, I think there is. I mean, I haven't come across it. I'll be perfectly upfront. I think you make a really valid point and I think if we went back a few years ago, I'll tell you a bit of a story. So when I grew up, I used to meet people, family, friends, friends of my parents and my parents. We had jobs for life. You just had one job or two jobs. You were in that job. Whereas now, Chris, we know that, you know, we talk about Generation Said and all of that and, and companies and as you touched on employer branding. Perception is so important now and again. It goes back to the point, if we're not scoping, who is it that we're trying to be? What is it? How we're trying to change perceptions? What is it these target markets, these Personas want to hear about? And once they hear what we're doing is interesting, it shouldn't just be part of that awareness and that attraction, it should be the journey that you're on. And obviously we have so many challenges in attrition.
People might come into a role. It's nothing like what that awareness and that perception was that was created in that initial stage. And this is why people move on after six months. Because we're not, you know, organizations have not scoped. It goes back to that point. We're not scoping it.
I mean, we haven't really touched on it. But to me, the most successful organizations that I've worked with or even just partnered with is it all comes down to collaboration. I know that sounds all a bit wishy washy, but it is true, because you're not just doing it yourself, you're just part of that environment that you've got to be working with hr, you've got to be working with senior leaderships, you've got to be working with ta, you've got to be working closely with your team. Because if you're not aligned, how can you expect that experience and that seamless journey that you've tried to create works if nobody knows what's going on? Yeah, for me, I've sat in those meetings where they're so structured in weekly, monthly, quarterly reviews to say, we're recruiting a lot of good people, spend a lot of money, but we're losing a lot of people. And it's not because the market is a great market for people to leave, to go and earn more money. We know that we're a good business, but why are we losing people? And it's because we haven't thought about that bigger picture about training, development, new opportunities.
So, so for me, that, that's, that's how.
Those are my views on that point.
[00:16:00] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a really good point because I think, I think so much attention around employer brand can be on immediate hiring and immediate attraction and pulling people into an organization. But like you say, employee experience and actually living the values and the culture that was presented to them in the first place. It's, it's so often overlooked and such an.
And I wanted to touch on a, on another point. So like on the topic of speaking the language of the board. So translating brand engagement and storytelling into commercial metrics. Yeah. You know, when you're in the room, for example, with senior leadership or have, you know, current roles, previous roles, whatever, doesn't really matter. But, you know, what's the, what's the one thing most EV practitioners get wrong about how they present their work? You know, how do you translate what we do into numbers the board actually kind of cares about?
[00:17:02] Speaker B: That's a good question. It's a tough question to answer. I think you could ask any person in EB or what is it?
I mean, I would probably touch on quality of candidates.
And when we talk about quality of candidates, we're not just talking about somebody who's an expert within a certain skill.
For me, we're not just looking at hard skills, we're looking at soft skills. We're looking at people who buy into our values. So it goes without saying you're looking for a DevOps manager.
They're going to be good ones. They're going to be perhaps those very good ones that don't align with our values. So even though they're very good, we don't want to attract that person because they don't buy into who we are. So for me, I would say in a short answer, quality of candidates. You could have all the traffic in the world coming to your social media, your email marketing, your career site. But when we look at these people and map them with the Personas, the archetypes of what we're looking for, that for me is quality and we see it all the time. I've worked in previous jobs where we spend so much money on things like investment in job site, job boards, investment in career sites, but we don't quite nail who is it that we're looking for because it goes back to the earlier points that we're talking about. I need bums on seats. It's a numbers game. Well, it isn't a numbers game if your attrition rate is 75%. Do you see what I mean?
But they're not right for us. But we have clients to please. We have to get people in. But sometimes it's too short term. And this is why I've always felt employer branding is very much a long term thing. We are set in our values and I think talking about wipro, they have some incredible values and expectations of the behaviors and that's why I've been at wipro for so long and I buy into that. So I'd like to think I'm a good fan rep ambassador.
[00:18:59] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:19:00] Speaker B: But I think sometimes, you know, perhaps we've brought in people that haven't been that right fit and maybe that's where we failed. You know, maybe I failed in the employer branding perception. But sometimes, again, going back to the point of empathy, I do feel sorry for businesses where we're under so much pressure to get good people in. We think they're good, but perhaps we rushed it. And this is why I think the most successful employer brands out there really nailed it both in terms of the hard skills and the soft skills.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: And I definitely agree with you. I think quality of hire, although can be very difficult to kind of measure, has to be, you know, the primary, the primary metric.
Michael Blakely actually put out a post, I think it was today on LinkedIn really, and he always put such kind of thought provoking content out, which I really enjoy today's post. It was, it was basically a poll on, you know, which of these four metrics are most important to you in recruitment. Employer, brand, ta, quality, hire, cost of hire, time to hire, something else.
I immediately went to the quality of hire and then I saw some really thought provoking, like comments coming through from Adam Gordon, lots of other people and rightly so, saying it kind of depends industry to industry, circumstance to circumstance. It may, you know, maybe you only need like a two week, you know, slot to be filled for, you know, a bunch of, you know, people to fill an immediate need and the cost of hire is for that one particular scenario is your primary driver, which I totally appreciate and understand. But I'm with you. Quality of hire for me has to be so high up the agenda because, because if quality of hire compromised all of those other things come crashing down anyway, don't they?
Because then you've got the attrition then you've got the, you know, you've got the, you know, the, the constant cycle of attrition and you have to go through every one of those stages once again. So, so when we're talking about quality part, when we're talking about just success, analytics, metrics, generally, what's important to you? What's, you know, when we, we just talk about data, employer brand analytics, you know, what, and that particular topic, what's, what are the things that spring to mind for you?
[00:21:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, you know, I mean I, I cut my teeth working in direct marketing which is very, you know, data focused and at the time it was very difficult for us to be able to measure things because we didn't have tools like we have now, Google Analytics, Adobe Suite, all of that thing.
I think every single metric out there is so important.
You know, I don't, obviously there will always be those metrics that we, that we say that's the most important. So I used to work in hospitality marketing, so I'd be able to say, wow, we spent a thousand pounds on that, but we've generated £495,000 in sales. You could say, well that was a really important metric. But for me, I learned a very valuable lesson a few years ago and this team, I was there on a contract and they mentioned the halo effect and it was such an interesting insight that they talked about.
We've got all these different marketing things going on and we're able to measure some of them. But what we used to do is that we used to switch one metric off or one channel off. So for instance, radio people say, well, why are we spending so much money on radio? Well, we believe it helps builds awareness. It keeps us out there in a very competitive market. We can measure it because we have specific telephone numbers for specific days of the week, etc. And what we did, we turned the radio off for one month.
The business says sales have dropped by 28%.
And we said, yeah, because we've turned off radio because you said that you didn't believe radio was right.
And what we did, we switched radio back on and down weighted our press and TV advertising.
We then saw sales drop off E commerce sales because it was driving traffic to websites.
We saw a 47% drop.
So when people say to us it's all about these measurable sources, we don't need to invest in tv, radio and press.
Yeah, you can't make those assumptions out there if you don't know what they're actually doing in terms of the Bigger picture.
So what we did, for me, testing has always been a big part of my career, Chris. Yeah, it would always say keep testing, keep learning, keep understanding. What is it that is helping you to go to the board to say, right, I would like to put this plan in place for next quarter because these channels, these creatives, this messaging, this approach, targeting these people, all the things that we have to consider as part of it are working. It's taken us 10 years to get here because again, another thing that we haven't really spoken about today, Chris, because I'm doing, I'm doing my senior leadership apprenticeship course at Henley and. Amazing. I have, I haven't studied strategy for some time, but it's all coming back to me when I did my professional qualifications that, that, yeah, we, you know, we have kind of lost my thought by mentioning Henley Business School. But you know that the apprenticeship has just taught me so much about how we have to just look at everything in a strategic lens because if we're not looking at these things properly, things can just drop off completely. So this has helped me really remind me that I have to find ways of getting the board to buy into decisions that we're trying to make to take the business forward. That was the point I was going to mention.
The one thing that Henley has reminded me of is some of the challenges that we're faced with now. These aren't short term problems, these are three to five year problems. So they are not going to be solved. But for me, what I've always tried to do in my career is if I can show them what good looks like in one particular period, then they start trusting me more and before I know it, we've done six months worth of work and the results are so impressive. We do another six months and then within the next two to three years we've solved that strategic problem because we talk time over it. So that was, I was going to just try and make there.
[00:25:33] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's, it's a really, really good point. I can imagine. I know you probably digress on the topic a bit, but I can imagine that kind of course and that kind of, you know, you just being in that environment, you know, with, with the, with the apprenticeship, that must, that must put such a really lovely lens across the work that you're doing at the moment, strategically anyway. Like, look at, did you tend to now look at the work you do, like a bigger picture kind of business outcomes perspective, 100%.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: I mean, again, if I can provide Wipro with more value to the role that I currently do. That's a good thing. But it's teaching me new things about how I can improve myself, better myself. Because let's face it, if we're doing training and development, we're only becoming better people for it. But at the same time, there's also that gut feel. We can't say that everything that we learned in a classroom is absolutely bang on because I would always agree with any senior leader. Dylan, this is great, but I just need you to deliver something.
[00:26:31] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:26:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And I totally get that we need to get sales in or we just need to find these candidates now, yesterday. So there's always that way of you can switch your strategic mindset on, but there comes a point is. It's great, Dylan, thanks very much, but I just need you to deliver. So there's that side of this as well?
[00:26:49] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. And there's one. You know, before I go into kind of the next topic I wanted to cover with you.
You know, do you think employer brand functions are, you know, the candidates that are moving, you know, most of the way through a hiring funnel, you know, let's say they're onboarded.
Do you think employer brand functions generally have enough time with those people in the.
In literally weeks, kind of, you know, 1 to 8, let's say, first couple of months of joining a business where they're just downloading some information from those people about the experience? You know, what did you like, what didn't you like? What content do you remember kind of, you know, where you found us? Do you remember, was there any content that really struck a chord with you?
And do you think that process is done much? You know, just observationally, whether it's in Wipro, whether it's, you know, beyond, and you know, observationally of the market generally, do you think that that's a valuable exercise or, you know, what were your just thoughts of that kind of feedback?
[00:27:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it is valuable. Again, have I seen anything like that?
I probably haven't, but it's so important because I learned something quite a few years ago which I'd never heard before. You might disagree with this, Chris, but somebody said to me when somebody takes on a new job that good candidates are still looking even three months into that new job. And that really shocked me. Really shocked me because they're thinking, is this job the job that was sold to me?
And when you hear somebody is left within their probationary period, that's a sign that is telling you, this is not what this person. Now, for all we know that the candidate Just perhaps wasn't good enough. So it's not all about the employer, just. But at the same time, I think it's a massive exercise because again, it all comes back to data. If you're looking at your data and you're seeing that you're in, let's use a number of, make it up a thousand people within a year.
Why is it that 400 of those people are leaving within the first three months and you're backfilling them and they're leaving. There is something clearly wrong in that experience. Suddenly they thought, right, I'm working too many hours, I don't have a great relationship with my boss who I thought was a good person or this job isn't for me. But at the same time, think about those 600 people who have remained and maybe we want to look at those, that those 600. Five years on, we still got 400 of them. So still, if you get this is going back to the lifetime value, sometimes we have to accept that you might bring in a thousand people in the next five years, you'll lose 600 of them, but you still retain the 4, 400. And in many ways, Chris, it's those 400 that you've always needed because they're your biggest fans. It's when everyone leaves where you don't have anyone who's been in that business, five, 10 years later, everyone's left. And the thing is, when that happens, you're losing so much knowledge and experience.
And I think I've joined quite a few meetings recently where they're talking about the multi generational impact that you've now got. People who are having to work because they don't have enough money to retire on. But you've still got these people coming through now where you've got, I think, forgive me, I think it's maybe four generations for the first ever time that are now having to work and collaborate and a lot of good businesses and Wipro is one of them that has put so much emphasis into how can our older, more experienced workers learn from new people, but how can we empower the young people? People coming through? Yeah, these are the sorts of things that has helped me start this business. So it's a really interesting time to be part of a large organization because Wipro invests so much in its culture on top of its marketing as well. So again, it's, it's a challenge. I've yet to come across a great case study, but we just have to look at some of the biggest brands out there in the world. So they must be doing something very well.
[00:30:56] Speaker A: Well, yeah, very, very true.
So the kind of final topic I wanted to touch on with you, Dylan, is, you know, if we move beyond vanity metrics, so the data, behavioral signals that leadership actually values, you know, if you could take one metric away from every employer brand, teams like reporting pack tomorrow, what would it be and what should replace it?
[00:31:25] Speaker B: That's a, that's a very, very tough question to answer.
I think I touched on it a bit earlier, Chris. I think every metric has its weight in gold. And I think until you've tested it and you've proved that that metric we don't actually need, and you can prove why that metric is of very little importance, then I would always say the great thing about data is we have to be looking at our data profiling and segmenting that data as much as we can. And I think before we can make decisions about removing certain benchmark data, for want of a better term, I would probably not advise on that. And I say that simply because there was a point in my career where data was a huge thing for me. And we now know that with so many, so much data out there, it's, it's almost so difficult to know what data to collect and what data not to collect.
[00:32:21] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:32:22] Speaker B: I don't know if I've answered that question properly, but for me, I think if you are on top of your data and you know your data inside out, then you can probably start dispensing with some of those metrics that perhaps aren't leading to the, the bigger ticket items.
Whereas I think that data that is so fundamental to everything we've talked about. Attrition. Yeah.
Okay. You would never want to get rid of attrition data and maybe start looking at lifetime value data or replacing it with lifetime value. So that might be one area, I don't think. But for me, I would say that if one thing that we haven't spoken about, that we've spoken about previously is again, a few years ago I came across a wonderful case study that was a video and it was by a company called Gatorade. And if anyone who's watching this podcast Today, go onto YouTube, type in mission Control Gatorade. And this is an example of where a brand does not ignore any data point.
Every single data point is important, whether it's an impression, a click, user generated content. And what they've highlighted is, is that we have to be on top of our brand because we compete with the likes of Coca Cola, Pepsi, I believe Gatorade is maybe possibly owned by Coca Cola now, but that's not the point. They are a huge brand in the States, not necessarily here in Europe.
Yeah.
They have a team of over 60 people and their one job is to look at data. And that's all it is. And you think to yourself, how can a consumer brand be employed employing 60 people, along with all that software and technology that is helping to inform that business, that by talking to our Gatorade fans on social media is more important than speaking to our database on social media or that our WhatsApp cohort are more important than our Facebook.
So to answer your question again, Chris, for me to make a decision to switch off data, whether that's impressions on Facebook and favor that over metrics that I might see on WhatsApp, these are huge decisions that I don't think you can take too lightly. But I would, I would say now check out Gatorade Mission Control. It's quite old, but if that's how an organization is looking at data.
[00:34:48] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:34:48] Speaker B: From 10, 15 years ago. That gives you an idea of how some brands still see, see every single data point is just massively important for their overall brand performance.
[00:34:57] Speaker A: Yeah, I love that. I love a case study too. So I'm going to check that out after this chat. You did touch on something really interesting there as well, Dylan. Well, many things, but one thing really stuck out for me and it was the lifetime value comment that you made. Can you expand on that a little bit? Kind of just what your lifetime value kind of thinking is?
[00:35:15] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, sure. So again, I keep mentioning that back in my youth.
So for those people who are watching this podcast, they might have heard of a brand called Goldfish. We had something called the Goldfish credit card. And at the time, credit cards were just everywhere. Everyone was, was happy to take out a credit card. And we were working on the direct marketing of this.
And even though this was quite some time ago, the importance on data was so important to this brand. Not because of the volumes, it was all about transactions. So getting customers to take out a credit card and to start using it. And it was where I, it was very early on in my career where I started learning all about lifetime value. And a big part of our reporting was we'd have certain customers coming in and taking out a specific credit card based on their.
Based on their credit score. So we could just give credit cards to anyone. And the emphasis around this was trying to understand the lifetime value of this customer. So for our sake, we'll take a customer. We'll call this customer Bob. Bob has come in and bought a credit card off the back of a TV ad. It could be an insert, it could be a magazine, it doesn't really matter. But we know that this person, Bob, is in a particular segment.
And Bob and his cohort all cost us £700 to acquire him as a Goldfish customer, which is quite a lot of money. So we already know that we now need to sell him as much as possible to recoup that £700. But we need to keep him as a Goldfish customer. And part of our data was every week, every month, all the way through, we had to start thinking, right, we've spent 700 on him, but this year we've made £14,000 in transactions from him. So the way it works is Goldfish get a. Get a transaction commission off everyone. So it's paying for the campaigns. But we need people like Bob to constantly activate his credit card or almost make his credit card become his debit card.
[00:37:30] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:37:31] Speaker B: What we found is we had to target these people more regularly, and we knew that sometimes they were very passionate about the brand and they would use their card regularly. But it taught me the lesson of lifetime value. Once you've acquired a customer, don't forget your best customers. It's that whole loyalty thing, isn't it? I'm sure many people on this have worked on loyalty campaigns and you kind of think to yourself, how can we be interested in loyalty for a credit card? It's a piece of plastic. It's not something that's really tangible.
But it was the one thing that I learned very early on, because financial services are huge users of direct marketing at the time, and loyalty was massive because you had so many other credit cards out there offering 0% APR.
And we were all very comfortable at that time to live a life of debt and spend huge amounts of money on debt that, that we couldn't pay back. But that's not the point. The point is, very early on in my career, I learned that by nurturing these people, we could keep these people on track.
Obviously, we have a responsibility to these people not to get them into terrible amounts of debt, but it was all about trying to help them use this credit card where they would get cash back and points. They enjoyed the experience.
But for us, our key outcome was how profitable was this customer over a certain time. And once we knew that, we took those insights to say, right, these types of people, this particular age group, this particular socioeconomic grouping, are reading the Times newspaper, and that's where we need to focus. And before we knew it, Chris, we were then targeting similar people and we got these people in at 250, not 700 pounds. And then we knew the things that didn't work and the things that did. And before we knew it, that lifetime value of these new cohorts just went through the roof. So for me, lifetime value, and it's the same in employer branding if we can find the very best candidates out there, which is difficult, but we know that we have a lot of metrics where we can get them in from a job board or a career site, and we know that and we keep them going and we know that these people are billable within an organization. We could say it cost us £7,000 to bring you in, but you've been with us five years now and you have demonstrated the impact that you've had, not just on your team as a person, but also contributed massively to the bottom line of two very, very important accounts for us. And I think that's why, probably the next step for employer branding, because that is mainstay for consumer marketing and it'd be great one day to see an organization to be able to do that.
[00:40:14] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's such a great point that you've come. We've kind of finished on there because I've never seen an LTV case study within employer brand.
But like you say, like everything is there. It's just connecting all of those dots, isn't it? You know, so it's, it would be, it's quite a complex task and it, and it take, you know, it will take a period of time, you know, and lifetime value is called lifetime value for a reason, because it needs to be measured over a, over a long, a long period. But, but I think you're right. I think once the lifetime value problem begins to get solved, I think that's when senior C suite really start taking employer brand a lot more seriously because it's, it becomes very tangible and very easy to illustrate value, doesn't it?
[00:41:03] Speaker B: It will. And this is where I think AI is going to be that help for us. Yeah. How that's going to be done, I don't know. But for argument's sake, we know that organizations make huge redundancies because we have to manage that cost base. But why make somebody redundant when your lifetime value actually tells you that this person is not just a biller, but this person is an incredible ambassador and credit to your organization? It shouldn't just be based on cost. And I would also go as far as saying that there will always be those down times.
But remember, if you end up removing somebody from the business. Yeah. It costs seven times the value to replace somebody. Yeah. This is where we talk about loyalty, that it's seven times more expensive to acquire somebody rather than retain somebody. And people don't realize that. And that was again another thing that I learned. Retaining great people is a cost saving in the long term. But sometimes I think some of the short sightedness over there. Right. Remove them. Let's start, let's start recruiting in these areas. And yet you've had these people there all but you just made that decision. So it's a tough one. But all being well, AI will come and save the day and help help us produce a lifetime value for employer branding. Recruitment marketing.
[00:42:22] Speaker A: Absolutely.
Dylan, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. You know, thanks so much for joining me today and yes, sharing so much brilliant insight. So it feels as though we've covered an awful lot in about 40 minutes or so. So thanks so much.
[00:42:38] Speaker B: Hey look, pleasure. And thank you so much for inviting me and hopefully there were some good insights out there. I'll probably switch off after this and think why didn't I mention that? But it is what it is. But who knows? Hopefully we can have another chat sometime soon. Anyway, Chris, but thanks for inviting me onto your podcast today.
[00:42:54] Speaker A: Yeah, been really good seeing you and catch up pretty soon.
[00:42:58] Speaker B: Take care. Thanks, Chris.
[00:42:59] Speaker A: Dylan, bye.
