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JIM LECINSKI: So welcome Laurie.
It's a pleasure to have you with us this afternoon.
LAURIE TUCKER: Thanks.
It's great to be here.
JIM LECINSKI: So we'll get to this concept of Zero Moment of
Truth and we'll have a nice chat, I hope, about that in a
little bit.
But why don't you start out a little bit, if you would, by
just explaining to folks.
I think we're all familiar with the FedEx brand but you
guys are in a lot of different areas.
I learned last night that you're transporting cars and
all kinds of interesting things.
What business is FedEx services in?
LAURIE TUCKER: Well, FedEx is now maturing.
When you said that year, there were a lot of people that sort
of shook because they weren't born yet, but it's
interesting.
So you were really expecting somebody really, really old to
come up on stage.
And I also want to say, by the way, thanks to Christian for
putting Dolly Parton up there because now my accent doesn't
sound quite as bad.
She's really got the accent.
She's got the twang down.
But FedEx has changed a lot over the years.
I started when the company was five years old.
It was five years old.
It was a startup.
We didn't even know to call it a startup back then.
Fred, who is still amazing, if anybody's saw him on CNBC
today or he was streaming live from the GEE Ohio State
Conference on mid-market companies, I mean, the man is
still amazing as a leader, as an icon.
A very interesting question asked of him by CNBC today
about why is it that Apple and FedEx have remained two huge
icons of companies.
And he was very humble by saying, well, Steve hired
great people and that's what I do, too.
And I'm sitting there thinking, now as Steve Jobs
was unbelievable and you're unbelievable.
But he is an amazing man still at the helm of the company
after almost 40 years.
And so you could say, oh gosh, you must be stuck in old
paradigms. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Where FedEx is today is really being a
global provider of services.
Primarily about moving goods, but moving in all different
modes of transportation.
Really being able to--
starting at that top of the pyramid that we started at
many years ago where it was primarily overnight and it was
high value goods and it was a smaller segment of the market,
yet a market that had never been served.
And that ability to serve that market, create the market,
invent an industry, and now moving all the
way down the market.
So in doing so, being able to reach then, the globe, which
is why our company runs on technology.
Everything we do runs on technology.
A few weeks ago we came into a meeting with IT and they all
looked a little tired.
One of our older systems went down.
It had not gone down in 15 years.
They didn't know why it went down.
They were able to cold start it which was a miracle.
But the fact was, when it went down it took down the airline
so they were launching manually that night.
They did get it up before the launch was over and we were
able to pretty much recover with very few planes late.
But technology runs that company.
So we're now a truly global provider.
We're also, of course, into some other services and
capabilities through FedEx Office with our print
services, and so forth.
So we just continue to try to grow our capabilities of
serving our customers from largest to smallest, and
primarily B2B, but also consumers.
JIM LECINSKI: So when you talk about your customers, how do
you think about them?
Who are your customers?
Who are the decision makers that you're trying to reach in
your communications and marketing program?
LAURIE TUCKER: Well, that's changed a lot over the years
as well, Jim.
And we used to sort of look at customers in terms of how they
used FedEx.
And so if they were a very large customer, we built
services and capabilities around how to serve a very
large customer.
Whether that was in terms of automating them both
physically and from a technology and information
standpoint, if they were medium sized or small.
But now, we look at it on a much more granular basis.
Of course, we're looking at customers not just in terms of
how they ship or how they use us, but how
they run their business.
Their undiversification, their needs, whether their needs
are, we want to get in and get out quickly, whether customers
want to dwell, whether they want to have more active
engagement with our company.
So there's so many different ways to
segment customers today.
And I think what's important from a marketing standpoint,
is that we utilize all our channels and all of our
capabilities to therefore communicate to customers in
the way that they want to be communicated to and served.
JIM LECINSKI: Well, we'll come back and talk much more about
channels that you're using.
I guess I wanted to ask you, do you think about those
customers and the objectives or goals you want to achieve
with customers in a fairly typical B2B fashion?
Meaning, here's a group that we want to have join the FedEx
family-- customer acquisition versus customer attention
versus increased usage, cross sell and upsell, and win back.
LAURIE TUCKER: I wish it were really easy and I could just
say yeah, what he said.
But it's not that easy.
I mean, it clearly is not that easy.
I'll just give you an example.
On any typical day if you walked into a FedEx Office,
formally known as Kinkos, you walk into a FedEx office.
Let's say we walk into one that's down on
6th and it's packed.
You couldn't tell in the room if someone were a business
customer or a consumer at that moment because everybody is
dressed in jeans.
Or, maybe not but the guy in the suit is actually in there
getting something made for his kid's baseball team award
ceremony that weekend.
The person in jeans is in there getting print made for a
direct mail campaign that's going
out for a small business.
So it is totally, it's not obvious anymore as to how a
customer is interacting because it changes.
So today, I'm a consumer.
Tomorrow, I'm a business.
I'm a small business today.
Five years from now I'm a medium, and in
10 year I'm a large.
So we have to be able to move with where that customer wants
us to move, change the way we interact, and be able to know
the customer in a lot of greater detail.
It always gets back to information and capability and
obviously, being able to touch those
customers where they are.
Our partnership with Google over these last several years
has been amazing.
The things we've learned from you and of, course, I think
sometimes we've pushed you a little bit because we want to
say, you should be able to do this, Jim.
Can't you all do this?
You all think about it a little bit.
You come back and you say, I think this is how
we want to do it.
So what's so amazing is being able to get to our customers
where they are at the time of the need that they have and
being able to serve them at that time.
I'm not saying we're doing it perfectly, yet.
But that, I think, is if you had said it five years ago we
would have said, well, I don't even know what
you're talking about.
And today when I say it, you actually know
what I'm talking about.
You're just saying, can you really do it?
Can you really be there at the time the customer has a need.
JIM LECINSKI: So you mentioned the deep technology heritage
and deep technology backbone of the company.
Thinking about your comment that it's knowing the customer
and being able to serve the need, would it be fair for me
to connect those two comments and say therefore, there must
be a pretty sophisticated CRM system that helps you
understand where those customers are
at in the life cycle?
And what is the right message to reach them
at the right point?
LAURIE TUCKER: I'll say that from a marketing standpoint we
like to think that if we can do mass marketing and we know
our customer base on a general level, then we're going to do
a pretty good job of probably hitting some high percentage
of customers.
So we know, for instance, that some customers
know how to use FedEx.
They've done it for years.
Or gosh, FedEx has changed a lot.
I'd like to know more.
And so, we know how to reach customers and use the channels
and capabilities that we have today.
For instance, recently we put about 150 videos out there on
YouTube, on our YouTube channel, to help our customers
really say, how do you use FedEx?
I mean, there's commercials that are there for fun.
We've got some viral videos.
We've even got the making of some of our commercials which
are some of our most popular hits.
But if you want to know how to use FedEx, you want to know
how to ship internationally, you want to know how to fill
out a customs declaration, those are all on the web.
They're all now available.
They're very easy and they're accessible,
simple Google search.
But when it gets down to being able to, again, meet that
customer where they are and where their needs are, you do
have to have an extremely sophisticated CRM system.
That's not something that you just sort of dream about or go
buy off the shelf.
It really takes years of analytics and understanding
how to segment the customer.
It's also a learning system.
You have to have, usually, a data partner.
Unless you've got some big [? mamu ?]
computer systems and some unbelievable sophistication,
it's a lot easier to partner with data partners to be able
to help enhance your data, what you already know about
your customers.
But then, you start to understand how customers react
and respond to your offers or to your content, and you start
to grade them based on their engagement with you.
And then you, of course, start to look for look-alikes, and
then you begin to repeat.
Test, repeat, get success, and over time you really start to
get fairly sophisticated.
So I start to think about this-- and this is like a
secret among us marketing types--
is that marketing is really the new sales.
Our ability to actually emulate what sales people do
in terms of getting to know their client, beginning to
test the waters about what customers like, want, and
need, starting to file that away physically or in their
heads, bringing back more interesting content the next
time, building a relationship and then, ultimately popping
the question of will you use us?
And we can do that now.
We can do that on the web.
We can do that as a result of our ability to interact with
our customers on the internet where they are whether that's
through the FedEx front door or in other places where they
might be on the web.
JIM LECINSKI: So let's pursue that point
a little bit deeper.
In the opening video before we took the stage was some
discussion about this path to purchase that might normally
start with a mass media stimulus or, in the B2B space,
a direct mailer that might show up at my
small business door.
If that's the stimulus, the typical call to action or
response is call your rep.
Go to a FedEx store where you want to
convert them, so to speak.
The video, of course, raised the hypothesis that it's not
that simple anymore.
That the stimulus often increasingly raises more
questions than it answers.
How does this work?
And you talked about your YouTube videos as , maybe, a
Zero Moment trigger for you guys.
Are you seeing this change from stimulus to conversion
that now you have to be ready to answer some
questions in between?
LAURIE TUCKER: No question.
Absolutely, no question.
In fact, I've pushed on our team sometimes.
Why are we not there, yet?
Why don't we have our channel up?
Or, sorry, but I'll mention Facebook.
Why is the Facebook page not being supported yet?
And well, we put together this particular customer service
group, and this particular group that is online
responding online in real time.
So when someone posts something somewhere and says,
I've been waiting all day and those creeps from FedEx
haven't shown up yet and I hate that company.
I want that person to get an instant message from FedEx and
say, please let me know more.
What's your tracking number?
Let me get back to you.
And you turn someone who was irate into a raving fan in
just moments.
And even if we weren't able to satisfy them immediately, the
fact that we, as a company, have got that level of service
and concern is what makes people trust us.
And so we have to change the way we think, the way we're
wired, the way that we act, the way that we're organized.
Traditional marketing
organizations can't work anymore.
We have to organize, really, around channels.
We have to organize around how our customers are doing
business with us.
If you google FedEx reviews, it's something like 52 million
places that FedEx reviews.
I'm sorry, I can't get there--
52 million.
But I'll also tell you that we have at least 25 FedEx touch
points on any given day.
There's a couple 100 million opportunities for
FedEx to screw up.
I mean, that's in the physical world.
So while that then gets multiplied virally with anyone
who is upset on the web, we have to be there.
Now, how are we there?
We've got to think about it.
Where are our customers?
How could we be there as often as we can be?
How can we touch them?
What searches are we doing to find these active
conversations and jump in on them and respond?
It's a different world, and that's what we have to do.
JIM LECINSKI: So 52 million page results for the query
FedEx reviews.
How do you think about, then?
What is marketing versus industry relations or IR
verses PR versus customer care or customer service?
It sounds like they kind of start to blur in your
description here.
LAURIE TUCKER: And when we talk about organizations have
to change, that's exactly what has to happen.
In the past, we could have defined a role for IR or PR,
direct-marketing, advertising, customer service.
In today's world, those are fully integrated.
We had to put forth an active initiative to do that.
I would have loved to have said hey, I've got
control over that.
I'll just call up my fellow senior VP's and say, hey
buddies, let's just do this together.
And they would have said, who is this?
And no.
And so we kind of had to start at a little higher level and
do some convincing that the world is changing and that we
were going to have to do this.
It was an imperative.
And then, for me to sit down with my cohorts with a little
push from the boss, you know?
It never hurts to tell the boss what you want and then,
he tells them like it was his idea.
That's a good boss.
That's a good boss.
But he understood what we needed to do, and so did they.
So we've now come together.
In fact, we even call it one voice.
We've been actively working as one voice.
The groups you just mentioned come in together.
We actually went a little further and brought in all our
agencies because our agencies are part of it.
And I'll even say, uniquely, our agencies have changed the
way they've organized.
Particularly, Omnicom.
They've actually said, here is your key person over all of
our agencies that you do business with because we have
to have one voice.
JIM LECINSKI: Not the PR agency
versus a creative agency?
LAURIE TUCKER: In fact, we had a meeting a couple of days ago
and they were all there.
So it's not as though--
and it was just us marketing guys--
so it wasn't like the PR guys were there.
Now the PR guys come to our meetings.
Our advertising people go to the PR meetings.
Why?
Because we have got to have a connected and integrated voice
across all the touchpoints and channels.
It's not like the old days where the odds were that any
one person in the room might interface with a channel.
Because there's access through all the channels, we have to
be consistent.
JIM LECINSKI: So a lot of folks in the room that I've
chatted with have debates within their company about, I
guess, branding versus direct response.
Or, a sale and a conversion that's measurable and
trackable today versus building sentiment and brand
for the future.
How do you think about that within FedEx?
Is that even a discussion and a dialogue you have?
And if so, how do you resolve that?
LAURIE TUCKER: Well, even as you pointed out in your book,
there's still a significant number of people who get their
information through traditional advertising.
It's not gone.
It's not dead, and I don't think it ever will be.
It will continue to change and morph.
We'll continue to interface with television and movies
differently, more on demand, I'm sure, as we do today
through Hulu and other sites.
But over time, we still want to get that traditional
messaging because, too, it's often entertaining and it's
just part of our culture.
So we're not going to abandon our traditional approach.
And that has to, by the way, I think, be very brand-centric.
Our opportunity to continue to create who we are through our
communications, through traditional means, our brand
personality.
The FedEx that you know is still the FedEx that you've
always known.
The one that you can rely on.
The one that's got a little bit of a sense
of humor about it.
We never laugh at our customers.
We laugh at ourselves or we laugh at situations that we've
always been in, and we like to think that we can play a part
in trying to help people get out of those tricky situations
that we find ourselves in.
So I think that's the traditional side of it, and it
has to be there.
But when you start to look at how you get down to specific
engagement and to be able to actually convert, the
difference, too, is traditional
campaigns that ran.
And gosh, we got this conversion rate, and we
tracked the revenue for a quarter or two and we brag
about it, send it around to everyone, get a pat on the
back, and then, run another campaign.
It's just not the way it works anymore.
And so, obviously, those customers have to get touched
on a regular basis.
We have to learn from them in terms of their desired
engagement.
We do a lot of test and learn within these segments and
markets and then it's test, learn, repeat.
Tremendous, tremendous results as we've learned over these
last couple of years.
Much, much greater than I thought we would get, truly.
JIM LECINSKI: So from your comments and obviously the
campaigns that you have out in the marketplace, it's clear
that FedEx leadership, as well as, the marketing organization
and their partners, understand the importance of lots of
different channels including digital.
And within digital, you mentioned Facebook and YouTube
and lots of things like that.
I think not, maybe, all of the organizations that are
represented in the room have their leadership convinced to
that point.
Were there are any specific steps or key things or even
advice you would offer if--
you mentioned the boss, right-- the boss thinks well,
my B2B target audience doesn't use the web, doesn't search,
doesn't research.
How did you, I guess, overcome the skeptics internally?
And what might you share for folks here
who are in that stage?
LAURIE TUCKER: Is anybody having that problem right now?
Raise your hand.
One, two, three.
So there are a few.
The reason I ask that is because I thought about asking
the question how many people in the room consider
themselves baby boomers?
Do you all mind raising your hand if you consider you're a
baby boomer?
The reason I ask that is I figured there's probably about
five people in the room.
And I think I'm right about that.
That is the fundamental problem.
There is something stuck up-- oh, I'm sorry.
There's something that boomers, many of them have in
their mind--
I don't want to stereotype--
that somehow social networking is just a time killer.
I don't have time for it.
So the first problem we've got to overcome is to get our
bosses to understand that if you're not participating,
you're not learning.
You're not forward thinking.
You're not understanding the impact it's
having on your brand.
Even if they're just occasional users or maybe they
just get real private with Google+ and they don't have to
be exposed to the world.
One says, I hate being out there.
They're going to have people asking me for
jobs all the time.
I'm probably the most visible Facebooker in the world and
everybody here knows that I'm just all over the place.
Nobody asks me for a job on Facebook.
And don't anybody in this room do that.
JIM LECINSKI: Here it comes.
LAURIE TUCKER: Don't you do that to me because I want to
keep my brag about, I'm sorry, I could argue that
point back to him.
I have thousands of friends and nobody's
asking me for a job.
We have great conversations.
I sometimes hear about issues but it is more about education
and learning and watching how people are interfacing and
interacting.
And so as we grow, and I think our knowledge of how the
social network works, it's so easy to go back to our bosses
and say look at the power of what we're able to do.
So the first point, is you've got to get them out there.
Even if you have to come do demos for them because they
won't do it.
The second thing, is you've got to show them how much
money you can save because it's not as expensive as
traditional advertising.
You can take a little bit of TV money and convert it into a
whole lot of online ads, a whole lot of paid search, and
get a whole lot of measurable results.
That's the third point, measurable results.
We're still dying to be able to measure TV and we've even
got a little bit of analytics that we're starting to test to
see how much better we can get at measuring it.
But you can measure the touches on the web.
You can measure the conversions.
You can then track the growth of that customer as you
continue to engage with them online.
You can do it.
It's phenomenal.
So a little bit of [? hit ?]
and we've got a whole lot of acceptance.
So much so, Jim, that we were actually given more money at
the end of our last fiscal year.
More money to speed up some of the development
that we were doing.
So it was pretty darn convincing when
they saw the numbers.
JIM LECINSKI: How important in your playbook, to make this
transformation and transition to reach those customers in
the way they want to be talked to, how important is, I guess,
personally leading from the front in terms of your own use
of the devices?
I mean, I'm struck by the fact that I work for Google and I'm
sitting here with a piece of paper and a pen and you sit
here with an iPad--
LAURIE TUCKER: In honor of Steve.
JIM LECINSKI: --and last night, I think, you had four
devices with you, right?
A couple of phones, you had a laptop, an iPad.
LAURIE TUCKER: I kept wanting to talk to Jim but I just had
too many devices going.
I got a few too many going.
JIM LECINSKI: But leading by example, is that important?
LAURIE TUCKER: It is, absolutely.
And it's also understanding the conversation
that's going on.
I mean, if I'm not listening to the conversation and
participating and pushing my own people, I'm pretty sad.
And I find that, personally, it's so intriguing.
It's so interesting to think that you can, as an
individual--
let's say, that if my son were to have a band, for instance.
JIM LECINSKI: Hypothetically.
LAURIE TUCKER: Hypothetically.
And let's just say, hypothetically, I wanted to
promote his YouTube site and a few of his videos, maybe just
test it with a few Google ads just to see.
Put a little money in the bank and see how it runs and then
sit there and watch the numbers tick up.
I'm fascinated by that.
So then I come back to work and I go, what are we doing
with our Google ads?
Are we doing this?
Are we doing that?
Why don't we just go hire some darn college students if you
guys aren't going to be working on this stuff.
And they're like OK, down girl.
But it's so much fun to see that we can take something
that I'm using to grow popularity in my son's website
to our $40 billion company and make it work.
Now where in the world could anything like that happen?
So again, if your bosses don't get that yet, you've got to go
share that with them.
The power of what we're able to do now, as a result of the
technology.
I guess I'll throw in, too, because you, again, had some
stats in your book about the difference between organic
search and paid search.
I'd love to think that we're so good with organic that we
don't need paid.
But we do have to have paid search, and paid search,
again, measurable.
I always love when I come to talk to our resolution media
people because they give me stats.
And they start telling me what the paid searches are giving
us back, and phenomenal.
I don't understand why everybody in the company is
not coming over with a bucket of money from their own
departments and giving it to us.
Why not?
Because when they see what we're able to generate because
of this capability and because what we're being able to do,
again, with the tools that are out there now for us as
marketers that were never there before.
JIM LECINSKI: Now, the more those tools that a brand, a
company, uses in more places--
I guess, some push back that's often said in the B2B space
now, there's more opportunity for people to say bad things.
More bad reviews.
If I'm on my Facebook, well, then,
somebody can type something.
You referred to this earlier.
How do you think about negative feedback?
Sam used the line earlier today, feedback is a gift.
But there are some that say, well, we'd be better off to
not be in those places because then we wouldn't have those
bad things being posted about us.
LAURIE TUCKER: We actually heard that from some people in
the company, and they lost because a
couple of things happened.
First of all, you better be a good company.
If you're a terrible company, run for your life because
people are going to know it instantly.
If you're not giving service, if you're not delivering
service, if you're not responding to service
failures, product failures, or whatever, disappointments to
customers, you're going to get killed out there.
It's a different world.
That's Zero Moment of Truth.
I don't know.
Do you also realize our brains are not working the same way
they used to if you're older like I am?
Somebody would make a statement and I'd think,
that's interesting.
I wonder if it's true.
Now, I think that's interesting and I'm
immediately googling it because I don't believe
anything any more.
Well, let me see if that's really true.
I don't know about that.
Let me go check that out and see if it works the way he
says it does.
So we're wired differently, now.
A failure on the part of a company--
I could give an example.
I will not mention the company name even though some of you
around me know who it was because I was so irate.
Rarely do I get so angry with service that
I would write somebody.
But you know what?
It didn't take two seconds for me to find the email to the
CMO of a particular company and write to him.
And fortunately, today I am happy but yesterday I was not.
But isn't that weird?
Can you imagine five years ago having that kind of access?
And thank goodness they were wired to respond even though
they weren't wired to provide me the good service that I had
expected in the first place.
So we have to, number one, recognize that we've got to be
delivering great service.
And if these interactions don't drive you to improve
service, if they only drive you to huddle and hide under
rocks, you might want to go ahead and figure out how to
get into another business.
But if it drives you to improve service on a
continuous basis, get that visibility
into your own network.
Things that were happening, perhaps, in your own company
you didn't even now we're happening.
It might have to do with an individual employee.
It may have to do with a process.
It might have to do with an obvious-to-our-customer issue
that's been going on for years that we never knew until we
allowed ourselves to be that transparent.
And then, to hear what our customers were saying in order
for us to be able to fix it.
We've got to be curious.
Very, very curious.
I have customers contact me directly a lot because they
can find me the same way I found that other CMO.
And if I'm not jumping on it and working on it or passing
it to an exec services person who's excellent at being able
to find anything, I want to know.
I want to understand what broke down, where it broke
down, and how we can prevent it from happening again.
JIM LECINSKI: I think we're all familiar with the YouTube
video that's well over several million views of "United
Airlines Broke My Guitar." So this is the recourse that the
individual has that they never had before in that
Zero Moment of Truth.
LAURIE TUCKER: Absolutely, and we've got 300,000 employees.
You're not going to have 300,000 perfect employees as
hard as we try.
And if a video ends up showing up where someone flung a
package over a fence, trust us.
We will address that, immediately.
But how interesting, for instance, last holiday period
something that we picked up from YouTube.
We started seeing videos of FedEx and our competitor, UPS,
going up to front doors, doing what they do, leaving packages
and then seeing the car drive up behind it
and *** it off.
So what we learned was a new trick among thieves at holiday
is to follow the FedEx and UPS trucks.
Well, then, we've had to respond by saying we have got
to create a much stronger capability around being able
to allow our customers to direct packages to hold at all
of our FedEx office locations, for instance.
And that's really something we needed to do
and respond to quickly.
But we learned it.
Not so much by someone saying, wow, do you know, we saw it on
YouTube just like everybody else was seeing it on YouTube.
So again, I think it's a really great place to learn
what's happening in your own company.