If you saw the movie Moneyball starring Brad Pitt as Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane, you probably remember those classic scenes about how an old-line brand struggles with changing its entire way of doing business. Beane had to morph the way the A’s approached scouting, player evaluation, and the game itself due to small budgets and changing times.
To accomplish this, he brought in a Harvard geek, Paul DePodesta, and started thinking more about algorithms than sacrifice bunts. It wasn’t easy changing the culture of an entrenched operation, especially with his group of grizzled scouts. These guys were bound and determined to judge talent the old-fashioned way – by observing, comparing notes, and using their decades of experience. Beane’s mission was to get them to embrace thinking differently, using a modes known as sabermetrics as the foundation. As you can see by the faces of these scouts, the transition wasn’t an easy one.
So when I read a recent story in Digiday’s “ThinkTank” by Shareen Pathak about how Avon is making the digital turn, it reminded me that legacy industries have the ability to adjust, adapt, and thrive. It’s just never easy.
The money quote is from Avon’s VP/Marketing, Matt Harker:
“I think digital is the secret weapon for Avon.”
For someone in a leadership position from a very old school company, this is an amazing strategic statement. Avon has created a campaign, “Beauty for a Purpose,” and it is content marketing on display, featuring an updated brochure, social media, as well as earned and paid advertising.
While you may think of Avon as salesladies going door-to-door, the new digitally-charged company features an online sales engine. But the real story behind the new campaign harkens back to Avon’s roots – 6 million reps worldwide evangelizing about women and their brand. Harker has the nomenclature down – he refers to his Avon ladies as “basic storytellers.”
But it begins and ends with training those famous Avon sellers about how to compete on the digital battlefield. They are being schooled about how to use content marketing to their advantage. This includes posting stories, videos, and pictures on social pages.
Another key factor for Avon is recommendation, something we talk about a lot within our Techsurveys and the power of the Net Promoter Score. As Harker points out, Avon is being driven by personal recommendations, and that’s how the brand plans to “reframe what the business model is about.”
For radio, this story is encouraging. Many have written Avon off as one of the next companies destined to fail. And yet, they are embracing digital, social, and content marketing – all the new tools of the trade. They have also committed to training, something that some of radio’s best companies are beginning to brace, too. The Entercom team headed up by Kim Reis is a good example of company-wide training, and there are other broadcasters taking a similar approach to helping airstaffs and programmers grow.
In the long run, this approach gives Avon the chance to leverage its legacy status over modern competitors like Birchbox and Sephora. In radio parlance, think of it as broadcasting retraining its workforce to be competitive against pure-plays and satellite radio. And in that context, Harker says timeless brands have an edge:
“I’d rather start with a brand that has a heritage. Because I don’t have to tell you why it has to mean something to you. That gives it a great foundation to start from. We count ourselves fortunate to have that. What I need to do is refresh the presentation and creativity around it, and maybe even the vernacular. But I can’t lose sight of the heritage.”
That sounds an awful lot like a great story for radio.
And we don’t even have to go door-to-door to tell it.