Transcript

Dave Minifie

[0:00]I would say the important themes for me, both professionally and personally, is about leadership, about understanding purpose,

[0:15]

Introduction to Leadership and Purpose

Dave Minifie

[0:10]you know, why the organization exists, why you're raising a family together. You know, the big things in your life in employment are personal. It's really important to understand why you're doing the things you do. And then culture. How do you set an environment where everybody has the opportunity to achieve their full potential and the organization goes beyond what they thought its full potential was? And those are the things that are super important to me.

Jerry Genneria

[0:40]Welcome to The Intangible Brand, the show where we explore the connection between employee experience and client experience, and the hidden forces that make brands stick. I'm your host, Jerry Gennaria, and I'm flying solo today with a guest I've been wanting to bring on a podcast for a long time. Dave Menefee is a former Marine Corps officer, Procter & Gamble brand leader, and was the CMO, CXO, and EVP of strategy at Centene Corporation, one of the most transformative forces in health insurance over the past two decades. I had the chance to work alongside Dave during a pivotal time at Centene, from the introduction of the Affordable Care Act and the healthcare.gov marketplace to the company's growth in Medicaid. What stood out then and still does now was his insistence that brand, strategy, and member experience all had to work together, particularly for vulnerable populations. Dave, welcome to the show.

Dave Minifie

[1:33]Thanks so much, Jared. It's good to see you. Good to talk to you. Likewise. We've known each other for like 13 years, so it's a little strange getting interviewed by you, brother.

Jerry Genneria

[1:43]I know, right? It's a little strange interviewing you. So, you know, I know a fair amount about your background, but our listeners don't. So can you walk me through your career path a little bit? You were, as I said at the opening, you were in the Marine Corps, and then you were at Procter & Gamble and Centene, and then you've been doing things since then. And so tell us a little bit about the journey and what's the threads that have kind of carried through each of those chapters?

Dave Minifie

[2:11]Yeah, it's a great question. I'll start with my college experience. I grew up in a middle class neighborhood in Connecticut and my parents were certainly willing to pay for college, but I just I didn't want to put that financial burden on them. So I started looking at options. I didn't want to do the domino delivery gig throughout a four-year institution, and I grew up in the Reagan 80s and thought that the idea of military service could be a good idea and started exploring our OTC programs.

[2:50]

A Journey Through Military and Corporate Life

Dave Minifie

[2:45]The ROTC kind of search experience led me to service academies. And I was a swimmer and a rower in high school, and I knew that I wanted to row in college. And the Naval Academy had a varsity crew program, and the other two primary federal agencies academies didn't. And so I pursued the Naval Academy. I was fortunate enough to earn an appointment there. I really thought I wanted to be a submarine officer.

Speaker0

[3:12]I'd read a lot of Tom Clancy. Even before the movie Hunt for Red October had come out, I was deep into his world, his universe, and I had only applied to engineering schools. And so I was pretty sure I was going to be in the engineering educational field somewhere. And when I got to the Naval Academy, after about two weeks there at Pleaves Summer, I looked around at the submarine officers, And I'm like, I don't think these are my people. Each service has a little bit of a different culture. I think culture and cultural fit is super important for everything that we do in our life. And the Marine Corps leadership ethos and philosophy and practice just was much more appealing to me. So I kind of shifted focus and took a commission in the U.S. Marine Corps as an artillery officer. And I was fortunate to serve largely in the Western Pacific. I think it was based on Oahu, but spent more time off the island than on it. My wife had a lot of visitors while I was gone, which was kind of nice. And then went back to Quantico, Virginia and joined the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, which is like the think tanks for the Marine Corps.

Speaker0

[4:23]And the cool thing about that job is that we were doing a lot of analytical and creative problem solving around how to operate in an urban environment. So this is the late 90s. We were looking at demographic trends and seeing the global population moving to large cities within 200 miles of the coastline. That is the remit for the U.S. Marine Corps. That's kind of our operating mandate. and so we knew we had to do a better job we knew or we suspected that the next war we were going to fight was not going to be in jungles or in deserts but rather in built-up areas so we had the opportunity to work with DARPA and a lot of other smart people and and understand the history of kind of urban battles all the way back to world war ii as well as if you're familiar with the Black Hawk Down situation in Somalia. We were studying that as well. I was spending a lot of time outside of the Commonwealth of Virginia in that role. In fact, about five years into the marriage of my senior prom date, we looked at each other and said, hey, I've been gone like three out of the last five years. It was all pre-9-11, all peacetime stuff, but still all.

Speaker0

[5:36]A lot of time away from home. And we kind of collectively agreed, maybe this is not the right lifestyle for us. So I said, okay, I don't really want to go back to get an MBA right now. I've got a child on the way. I kind of think I want to earn some money rather than rack up additional debt. So let me find a job. And I thought there were three ways to kind of go after a job search. Number one, you know where you want to live. I was in my late twenties, didn't really want to settle down for the rest of my life. So I kind of threw that one out the window. Number two, you know what functional area you want to be in. And like, I love gunpowder and blowing stuff up. Not a lot of call for that in corporate America. So I threw that one out the window. And I said, number three, let's see if I can find a company that's going to set me up for future success. And the good news for junior military officers is that there are quite a few Fortune 500 companies that value the skills that JMOs bring into the workforce, which is really around teamwork, collaboration, leadership.

Speaker0

[6:41]Inquisitiveness, and a willingness to roll up your sleeves and get things done. So I was looking at key functional areas for big companies. So Six Sigma Black Belt roles with GE or operations roles with GM. And I looked at brand management at P&G. I didn't know what brand management was. I didn't know what marketing was. I just knew that that was the key function for the company. So I'm like, okay, that's what I want to go do. And it just so happened that I lucked out is P&G picked me up. And the brand management role is super interesting because it's got two components. Number one, you're the marketing leader for a brand. And marketers, as we know, need to solve problems both creatively and analytically. I mentioned that I only applied to the engineering schools. But when I got to the Naval Academy, because the curriculum is so math science heavy, everybody graduates with a bachelor's science degree. So I kind of took a little bit of a right hand turn and said, I'm going to be an English major. And so being an English major with a BS, it's kind of funny, right? You got a BS in English is the is a great skill set and background to have when you when you go into into marketing. And then the leadership development that I had had throughout my four years at the Academy and my nearly seven years in the Marine Corps really set me apart from my peers inside me.

Speaker0

[8:06]P&G. I was probably behind on business acumen. Most of my other entry-level peers had come out of an MBA program, but I was ahead in my ability to build teams and get things done and overcome obstacles. So I was at P&G for 12 years. I worked on a variety of brands, Starman, Bounty, Puffs, Duracell, Eukanuba, and Iams. Eukanuba was the most fun.

Speaker0

[8:35]You know, toilet paper has its places, but watching dogs work in the field, you know, is more exciting. Although, you know, the good thing about, you know, Procter & Gamble is they

[8:53]

Transitioning to Centene

Speaker0

[8:48]manufacture and sell items that people need every day, regardless of how well the economy is rolling. Yeah, I was not looking to leave Procter when I got a call in August of 2011 and from an executive recruiter who said, hey, Dave, we think we might have an opportunity for you. It's in St. Louis, a city I'd never been to. It's a company called Centene. I'd never heard of it. And they do Medicaid and Medicare third-party payer stuff. I'm like, I don't know what those government programs are or anything that you mentioned. Most of the words I don't even understand, but okay, I'll take a look at it. The CEO at the time, Michael Nidor, had started his career early, you know, decades earlier in CPG, and he was very interested in bringing in a CPG consumer packaged goods professional to help get the company ready for the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and to professionalize the way we went to market for our members. And so, you know, really the first conch of work that I did at Centene was to help the company articulate its values, beliefs, and purpose. And I use that as the foundation for all the other work that we did in terms of.

Speaker0

[10:05]Setting up brand standards, understanding how we were going to go to market, starting to think more like brand managers as opposed to communicators who were just pushing out regulatory required information to our members. So that was, you know, super transformative. You know, I had the good fortune to be able to build my own team of agencies. Jerry, you were part of that which was which was awesome i you know coming out of png which was going through kind of the the holding company consolidation you know i really didn't like that that structure i still don't like the holding company structure what i like is smaller agencies that do one thing really really well and then i can build the team internally and have them all work together and And Jerry, we can talk a little bit about that team dynamic of multiple agencies working together seamlessly. But I think, you know, I had mentioned earlier how important culture is. And I think for marketing leaders, they can build their own culture, not only internally, but with their agency partners. And I think that was, you know, super important and led to, you know, a lot of the success that we had at Centene. I joined the company when they were $5 billion in revenue.

Speaker0

[11:26]I left the company nine years later. The company, I think, had $111 million in revenue or something, just massive growth, 20x in nine years. And that meant that we were constantly evaluating our organizational capabilities, capacity, and culture and redesigning the organization, you know, every six to nine months. I started with, I think, 12 or 14 employees in my department right after we acquired WellCare in 2020. We were up to 220 employees in the department. We right-sized back down to 160. But that was another great skill set that I had the opportunity to develop there is how do you do org design and development? How do you make sure that everybody's working together, not just internally, but as I mentioned before, with your agency partners? When I left Centene in 2021, I wasn't really looking for my next job.

Speaker0

[12:25]Job. I was recovering from a health issue and things were going on with my family. I was just taking some time to enjoy things. But people on my network started calling me and saying, hey, Dave, can you help us with this strategy problem or this positioning problem? I said, okay. And I fell into fractional CMO work, consulting work. I did that for about two years on my own and then joined a dozen other fractional CMOs at the CMO Syndicate, where we had the opportunity to work together, share our skill sets, help us grow professionally.

Speaker0

[12:58]I had the opportunity to work in industries I had never worked in before, like robotics and quick-serve restaurants and things like that. A little over a year into my tenure with the syndicate, Tara Keat, a longtime client of mine said, hey, we think we want more of you. And I said, okay, I sent a proposal for 50% time. And they're like, yeah, it's not enough. We want all of you. So they managed to talk me into drastically increasing my hours and decreasing my hourly rate. And I went inside with TerraKete full-time.

[13:38]

The Role of AI in Writing

Speaker0

[13:35]They've come out of the search engine optimization business. They do a great job at helping brands control the brand narrative and the story that they tell online by optimizing content. And these techniques have been super successful in traditional search, but are also successful in the world of generative search, which, you know, I don't know about the listeners here, but I can increasingly do more and more search with ChatGPT rather than in the traditional Google search bar. It gets to an answer more quickly. And when there are citations in place there, it helps me to delve deeper when I need to.

Speaker0

[14:17]In March, I moved from the full-time position that I just mentioned back to a fractional role with them through the end of the summer as Terakete reinvents itself in this new technology space and love their brand and what they do on behalf of brands. Their purpose is to bring together brands and their audiences wherever that user is in the online consumer journey. And I think that's a pretty powerful story to tell. And as marketers, it's something that I think is important to all of us. So you were asking about themes, Jerry. And I'm sorry that you just put, I guess you put the quarter in and let me go here. But I would say the important themes for me, both professionally and personally, is about leadership. It's about understanding purpose, why the organization exists. Why you're raising a family together. You know, the big things in your life in employment are personal. It's really important to understand why you're doing the things you do. And then culture. How do you set an environment where everybody has the opportunity to achieve their full potential and the organization goes beyond what they thought its full potential was? And those are the things that are super important to me. Yeah.

[15:40]

Leadership Lessons from the Military

Speaker1

[15:40]So I want to dig into that idea of leadership just a little bit. And maybe can you unpack how your background in the military, how your time in CPG has kind of shaped how you approach leadership, particularly when you're dealing with a massive regulated system like healthcare, or as you were talking about, when you're bringing multiple agencies together. I mean, And this is host commentary, but one of the things that was remarkable to me during the time that I worked with you on the Centene business, and I was at a different agency than Toki at the time, and Toki was one of the agencies. And I'm here largely because of you and bringing these agencies together. But what was remarkable to me is the clarity that you brought to the roles that each agency had. I have worked my entire career in situations that are multiple agency situations and never experienced that kind of clarity. In fact, had many situations where it was almost the opposite of that. The client was intentionally or unintentionally pitting the agencies against each other. So can you talk a little bit about that approach to leadership and what shaped it and how you think about it?

Speaker0

[17:04]Yeah, that's a great question, Jerry. I was once in an interview asked what my theory of management was. And I said, assets get managed and people get led. So I'm going to talk about my leadership philosophy, not my management philosophy. The Marine Corps is almost exclusively a leadership organization. Like if you're, whether you're on the officer side or the enlisted side, Everything the Marine Corps does is about leadership. They have 14 leadership traits and 11 leadership principles. That's 25 things that you're expected to know, understand, and be able to talk about. And those traits and principles are just as effective in corporate America or coaching youth soccer as they are in the Marine Corps. I'm not going to rattle off the 25 things because I think they really fall into three broad categories. The first is on communication.

Speaker0

[18:04]You know, have a bias to over-communicating, not under-communicating, and being clear in your communication skills. There's a story that was told in the Marine Corps when I was there. I don't know if it's true or not, but it doesn't matter. And the story is that Napoleon had a corporal who would get his uniform ready every day and get it ready before battles, etc.

Speaker0

[18:28]And whenever Napoleon was getting ready to write an order for battle, he would give it to his corporal to read it. And if the corporal didn't understand it, he would rewrite it. So he wasn't writing for generals he was writing for everybody in the army so that they would know what was going on and i think too often you know executive leaders sit around on their friday morning executive discussion and talk about things and decide things and then don't communicate it out and i i think you know you mentioning how clear i was with with with agency partners and with my team was deliberate like we we would set goals and talk about those and and and deliver against them you know very aggressively there's a lot of other things in in communication we could talk about that that's just one example second broad area i call coaching some people call it development it's about self-coaching you know how are you improving yourself what are you reading what are you listening to what are you writing about and i think in today's day and age we spend too little time writing.

Speaker0

[19:40]You know, at P&G, they had one class that they brought in from the outside. It was called Leadership on Paper. And P&G's philosophy is you might be a good thinker without being a good writer, but you can't be a good writer without being a good thinker.

Speaker1

[19:56]Interesting, yeah.

Speaker0

[19:57]And when we write, we have conversations with ourselves to crystallize ideas. And so that that self-improvement that coaching you know org design and development falls under coaching as well but being deliberate about how we think about developing ourselves and our people and it's developing our people in two ways number one it's developing them as individuals but number two it's about developing a team right when my daughter was doing her college search she looked at university of pennsylvania and she looked at william and mary and she's like oh they're they're both very it seems like they're both very competitive academically she's like but it seems like the penn students are competitive with each other academically whereas the william and mary students were competitive but collaborative right so you know it's the difference between trying to function in a team sport where you are super competitive and you want to beat your opponents, but you want to make everybody in your team better because that improves your chance to win as opposed to an individual sport where you're just trying to, you know, trying to dominate.

Speaker0

[21:10]And then the third broad area is catalyzing the organization. So how do you catalyze the organization? Largely through culture, trust, transparency, doing those first two things, communicating and coaching really, really well, helps the organization to function at a super high level. And that's one of the things that I, you know, in most...

Speaker0

[21:34]Impressed by, you know, in my career at Centene was how well everybody worked together. And I think in large part because we did those first couple of things really, really well.

Speaker1

[21:45]Yeah, makes sense. You mentioned writing as a way of crystallizing thinking, and I couldn't agree with that more. As generative AI is becoming more and more a tool that we're relying on to get more things done in less time or to improve the way that we do things, I think people, some people are concerned about what that means for us as writers and thinkers. How are you thinking about AI in terms of writing and thinking? And is it a help? Is it a hindrance?

Speaker0

[22:18]That's a great question, Jerry. I love, you know, and I'm using ChatGPT. I've used other models as well. But what I really like about ChatGPT is it's a great research assistant. So i'm working on an article right now about southwest airlines you know i was a big fan of herb kelleher and you know they were a purpose-driven airline and changes that i see coming down the pike now make me believe that they've fallen off of of herb's way right and so so you know i can use chat gpt to say hey but you know this is this is my thesis can you help me find quotes and supporting, you know, documentation on what Herb has done and then what's happened to Airline over the last, you know, three to five years. Now, I could have SatGPD take all that and write an article for me, but that doesn't help me to think about what I'm thinking about or learn enough about Southwest and then have a cogent conversation with you, Jerry, like if we were do another film you know film another podcast and dave tell us what you learned about south you know southwest airlines.

Speaker0

[23:33]I can't have that conversation unless I write it myself. So I love having the research assistants because I'm not typing in Google searches and trying to find investor interviews from years ago. I have helped doing that. Now, obviously, with hallucinations and things of that nature, we still have to verify the source of the quote and all that. But I think using Gen.AI as a research assistant in that way can be super, super helpful. And it makes writing the article a lot faster because, you know, I can just keep having the dialogue with the generative engine. And I think that's the difference between traditional search, which is more like an interview. Like I ask one question, I get an answer. whereas with generative AI it's more like having a conversation hey thanks for that what about.

Speaker1

[24:31]This yeah so let's go back a little bit to your time at Centene and something that I'm curious about your title your role evolved over that period of time that you were there you were VP and CMO at the beginning you were chief experience officer and EVP at corporate strategy when you left how How did that come about? What was the philosophy of consumer experience, marketing, branding, and how did those things fit together in those roles?

Speaker0

[25:04]Yeah. So like I mentioned, I was hired as the first CMO for the company. And Michael was really trying to elevate how we thought about going to market and a brand, et cetera. About halfway through my tenure there, I'm like, dude, the healthcare experience, from a consumer experience perspective, sucks. It's the worst. We had the Temkin experience ratings. We were one of the last categories. Health insurance, one of the last categories. Brand simplicity index, one of the last categories. it sounds bad that you're at the bottom but like our our as an industry our ratings were below that of cable companies i'm like and i don't know anybody who loves their cable company right so like that's really really exceptionally bad and so you like you can't market your way out of a bad consumer experience so we had some discussions internally and said hey you know we've gotten a lot better in the way we go to market, what our look and fetal is, the consistency.

Speaker0

[26:11]Getting our 20-plus health plans kind of on the same sheet of music and the way that we talk to our consumers, et cetera. But we need to do more. And so when I changed the title from chief marketing officer to chief experience officer, I kept all the marketing responsibilities, but added responsibilities in net promoter score and customer satisfaction scores and how we were evaluating tracking and improving those things and we also started working more diligently with you know some of our the the portion of the company is actually sending out letters to people on managing their medical conditions so the reality is that when nurses and doctors write things it sounds like medical right so i mentioned i i mentioned before that i that i had a health issue and I'm fine now. And it was like the JV of cancers. But officially I had a mucinous, appendiceal carcinoma. Jerry, do you know what that is?

Speaker1

[27:19]I have no idea, but it sounds bad.

Speaker0

[27:21]It's cancer of the appendix, okay? So, like, instead of telling me high-grade mucanus appendiceal carcinoma, like, can't we just say I had appendix cancer? Like, and as a patient, like, I have to learn this terminology because when I moved from St. Louis to Annapolis, I was changing, you know, oncologists, and it's like, okay, If I say appendix cancer, I guess you're going to know, but then you're going to have questions about, like, was it high grade or low grade? And, like, so you have to know those things. But, like, if I'm, you know, a patient or a member of a health plan and I have multiple comorbidities, right, I've got, you know, heart disease and diabetes and I'm obese, you know, I don't want three letters coming to me. Right. I want one letter treating me as a person using plain language, not using jargon. And the way we had previously been set up inside Centene is,

[28:22]

Enhancing Consumer Experience in Healthcare

Speaker0

[28:18]you know, our medical management team was looking at each condition. They weren't looking at people. So it was possible. We did an audit for our Medicare population. It was possible that one person could receive 750 pieces of communication from the company.

Speaker0

[28:38]That's ridiculous, right? Like it's just noise. It's overwhelming. It's like, it's noise, right? So like, I remember going through Lamaze classes with my wife when we were pregnant with our first child. And it's like, you get this bag full of coupons and books and pamphlets. And it's like, okay, I'm taking the coupons, I'm throwing everything else out. I can't ingest this amount of information. I'm freaked out enough as it is, as a new parent. So those are the types of things that we were taking a look at when I took over the experience responsibilities. And we were also doing a lot of work from a market research standpoint and understanding consumer journey for our different products. You know, the Medicaid consumer journey is different than the health insurance marketplace, which is different than Medicare. And it was really important for us to have deep consumer understanding to better meet the needs of those populations.

Speaker1

[29:35]One of the premises of the podcast is the idea that brand is really the experience that people have with a product or service. So, you know, I appreciate the intense focus on that member experience. Do you think that health care as a whole is improving from that perspective?

Speaker0

[29:56]No. I mean, I think we did make some improvements during the COVID period at doing more with telemedicine. I think that's great. You know, I think that level of access, I think, is super important.

Speaker0

[30:12]You know, the big, beautiful bill here is going to make changes that's going to complicate government healthcare more. The last thing this category needs is additional complexity. And so, you know, I think there are some things going on from, you know, on the provider side of things on consolidation into fewer healthcare systems. I think that can have benefits for some patients and some members, but sometimes it makes it harder to actually get the care you need. You know like my daughter is in kaiser permanente out in california and she had a really tough time with the bureaucracy of that organization she's like i just want to go see a dermatologist and you're making me jump through hoops like why can't i just pay my co-pay and and schedule it and so she came home for a vacation last summer we just brought her to our dermatologist it was out of network but we just paid for it but i'm like that's that's challenging so like there are there are continue to be incentives inside

[31:21]

Challenges in the Healthcare Industry

Speaker0

[31:17]the industry that are not aligned, right? A hospital, if it's paying for equipment, wants to use the equipment. A payer wants to save its margin and deny the use of that equipment.

Speaker0

[31:31]And both those, you know, organizations are working in their best interest, which is capitalism, but they're not necessarily working in the best interest of the patient and for the best outcome of the patient. And I think we've got a long way to go to get to truly patient-centered healthcare. Yeah.

Speaker1

[31:54]Yeah. It's an interesting thing about, you know, capitalism. And I think organizations that figure out how to do what's best for the corporation by way of doing what's best for their consumer are the ones that are going to be most successful in the long term.

Speaker0

[32:10]Yeah. Well, let's go back. I mentioned Southwest just a minute ago. When Herb Keller was at the helm, he had a very fierce philosophy on the three stakeholders that the company served and in what order they served them. And he said, listen, number one, our employees come first. If our employees are not happy they can't make our customers happy our customers come second because they drive the business without customers we don't have a business but if our customers are happy our shareholders will be happy and if you look at the the run of you know profitable growth for southwest while herb keller was in charge it's it's extraordinary especially relative to its peer group you know their their flight attendant and pilot unions have better pay and better benefits than competitive you know peer groups and the stock performance was also much much better over that period of time now apparent you know it appears that the shareholder is coming first right and the shareholder coming first means that okay we're gonna start charging for bags again, and we're going to start assigning seats because we keep hearing that people want assigned seats. I'm like, I actually don't know. Like, I understand that if you just have a focus group, you want to assign seats. Yeah.

Speaker0

[33:35]I have status on both Delta and Southwest, and I really like both airlines, but I really like both airlines for completely different reasons. I like Delta because I get an assigned seat, I know where I'm going to be, and I can get Woodford Reserve.

Speaker0

[33:52]And I like Southwest because there are no assigned seats, and because everybody feels like they're all in it together and they help get their bags up into the overhead, and I know which seat I want and I'm going to, nine times out of 10, I get it and I can get wild turkey because that's what herb drank. So I, I, I can get the bourbon in either place, but you know, the overall experience is just, it's just different.

Speaker1

[34:21]It's interesting. You, you mentioned focus groups and I spend a lot of time these days on research and we've done research together and you've done a lot of research prior to when you were at P&G. Do you find that people often don't actually know what they want that maybe we're doing research the wrong way

Speaker0

[34:44]We're definitely doing research the wrong way like the the worst type of market research to do is focus groups because there's you know generally speaking there's one or two dominant personalities that will talk more than everybody else and group think starts coming in and people don't want to contradict what the group is thinking.

Speaker0

[35:04]It's effective for some things to get quick hits, but in general, if you're basing your whole marketing plan on focus group research, that's a problem. The second worst would be one-on-one interviews. One-on-one interviews are great because they're rich. The person doesn't have to compete with somebody else, and they're going to tell you what they think you want to hear. It's kind of mostly true but not necessarily 100 true better than that would be in-home interviews, because somebody who has agreed to host you in their home to conduct an interview is an open person who wants to be hospital and help you understand what their what their life is like right, but the best research if you're talking in the consumer packaged goods arena is you know with shop alongs right because someone will tell you you know in an interview that they know exactly which toothpaste they buy, They don't. I've never, like, there are some categories where it's like, yeah, I know that's what you buy. But there's other categories like deodorant, toothpaste. You know, a lot of these categories that, like, where the cost of failure is pretty low. Like, did I get clean mint or true mint? Like, it doesn't really matter.

Speaker1

[36:29]No.

Speaker0

[36:30]That people think they're really, really sure about what they buy, but they're not. They're really confused. and like I was with a woman, stopping with a woman who picked an item up from an end cap, then went to the category and took the end cap item out and put it on the shelf and picked something up and then walked down the category and saw another thing and she put the second thing back and picked up the third thing. And then she went back by the end cap again and she went back to her first choice. But she changed her mind three times. right there wasn't a high degree of certainty of what she was picking up right so that's just kind of you know human behavior is is fascinating and you know one of the reasons that the health care categories is so tough is you know competing incentives but the other thing is behavior change is hard health care behavior change is even harder yeah you know so you know it's it's Like when you've dug yourself into, you know, a medical condition that is behavior driven, it's really hard to unbehave to get yourself out of that medical condition.

Speaker1

[37:42]Yeah. Well, and I find that if you're doing research that's around innovation and new ideas, that's not necessarily the place where you're,

[37:57]

The Importance of Research in Marketing

Speaker1

[37:51]I think you can get a tremendous amount of insight from the research that you do. And I really do think that the in-home is one of the most valuable that you can do, not necessarily always because they're more open, but like the shop-along, you're getting context that you don't in other places,

Speaker0

[38:11]Right?

Speaker1

[38:11]And when we're thinking about innovation, it's like nobody wanted the iPhone or the iPad before they actually had one, and now you can't live without them. We are challenged as consumers to think beyond variations of the things that we have. So as marketers, we have a tremendous challenge to figure out what the next thing is going to be and to help our consumers embrace those ideas.

Speaker0

[38:40]Absolutely.

Speaker1

[38:42]So, you know, after Centene, you've taken on some new roles. You talked about consulting, fractional CMO, working with Terakete. What's been the things that you've learned? Is there connective threads in what you've been doing since your time in healthcare?

Speaker0

[38:57]I mean, I tend to be a very purpose-driven marketer. I like organizations to understand why they exist. It's surprising to me still how many organizations don't know why they exist. And I think that acts as a strategic foundation as well as a cultural foundation for the company. And so I prefer to do purpose work prior to doing positioning work because I think it gets to a stronger outcome faster and more long lasting. And I think culture has also been kind of another really important thing for me to help organizations understand and work on. And, you know, at Terrokeet, you know, I led the, facilitated the purpose work before I joined the company. And then while I was at the company, we kind of double clicked on that and went down into what do we think the leadership and cultural behaviors that we should expect are and kind of threw that out as well. You know, I led some purpose work with a major league baseball team several years ago. And, you know, they basically, off of those values, they decided to do employee evaluations exclusively off of those values.

[40:15]

Finding Purpose in Organizations

Speaker0

[40:15]So that's another thing that's like super interesting is when you get your purpose right, it drives other decisions.

Speaker0

[40:26]Not to beat the southwest example but like if if southwest if the reason why southwest exists is to democratize travel that's your purpose then you don't charge change fees or bag fees right right if you're if if you fall off your purpose and you say no we're going to be mission driven we're going to fly airplanes and make money then that's when you start charging bag fees again mm-hmm.

Speaker1

[40:52]We work with a lot of smaller or mid-sized professional service firms, and a lot of them are started by individuals that, you know, they did whatever their function was. Maybe they were an engineer or an architect, and they go off and start a firm. They are frequently not going off and starting a firm because they think they can change the world or they have some deeper purpose other than, I think I can do this job, you know, better than my bosses are letting me or what have And so we see a lot of firms that don't necessarily have a higher purpose. How do you help them find that when it really wasn't there to begin with?

Speaker0

[41:32]Yeah, like when I joined Centene, we didn't have an articulated purpose. We had a mission statement to improve health outcomes and lower costs. And well, which of our competitors didn't want that? Did anybody want higher costs? Did anybody want worse health outcomes? The answer is no, right? And so by understanding that we exist to improve the health of the individual, of the community, one individual at a time, that changes the way we thought about going to market and strategies that we're going to employ to get better. And architects, most architects don't do everything. They don't do like single home, single family homes and condominiums and high rises. Right. And if they're just doing single family homes, generally speaking, they have a niche area that they like to work in. So we're doing a home renovation right now. We've got a great architect. He's really oriented to preservation. Yeah. So he does a lot of work in old homes, and he does a lot of work for families that want new homes that look like old homes.

Speaker0

[42:56]And I haven't talked to him about this, but he might have a purpose to say, hey, I want to bring out the joy of traditional living or something like that. The way I would help somebody do that is I have a system. I have a series of questions that I ask and a couple of workshops that I put people through. I've done this for large Fortune 500 companies. I've done it for privately held organizations. I've also done it for individuals. So it's a very whether whether it's for one person trying to figure out how they articulate their own purpose which i think is useful to to know about yourself right or whether it's an organization that wants to to do it on a larger scale find me on linkedin and contact me i can help you there.

Speaker1

[43:44]You go perfect what advice would you give to leaders in other industries that are trying to align their brands around real human needs like you were doing at centine

Speaker0

[43:55]It's like really understand your your consumer your client your customer whoever wherever you're serving understand that person deeply so you know at centine you know when we're doing our our brand identity work we started to really want to to get into the heads of our our medicaid consumers And guess what, Jerry? Medicaid members are at or under the poverty level. They have concerns about where they're going to sleep, how they're going to clothe their children, and how they're going to feed their children. That's brutal. And then on top of that, you have to navigate at the bottom end of the healthcare spectrum. And so we were very deliberate that we wanted the Centene brand to be as simple as possible, to differentiate us versus everything else in that category, and to actively empower our members. We were not the heroes solving their medical issues. We were their ally helping them to navigate the really complicated terrain of the healthcare space and they were the hero mom was going to be the hero and solve the problems for her child Centene was not going to do that we could help but we weren't wearing the superhero cape she was.

Speaker1

[45:20]So what's next for you? You're ending your time with Tara Keat in a full-time capacity.

[45:30]

The Future of Leadership and Marketing

Speaker1

[45:28]What's next? What are you looking for?

Speaker0

[45:30]Well, I do have some, you know, while I am open to kind of consulting gigs, really what I'm looking for is my next full-time in-house executive leadership position. I love building brands and marketing, but I love building teams and culture more. And i'm sure there's you know some business in the 500 million to two and a half billion dollar revenue range that's stuck they've plateaued in growth or they need to turn around and i love that type of work i've been successful at it throughout my career and you know i love i love making people better my personal purpose is to make the people around me better so they can achieve their full potential and i i do that with teams and individuals and you know i'm kind of industry agnostic You know, I've demonstrated an ability to work well in different corporate cultural climates. And, you know, TNG might be more hierarchical than the Marine Corps. And, and, you know, Centene was certainly more, more chaotic, but, you know, more highly regulated from a healthcare perspective versus CPG. And then you worked in the tech services business. And it's been, it's been fun working across industries. And, and I, I think if there's, there's a CEO out there who knows that they need help at getting over the hump, you know, feel free to, feel free to give me a call either on a consulting or potential full-time basis.

Speaker1

[46:53]Yeah, that's great. So we've kind of been all over in our conversation today. What's the one thing that you hope our viewers or listeners take away from this conversation?

Speaker0

[47:04]Pay attention to culture. It matters. It's the X factor. We've all heard the poultry strategy for breakfast. And if you don't know your purpose, if you don't know why you exist as a human being or why your organization exists as an entity, then work aggressively to figure that out and articulate it. And then take steps to bring that to life. Your purpose should inform your culture and your strategy and the priorities that you make within that that framework and i think too many people and organizations mistake activity for strategy and they forget that even if they have a good strategy they've got to prioritize in order to make the most important things happen the 80 for 20 thing is you know or 20 for 80 rule whatever it is, you know, 20% of the things that you do accomplish 80% of what you need.

[48:08]

Key Takeaways and Recommendations

Speaker0

[48:01]So focusing on that 20% is way more important than trying to do 100% of the activity. And I think you get to faster, better business results by focusing than by lettering about.

Speaker1

[48:16]Yeah. When you were talking about the Marine Corps leadership principles and you boiled it down to three. The second one was coaching and you started by the idea of self-coaching. So that leads perfectly into a question we like to ask everyone. Is there a book or a podcast that you would recommend to the listeners that has been helping you or that you think would provide value?

Speaker0

[48:40]Yeah, I'll mention a couple of things here. If you care about purpose, there's three books that came out around 2010 that are all really good. One is, It's Not What You Sell, It's What You Stand For by Roy Spence Jr. He did a lot of work with both Southwest Airlines and Walmart. He's a great storyteller. Starts With Why by Simon Sinek, although I'd recommend the TED Talk rather than reading the book. It's much more efficient. And then the third is Grow by Jim Stengel, the former global marketing officer for P&G. His is much more data-driven in why purpose matters to organizations. So that trio is super interesting. And then for today's living, I really enjoy the podcast Pivot with Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher. She has kind of a tech background. He's got a marketing and business background. And they talk about, you know, business, tech, politics, and, you know, he tells some horrible dad jokes. So highly entertaining.

[49:47]

Conclusion and Farewell

Speaker1

[49:47]Excellent. Well, Dave, thanks again for joining me. It's always a pleasure to talk. I could talk with you for hours, but we'll try and limit it for this show and we'll definitely have you back. If folks want to follow your work or get in touch,

Speaker0

[50:00]You mentioned LinkedIn.

Speaker1

[50:01]Is there any other place that they should look for you?

Speaker0

[50:03]LinkedIn is the best place.

Speaker1

[50:05]Perfect. Well, that wraps up another episode of The Intangible Brand. If you enjoyed today's conversation, we'd love it if you'd follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. It helps us keep bringing these insights to folks like you. And if you're watching on YouTube, be sure to like the video, subscribe to our channel so you don't miss future episodes. And we'd love to hear what resonated with you. Leave us a review, share your thoughts, drop us a line with ideas for future topics or guests. You can always connect with us on LinkedIn or visit theintangiblebrand.com for more resources and info about the show. Thanks for listening to The Intangible Brand, where the strongest brands are built on the experiences they create for their clients and their teams.