An Interview With Kieran Powell
Know where you are on your journey: The marketing mix will always change based on your situation, whether your brand is nascent or mature, whether you are introducing new products or defending against new competitors. Be self-aware and ask others to help check your blind spots as you finalize marketing spend allocations.
In an age where marketing landscapes are rapidly evolving and consumer behaviors are constantly shifting, Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) play a pivotal role in steering their organizations’ marketing strategies towards success. With a plethora of channels, platforms, and techniques at their disposal, the decision on where to allocate the marketing budget is more critical than ever. We’re seeking to explore questions like: What factors influence their decisions? How do they balance between digital and traditional marketing channels? What role does data play in their decision-making process? And importantly, why they choose to invest in certain areas over others? As part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Colin Chow.
Colin is a “diagonal thinker” who believes that great brands must combine rigorous insight with heart-stopping creativity. He loves creating clarity from chaos for purpose-driven brands that have the ambition to upend categories and challenge convention.
Prior to 21CB, Colin was CEO at Redscout, a brand strategy and innovation consultancy whose client roster included Airbnb, Google, Netflix, Nike and Uber. He oversaw all aspects of agency operations, from strategy development to business growth to talent cultivation.
Colin also worked for twelve years at Sterling Brands, a strategy and design agency. As Managing Director in San Francisco, he led brand positioning and innovation projects for a wide range of clients including Anheuser-Busch, ESPN, Facebook, Google, HBO, MSNBC, Nike, Pernod Ricard, Taco Bell, Thompson Hotels, Visa and Warner Bros.
Before finding his true calling in brand strategy, Colin was a management consultant at McKinsey & Co. where he led engagements for global Fortune 500 companies, as well as cultural institutions like MoMA and Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Thank you so much for your time! I know that you are a very busy person. Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?
Depending on your perspective, I’m either the most qualified or the least qualified person to talk about marketing. As an undergraduate, I studied art history, which is the most subjective discipline that you could think of, followed by a law degree, which taught me to build a case for something with logic and evidence. My first job in management consulting at McKinsey gave me a deep foundation in business fundamentals and trained me in the rigor of data-backed analysis. When I shifted into brand strategy it felt like the right place for me, where I can bring the right and left brain together: combining strategic rigor with creativity and rooting every decision in the business. My whole career has been based on this idea that brand is not just something we do because it’s fun, which it is sometimes, but it’s also a really powerful driver of business growth.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Years ago, before I had kids of my own, I led a project to understand global perceptions of superheroes. Which was great! I got to travel to London, Paris, Melbourne and Shanghai. But in LA, I made a huge mistake when I volunteered to moderate a focus group with six-year olds. Figuring to myself, “How hard can this be?” I immediately floundered in getting them to talk. In desperation, I had the genius idea to give them unlimited candy, which worked until they literally started bouncing out of their chairs. I got the insights I needed, but I’m sure their poor parents had to deal with major sugar crash tantrums on their drive home.
The lesson I learned was that it’s fine to fake it til you make it…but sometimes it’s just wiser to acknowledge that specific expertise is needed.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
One of the most fulfilling parts of my day-to-day work is working directly with some of the most ambitious and brilliant brand leaders of our time. Working so closely on business-critical issues made me realize how challenging the current reality is for today’s CMOs, from setting a growth agenda to grappling with the impact of generative AI.
That’s why I’m most excited about our upcoming “CMO Thrive Guide,” which TwentyFirstCenturyBrand has created in collaboration with over thirty of the world’s leading CMOs, CEOs, and CFOs. It will be the definitive ‘Year 1’ playbook to help top marketing leaders succeed, with an insider perspective on the principles, tools, and rituals that power the most impactful CMOs.
Aside from that, I’m so energized to build strategies and brand identities with some of the most influential brands of our time, whether icons like Volvo and Macys, or startups like Source, an incredible company that will help people everywhere through its innovative tech that sustainably harvests water from the atmosphere.
Thank you for that. Let’s now shift to the central focus of our discussion. Can you share an experience where a unique or unconventional budget allocation led to unexpected success in a marketing campaign?
What if I told you that instead of focusing on “unconventional” and “unexpected,” which allude to a lucky shot, we believe in an approach prioritizing actions over ads — an approach that has proven to be a winning and repeatable playbook for our clients?
The typical way to look at marketing budgets is to focus solely on campaigns and performance marketing. While these are important elements, we believe that a truly holistic approach is the most impactful: combining both the functional and emotional connection between marketing and the product experience.
One great example is our work with Pinterest. After our work defined their purpose to be “the world’s inspiration company, bringing everyone the inspiration to create a life they love,” Pinterest realized that they had to behave differently, both in product and marketing.
If one of your key business goals is to drive greater frequency and engagement, how can you get people to return again and again? You can give them daily inspiration with a dedicated tab in the app, which will entice them to come back more frequently for valuable inspiration. Pinterest’s purpose continually guides their actions, whether skin tone search filters to make it more inclusive for people of color or their ‘Don’t Don’t Yourself’ campaign, which defies self-doubt. These initiatives have not only received great PR coverage, driving a disproportionate share of voice but have also boosted Pinterest’s overall business performance.
How do you balance investing in emerging marketing trends versus traditional, proven strategies in your budget decisions? Can you give us an example?
Overall, I’m a big proponent of the general principle of “70/20/10,” balancing proven tactics, innovative strategies, and experimental initiatives, respectively. This is one way to think about the calibration of the budgets — which can shift based on a brand’s industry and marketing conditions, maturity level, or even price point, and thus should never be considered set in stone.
The budget decision in itself will be heavily influenced by the strength of the brand in question. The stronger the brand, the more efficient and effective any initiative can become. At the community level, strong brands influence choice — they help you sustain price premiums and create loyalty beyond reason, driving growth and efficiency across every part of the marketing funnel. From a cultural standpoint, culturally resonant brands have a disproportionate share of voice, which drives not only the PR narrative but attracts higher quality partners at a lower cost.
Achieving these results will not only require a continued brand investment but also some time since you need to continue to invest across both long and short-term horizons. This is a difficult feat to accomplish, especially as CMOs face the increased pressure of operating on shorter tenures.
In what ways has data-driven decision-making influenced your approach to allocating marketing budgets, and can you provide an example of this in action?
Data is ultimately just one of the tools at a marketer’s disposal. Before deploying tactics and the broader marketing machinery, we always take a step back first, grounding our decision-making in the brand strategy. This strategy serves as the unifying North Star, ensuring that both the head and the heart work together seamlessly. No matter how rich your dataset may be, you still need a clear lens to guide you in interpreting it.
I’d like to share an example that illustrates how powerful brand can be when used together with data-driven decisions. After fully embracing our Brand Blueprint strategy framework, Facet, an ambitious financial planning innovator, immediately benefited from greater alignment in the management team’s decision-making process. This enhancement enabled them to pilot new product features that embody their human-centric, tech-enabled approach, like helping their clients envision multiple scenarios for their financial lives. By focusing all their attention and efforts on the right initiatives, Facet was able to eliminate costly promotions that did not align with their brand strategy, increasing their direct margin by 5%. Additionally, they increased their incremental margin dramatically through digital transformation opportunities identified by the brand work. These efforts paid off, growing their client base by 23% in 2022 and reducing their year-over-year customer acquisition cost by 30%.
How do you evaluate the ROI of different marketing channels and decide where to invest more or cut back?
While deciding where to invest is a key consideration in ROI conversations, the sole focus on performance factors and Cost Per Acquisition can sometimes cloud the conversation of where to invest more and cut back. At TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, we have had extensive conversations with CMO clients of various company sizes and found that the most holistic approach tracks both leading (short-term) and lagging (long-term) indicators across four dimensions of positive impact:
- Employee: employee motivation, fulfillment, and productivity.
- Customer: customers’ desire for and experience of the brand.
- Financial: financial performance, shareholder returns, and leverage in financial transactions.
- Cultural: visibility/credibility in culture and creating a positive impact on society.
While this Brand Effectiveness framework is not a catch-all solution, we have found it a very impactful tool to lead ongoing effectiveness conversations with our clients. Rather than make it proprietary, we decided to share it with the wider industry in a desire to empower all CMOs and company leaders in their efforts to strike the right balance between long-term brand building and near-term performance marketing.
Based on your experience and success, what are the “5 Things To Keep in Mind When Deciding Where to Assign Your Marketing Budget, and Why?”
- Keep your North Star in sight: Always be clear on what you are trying to achieve, and then ask will this investment help you get there?
- Define your success on two horizons: Consider both leading and lagging impact metrics to ensure that your decisions benefit both short- and long-term goals.
- Activate your allies: Envision your marketing budget as the sum of your own direct spend and the spend you can influence inside your organization, which can be a force multiplier for the impact you unlock.
- Review industry benchmarks, then throw them out the window: You have to understand your specific industry context, but if you just follow what everyone else does, you’re not going to win!
- Know where you are on your journey: The marketing mix will always change based on your situation, whether your brand is nascent or mature, whether you are introducing new products or defending against new competitors. Be self-aware and ask others to help check your blind spots as you finalize marketing spend allocations.
Could you discuss a challenging budget decision a client faced, how you navigated it, and the impact it had on their overall marketing strategy?
Great question. When TwentyFirstCenturyBrand worked with the fashion platform Depop, a key insight that emerged was that one of the primary reasons users were engaging with its platform was for entertainment. This prompted the brand to transform beyond its marketplace functionality and turn it into a place for discovery where people want to hang out. As the ‘home of fashion,’ Depop shifted its entire marketing approach to serve the shared mindset of its incredible community rather than exclusively targeting a purely Gen-Z demographic. Rather than focus just on increasing sign-ups and gross merchandise value (GMV), the new strategy was designed to motivate users to spend more time on the app, hang out longer and more frequently (and, consequently, to sell and buy more often). While changing your marketing strategy can be a challenging decision, it can also lead to rewarding outcomes when it pays off, as it did for Depop when it was acquired by eBay in 2021.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
At TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, we’ve always believed in leading through our values. Two of our company values are “Diversity in Harmony” and “Commercial Creativity,” which means we embrace all forms of diversity — from ethnicity to experience — to fuel innovation and growth. This has come to life not only through our client work but also through our white paper “The Business Case for an Inclusive, Iconic Brand” and our book “A Colorful View from the Top,” which celebrates business luminaries who are people of color.
As part of our advocacy for inclusion in the corporate world, we hope to address the equity gap that hinders our industry and clients from creating inclusive environments. This gap is systemic, leading to unequal access to resources and opportunities that disproportionately affect marginalized communities. Poverty, racism, and discrimination are cycles that can be broken through investment in young people and expanding their career possibilities. This is why we’ve decided to double down on it by championing inclusivity in the marketing & advertising industry — from the inside out and the outside in — by partnering with non-profit institutions like College Track, The Creative Ladder, and Brixton Finishing School.
We feel it’s both our right and our responsibility to make our industry more diverse, and we hope that more industry professionals will join us on this journey.
You can follow us on:
Colin Chow: LinkedIn
Website: TwentyFirstCenturyBrand
LinkedIn: TwentyFirstCenturyBrand
X (Twitter) @21CBrand
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
About The Interviewer: Kieran Powell is the EVP of Channel V Media a New York City Public Relations agency with a global network of agency partners in over 30 countries. Kieran has advised more than 150 companies in the Technology, B2B, Retail and Financial sectors. Prior to taking over business operations at Channel V Media, Kieran held roles at Merrill Lynch, PwC and Ernst & Young. Get in touch with Kieran to discuss how marketing and public relations can be leveraged to achieve concrete business goals.
CMO Perspectives: Colin Chow On Where to Assign Your Marketing Budget and Why was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.