Quote of the Day

With virtual events, you can watch your favorite artist with your friends at home and you can have a front row experience. You can buy a more expensive package and get to ask questions after the show or before the show. You can also create that exclusive experience by maybe voting for the next act or the next song. So I see this happening especially for maybe the up and coming artists. The top artists have the way that they do things, but the up and coming artists,it is much harder for them to do a tour. It is harder for them to fill venues, it is harder for them to have fans all over the US and they may not have critical mass, so these virtual events can be huge for them.

Transparency, inclusivity, and diversity is core to Ulta’s mission, so when we moved into that time of civil unrest and social injustice, it made a lot of sense to really make sure that our mission was clear to our guests and consumers. We really needed to understand fundamentally the role our brand plays in that narrative and the specific positions that our consumers expect from us. A lot of that was represented through the work we’ve been doing with our influencer network and the Ulta Beauty collective in celebrating our black creators, uplifting and celebrating the black brands we have, and also acknowledging the work we have in front of us in terms of where we need to go and how we need to continue those partnerships.

My advice for other females in marketing is to ask a lot of questions, but don’t question yourself. In the time it might take you to raise your hand, the man next to you is already raising his hand, so you need to go for it. If you’re not exactly sure how to do something but you want to do it, say yes, and figure it out afterwards. It’s the passion that matters. Jump at the chance, find the right mentors and keep pushing forward.

When we talk about Danone’s mission, which is one planet, one health, all of our brands are committed to delivering that vision, but of course in a way that is authentic to that individual brand and its brand purpose. We know that today more and more consumers care about brand purpose. They want to buy brands and believe in brands that share their values. We are living in this value-driven world, so it is more important than ever that we are building brands that have a purpose in the world.

Almost every company is shifting towards giving employees the choice of where to work and when. People aren’t going to come to the office five days a week anymore and there's going to be less and less willingness from employees to sit in the same chair for ten hours a day. The core themes here are more employee empowerment and a more distributed way of working. Instead of having a one-size-fits-all workplace, you’ll see more diversity in spaces and the ability for employees to move throughout.

In the next ten years, the Ford Motor Company workforce will turn at a rate of 60%, which means we’ll have a younger, more nimble workforce and a new set of values to account for - to champion. We have five generations working together under one roof, so we come at this with a shared value proposition. We need to really think about what our shared values are. What we’re learning so far on the outside of our think tank is that things such as wellness, these are simple things we need to champion. In a post-COVID world, we’re learning new non-negotiables, like systemic resilience and we’re going to fight for that. We’re generating this list of new values that we believe will be present in any context - retail, community building, workforce - wherever for any generation.

Companies have been so focused on communicating their brand value and their value proposition to their consumers that there has been some neglect on the employee side. Even if you segment workers and employees beyond the segment of generations but by where they’re actually at in their career and the options they're considering, the brand of the employer becomes really important. Relating to shared values, it's really an opportunity for companies to stand for something and really talk about what those values are - not to make everyone carbon copies of one another but to be on the same page on how we make decisions.

During quarantine I think it was clear that this is a nation that was starving for sports. People were watching NBA players play Xbox, so by the time when fall came around and football season was approaching, there was a lot of anticipation built up for really wanting to see that all. While there's still a lot of uncertainty, there is one thing that was certain: people are going to be watching from home. Everyone was talking about the stadiums, but guess what, over 90% of football fans watch from their homes anyhow.

Right now, it’s all about the speed to market. Things happen in real time at the restaurant level, so we're basically getting feedback at the restaurant level and we don’t have the option to wait 2-3 days to react. We need to react on the spot - pull promotions out of the store or introduce something new to the store, or ship merchandise because a product is not selling as well as we would like it to be selling. There is a big shift in that need for flexibility, agility and speed to market.

It’s so easy to just cast multicultural faces in your advertising. That has to be just the beginning. When you’re impacting communities and lives through your advertising, that’s when you make a difference. When you start to employ people behind the camera that reflect that diversity on screen, that’s when brands really make a short-term and a long-term difference and that’s what we’re working to do at Cadillac.