Interview with Jerome Hiquet, Tough Mudder

Meet the Chief Marketing Officer of Tough Mudder Inc, the military-style obstacle-course events which have just been shortlisted in our 20 Brave Brands of The Year.

As CMO, Hiquet is responsible for overseeing Sales, Marketing & Product Innovation Strategies globally. 

In just three years Hiquet has increased the Media investment Performance by 50%, implemented the 1st Brand Campaign for Tough Mudder and launched a new Corporate Sales Program, generating a 7-figure in sales since the 1st year.

Like Tough Mudder which encourages pushing yourself to the limit, it's clear that its CMO has been pushing his own boundaries, stepping out of his comfort zone and taking brave risks. 

So we talk to Hiquet - who is also our Society's New York Board Member - to find out how marketers can be braver.

What’s your golden rule?

“Ideation without execution is hallucination”. To get things done is the most difficult things and need a lot of focus and discipline.

What is your most hated business expression?

CPM. I thought for a while that CPM was the most overrated KPI and it’s great to see that things are starting to change. We are in a world where Customer engagement is becoming a priority and our KPIs have to evolve to reflect this change.

What’s your favourite word?

GRIT.

Having a strong sense of grit, a term I like as it describes the combination between passion and perseverance, is critical for executives in every organization.  I like its acronym: Guts, Resilience, Initiative, and Tenacity.

How can marketers be braver?

Marketers must consider themselves as transformational leaders for the entire organization; they must steward the brand across all customer touch points and interactions, keeping the customer at the core of every marketing strategy. From my perspective, brave marketers can be identified around few dimensions, such as:

• Purpose driven leaders who are passionate and believe in their vision.
• Risk takers.
• Always-on mindset towards innovation.

What’s the biggest risk you’ve taken in your career?

My choice to join Tough Mudder back in 2014 was a significant career change for me. My experience was always working with large corporations, like Club Med for example - a 60-year-old global corporation. At that point in my career, what was very important for me was that I wanted to be part of a story. Tough Mudder was and still is a unique story and very much a purpose-driven organization.

Making the decision to be part of that story while the company was and still is at a very early stage was a unique opportunity for me. It has certainly not always been the easiest of marketing positions I’ve held but it’s an opportunity that I’m grateful for and proud to embrace the challenges of. I remember that as part of my final interview for the role of CMO, I was invited to run a 12-mile Tough Mudder event with Tough Mudder’s Founder and CEO, Will Dean. During almost five hours in the mountains of Colorado, we discussed marketing strategy while conquering mud, dozens of obstacles, steep hills and ice-cold water.  It was the longest, toughest and probably one of the most unique interviews ever, but without a doubt such a genuine and thrilling experience that it convinced me to make the decision to join the team; I have been lucky to be part of all we have accomplished since.

 

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Sep 23, 2017 at 8:00am PDT

What does bold marketing leadership mean to you?

In today’s ever-changing marketing landscape, bold marketing leadership is a mindset that marketers across every discipline need to adapt to. More than ever, the role of marketing means connecting a brand with the market in a way that benefits both the customer and company in an authentic way. Marketing executives must consider themselves as transformational leaders for the entire organization; they must steward the brand across all customer touch points and interactions, keeping the customer at the core of every marketing strategy. From my perspective, as Tough Mudder’s Chief Marketing Officer, bold marketing leadership can be identified around few dimensions, such as:

I believe in purpose-driven leaders who are passionate and believe in their vision:

• Having a strong sense of grit, a term I like as it describes the combination between passion and perseverance, is critical for executives in every organization.

Bold leaders must be risk takers:

• They must be able to acknowledge the value of failure, move at a faster pace and be nimble. As Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos famously said, “It’s always Day One.” I believe Bezos is 100% right.  The pursuit of success inevitably involves taking risks and being innovative.

Bold leadership means having an always-on mindset towards innovation:

• I have always liked the saying, “in business, only the paranoid survive.”
• While I strongly believe you should take the time to reflect and enjoy the journey as a leader, in a world where consumer attention and brand loyalty is often on the decline, an always-on outlook is critical in order to embrace change and ignite innovation within your organization.

What skills will the CMOs of the future need?

As CMO of Tough Mudder, I have been fortunate to play a key role in disrupting the company’s marketing strategy as well as its overall brand positioning, ultimately reshaping the organization from an “event-first company” to a leading active lifestyle brand and media company. It has been an incredible journey and a unique experience to grow and understand better what it means to be a 21^st century CMO.

First and foremost I’ve learned that CMOs must be ‘Chief Storytellers’ as much as they are marketers. Shaping your company’s narrative across all points of the marketing funnel is key in terms of brand loyalty, reaching new customers and customer retention. From customer service to social media, content marketing and public relations, the ability to authentically tell a story about your brand and customers is the key factor to differentiate your organization from others.

1. As Dan Pallotta wrote in his recent post for the Harvard Business Review, “Brand is everything, and everything is brand.” What he means is brands are more than their logo. It’s the story you tell and the people you leverage to create a narrative. It’s the way you ignite your customers and the communication tools used to tell the story.
2. As CMOs it is important to be comfortable in uncertain, complex and ambiguous environments. Whether you have experience in large corporations or agencies, you must also be able to understand and embrace the “entrepreneurial mindset.”
3. CMOs should continue to act as global decision makers and executives more than just marketers. We are ultimately accountable for sales impact and bottom line results, so you need to be results-oriented and focus on outcomes more than input. I believe that a CMO of tomorrow will have to be CMO but also consider themselves as CRO, CTO, CFO and even Chief of Staff/Special Advisor to the CEO. CMOs have the opportunity to touch and change an entire organization, so it’s important to adopt a mindset of all leaders within the company.
4. CMOs must advocate and become lobbyists for our entire industry, not only our organization. Recent studies around brand safety in digital advertising and the increasing power or impact that data has on decision-marking puts more responsibilities on CMOs to speak up and become bullish about using data to make informed decisions on your overall strategy, not only for your company but among the industry your company sits in.
5. Organizations should evolve from a model with hierarchy and hierarchical decision-marking to a structure with an agile network empowered by team leaders and fueled by collaboration and knowledge sharing. For this type of model to be employed, CMOs must also act as strong Chief Talent Officers. We must lead by orchestration and not simply be direction only. The need for expertise across all marketing channels will drastically grow and be in larger demand for CMOs, so we must remain focused on and be experts on innovation and customer impact while choosing the right talent who can protect and propel our purpose-driven brand.

Which leader do you admire most and why?

Walt Disney was a unique leader for many reasons. What most stands out most for me was his ability to believe and inspire others to believe in his vision and build a purpose-driven organization through storytelling and experiential marketing.

On a very different end of the spectrum, I’m impressed and amazed by what Jeff Bezos is building with Amazon. He constantly chooses to prioritize investment vs. short-term profitability to continue to innovate in very different activities and keep Amazon on the forefront of innovation and revolutionizing what it means to be an e-commerce company. His focus on Data-Driven Marketing to develop Customer Lifetime Value and Loyalty and his obsession to keep a nimble and disruptive mindset in Amazon is incredible and inspiring to me.

What excites you most about the Society?

The global footprint from the Society is unique and it helps to keep a global perspective in all the discussions that I have seen during their panels, dinners. I also like the fact that “bold Marketing” is at the core of the Marketing Society DNA. In such a complex and ambiguous environments, we need to be able to have genuine, authentic and controversial discussions; and the Society is bringing that around the world for many years…and now in NYC !

Tell us a secret?

I’m French but I don’t like cheese and wine. Shame on me!...:)

Read more about the other brands shortlisted as Brave Brand of The Year and how you can vote for the winner.