Michael Mendenhall, Hewlett-Packard
Michael Mendenhall
Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer
Hewlett-Packard
Michael Mendenhall manages all aspects of Hewlett-Packard’s corporate marketing operations worldwide. His organization oversees brand and digital strategy; internal and external communications; global citizenship; design; customer intelligence, services and operations; and hp.com.
Prior to joining HP, Mr. Mendenhall spent 17 years at The Walt Disney Co. His last position there was executive vice president in charge of all marketing and communications for Walt Disney Parks and Resorts.
In this interview, he shares HP’s philosophy on integrated marketing and its approach to effective brand stewardship.
eMarketer: As a marketer, what are you looking at from the performance of HP’s online brand advertising campaigns?
Michael Mendenhall: Well, I would say we want to see measures of brand health and brand preference.
Brands are built on experiences, and those experiences are a culmination of all of the touchpoints that you have with a given consumer. The difficulty that people find in measuring experiences online is in determining what the true level of engagement is, whether something is purchased and how that engagement is or is not consistent with their brand.
eMarketer: What do you consider engagement?
Mr. Mendenhall: Engagement is the first contact of the multiple contacts that a customer has with your brand and its products and services. It’s the initial contact that is engagement, when they’ve reached out to you and you start to provide them with information and recognize them as individuals with specific needs. It’s how you address those needs that becomes very relevant.
Marketers are struggling to deal with so many pieces of information they’re receiving. Certainly, the measurement of a brand’s online value is now more relevant than ever to marketers’ success.
eMarketer: There’s a lot of data out there.
Mr. Mendenhall: There is a need to monitor the analytics and build sophisticated technology and applications that capture the digital footprint, online measurement and brand preference. We also believe that this becomes a major competitive differentiator for brands. The ability for marketers to see, monitor and analyze and pull insights becomes very important.
eMarketer: As a brand marketer, what are you looking for from post-campaign metrics?
Mr. Mendenhall: That’s very dependent on the strategy and objectives for the specific product launch, service or promotion, and those vary. It really depends on what I’m trying to accomplish.
I’ll give you an example. When we launched IdeaLab last year, a site promoting HP’s R&D [research and development] projects, we opened HP Labs to the world. The site is all about open innovation. What it did was show our understanding of the long tail within digital platforms like printing, software and books. It enabled people to participate, no matter where they are or what type of organization they are in.
So the metrics there would be that we’ve reduced the length of time it takes [for a business] to go to market with innovation. That’s a metric that you would look at and say, well, that’s a good metric and you want that as a technology company.
Another example: We wanted to help our customers solve their service issues more quickly, so we created the ability for people to help each other solve problems. We’ve had success in the metrics relevant to solving customers’ problems—we’re enabling them to help themselves through this kind of online, peer-to-peer experience. That’s a different type of brand effectiveness metric.
Marketers have clickstream and e-commerce data, but the difficult part is the qualitative part in between. I think the challenge for marketers is to begin to build technological capabilities that allow you to see the complete digital footprint that a given customer leaves when they engage with your brand. You need to be able to understand that behaviorally and/or contextually and address that consumer in a relevant way.
eMarketer: Would your work be aided by the existence of a common platform or standard for online brand measurement? It sounds like you don’t think so.
Mr. Mendenhall: For us, no. And in fact, with all the different venues in the digital world, it would be hard to find a digital standard, because, again, it depends on the strategy and objective—what you’re looking to accomplish.
Our goals revolve around forming a lifetime relationship with the customer. The process is definitely about real time behavioral and contextual targeting that engages the consumer in a very relevant conversation that’s two-way. When I say relevant, it’s about following secular trends behaviorally. For example, mobility is a secular trend—it means being always on, always connected.
In that context, you’re looking to tie in a strategy for the digital ecosystem that addresses all the consumer touchpoints. Another secular trend is personalization and customization. Another is e-commerce.
Marketers need the ability to pull strategic information out of the digital footprints that consumers are leaving. It becomes very, very important. It can help you determine the speed with which you go to market, which markets you penetrated, what your market share is, what consumers are doing, how they’re engaging with competitors, how they’re engaging with you and what they’re saying about you.
eMarketer: What role does listening to consumers’ conversations online and offline play?
Mr. Mendenhall: I view listening to customers as an important analytic. As you employ listening and other analytics, they start to drive your strategy at a macro level. Consumers either reinforce your strategy or correct it and give you opportunities for ideas, products and services and/or segments or geographies that you’re not even in. Word-of-mouth becomes very important as well.
eMarketer: When it comes time to make recommendations to your chairman, how do you quantify or package all of these insights, particularly from social media and word-of-mouth, in a way that illustrates ROI metrics?
Mr. Mendenhall: Well, in a digital landscape, there’s a footprint that’s more precise than what we’ve seen in conventional media. For instance, somebody wants to purchase a notebook PC and they’re looking at HP. That person may pull others in by saying, “Here’s the type of notebook I’m looking to buy. What do you think?” The dialogue starts and you can see it in the footprint.
We can now see what they’re doing. You can see how to engage them, convert them into a lead and manage them as a lead into e-commerce. Those become conversions that you can then say to a chairman, “Look at the level of engagement and response that we’ve had to our brand.” And it’s more exact.
Then you think about how many people come through your front door. How many people come into your portal? How many of those people stay? How long do they stay? Where do they go? What do they do? If you have a good CRM [customer relationship management] capability that pulls those analytics, and you look at the behavioral and contextual footprints, it all becomes incredibly valuable to a marketer. These kinds of analytics become a competitive differentiator.
eMarketer: Having a good analytics capability makes a difference.
Mr. Mendenhall: Yes, and technology. Many marketers have disparate databases that don’t speak to each other, so they don’t have a 360-degree view of a customer. There may be a bit of information in this database and a bit in that one. As you think about Fortune 500 companies that are selling across a portfolio and selling brand experiences, it becomes very hard to sell based on a portfolio approach without appropriate analytics.
eMarketer: To what extent can you now integrate the measurement of search and display advertising today and give the proper weight to each of those?
Mr. Mendenhall: I think that both of them are critical success metrics for companies, especially HP. Without giving a lot of detail, you want to be able to tie these key metrics back to sales, back to the experience, purchase funnel and channel, if you have channel partners. That becomes incredibly important.
Again, where most marketers struggle is they do not have the information technology capability and/or management to do that. You need a sophisticated CRM platform that allows you to identify somebody coming through search or display, and gets them to opt in and [allows you to] start to manage them.
If you don’t have that, at some point, within that engagement funnel and then the purchase funnel, the customer is lost. Then the next time they come back in, you have to begin that process all over. That becomes incredibly frustrating for a customer. Generally speaking, most people will visit, on average, three times before they make a purchase. If you can’t recognize them and engage them in a relevant way, that’s a problem.
