Transcript

Bennie F Johnson 

Hello, and thank you for joining us for this special episode of AMA’s Marketing And. I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson. In our episodes, we explore life through the lens of marketing, delving into conversations with individuals that flourish at this intersection of marketing and the unexpected. We’ll introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know.

Through our thought -provoking conversations, we unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. Today, my guest is John Fisher. John is a senior instructor of marketing at the Carroll School of Management, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in brand management at Boston College. But prior to his time at Boston College, John spent 34 years in the sporting goods industry with Saucony serving as its CEO for 15 years. After Saucony merged with Stride Rite Corporation, Fisher served as a consultant to the CEO. And it’s during his industry tenure that he also held several, a series of advertising, marketing, strategic business development, branding, and sales position, including roles as leading VP of sales and marketing for many of the leading sports organizations.

Fisher currently is the owner and principal of a Boston based consultancy firm, Jazz Advisors, which specializes in brand development, brand identity, brand maintenance, rehabilitation, and enhancement. I’d like to welcome to our podcast today, John Fisher. Good, sir. Thank you.

John Fisher 

Thank you. Thank you, Bennie, and it’s a pleasure to be here, certainly.

Bennie 

It’s it’s really a treat today to have this conversation with you in and to start off at this moment. Brand marketing has been such a part in a hallmark of your career and your teaching practice I’d really love to take you back to the beginning. What brought you into brand management? What kind of peaks your curiosity?

John 

Well, I began the sort of athletic shoe wars, if you can call them that, as a small, working for a small brand in a big brand world. And as a small brand, it’s quite difficult to wake up every day and have a Nike or an Adidas on your shoulders and everything they do impacts you but…

Bennie

Right? Okay?

John 

How does a small brand even step into the arena in the context of this larger brand? And I learned very, very quickly that it was nimbleness, it was marketing execution of creative techniques to get to the same place, and all of it had to be done on a vastly reduced economic budget. It was more a creative marketing effort than a spending marketing effort.

Bennie 

Right, right. When you think about that, it’s great. Your story gives great advice for many people today dealing with startup brands or smaller brands and categories that, you know, are days where we see them making a meaningful difference.

John 

Yes.

Yes, a small brand today is much more normalized in the sense that many, many, not only graduate students from universities, but individuals who for one reason or the other have decided that they’re training at Procter & Gamble or they’re training at Unilever or they’re training in these large firms has provided them the basis with which, let me try it myself. And I think there’s more.

In today’s world, there’s more of a risk -taking environment where students or professionals will take that risk because the reward is very high. It’s always been high, but the environment of taking a risk is much more open to many, many, many more people.

Bennie 

You know, many of us, when we think about brands, I’m just hearing you just start your story off with being at Saucony and going up against the kind of large brands in there. How did you find your kind of brand center and heart in that moment? Knowing that you’re kind of outspent.

John 

Well, to be honest with you, 100% honest, our brand space actually found us because our firm originally had approximately 12 or 13 categories of athletic footwear that it designed, built, inventoried, sold, and then marketed. But we found in the late 80s,

Bennie

Nice.

John 

that that wasn’t gonna succeed any longer because of the strength of these larger brands. And these larger brands actually began to winnow down the effectiveness of some of the categories of our footwear, such as professional football, baseball, soccer, cleated shoes. We sold those products. Nike gave away those products. And in a sense,

Bennie 

Mm -hmm. Hmm

John 

The big brands gave away much of the business of my company. So fortunately we were involved in the then sport of jogging, which had a following back in the late seventies and early eighties. But there was a magazine, not really a magazine, it was a publication, a mimeographed publication that was stapled in the middle called runner’s world. You may remember that it still exists today.

Bennie 

Right. Right. Yes.

John 

And in 9th, I may have the year wrong, but 1980, 81, 79, something like that. They did a survey of the running shoe brands in terms of their readership and what they recommended to their readership. And Saucony entered that competition, if you will, and didn’t really think much of it. But three months later, outcomes this published document. I don’t even call it a magazine at the time.

Bennie

Right. You’re right, right.

John 

That named the women’s Saucony Dove running shoe, the number one running shoe for women in the country. And when I tell you overnight, literally overnight, people who couldn’t pronounce our name, Saucony, Saucony, never heard of it, the orders started coming in at a scale that we totally were not prepared for, pleasantly shocked.

Bennie 

Right, right.

John 

And we over time quickly converted our available manufacturer because we manufactured footwear in the United States. Whereas most of the competition either was manufacturing in Europe or in Asia at that time. And so this running momentum began to build and all of a sudden Saucony, the child, the small part of our company began to gobble up the parent and we became niche focused and really by eighty five or six the ship had sailed we were a running shoe company.

Bennie 

At that time, working in marketing, did you ever imagine the impact that the running industry would have today?

John 

No, because there were a couple of things happening that boosted the running impact. And one was that the American sort of mentality toward health and wellness had just begun to develop. And patients and doctors and consumers and athletes found this sport called jogging because it was good for you.

Bennie 

Mm -hmm.

John 

But it almost operated in a vacuum. It had no competition because Bennie, you and I can go out for a run in a half an hour by throwing on a pair of sneakers and putting on a t -shirt and a pair of shorts. We don’t need a basketball court. We don’t need golf clubs. We don’t need a partner for tennis. It was a sport in and of itself that provided direct health benefit and it exploded to the point that you’d go to a cocktail party. And one of the discussions would be, what kind of running shoes are in your closet? What race are you running? Are you going to do the Turkey Trot in Boston? Are you going to do it in Washington, DC? How do you train for a marathon? And it just began to, there was no gravity to pull it back. So it exploded. And some of the big brands, and here’s where a small brand does have an advantage, the big brands were so large, they couldn’t nimbly react to it and sock any.

As I say, it found us, but we were able to react quickly to it. And that launched really the modern day success of the brand.

Bennie 

Right. And there are ways in which you talk about being small and nimble, that you are really able to show up authentically and build these communities, right? Because you’re a runner’s brand. Yeah.

John 

Yes, yes, yes. Well, often, yes, authenticity, perhaps in any product market focus is one of the key elements of success. You can, you know, the old expression, you can fool some of the people all the time, but it’s really hard to fool all the people all the time. So you need to have that authentic commitment to the, in this case, sport. And in turn, the commitment given back to our brand over decades now, even though that I’m no longer involved with it, is still quite strong. There are people who are Saucony runners. They may have Nike sneakers or they play basketball in a Ditas, but when it comes to running, they are Saucony people. Pretty powerful.

Bennie 

So it’s incredibly powerful. Also in your journey, what I find really intriguing, and we talk about this a lot, is the elevation of marketing leaders to the CEO suite. And I’d love to get your input, because you did this before this became a trend, kind of growing up through marketing in the space. And talking about that, you spent 15 years as CEO. What was the first lesson?

John 

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Bennie

That you learned and what was the last lesson that you learned?

John 

Well, let me start with the last lesson because it bridges my teaching career at Boston College. If you were a day one student of mine next fall, in the introductory four or five slides that I would have as a beginning of the lecture, there would be a slide that makes a statement that you just referenced.

Bennie 

Okay. Perfect.

John 

And that statement is in today’s world, in my opinion, the power job, the job, the title you should seek is not CEO, but CMO, because the CMO really has the ability, the keys to the engine, the foot on the throttle, so to speak. And while CEO is a great title and you ride around in a private jet or use a gold toilet or you play golf in a pro-amp,

If you really want to make a concrete contribution to your own particular skill set, the position to obtain or attain is CMO, Chief Marketing Officer. That to me is where I tell my students. And of course, they look a little aghast at me and they say, is he telling the truth? I am telling the truth. CMO is to me the most important position within an organization.

Bennie 

Well, you know, I’m biased and couldn’t agree more. We talk about the skills that we develop, the insight and foresight and the ability to be agile in this new competitive and dynamic world that we’re in. So what was your first learning when you put down your core marketing responsibilities, which we never really did. We always are a space in there. But when you added the responsibility being CEO.

John

100%. Well, I would tell you that once again, defaulting to my teaching career, I’ve learned the old axiom. If I knew then what I know now, I might’ve done it differently. But back when I became responsible for the organization’s fiscal and marketing and the whole package that goes with the CEO, I was conflicted then because…

Bennie

Right.

John 

For a small brand, the line between marketing and sales became somewhat blurred. Now I teach today, interestingly enough, that if you see a job posting and it says, assistant director of marketing and sales, I tell students don’t even apply to that job because the company doesn’t realize there’s a defined strategic difference between the field of marketing and the field of sales. Marketing’s for tomorrow. You’re building a brand for tomorrow. Your success depends on something that will happen in the future. And sales, which are much more tactical, are here now. And while a CEO opens the Wall Street Journal and looks at his or her stock price on a daily basis, a CMO is investing in the future and trying to convince the CEO…don’t worry, we’re gonna enhance our value in the future. And the CEO turns around and says, I won’t be here in the future if I don’t enhance our value today. So, you know, back in, I was the former group, I was always conflicted between sales and marketing, but today I would, I would, I, and I do, in a teaching context, speak to the importance of separating the two. They’re both cousins of one another.

Bennie 

Right.

John 

And they feed off of one another, but one is strategic and one is tactical.

Bennie 

A really interesting point. I’m going to lean into this notion of investing in the future as a transition point for you leave the kind of full -time corporate space as CEO and you migrate into kind of this beautiful teaching career. We’re going to talk about what really drew you into ultimately now you’re at BC at Boston College. What drew you into teaching at that point?

John 

Well, again, going way, way back, when I received my master’s in business from Boston College in the early 70s, 1972, I believe, the country was in the, as we remember, was in the Vietnam War, post -Vietnam War era, and the selective service system would extend deferments to… students and or teachers. So I got an opportunity to teach at the college level, at the junior college level, right after receiving my MBA. So for two years, I taught economics at a junior college in Boston. During that time, the draft selective service went to a lottery system and I was no longer by way of the lottery draft eligible. But I

Bennie 

Mm -mm. Mm -hmm.

John 

But I had taken this position and I spent a couple years doing it. And I remember at the end of the second year, I was sitting with the dean of the school and reviewing my progress and they gave me a raise, which was kind of them. But the amount of money that I was being paid then, even in 1972 dollars, really wouldn’t get very far. So I began looking for employment inside the world of…

Bennie

All right.

John 

Using my skills that I thought I had and it turned out to be athletic footwear.

Bennie 

So it’s going back to athletic footwear and thinking about entering the market at that time place. It’s a completely new world now. When you think about athletic, we were talking about this sense of patience and urgency and the ability to, you know, customize our shoe fashion lifestyle experience now. Was that something that you imagined that would ever happen to the point where the customer would be a co -creator?

John 

Yes.

Absolutely, unequivocally not. You know, back, there’s been a big change in all industry, but you know, athletic footwear somehow became almost a pathway of celebrity status. You know, I credit Nike for a lot of it. I credit their partnership with Michael Jordan for a lot of it. There have been

John

People before Michael Jordan and after Michael Jordan, but I arguably, I think he was the sort of the pivotal person that made sneakers more than just foot coverings. And it wasn’t enough to make a high quality, fair priced and valued product that had durability and availability. You now had to put some sort of marketing pizzazz behind it.

To make it stand out. And I attended a breakfast in the late 70s, early 80s, must have been early 80s, as part of the National Sporting Good Association annual show. And their keynote speaker was a man named Phil Knight, who had at that time sort of, I would say he was well known, but he wasn’t universally known. And I actually went to this breakfast along with I’m estimating three or 4 ,000 other members of the athletic sporting goods industry. And he steps up on the dais and he said, he thanked everybody and he’s looking around and he said, I see many of my competitors here and thank you for coming. And I suspect some of you want to hear how Nike has become so successful in the shoe business. And then he pauses and everybody’s sort of waiting to hear, hanging on his next words. And he said, well, I’m gonna tell you how we have become successful. And he pauses again. And the prolonged pause again takes everybody’s attention level higher. And he says, well, here’s the secret. We’re not in the shoe business. We’re in the entertainment business. And there was, including myself, a gasp, my gosh, he’s right.

Bennie 

Right.

John 

And that was, I think for me, probably the seminal moment when I said building a good mousetrap just isn’t enough anymore. And so marketing became almost the entry ticket to success in athletic footwear and athletic apparel and sport and goods products in general. It’s part of the entertainment element that delivers the pizzazz that spurns the sales that creates the loyalty and the following.

Bennie 

Right. You know, when you think about it, marketing has the ability to propel brands in that space. That’s that stratosphere that’s above the actual product delivery or service that gets into these higher and deeper connections. You know, it’s to go to the product, though, because you said something earlier and we’re going to come back to the brand space in there. But something that you noted and you noted with great pride when you talked about your work at Saucony was the fact that this is an American built

John 

Yeah. Right.

Bennie 

Product, an American built company that was going in. And you mentioned earlier, you told me a story about meeting a certain president who was a runner. Take us through that kind of experience in there, where you were able to kind of advocate for not just the power of the industry, but the American product that was being built.

John 

Sure. As you properly stated, we, we, Saucony had been making, literally making shoes in the United States since 1906. There were other footwear companies that converse for one, New Balance for another, that had also could lay claim to the, to the American manufacturing process as part of their their sales and marketing efforts. We were made in America product. And then with the onslaught of Adidas in the late 60s and early 70s, followed by Puma and other European brands, there was sort of a second geography of manufacturer. And then shortly thereafter came the, really Nike was the first of them.

ASICs and Nike were the first of the Asian manufacturers to gain some credibility. There had always been low -cost providers of athletic footwear, but no one at the quality end had been sourced in Asia. But as that quickly, quickly began to take more and more market share, the positioning of Made in America was under even more stress, not only economically, but technological innovations were being dispersed throughout the world and one of the things that the Asian marketplace had was tons of investment labor because it was government backed and tons of persons to manufacture these products. So becoming Made in America became a marketing stalwart of our brand and in the other brands and we tried to…use the flag as much as we possibly could. But the inevitability was real. And there was an opportunity that I had to actually meet an individual who was involved, highly involved with the reelection of President Clinton back in the 90s. And he and I were talking and I said to him, you know, you’re our president.

Is about to enter one of the most significant races of his life. And I know that he’s a runner, because I’ve seen him run photographs of him running constantly. And I think it would be in his best interest as he appeals to the American voters to wear an American -made running shoe. And there are a number of companies that he can choose from, but regardless of which ones he chooses, I suggest strongly that that’s what he does in this friend of mine and President Clinton’s sort of agreed and said, you know, that’s a good point. I remember him writing it down in his notebook that he kept in his inside suit jacket pocket. And then a couple of weeks later, I received a phone call introducing themselves from the president’s social secretary’s office, which I thought was a joke, a prank. And during that conversation, it became…

Bennie 

Right. you

Yeah, right.

John 

I was convinced that this was legit and that President Clinton had heard my comment through the intermediary and agreed. And if I would like to come down to Washington, DC to attend a small dinner and present him with a pair of running shoes, that would be something that he would appreciate and will absolutely continue his running interests in an American shoe. So the net net net is that I did that and it was a tremendously somewhat nervous but nevertheless gratifying experience. And I actually got to my 15 seconds of fame if you will. I got on the platform, had a photograph, was able to present these shoes to the President of the United States. And of course I remember saying to him, he said to me, I understand you don’t like

Bennie 

Right.

John 

The shoes I’m running in presently. And I said to him, Mr. President, who am I to tell you what to do? But on behalf of the 175 people who worked on these shoes up in Bangor, Maine, we would pride, give them to you and hope that they meet your athletic needs. And he was very gracious. And I did then subsequently see a picture of him running with his security people in those shoes. And they were plastered all over our factory up in Bangor.

Bennie 

Wow, which is, you know, it’s great story, wonderful story. And what I love also about it is the reflective of the art, right? 30 years ago, you had to be the president to get custom shoes. Today, you just have to have an ID account and email access. That so many of our brands have moved into this space of individual customization in which you become a co -creator in the work in shoes.

John 

Great story. That’s correct.

Yeah. And one of the interesting things, Bennie, is that I’m sure you know, is that the idea of a custom product, or in this case, shoes, perhaps might have envisioned three weeks, six weeks, nine weeks from ordering to receipt. Now you basically do it at your laptop and within a matter of as short as 10 days, you can have that delivery with

Bennie 

When

John Fisher 

Bennie Johnson embroidered on that shoe and it’s yours because that’s the way you designed it.

Bennie

Yes, I’m guilty of that. We’ve got a couple boxes here in that same space. So when we think about that, kind of this newer world, if you will, that we’re in marketing, where marketing is even more empowered, you know, how do you encourage your students to take hold of this dynamic new world?

John

There you go.

Well, there are two pathways and I actually encourage both of them. So I’m gonna speak to both of them and you or your listeners may have come to the conclusion, well, you can’t have it both ways, but I’m gonna tell you that you can. Number one, I think while marketing is a dynamic art, if you will, or dynamic science, it’s built on some foundational principles that have decades of trial in practice and building a strong core identity and making sure that the identity of your brand does not have any conflicting extended identities. This has been around for decades of study and teaching. And then you build a value proposition that balances the costs versus the benefits, not just price, but all of the…ancillary costs the frustrations the waiting time the sitting in a car dealer why they fix the rattle That’s all part of the cost so your your customer value proposition always needs to be balanced because if it isn’t You’re you’re you’re gonna find yourself losing Some of the equity that your brand is built and then it’s important that a brand develops its own personality much like human beings we all have personalities and and brands that develop a personality actually can extend that personality to a consumer group to the extent that some people are gonna like that personality and others will not. And we talked earlier this morning, one of Saucony’s strengths has become that they have all, they built this two -way relationship with its customers so that yes, you might have.

You might wear Nike basketball shoes or tennis shoes, or you might have an Adidas pair of casual sneakers to walk around, but when those same people choose to run, their friend, the brand that speaks to them, the personality that they like the best is Saucony. So those elements of traditional marketing understanding have been around for a long time, and they can’t be short changed even in today’s world. But now we flash forward.

To today’s world and the rapidity and the almost instantaneous success that a brand can gain through appropriate, and I almost want to call it guerrilla marketing technique, influencer marketing technique, being at the right place at the right time is creating sort of an accelerator and it leads students to perhaps not understand and embrace the necessity to do both the traditional, understand and be able to speak to the traditional elements of marketing and then overlay them with some of the opportunities that are much quicker, more incendiary in a positive sense in today’s marketplace. And my caution to students is don’t allow the sizzle to take…the place of the actual steak itself. You have to put the steak in the frying pan or in the grill pan or on the grill in the barbecue before that sizzle will ever happen. Now, you can enhance that sizzle by techniques that we as marketers didn’t have in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s. And they’re available. Way back when, we all know the Seinfeld show. Jerry Seinfeld’s production company sold…the opportunity to put shoes on all the characters feet and Jerry Seinfeld wore Nike and Nike paid for that.

That was something that was very successful for them and they understood how product placement could work. Today, if you can find the right influencer and that influencer can use your product and use social media to project that product and perhaps even do so in a non -paid manner, the ignition of that particular product or brand is unbelievable. So those are the differences.

John 

But you almost have to integrate, we’ve heard this terminology, integrated marketing communications. What integrated marketing communications really means, taking the value of the old, applying the accelerant of the new, and you get a synergistic effect. And students today, I feel, wanna lean more on the new, and they’re…

Their concept is, well, the old, we don’t need the old anymore. Yes, you do. Because if a brand is not built with a strong identity, CVP and personality as foundation stones, you can’t accelerate it through any type of new media that’s opportunistic to the marketplace.

Bennie 

But, you know, I love the conversation about it because it is that tension between what may be traditional or older approaches with kind of new opportunities and space in there. And really, you know, I see it as the opportunity that some of the new things we’re doing were things that were beyond our technical reach, but not our imaginative reach, right? Now you have a space where as you go into these new dynamic areas,

John 

There you go.

Bennie

There’s still a cause for how do we prove this worked? How do we model? How do we make sure that we have a story to tell to our other business components that come in there that allows us to kind of bridge the what I like to always refer to as this marketing as art, science, and then magic.

John 

That’s correct. I tell my students, and I must use this phrase so many times that they actually become almost bored by it, but a strong brand strives to make a connection with its consumers, makes sense, but then must communicate a distinct advantage. And if you look at brands today and you say, or, especially advertising, you can use the Super Bowl as an example. The Super Bowl is a tremendously effective way for a brand to make a communication, to expose the brand to an individual or group of individuals. But that’s only half the battle. If you can’t communicate a distinct advantage in that connection, you’ve wasted your $9 million or whatever the network is charging for 30, 30 second commercials. So strong brands make the connection. Yup. Got it. But then they have to communicate a distinct advantage.

And the technique of communicating that’s a distinct advantage is enhanced by all the opportunities that exist today. And digital has really provided a lot of that opportunity. And if you’re, if you’re, if you want to approach from the other way around data analytics, which was something, Benny, back when I was at Saucony, our data analytics, was how many products did we sell in a given day? That was data analytics. Gee, we had a good day or a good week because we sold through our pro forma budget by 8%. That was data. Today, there’s industry built on data analytics.

Bennie 

Right. And it’s interesting when you were doing that, you probably had very little idea as to why. You know, you knew, you knew as a. Right.

John 

Sure, absolutely. Because we were tactically driven. We were tactically driven. Today you need to be strategically driven and strategic planning has in today’s world has part of its foundation or linkage to the future in data understanding and impacting the results of data analytics.

Bennie 

It’s so true. And in our conversation, it’s clear. If you’re doing strategic marketing well, it can be a great equalizer for you as a small brand. If you’re doing strategic marketing well, it’s a great accelerator for you of a brand of any type of space. And if you’re doing strategic marketing well, it is what provides that foundation for your business.

John 

Right. Yeah.

Right, and then flip it the other way around. If you’re not doing strategic marketing well, the slope of success has just become almost vertical. That’s why I preach to my students, and I wish I knew this back when I was CEO, that the key to success is marketing -driven. It’s not sales -driven. It’s strategic ability to impact your future path of success, not your current one.

Bennie 

Mm -hmm. Right. Wow.

Wow. John, I think I can’t believe our time has come to an end, but that’s a great way to end our conversation. Thank you for being a part of this and thank you all for listening and being a part of this special episode of AMA’s Marketing And. Once again, I’m your host, Bennie F. Johnson, AMA CEO. Thank you, John, for being here. You can learn more about John’s career and engage with his courses at Boston College.

John 

Well, I’ve enjoyed it.

Bennie 

Just tremendous honor to have you here, Good Sir, and to impart your wisdom on our growing and dynamic community of marketers. Thank you.

John 

Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it.