Leadership Lessons from AT&T and e.l.f. Beauty | Kellogg School of Management Marketing Leadership Summit

Speaker A: Before we dive into today's episode, we would very much appreciate a moment from you to make sure you're subscribed to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, along with optioning to auto download the episodes. It really is the best way to never miss an episode. Along with supporting the show and the amazing team that helps me bring it to you. And while you're there, leave us a rating or review. It only takes a minute and helps more people find the show and helps us learn. And of course share this episode with a friend or colleague who might enjoy it. We wouldn't be here six years later and still going so strong without you all our community. So thank you for being part of it. Now onto the show. I spent years at Procter and Gamble trying to answer that question. We had the creative, we had the reach, we had campaigns that genuinely stopped people. And then we watched that value quietly disappear somewhere between the moment of engagement and and the proof of a business result. That gap between attention and action is where most media budgets go to die, and most digital media platforms have been content to live inside it, just a little upstream from accountability. Infilion is the company that decided to close it. They started as the original attention company, built on the idea that a consumer choosing to engage with an ad is worth more than one who ignores it. But they did not stop there. They have built the infrastructure to connect the moment of attention to the proof of action, a framework across every screen, every format, every vertical. That is not a feature. That is a fundamentally different idea of what an ad platform should be. And it is the one brands have been waiting for. Learn more in the show notes MeTV

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Speaker C: What's really important is recognizing that every single room you walk into is an opportunity to learn, not just the ones that are built for learning. I'm a student in every room Terang is in. I'm a student in every room. Our CFO is a student in every room our board is in. Insert room here. I'm a student in that room.

Speaker A: Hi, I'm Jim Stengel. I've helped hundreds of Major brands discover and activate their purpose. Because when a brand's purpose is clear, compelling and authentic, profit naturally follows. Each week, I welcome the CMOs, the chief marketing officers of your favorite brands, to speak to how their job is so much more than marketing. These leaders share their inspiration and challenges along with how they try to build a full, healthy and happy life in and out of the office. And it's that energy that reaches everyone they touch. And we're glad you're here to feel that energy and to learn from these remarkable leaders.

Speaker D: So here we go.

Speaker A: This week, we're bringing you a special episode recorded live at the Northwestern Kellogg School of Management Marketing Leadership Summit in Chicago. It's an annual event that brings together some of today's most thoughtful leaders in industry and academia to talk about the of growth, leadership, creativity and brand building. McKinsey and Egon Zehnder partner with the Kellogg School to design and deliver the summit every year. I make this trip to Kellogg each year, and what I always love about this gathering is that the conversations tend to go much deeper than marketing tactics. They become conversations about leadership culture, customer obsession, and how organizations evolve during moments of change. In this episode, you'll hear highlights from two live keynote conversations in front of an audience of about 150 business leaders, professors, and a few MBA candidates. First, I sit down with Kellen Smith Kenny, Chief marketing and growth officer at AT&T for a discussion about transforming a, uh, 150-year-old legacy brand into a modern growth company. We talk about customer obsession, AI organizational culture, and why she believes marketers today have to think like growth leaders, not just storytellers. Kellan is a previous guest on our show, but this conversation goes to different places. Then I lead a conversation with Tarang Amin, Chairman and CEO of E L F Beauty, and Corey Marchisotto, President of Elf Beauty Brands. Together, they unpack one of the most remarkable growth stories in modern business. How Elf built a culture driven community first brand by embracing disruption, creativity, curiosity, and what they call zero distance between the company and its customers. Across both conversations, there's a shared theme. The brands winning today are the ones willing to stay curious, move quickly, listen deeply to customers, and build cultures where people can do the best work of their lives.

Speaker D: Here we go with highlights from the Kellogg Summit. Welcome Kellen Smith, Kenny kellogg, class of 2005. There we go.

Speaker E: We're going here.

Speaker D: Yeah, yeah. I think you're at the near chair.

Speaker E: All right.

Speaker D: I guess we can stand down there, too. We'll see how it goes. So, Kellen, welcome back. Welcome back. To Kellogg 21 years ago?

Speaker E: Yes.

Speaker F: Okay.

Speaker D: So.

Speaker E: So I was.

Speaker D: What's it like being back?

Speaker E: I was here last year for my 20 year reunion. And how many people in this room attended Kellogg? Okay, how many people attended Kellogg in the global hub? Yeah, like, this is very different. We were in a building where you couldn't see the lake and there were no windows in any of the classrooms. So the first time I.

Speaker D: What's to miss?

Speaker C: Right? Yeah.

Speaker E: I thought, oh, my gosh, how do they get any work done?

Speaker C: It's so glorious here.

Speaker E: This looks like the Atlantic Ocean now. This is so, so incredible to be back. But one of the things when I came back last year for reunion is I was just struck by how humble our alumni are and how real they are and how they're some of the very best people that I've met in all of my life. So it was just awesome to be back.

Speaker D: I'll put a little bit of a Kellogg plug in here. When I was at Procter and Gamble in Karuna met me this way. I was the head of recruiting here for P and G at Kellogg. And this goes back a few years. And we love the school because it was smart without the attitude. And the people who came from Kellogg to go to P and G did well versus some of the other schools that have high reputations but did not do so well. So what did you want to do when you went here? What was your dream when you were a student 21 years ago?

Speaker E: Oh, my gosh. So you're really taking me back. Okay, so when I originally came to Kellogg, I remember I knew I needed a career change because I was in consulting, but I was coming because I wanted to be. I didn't know if I wanted to be a product manager, if I wanted to go into marketing. I just knew I wanted to be much closer to the customer. And being a tech consultant, I studied economics and computer science. In undergrad, I was hands on keyboard coding. And I remember thinking I was doing all this work that I was deeply passionate about, but I would hand it to somebody else who then would decide if we got to take that to market. And I just felt it was too many hops for me to the customer. So I wanted to get closer to the customer. And then while I was here, I really got the marketing and product bug. Uh, so my first job after Kellogg was as a product manager at Microsoft.

Speaker D: Yeah, I know that.

Speaker A: I know that.

Speaker D: Yeah. Well, I want to start with. You're wearing three pins.

Speaker E: Yes.

Speaker D: And I want you to talk about those. I'M wearing a pin, too.

Speaker E: You are? What is your pin? Is your advertising hall of fame?

Speaker D: Well, it's related to that. Mine's a wave.

Speaker E: Okay, so this first one says 150. And so March 10th was the 150th anniversary of the first phone call by our founder, Alexander Graham Bell. We celebrated that and we thought, people will probably be interested in this. But within, it was amazing, right, because there's been, I think, 800 trillion phone calls since in the past 150 years, there were something like 40 trillion text messages sent. And so we thought, will we be tapping into something that resonates? Within 24 hours, we had 3 billion impressions of just the fact that it had been the 150th anniversary of the first phone call. And we wanted to invite everybody in to celebrate. Didn't matter if you were an AT and T customer or not, but we felt like this was this really iconic milestone and very much a moment where AT and T is looking forward.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker E: We can't be about just romancing the past. We have to think about what is the future of connectivity and the role that video plays and the role of data packets traversing our networks. That's the first pin. The second pin is the AT&T guarantee, which we may talk about while I'm, um, up here. We launched the AT and T guarantee about a year ago, January of 2025. And we had some very compelling research going into the launch of that product, which. Which literally took us years to bring to life. And we can talk about why it took so long, but what we have seen in the past year is that customers who have had a negative experience where we make it right, where we guarantee that we will make it right, their NPS scores are higher than customers who haven't even had an issue. So there's a lot of learning and insight there. And this other one is just a classic AT&T logo.

Speaker D: Tell the story about. We were chatting before you came up. You had some merchandise made of 150 years and it sold like that. That's a statement.

Speaker E: Um, it is. So we had, in our own brand shop, we produced T shirts and hats and pins. And within 24 hours of us putting the T shirts on the brand shop and the pins and the mugs, it was completely sold out. And it just speaks to the rally culture of AT&T and just the sense of pride that people have. I have people on my team who are fifth generation AT&T ers, so their great, great, great grandparents worked at the company. I mean, it's, it's amazing.

Speaker D: Now, let's go back about six years when you joined AT&T. And by the way, the. You can get into the business data. But this is a remarkable story, right? Uh, this is a brand that has been around a long time, that is growing customers, growing revenue, growing customer satisfaction. And it hasn't always been that way. So I want you to tell the story about why you said yes to at&t and how you entered that culture. And you use words on the podcast about. I was brought in to make an impact, uh, not to do better marketing, not to grow customers to make an impact. And I want, I want you to talk about how you entered the culture, how you got started, and what was your revelation that this, this old trusted brand had to shake it up a bit.

Speaker E: So, uh, when I was, when I was assessing the opportunity at AT&T, I tried to come up with my list of if I was going to take a new role, what would have to be true. And I thought about it through, I always think through the lens of customer. Is this a role where I can have an impact? And is the role of marketing critical to the customer experience? Check. I also gravitate to companies that have both a heritage, but a strong CEO who's willing to change and transform. I knew, even when I was at Kellogg, I knew that I would never want to into a job where I would just optimize the thing that the person before me had. I was a, uh, builder, I was an innovator, I was a disruptor. And so I wanted to make sure that the CEO and the board had a hunger for that check, check. Because the customer piece was there. The scale of this business is just massive. And then I knew that the CEO and the board were on side. And then finally the thing that I, that I tend to pay attention to is the competition. And what I mean by that is typically what I have found is that fiercely competitive industries, they're forced to innovate. And what I knew is I could ensure that that innovation was for the best interest of the customer. So I actually liked that the telecom wars were on. I actually liked that it was kind of chippy because I thought, I can get in there and I can do what I do best. So that's why I joined. What I found was a board and a CEO and a C suite that was signed up for the transformation, but a large employee base that was drinking the Kool Aid. They didn't realize they were looking at all these internal metrics and you can make data say anything you want it to. But I, um, but I'm looking at it, I'm thinking customer satisfaction is down, brand love is down, the velocity of our growth is down. I mean, our mobility business you talked about, it's growing now. It was in decline. And we were using our mobility business and the proceeds of that, we were harvesting it and putting it into non core products like our entertainment division. We owned DirecTV at the time and WarnerMedia at the time. And so based on that, I knew that we had to really shake it up, to use your words. I also recognized that if we were going to have an impact, we needed to make sure that the entire company got on the same page. We needed to clarify the purpose of the company and we needed to clarify the role that every single individual across AT&T would play. And at that point, I know this probably sounds silly to many of you, but it was interesting to me. I thought we're this legacy brand that had a lot of good things. We were iconic, but we were sort of talking like an old stodgy company. And the reason we were talking like an old stodgy company is because we were behaving like one. And so one of the first things I did was I gathered about the 60 most senior people in the company and we held a workshop and we talked about what are some of the forces at play in the marketplace, what are people concerned about that are headwinds and where do we have tailwinds? And this was all right as Covid was sort of heat, uh, maybe not heating up, but we were still in full blown Covid mode because it was November of 2020 when I joined. So we held that workshop and we got people to articulate a vision for the future. And what they realized was that they had a lot in common with each other. This is a giant company and so people were behaving in these silos, heads down, just doing what they did, but by bringing them all together, and again, since this was full blown Covid, it had been a while since they'd been together, since they'd broken bread, since they were traversing this giant 150,000 person company and working cross team and we were able to codify the purpose of the company. And finally I knew, and I said this on your podcast, I knew that we had gotten people to internalize the mission. When the CTO stood up at the end and we asked everybody as their checkout question, what are you taking away from today? And the CTO said, I realized that the marketing Team isn't responsible for the brand. I realized that all of us in this room, from legal to product to technology to finance, that we all play a role in either polishing or tarnishing the brand. Uh, guys, I almost cried. I mean, inside I, uh, was weeping. On the outside, I was like, yes, gold star. But that is just not what the company believed before I arrived. It was the marketing team or the brand team will fix that. They'll just fix the logo. And by the way, we have to keep five and a half. Almost six years later. We have to repeat to people that aha. Uh-huh. That Jeremy, our cto, had at the time. Just last Tuesday, I was on stage at a big meeting with all of our VPs and above, and I said, the number one thing that informs the health of your brand is in the category of a customer's direct experience with your product, service or employees. A distant second is media coverage, word of mouth and advertising. Distant, distant second in our category anyway. And so we've got to get everyone to understand I am making a decision that impacts the product. I am making a decision that impacts the services. I'm making a decision that either helps our employees in the store or on the phone deliver an impeccable customer experience or a negative one.

Speaker A: One of the things I have learned from years of talking to the best CMOs in the world is this. The question is never just whether your creative is working. The question is whether your infrastructure can keep up with it. Because a brilliant campaign still has to travel through an ad stack, through data, through decisioning, through supply, through measurement. And every hop in that journey is a place where value leaks out. Most platforms solve one piece of that. A data company, a dsp, a measurement vendor. You stitch them together and pay a fragmentation tax in performance, in speed, and in accountability. Infilion built something very different. Demand supply, data measurement and creative connect it in a single composable platform. The highest performing opt in attention formats via Infilion's proprietary tech in the industry, Agnostic Identity Resolution Solutions. And now Catalina. 130 million U.S. households of, uh, verified purchase truth running as live signal through every campaign they execute. No black boxes, no hops, no fragmented vendor relationships to manage. The only company I know of that can take you from the first moment of attention to the final proof of action for any vertical on any screen without leaving the platform open. Composable agentic that is Infilian.

Speaker D: Now, the title of our session today is cmo. The right title for the job to be done. You're not A cmo? Uh, you're a CMO and Growth Officer.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker D: So I want you to talk about the meaning of that. I know. And titles. Some people say titles don't matter. Well, they do signal what you value and what you work on. So could you talk a bit about the meaningfulness of that and how that affects how you approach your role?

Speaker E: So titles shouldn't matter in terms of how marketers approach what they're doing. We should be the growth engine inside every organization. But in some organizations, titles matter more than others. And in traditional legacy organizations, uh, I think they tend to signal to people, particularly when the companies are really large, what the CEO and the board expect the remit of this individual to be. So I approach the job day to day and my team approaches the job day to day as we are the growth integrators for the entire company. And what that means is from early diagnosis, where are the biggest opportunities? Where do we have the biggest threats? What strategies do we need to build so that we can unlock more growth? From an execution perspective, maybe that's where we're a bit more narrow. I don't have all of operations reporting to me, but I absolutely consider my job is I have to diagnose operationally, what do we need to do from a legal perspective, what are the things that are getting in our way that are decelerating our growth? Same thing from a strategy perspective and then finally from a measurement perspective, really holding up the mirror. No more happy talk, no more Kool aid, no more good news bears. How do we make sure that we get to the unimpeachable truth that we really understand what is working hard for us and that we really understand the things that are slowing us down so that we can deprioritize them. And if it's not the marketers doing it, then who is going to do that work? Who is sitting in a position to guide and inform the customer insight that's going to drive your product strategy, if not the marketing organization? Who is helping to understand where you have air pockets for growth within audience and segments, where you're under penetrated, if not the marketing organization? And who are the people inside the company that are representing the voice of the customer, if not the marketing organization? And that in my opinion and my experience, is where all the growth comes from. So I don't think I have the luxury of just managing my team. My job is to inspire the entire company to think customer first and for them to truly pursue excellence and innovation in service of making the customer's life more Easy. If you think about the fundamentals of marketing. And for those of you who have read Greg Creed's book, I think it's called Red Marketing. He talks about how, uh, you need to have relevance, ease and distinctiveness. If you don't have relevance, ease and distinctiveness, it's going to be a lot harder to grow. In my world, the only way to be relevant from a marketplace perspective and a cultural perspective is to be able to tap into teams well beyond traditional, just what marketing owns. Similarly, how can we make the experience of dealing with our, uh, products or services in our company easy? You've got to be working with technology. You've got to be working with the digital organization, which happens to report into me as well. You need to make sure that you're partnered up with legal. So that, I mean, I had one of the best legal partners. He goes, kellen, one of the contracts was 14 pages. We're going to get it to one page. And when your SVP of legal is saying that, you know, you've got momentum and you need partners like that. And in terms of distinctiveness, the only way to truly make it feel distinctive is if you're harnessing the collective expertise of everybody in the company. And so as a growth officer, I think that title gave me more permission to insert myself into conversations where people may historically been like, that's not what the marketing person does. And like, well, I'm not the person who's always been here either.

Speaker D: You said a few minutes ago, customer centricity will never change. You have to always be curious, learning about the customer behaviors, motivations, insights. What are you most excited about in your role, about AI's capability to enhance that.

Speaker E: So we've done a few experiments in that scaled personalization space. And what we saw were, and we didn't even have the creative, fully generative and automated, but we at least programmed within this. I think we had 80 different units. We were doing it and the sequencing of things. We were exposing it to customers in a very personalized way so that their unique touches would look different from anybody else in the cohort. We saw a 278% increase in response rate. It's very hard to run any experiments right now where you see a 278% improvement. That was staggering right then and there. But when we started looking at some of the creative units that had performed especially well or higher percentage of customers were being exposed to that type of a message. I was sitting there with four of my leaders and I said, would any of us have guessed that this was the winning thing with 14% of our existing customers. And none of us would have guessed that, but the machines knew to introduce it in that way and to expose them to a benefit that we didn't think that would resonate really with people at all. It was a message about a different product, and it ended up converting on Adelines. And so it just really opens up to your point about customer centricity. It really opens your mind because so often we get caught up in the averages. Even when you look at your segments, you get caught up in the average within the segments. And what we found, and now I've got a lot of religion about this, is you've got to de average the averages if you want to unlock the true air pockets of growth. And what personalization at scale is going to allow you to do is to completely de average the averages and increase performance overall.

Speaker D: So, Kellen, we're getting the. So I want you to stand. And before we applaud, we, uh, have a gift from the Kellogg school. Thank you. Welcome back. But I want you to comment on one thing. When I interviewed Late Year last year, around the holidays, I said, what's your one wish for all of us going into 2026? And you said, my wish is that we reject apathy and complacency. So would you share something with our audience before you leave about some counsel or some inspiration on rejecting apathy and complete.

Speaker E: Yeah, I mean, I always. I try to say to my team, anytime you say yes to something good, you're not leaving room for something great or exceptional. M. It's a choice, right? And it's funny, the word priority, we've bastardized it. It literally just means one thing. And we're like, what are our top 20 priorities? So if you want to reject complacency, if you want to reject apathy, you've got to be willing to say no to things. To leave room for only the most exceptional ideas, to leave room for only the things that are going to be truly transformative and challenge the status quo. And it's easier said than done, but I would say that's one thing. And then my second piece of advice, uh, which was said to me by a friend of ours, when you encounter resistance, teach. Most people didn't have the privilege of going to Kellogg and taking marketing 401 and getting a B the way I did. They don't understand marketing. And we, as marketing leaders, we have to make it accessible, and we have to teach it in a way that people understand. And then when they understand. I think that also allows people to prioritize and reject apathy and really pursue excellence.

Speaker D: Thank you, Kellen. Let's give it up for Kellen.

Speaker E: Thank you.

Speaker D: Thank you for coming back.

Speaker E: Thank you.

Speaker C: Thank you.

Speaker E: This is great.

Speaker D: Oh, my gosh, it was so much fun.

Speaker A: If you were a chief marketing officer in consumer products, I want you to think about something for a moment. You have creative that works. You have campaigns that capture attention. But somewhere between that moment and the register, the signal gets lost. You cannot see what actually drove the sale. You are making optimization decisions on inference, not truth. Well, that changed in February. Infilion acquired Catalina. Four decades of deterministic purchase intelligence. 130 million US households, 70 retail banners, $600 billion in verified annual consumer spending. And here is what really matters. Over 90% of consumable purchases still happen in store. Infilion and Catalina together can close the loop from digital advertising to inlane purchase and incentivize the next one. This is not a measurement tool you consult after the campaign. This is a live signal that runs through your media while the campaign is in flight. You can now optimize from attention to action in real time against people whose actual purchase behavior you know. A consumer product's brand needs return on ad spending. It needs foot traffic. Infilion now delivers all of it. Not as separate vendors. You reconcile later as one connected platform. That is what closing the gap looks like.

Speaker D: Tarang and Corey come up on stage.

Speaker C: Do you have an order? You want us?

Speaker D: You know, that's a good question. Why don't you go the last two and I'll sit on the end here? Um, Now, Corey said to me that this visit has kind of changed her life and made her think about decisions in her past. So we have to start with that. So what's going on?

Speaker C: So when we pulled up on campus, I said, I'm questioning all my life's choices. I went to university in Manhattan, downtown, in the financial district. And it does not look anything like this. So you see a campus like this and you understand that the conditions are ripe for learning to happen. It's expansive. You can look out on the horizon. There are places to think. And yeah, if I had to do it all over again, I would come to Kellogg.

Speaker D: So, yeah, it's never too late.

Speaker C: It's never too late.

Speaker D: Never too late. Tarang, you've been on this campus before.

Speaker F: I have. It's a beautiful campus.

Speaker D: Okay, super.

Speaker F: Super.

Speaker D: Did it make you think about decisions in your life?

Speaker F: Uh, no.

Speaker A: No.

Speaker D: Everything has been good. Okay. All Right, Super.

Speaker C: He went to Duke and you're never gonna get him off the, the Duke trip.

Speaker D: Well I can't understand that. I knew that. I knew that. Double degree right? At Duke. Yeah. Okay, super. Now um, I want to start this uh, session. Uh, we had a nice uh, fan sort of session. But you two 12 years at ELF. How many years as chairman CEO?

Speaker F: 1212.

Speaker D: Okay, so 12 years as chairman CEO, you're seven and a half years CMO now president. So you've been a team for a long time. So I'd like you to talk about that to start off the discussion and I want you to put it in this kind of framework. What have you seen in each other that's evolved that you admire? Because obviously he's changed in 12 years. You've changed in seven and a half. You've both seen it. So let's start tarang. Why don't you start with Corey? You just promoted her.

Speaker F: Mhm.

Speaker D: You and the board. Congratulations. Thank you. So what have you seen about Corey? Change and evolve that you admire?

Speaker F: Sure. So maybe I'll back all the way up is 2018 when we first started recruiting for Corey's role. ELF was uh, founded 22 years ago. Um, in that 22 years we've grown every single quarter except for two, uh, those two quarters are in 2018. And so just like, and I won't get to the whole story of what happened in 2018 but it was an important point to kind of say all right, we need to shake up the leadership of the company and ah, specifically what I was looking for that at time we had obviously quite a few uh, consumer packaged goods people on the team, done a terrific job but we were lacking true beauty expertise. And Kowori had 20 years of prestige beauty experience at LVMH, Peugeot Shiseido. And so she had a passion for beauty and obviously her role in particular is in charge of end to end from the consumer. That was our vision of give someone, the entire consumer from end to end. And I'll talk about that in a minute. So we wanted somebody that was steeped in beauty. But more importantly because we typically we're a mid market growth company, we typically are ah, reluctant to take someone from a really big company right away into elf. Uh, what Corey had demonstrated to us is she was part of the prestige brand group, ah, at ah, uh, Shiseido. She had to work with Aramis, other key founders brands and convince them to hand over their brand to Shiseido where she then partnered and really got them through North America and so she had this great, I'd call it academy background in beauty, but the scrappiness that we look for and then you know, from the moment she got to elf, I mean I always describe Corey as a lightning bolt of energy and ideas and we've just seen that and we've seen her thrive to be able to actually be able to. Because sometimes there's a CMO title but you don't often get the entire enterprise. And for Corey it goes everything from insights to innovation to our digital channels all the way certainly brand integrated marketing, the entire piece. And obviously a key member of our exec team. And that's probably where I've seen her grow the most is uh, her impact across the entire enterprise.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker F: It's not limited just to marketing and that was the reason for her elevation to president of the ELF brand. She has incredible passion for the ELF brands and really being able to expand them in different categories geographies and other things that we're going to be able to do. So it's been a real pleasure for me to see uh, not only her growth but more importantly her impact uh, throughout the entire company.

Speaker D: So what do you think as a leader? What have you seen her grow the most in, in terms of a skill or characteristic in the seven years?

Speaker F: You know, I've seen her growing the most in her multifunctional leadership. Right. I'd say um, she's always had a very strong marketing background. She is, I mean she has this thirst and curiosity for learning constantly. I mean she's here, I know she's going to come back with like pages full of notes and things we should be doing and what I learned and what I took and that curiosity applied to her peers. The way our, our team works is the exec team of the company which is my direct reports. We do every enterprise decision together. Um, I always remind them, they hate when I say it's not a democracy but we do do things together and being able to have that high performance kind of healthy conflict and really. But in order to do that, in order to be successful you have to really understand the other area and the other function. I've seen her do that exceptionally well. Uh, and I'd say the second thing is her people leadership over time. She's always had a great eye for talent. Uh, the people that we've brought in under her uh, throughout marketing are just top notch. But I'd say that uh, influence well beyond marketing where every other function looks to her as a key leader as well. I think were two Areas that really, really stood out.

Speaker D: I didn't mean to do your performance review so publicly.

Speaker F: Well, we just promoted her.

Speaker C: Wow, this is kind of embarrassing.

Speaker D: I'm sweating under here now we'll flip it.

Speaker C: Yeah.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker D: You've known Tehrang for seven years. Uh, first, why did you say yes seven years ago?

Speaker C: Longer than seven years actually. But he didn't know me. So if I go back to the first interaction I ever had with Tarang, I was like many of you are today a student in a room of business executives. And, um, Women's Wear Daily, which is a trade publication, does an annual event. I see some head nodding. So you guys know what it is where they. It's called the CEO Summit. And I was really excited to have a seat in this room of incredible leaders and change makers. And I did what I always do. I was bright eyed, bushy tailed notebook, pen and paper, ready to really absorb and learn everything that I could from these amazing leaders. And a little bit after lunch, I looked down at my notebook and shockingly, I didn't have any notes. And I was starting to question myself. Like, am I not humble enough to be inspired anymore? What is going on in this room? Or is the content just not at the level that perhaps I anticipated that was going to get my hand to paper moving? And then all of a sudden this gentleman gets on the stage that I had never heard of before or met. And he starts talking and I'm like, on page 15, my hand is hurting. And his name was Tarang Amin and he was the CEO of this company called elf. And in this moment, I leaned over to my boss who was to my left. And I had known her for almost 20 years at this point, so I could be very comfortable doing this. And I leaned over and I whispered in her ear and I said, kathy, I hope you don't mind, but at the end of his talk, I'm going to give that guy my resume. And she turned back and looked at me and goes, do me a favor, give him mine too. At the end of his talk, I had all the best intentions. I wanted to go up and introduce myself and genuinely tell him that I was really moved and show him I had like 20 pages of notes from his talk. And time gets away from you. And I never did. Two years later, I get a phone call from a recruiter. ELF is looking for a chief marketing officer. And I said two questions. First one is describe for me in three words what they're looking for. And that was bold change agent. Second is Tarangamine still the CEO. And it was very easy from there.

Speaker D: So those 15 pages of a note, do you remember anything that you would. That you wrote down? Um, like, what was it? What was the overwhelming impression?

Speaker C: The overwhelming impression was that elf was doing it differently. I had been in the beauty space at that point for 20 years, and this was different. It felt different, it looked different, it tasted different. Everything about it was just calling for a different kind of energy that it was bringing to this space. And when I think about it later, I truly believe we're all antennas and there's frequencies that everybody sends out. And the vibration that I was hearing was actually a call to me, because what they were doing was so aligned to my frequency. And that's really what that was all about.

Speaker D: We'll come back to that in a second. But talk about how you've seen Tarang evolve in the seven and a half years or so you've worked for him.

Speaker C: So, uh, I'm going to do a little setup for him, because I think so many things have to be true for all the things to be true. Right. And I grew up with parents who were pretty much opposing forces. My mother is a unicorn and my father is a bull. So I had the grounded realist and the dreamer. And my dad would always tell me, don't listen to your mom. Your mom's crazy. And my dad was the opposite. Right. So I'm actually really comfortable in tension and friction. And I actually believe magic happens at those friction points. And when I think about Tarang, he lives at those friction points. So if you just go back to his beginning Indian, born in Kenya, growing up in the United States, you're already at a massive friction point. Family man who's also a business tycoon. Friction point. And then you layer on this entrepreneur, um, and big cpg friction point, and you get to terang. So if you go on his journey, it actually starts in a family motel business. And in the family motel business, he was cleaning hotel rooms, he was making beds. He was also seeing his family empty the bank account to make the business work. That's a pretty incredible start. That really teaches you the entrepreneurial skills necessary, but also the heart that goes into keeping the businesses moving from there. He spent 20 years in big CPG.

Speaker D: We won't mention the brand.

Speaker C: I'm not going to mention the brand, because I told Jim, we're not saying it out loud up on this panel. He spent 20 years, uh, between Procter and gamble and Clorox, and he got big company chops, really learning structural development. The inner workings of an organization. And I would say the most important thing he learned is what not to do. Now you go into chapter three, which is the chapter that we're in today. You have this intersection point between an entrepreneur who now has big company chops, and we've seen him be able to bring that to life. Scaling, shift nutrition, where he came in around two, uh, hundred million and scaled it to a billion. And then what he's done at ELF, taking it from 100 million to nearly 2 billion. So that intersection point doesn't usually work for most. Very oftentimes entrepreneurs want to drop out after the 100 million or the 200 million. But he's. Because he had that entrepreneurial training with the big company chops, you get to this friction point where it is today. The biggest friction point, though, that I would say is what actually defines ELF as a company. And the reason we wrote this word and codified it into our Persona is because Tarang lives it every day. And that is a bold disruptor with a kind heart. And when you think about those two things and the friction point between them, if I just ask you right now and go through the exercise in your mind, think about a kind heart. Now think about bold disruptors. And when you play this game and you think about kind hearts, you're going to have a long list. Bold disruptors are way harder. Now you go at the intersection between those two things, and you're in unicorn territory. And that's where Terang lives. And that is what attracted me most about Terang and what we're building here at elf.

Speaker D: I loved how you did that. No, I do. Kind heart disruptor. It's hard to find them together. And that's where we want to be.

Speaker C: That's unicorn.

Speaker D: That's a very powerful metaphor. Wow. Well, listen, um, I mean, you've referenced this. It's, you know, your business results are crazy. So I want to talk about that kind of as context before we get into your relationship. And we've already been talking about your relationship, but I mean, it's. How many quarters now? Consecutive growth?

Speaker F: 28.

Speaker D: 28/4 of consecutive growth. Nearly 2 billion in sales. Pretty fired up. Culture. Uh, you're in culture, so you build a great board. Uh, and Tarang, I've read a lot of what you both said on video and also have written, but I've heard you say it's three things, really that have driven this company. Value prop, relentless innovation, and disruptive marketing. Could you both expand on that? Maybe you want to add to that but what could we all learn from what you've done?

Speaker F: Well, I think it goes to one of the themes I heard just walking in here today. It all starts with uh, we use the word consumer often. We tend to use the word community.

Speaker G: Mhm.

Speaker F: What's the community you're serving and what do they value really? This company was founded with this crazy idea. The founders of this company were selling in 2004 cosmetics over the Internet for $1. Everyone thought they were crazy. It's 2004 pre iPhone. You couldn't sell cosmetics over the Internet. You certainly couldn't make money at a dollar. And that spirit of disruption, even though we've now migrated to many other channels, different price points as much stayed with us. And so looking at first the community and what are they, and they saw a gap in the market between prestige, a lot of the mass brands. And they really ask the question of, um, you know, why, why does cosmetics have to be so expensive? That was their starting point. When we got involved about 12 years ago, we said, well why, why does it have to be just inexpensive? Why does it have to be just $1, $2, $3? What if we could actually take the best of prestige, put our twist on it and make it accessible? Right. So in the end of the day, we're in the business of democratizing access to the best of beauty. And in order to do that, it required a few things. It required one, a core vision of we're making the best of beauty. Our mission of making the best of beauty accessible to every eye, lip and face, and we're for everyone. Uh, two, in order to do that, you have to go back to your community and what do they value? And in our community it's really clear. And you actually heard it with the super fans. It's innovation and how we engage.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker F: And I'd say on the innovation front, we are known for our innovation. Um, you know, there's 1800 cosmetics, skincare brands in the US alone, yet we regularly have the majority of the top launches every single year. And we usually, uh, account for most of the innovation volume. It's one of the reasons why we've grown so well. But also, and I'll turn it over to Corey, how we engage, um, uh, with our community, it's not the approach I learned, uh, growing up kind of in classical cpg. Uh, it really is a very different, uh, mindset. I'll tell one story that will show, um, and I'll get a little bit into our relationship. I remember this was a number of years Ago, Corey came to me and said, hey, boss, we gotta be on TikTok, because that's where Gen Z is. And my answer is, well, if that's where Gen Z is, Absolutely. Now what's TikTok? Right. And it's illustrative of a lot of our relationship, but Corey's always at that forefront with her team on what is our community responding to? Where are they spending their time? How are they living? And we define ourselves that way. We often say we. We often think of ourselves as an entertainment company that happens to sell some beauty products. Right. But it's a very different mindset and framework than, um, a lot of what I call it, many of our competitors, which is, I want you to buy this mascara. And here are the features of the mascara, here are the claims of the mascara, and here's, like, for us, I mean, yeah, we, we, we sell products, but that's not the approach on community. But Corey can say it a lot better than I can, so.

Speaker C: Well, because he brought up the TikTok word, I do have to let the audience know that I. He says terrorize. I don't think I terrorize him. I think he actually enjoys it.

Speaker F: She definitely terrorizes.

Speaker C: He goes on. TikTok lives to speak to the community directly. And this is absolutely key to who we are and how we operate. He didn't just give me and the team permission to do TikTok. Yes, that is true. And he's fully engaged himself. In those early days, we had, we had him making TikTok content and post. We have him engaging directly with the community. And I'll tell you why that's really important. When you bring a CEO onto a TikTok Live and 16,000 people show up, you give them an opportunity to directly create the brand with you. So it's not just about engaging a community. It's about making sure they understand this is your brand, not ours. We are here to steer it on your behalf. So the community was going absolutely wild. And this has happened many times. So I'll just give you one example, which is around our bronzing drops, they were going absolutely wild. There was a prestige product that was over $40 that they absolutely could not afford, and they felt like they were getting left out. Which is the story of how ELF even started in the first place is opening doors, dropping velvet ropes, and giving people access to something that others had shut them out of. So bronzing drops were the thing of the moment. So I put Tarang on the TikTok Live. We start, uh, engaging in dialogue.

Speaker F: No, no. But by the way, when I said terrorize, this is what she actually does. She gets on TikTok live. I see the whole thing of, like, the chat going and her opening, the setup is, you got the big boss on now tell me exactly what you want, right? And the chat lights up. It lights up these, these bronzing drops. It's prestige brands. Got them. Um, we want, but we can't afford it. Help us out. I'm looking at the chat field and I'm like, all right, yeah, you guys went bronzing drops, right? The chat goes to another, like, 50 chats and it's like. And they all go. And they use her setup and they go, no, no, boss man. We want them now. And so I will leave that literally traumatized. Uh, first call I'll make is head of our R and D and say, we have a three year product pipeline. Please, for the love of God, tell me we have bronzing drops on the pipeline. And she'll say, yes, we do. I'm like, oh, thank God. When are they coming out? And he's like, well, they're slated for 18 months from now. And she knew exactly what she was doing. She so traumatized me. I'm like, oh, no, no, no. I am not getting yelled by our community again. And we launched them six months later. And to say that just happened by chance is totally false. That's Cory Marchisotto in action, totally setting me up and putting me on the spot to make.

Speaker C: Uh, we've done that many times and it has birthed.

Speaker D: And he keeps doing it.

Speaker C: Yeah, and he keeps doing it because he's an amazing sport. And it's super important because this is what we call zero distance. And if there's one thing you take away from the ELF brand, it's zero distance. What does zero distance mean? It means zero distance between our C suite and the community we serve, and zero distance between insight and action. These are fundamental drivers of our business.

Speaker D: Foreign.

Speaker G: Hey, everybody, this is Andrea Sullivan, the CEO of Vive and we produce the CMO podcast and are so excited to have partnered with Jim Stengel for so many years. Wanted to tell you a little bit about something that could be right for you. Vive is a program for entrepreneurs and business leaders who want to get more out of their life and become their best and happiest selves, both personally and professionally. We have a, uh, 12 month program that allows people to meet up with some of the best business leaders out there and additionally experts in the wellness sector. So that you can learn how to nurture yourself. So we teach things around sleep optimization, meditation, all those good things as well. Please reach out to us at podcastiveive. Co to get more information. That's P O D C A S T S at uh V Y V E Co. Thanks for listening to the CMO podcast and hope to talk to you more about Vibe.

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Speaker D: last year we had George Felix and Kevin Hockman on stage talking about a successful CEO CMO relationship. The Chili's CEO and CMO also unbelievable results. And they said three things drove their relationship. Shared values, trust, and radical transparency. So I'd like to ask the same question of you two. What drives this obvious, productive, affectionate, ambitious relationship?

Speaker C: So I have to first start by saying I know George quite well. And Chili's was the first time I ever got fired. So I was fired from Chili's Westbury. I will not tell you why that's a secret kept in the box unless you take me out for a few drinks, margaritas. And I saw George at, uh, one of the events. He actually got, uh, CMO of the year at one of the events that we were at. And I went up to him and I was like, george, I need to know how Westbury is doing.

Speaker B: He goes, westbury?

Speaker C: It's our number one store in the entire chain nationwide. I was like, because I have everything to do with, um. So when I think about those three words, I'm not. My struggle with them is, sure, they could be true, but that doesn't actually make magic happen among two people. Sure, we can have radical transparency. Shared belief. What was the other one?

Speaker D: Trust.

Speaker C: Shared values and trust and trust. But it's missing some key ingredients for me. So when I think about it, the first and foremost, and if I had to let everything else go and just keep one, it's belief. You have to believe in one, um, another. If I didn't believe in Taurang Amin, deeply, believe in who he was, how capable he was, and that he was going to set up the conditions necessary for me to thrive and believe in the thing we were up to, what is the vision? What is the mission? What is it that we're trying to accomplish in the world? How do we want to show up for others and create this place of belonging. If you do not have belief, then I don't think the rest actually matters. The second thing I would add to that if you get a two is care. And why that matters is because that actually takes courage. If you show up every day to get a paycheck, there's no courage in that. You're not going to do breakthrough work. But if you actually care so deeply about serving the community, about serving your internal teams, your partners, lifting up your suppliers, doing this together so that you actually create these win win scenarios, our win is everybody else's win. If you care deeply about that, you will run through walls. You will make magic happen. You will break through the impossible, which is what we do every day at elf. I think the third thing that you absolutely have to have in this mix is you gotta have a good time. Like when things are really hard. Touring makes us laugh. And I know that sounds silly, but it really matters. It really matters. It is hard to beat a team that's having a good time. And that is a massive part of our success formula. You're not going to be able to show up to the outside world as an incredible brand that everybody wants to be a part of if inside that is not how people feel. So if you believe in the thing that you're up to, if you care really deeply about it, and if you have a good time together as a team, the rest will follow.

Speaker D: I love that. Tying back to Steve yesterday, remember last night? Humor, fun, enjoyment. Anyway, Tarang react to that.

Speaker F: Yeah. No, I agree with what Corey says. The only other one I would add to it, which I don't think enough CEOs and CMOs do, is a genuine respect of what each other's strengths are. Right. Sometimes it would have been very easy for me, I was classically trained in marketing, to try to do Corey's job. And that would have been a disaster. Marketing would look anywhere near as good as it does, uh, with her. But two is really understanding. We spend a lot of time on this. What are your superpowers? We talk that way. We make people define what are your superpowers? And how do you leverage superpowers? Because we're big believers in inclusivity for every eye, lip and face. Our team's got to reflect the communities we serve all the way to the board. You saw some of the stats there. Um, so we're big believers in diversity. And part of that, where that goes hand in hand for competitive advantage, is if you have a diverse team and each person is leveraging their unique superpowers the entire team is stronger, right? So that we spend a lot of time. There's things Corey does so much better than I do. There's trust in her and her vision, and a lot of times I don't even understand it, but I don't have to. And it's okay because I trust her and I say, all right, keep moving things. I have coaching things on she listens to. And then we figure out where our strengths. I remember when she first came on, we were spending 6% of our net sales and marketing, and I knew it wasn't enough. It was one of the reasons why we hit the wall. We were getting drowned out in a very crowded space. And so when she first came on board, for somebody who said retail stores, we had 27 retail stores. We made the tough choices. Shutting down. We were expanding distribution at Target, Walmart, Ulta Beauty. 27 boutiques. Didn't make any sense relative to, we're now in 55,000 doors in the U.S. we shut them down. But a key reason to shutting them down was we took the $17 million we're spending on stores and we put it straight into marketing and digital. That's what Corey had to start with. When Corey first started, though, I said, hey, I, uh, can give you this 17 million right now. But in order to keep it going, I'm probably going to need some hard ROI data. Just public company investors board, et cetera. Where she came from in prestige, the type of attribution I was used to at a PNG or Clorox didn't exist, um, in those models. So we did a divide and conquer. I said, you keep being bold, keep driving forward. Get after the consumer. Do all the crazy stuff you want to go do. I will work with your head of insights. And connected him to the advanced analytics at Clorox. And we put in a system where we could get hard ROI data that would satisfy anyone. And we use that to actually drive, um, marketing as a percent of sales from 6% to 24% over the last seven years. And it was because the ROIs we saw were multiples ahead of where the industry is. And that's a small example, but it's leveraging each other's strength. I had a strength, a certain thing. She had a strength. And then we've been able to use that to, uh, continue to propel the brand. And we have the rid. She doesn't really look at it that much because she's like, that's rear view mirror. I'm looking forward. I'm like, all Right. Well, I'll look at the rear view, you look forward, and we'll be good. It'll be a good combo.

Speaker D: We're going to have to wrap this in a minute, so I'd like you to share with our audience. You know, we have CMOs in the audience, some CEOs. One thing you would suggest they consider when they go back to work tomorrow, learning from what makes you two so successful and happy and having fun.

Speaker F: I would say, um, trust is not enough. You have to. And if you haven't done this, start developing the ritual of, um, really candid feedback in the spirit of helping the other person, the team, succeed. I feel like too many times, particularly if it's a CEO to C suite, the real conversations aren't happening. Right. The perfunctory stuff on performance or campaigns or activities of what you're doing. Not truly. And we get very personal down to. This is what motivates me. This what. This is what demoralized me. Uh, how do you get through that? Because unless you have that level of candor and relationship, it's very hard to make the harder stuff work. And so I just. I'd be happy to talk to anyone of how you do that, but that's a big, big one for me.

Speaker C: Somebody said before word soup, word salad, Alphabet soup. So I had the letters in my head. So I'm going to leave you with abc, which is always be curious. Always be curious. What does that mean? I'm curious about Tarang's job. I'm curious about what it means to talk to investors. I'm curious about how he navigates a board, how he builds a board. I'm curious about his family. I know his kids. I know his wife. I know what's going on at home. Be curious. Never stop at the surface. If you stop at the surface, you're going to have to shallow relationships. The curiosity has to go deep in everything you do. And if you think about today, and, uh, I'm glad Jim brought that up. Less than 10% of the time I spend here today is teaching, if you will, or sharing. 90% of it was spent learning sitting back there taking pages of notes. And what's really important is recognizing that every single room you walk into is an opportunity to learn, not just the ones that are built for learning. I'm a student in every room Tarang is in. I'm a student in every room our CFO is in. I'm a student in every room our board is in. Insert room here. I'm a student in that room. So I would just boil that down into a very simple four part framework. And the first one is most important, pick up what other people are putting down. Don't leave it on the table, don't leave it behind. Pick it, uh, up. Take it with you. The second thing is put it into practice. Am I ever going to speak to the investors exactly the way Tarang does? No. But I'm going to learn the tips and tricks and he's going to teach me how to not make a forward looking statement and then I'm going to put my own spin on it, right? So I'm going to put it into practice. Step 3 Make it a habit. It'll become part of who you are. And then fourth and most important is give it back to others.

Speaker D: Let's give it up for these two Wonderful discussion. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank

Speaker C: you, thank you for having us. And Happy Birthday.

Speaker D: It was a great way to spend my birthday.

Speaker A: That's it for this week's episode of the CMO Podcast. As always, I would be grateful if you shared our show with your friends. Along with subscribing and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen. The CMO Podcast is a Vive original production.

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