Innovation in action with Michelle Booth (part 2)

PLEASE NOTE: This transcript has been created using fireflies.ai – a transcription service. It has not been edited by a human and therefore may contain mistakes 

 
 
00:03 
Dom Hawes 
You are listening to Unicorny and I am your host, Dom Hawes. Welcome back. This is part two. In part one, we met the amazing Michelle Booth, a champion of marketing transformation who thrives leading teams that are agile and empowered. We pick up her story, dealing with heartbreak at Bo, but illustrate how positive people often find new futures, even from a unit that folded. The demise of Bo is pretty well documented. It's a shame that such a successful product was shelved for reasons other than commercial traction. But we're not going to dive into those reasons today. Instead, we're going to look at the positive. And by the way, it includes Marcus Rashford too. That's coming up. Let's head right back to the studio.  

 
00:48 
Dom Hawes 
So we all know now that Bo didn't survive the transition from incubation through transition into the mainstream. And it seems to illustrate how vulnerable innovative units can be in large organizations, particularly if they lose an executive sponsor. Because that transition piece is so important to have executive sponsorship. So it must be hard to have.  

 
01:08 
Dom Hawes 
A successful product, a brand marketing program.  

 
01:11 
Dom Hawes 
That works really well and that been knocked over by a mix of pandemic, competing corporate priorities, executive transition and that stuff. But it wasn't the end of the team, was it?  

 
01:22 
Dom Hawes 
What happened next?  

 
01:23 
Michelle Booth 
No, it wasn't. The folding of Bó was heartbreaking. We'd put our heart and soul into it and were just about to launch our big above the line campaign, which is still the best campaign I've ever worked on and no one's seen it. But what we had been doing is effectively been doing press ups for the next challenge ahead. So we came as a team to NatWest, into the belly of the beast. And our first job was to look at the NatWest brand and also to revitalize the brand platform, to move it towards a younger growth strategy. So that was super exciting, but also because we brought the team, we brought that nucleus of psychological safety and those way of working so that we could change at pace.  

 
02:06 
Dom Hawes 
I'm interested in what happens when you move from an incubation or a transitionary business, or part of a business where the culture is very clearly distinct, where you have an awful lot of autonomy and freedom, and suddenly you move into a different environment. It doesn't matter if it's the same company, frankly, or a new job as a leader.  

 
02:26 
Dom Hawes 
How do you handle the transition of.  

02:28 
Dom Hawes 
Culture and management style like that?  

 
02:30 
Michelle Booth 
It's critical to understand that there's only so much in your gift. And I have been so lucky just to have the most amazing managers and people that have supported me and given me that autonomy. And so I think that when you make the move, you need to understand that you are in a different cultural framework. Big organizations are brilliant at doing operational structure at scale, and therefore agile methodology and test and learn can feel very different to the organization. And I think that you need to respect that and have the humility. And I think the biggest gift is living it and getting people to learn by doing, rather than trying to convince people that this is the way forward.  

 
03:18 
Michelle Booth 
And the way that I've always done that is with humour, with leading from the front, and with creating that sense of play and exploration and curiosity, with a really clear goal that we're trying to fix. And I think that in itself builds momentum and the benefit of being ex agency and also maybe a bit of theatre skills as well, is that storytelling and is getting people excited about the opportunity, but also respectful that people are different. And sometimes you need to be aware that change can feel really scary. And often people don't understandably want to put their head above the parapet. And I think you need to respect that and work at the pace of the team, not just be out there pushing it beyond people's comfort level.  

 
04:06 
Dom Hawes 
It's an interesting one, because if you move into a new role in marketing leadership, by definition, the team that you move into is going to experience change, because obviously you're going to want to set up that team and that department in the way that you like. And we talked a little bit in our pre call about culture versus strategy. It's not a competition, but we talked a bit about the importance of culture, or maybe how culture influences motivation. Maybe. And that's a very delicate thing to change.  

 
04:33 
Michelle Booth 
Yes. And I think the phrase is culture eats strategy for breakfast. But also strategy can be culture. And I think that's what we achieved really well at Bo is that we had a sense of who were solving for. We had a passion, and were all aligned to solving for those customers, and they were very real to us. And so that created its own momentum, its own motivation, and got us out of the sort of internal navel gazing that can often happen in big companies because were really clear on the what and the why.  

 
05:05 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, you know what really strikes me, as you were talking about there, the hair on the back of my neck just stood up because there's something we don't often talk about, I think, in business, and that's momentum. Momentum, that thing where you get a large body of people all moving in the same direction at the same time, and it's almost unstoppable. And that creates excitement, which itself creates motivation. And the things you're talking about here. Look, I often rail against the culture eat strategy for breakfast, because normally when people say it and it's on LinkedIn, they're saying strategy doesn't matter. And of course it does. As you say, often culture and strategy are sort of synonymous. But actually it's about aligning everybody. It's like stroking all the hairs so they're all heading in the same direction. It's like getting that momentum.  

 
05:45 
Dom Hawes 
That's how businesses win.  

 
05:47 
Michelle Booth 
And that's what's amazing about working in a big organization, because you have a big colleague network. And those people are passionate. They've got life experience, they want to help, but they're also at the front line. And so they really challenge you and they really want to be a part of something. And that was what we achieved in NatWest thrive with the work we did with Marcus Rashford is everyone wanted to help people, wanted to go and volunteer in youth clubs and be part of that. And I think I've done a lot of work historically for not for profits, where you are trying to create movements.  

 
06:17 
Michelle Booth 
And I think some of that learning of proper community management, really understanding the power and the intelligence of our colleagues that are really living and breathing what we're doing on a PowerPoint slide is a massive opportunity and something that the smaller fintechs or startups don't have. And I think it's an underutilized resource.  

 
06:36 
Dom Hawes 
I 100% agree, by the way. Again, one of the things were talking about before is that both agencies sometimes and in house marketing departments suffer from the same malaise a little bit. In agencies, it's the all you can eat buffet, and in house it's kind of the lead marketer kind of being a matrid to the rest of the business. Both are corrosive to the effectiveness of marketing, I think. What do you think leaders in marketing can do to avoid being pushed into either that being the Matri d or having agencies expected to be the all you can eat buffet?  

 
07:10 
Michelle Booth 
I think the first thing is curiosity and also passion. I mean, I've never been that motivated to climb the career ladder in a linear way. I've always been looking for the next opportunity. And I know that everyone's not like that, and it's not a judgment call, but I think that when you are really curious and passionate about the problem that you're trying to fix, I think that can be infectious. And if you are always asking why, I think we jump to solutions far too quickly rather than being really clear on the problem that we're trying to solve. And I think once you get everyone agreed on the shared problem, then what you notice is that all of a sudden you might spot opportunities where you didn't think there were, and you can kind of push on open doors.  

 
07:53 
Michelle Booth 
So I think that the goal is to really make sure that you're answering the right problem, because often we're not. And to spend all that time testing the hypothesis and having the humility that when you're wrong, to roll with it and to ask again, everything's a data point. But I think that's the thing, is business has been constructed in fake certainty. If it looks good on an Excel spreadsheet, if it looks good on a PowerPoint, then you can get buy in. But the truth is in the field, and that is uncertain, it is messy, and that involves reputational risk.  

 
08:28 
Michelle Booth 
And I think that's the challenge, is we need to create that safety where people feel like it's okay to take a risk and also understand and be sensitive to how it feels when you're the tall poppy saying, I think we should go this direction rather than the other.  

 
08:46 
Dom Hawes 
Increasingly, we're seeing a need for a marketer to stand up and talk to. In fact, on this very podcast, I plead with cmos to take the CEO out to lunch and ask them what their problems are, because there are a lot of problems in a business that marketing can help solve, but often they don't get a chance to.  

 
09:04 
Michelle Booth 
Yeah, I think the most important thing is to really understand the commercial side of the business and to really understand what success looks like, because that is the shared anchor. We're all trying to drive growth, but there may be different ways to do that have been overlooked, because we can often be very rational in terms of the way that we look at things. And that for me, is the marketeer's opportunity is to unlock that intangible value that often can't be seen on a balance sheet, and to also make those innovative leaps that when we see them, we all recognize them, but they look great in retrospect, but often took a huge chance.  

09:46 
Michelle Booth 
But without that anchor point of really understanding the commercials and also being the truth teller in terms of market context and customer insight, our job is to create that aha moment, to create that really strong story. And I always say success for me is when people steal my slides in terms of the story that we're trying to say, because we need to tell that story and we need to tell it over and over again, but also have that humility that if we are wrong, to say, okay, let's try again. And I think that resilience is what's needed in these uncertain times.  

 
10:19 
Dom Hawes 
What's your approach if you need to push back against an organization because you think marketing can deliver more value, but is probably being either siloed or held down? Give our listeners some advice. How should they go about that?  

 
10:32 
Michelle Booth 
For me, I always look at the data and I think the data in the strange places, it might be the signal data of an email campaign. It might be some kind of source that maybe people haven't looked at. And I think it's to try and derisk the hypothesis as much as possible. We often talk a lot about test and learn, but usually what that means is test and test. So especially what we need to do is surface the learnings and the insights. And one of my favorite things in the whole world is sitting next to a data analyst and just digging into the data and asking why often we can look at data in a way to find the number that proves our point.  

 
11:12 
Michelle Booth 
But really it's having that sort of curiosity to look at the anomalies and to go, what is our assumption there? Is that right, or is it a bias? And then to build that hypothesis, to test in the smallest, safest way and then scale from there, rather than try and get a massive big campaign out the door that is completely different to where the status is now.  

 
11:34 
Dom Hawes 
Brilliant advice. I hope you wrote that down. We are going to look in a minute at the future. What you mentioned the name earlier, and I just want to go back. Anything to do with celebs? I'm a little bit interested in how it works, particularly with corporates. You mentioned you'd done a lot of work with Marcus Rashford. Talk to me about what that was, why it was and how it worked.  

 
11:53 
Michelle Booth 
Marcus was looking for a partnership. He'd seen the need to help young people around money, and obviously his lens was through a social mobility lens. He didn't want to badge anything, and him and his team were really vocal about that. So that gave us the real opportunity again to look at the problem. And we worked with a number of different experts in the field to really understand what are some of the barriers that young people face. The interesting thing about it was that you can't be what you can't see. And so for a lot of young people, they don't get the opportunities because they don't see the different types of jobs or availability, just down to their living circumstances.  

 
12:32 
Michelle Booth 
So what we created was an opportunity to help young people really discuss their motivations, their ambitions, and also sort of meet people that come from some of those backgrounds, whether it's back office in a football stadium, or whether it's an illustrator for a book, and really help understand their motivations in a safe space. And what we learned was that safe space wasn't school, but it was youth work. And so in a youth work context, you're with your peers and you're having a discussion, and it's a good opportunity to really unpack some of the attitudes and challenge that you have around money and your future. And the thing that makes me proudest in the world is that when we did the research and when we rolled it out into some youth centers, we started to hear evidence that young people were starting to save.  

13:20 
Michelle Booth 
They'd signed up for college. They started to take action, not because we told them to, but because same principles, we'd unlock their motivation and allowed them to see something was possible. So for me, it was such a proud moment. And I often say, if you want to change the world, work for a bank. And it was really evident that is possible when you work for a big bank.  

 
13:40 
Dom Hawes 
Yeah, that's an amazing story. I bet it was a very popular one to work on, too, because there's a genuine purpose there. Not a mayonnaise with purpose, but a positive, active way that you can impact society. So I bet you had people fighting to work on that.  

 
13:54 
Michelle Booth 
And not just that. I think when we looked at activating it, we worked with a beano. So I scored lots of branded points with my ten year old. But as were working together, we crafted a story together. The brand was in that narrative. It went on newsstands and it made international news with Marcus on the COVID of it. But also we activated it in branch as well. So we worked with the Beano IP, which was super fun. So it was also spotting opportunities when were working to continuously connect the proposition to the marketing and to really, truly activate an idea across all the channels, be they TikTok, be they out of home, or be they in the beano.  

 
14:34 
Dom Hawes 
I also think it's a lovely way, because, look, as a consumer, people often look at banks and they see big organizations. Obviously, they have a color, green or blue or whatever their particular color is, but they don't see much beyond that. And I don't think many people think about the social good that actually money or money management can do. I wanted to talk about that one because I thought it was a particularly cool initiative.  

 
15:00 
Dom Hawes 
Wow. We covered so much in the hour.  

 
15:02 
Dom Hawes 
Or so that we recorded.  

 
15:03 
Dom Hawes 
Now, we've edited down a little, but so much of what we spoke about is truly valuable. So actually, not that much ended up on the cutting room floor. So we've also published a bonus episode to accompany part one and this part two, and that is also available right now on this platform. The main story is Michelle's story. In the bonus. We look into the future using the pest framework as a guide. It's definitely worth listening to. Michelle is a tour de force. Now, I chose not to interrupt the flow of our conversation in part one and part two. Instead, I'm going to do this, an extended digital doggy bag of things you can take away. We picked up Michelle's story at Bo, a new banking product in the incubation zone of the Royal bank of Scotland.  

 
15:49 
Dom Hawes 
The incubation zone is one of four organisational zones identified in Jeffrey Moore's classic book zone to win. You can read about them online in the book, or you can listen to Jeffrey talk about theory himself on this very podcast, which was recorded in January 2024. And you can find that on Unicorny Co. UK. Now, Michelle has a really interesting background and I think that informs her approach to business. She trained at the poor school drama college, and while that may seem irrelevant to the michelle I met today, I can't help feeling that experience has had a profound impact on her work, her attitude and her ability to problem solve. It's no surprise to me that Michelle thrived in agency. She's clearly comfortable with uncertainty and she has a strong leaning towards creativity and experimental approaches.  

16:38 
Dom Hawes 
And so here's my first takeaway, and I hope Michelle doesn't mind me highlighting this, but I've brought it up because, well, first, it's an interesting observation. Next, it's a very personal one to me, and also, frankly, just because I think it matters. Imagine a young person, fresh out of the poor school, applying to your business for a role today. Be honest, would you interview her? Many businesses that I meet wouldn't. And I'm ashamed to say that many of the businesses in my own group probably wouldn't either. Because, much to my irritation, we all hire to a type, you know, we all bleed on about diversity, then we frame it in a way to suit our own worldview. And Michelle's one of the most go getting dynamic and talented marketers we've met on this journey.  

 
17:23 
Dom Hawes 
Part of her uniqueness is her background, but it's that very background that many people wouldn't hire to. And by the way, I know what I'm talking about. Because when I left the army, it took me 18 months to find a starter job in marketing. I kept the 86 rejection without interview letters I received. Twice as many businesses never replied to my application. I ended my search, by the way, landing a job in the postroom of a PR company. So my takeaway is this. Examine your hiring policies. Extraordinary talent doesn't always grow from ordinary backgrounds. Let's move on. In act one, part one, we looked at the story of Bo. This was a product being launched into a mature market. There were already many brands targeting similar needs and wellfunded startups, the Neos or neo banks dominating the headlines.  

 
18:15 
Dom Hawes 
This marketing team's genius was to understand that financial stability was, and in fact still is, more about behavior than income. So by applying behavioural psychology principles, they realized they could influence behavior and help make money easier for those that find money management boring or overwhelming. Now that sounds so simple in retrospect, but it's not if you're marketing a product into main street, a mature market. The starting point for differentiation is market orientation. So understand what your customers currently have available to them. Then seek to find behavioral traits or insights that point to an underserved segment. What we saw with Bo is they segmented by behavior and targeted attitudinally. They were able to do this because they had the data. They had the data because they'd conducted extensive market research and analysis. I have banged this drum before.  

 
19:12 
Dom Hawes 
Our conversation spotlighted Michelle's commitment to research and analysis, which led to the successful market and customer orientation. Bo's product development was deeply rooted in market research, customer interviews and data analysis. And to me, this underscores the notion that understanding behavior and needs through rigorous research is an essential precursor to successful innovation. It not only tailors products that resonate with target demographics, but it also allows you to challenge existing market norms, driving your business in the direction of differentiation. So take away two from today, be more Abraham Lincoln if you're given 6 hours to fell a tree, spend 4 hours sharpening your axe bow was a textbook incubation zone success, but it failed to make it through transition into the mainstream business.  

 
20:04 
Dom Hawes 
And more's the pity too, because while there are substitute products out there, from a technical viewpoint, none have found the same targeting key. So some of the sector remains underserved. Now we deliberately didn't explore the reasons for Bo's demise because, well, it was a choice made of competing priorities, not market failure. But Bo's story does highlight the importance of executive sponsorship at the very highest level in the transition zone. And when I spoke to Jeffrey Moore about this, he was unequivocal. The transition zone needs all the way to the CEO behind a product, or it will fail. Or at least it'll fail to reach its potential. Now, if you're not familiar with zone to win yet, that is my takeaway. Three, read it. It's full of smarts that will help you create value and help your business win.  

 
20:51 
Dom Hawes 
Which brings us up to Michelle and her team. Moving lock, stock and barrel into Natwest to revitalise the brand platform. Her team came into a very different cultural framework and from the off, Michelle knew how important it was to respect that. She said, have the humility. Get people to learn by doing rather than trying to convince them that this is the way forwards. And she employed theatre skills she'd learned at the outset of her career to do it with humor, by creating a sense of play, exploration and curiosity. Which takes me to the final takeaway for today. Do not say if you're facing a culture or behavioural change challenge. How can you make living the new way fun, safe and, frankly, worth trying? Because leadership's tough at the best of times and in times of change, it is even tougher. It's even more lonely.  

 
21:48 
Dom Hawes 
But maybe we can take a leaf out of Michelle's book. Maybe we can summer up the inner thespian in all of us. Maybe by employing humour, by employing a sense of play and encouraging exploration, we can all win the day. You've been listening to unicorny and I am your host, Dom Hawes. Nicola Fairley is the series producer, Laura Taylor McAllister is the production assistant, Pete Allen is the editor. Unicorny is a Selby Anderson production.