Diego Scotti, chief marketing officer of Verizon, discusses
transforming -- and sometimes even scrapping -- a brand name
By Ryan Knutson
In just over two years as Verizon Communications Inc.'s chief
marketing officer, Diego Scotti has overseen some big changes in
how the company approaches consumers. Mr. Scotti, who previously
served as the marketing chief for J. Crew, was Verizon's first
outside hire ever for the CMO role. He spoke with The Wall Street
Journal about how the more than 100-year-old company is trying to
appeal to the next generation of consumers. Following are edited
excerpts of the conversation.
Staying relevant
WSJ: Tell me about how you arrived at Verizon.
MR. SCOTTI: The first time that I talked to [Verizon CEO] Lowell
McAdam I said, "I'm not a telco person, so why would you want
somebody like me for this role?" His explanation was that our brand
and our company are going to go through a big transformation. We
really need to work on creating an emotional connection with our
customers -- current and future ones. Because as our industry gets
more commoditized, if we don't take that step, we won't be as
successful. And in order to do that he wanted to bring in somebody
who has other experiences, not only the telco industry.
WSJ: Tell me about some of the company's recent changes.
MR. SCOTTI: Part of Lowell's vision was that as we start
thinking about the next-generation customers -- that being
millennials or Gen Z and whatever is coming next -- we need to
ensure that we are very relevant. And in order to do that, [being
simple, personalizable and reliable] becomes really important.
So when we heard that our service plans were not simple, we got
rid of all our plans, and decided to do small, medium, large and
extra large. The same way you buy your T-shirts, now you can get
your plan. That's something that people understand. A lot of people
say that I did that because I came from J. Crew and all I do is
think about T-shirts. That's a little simplistic, but whatever, it
works.
The new My Verizon app was a tremendous innovation for us.
Because we said we're going to take the current app that we have,
and we're going to, like, burn it. And we're going to start from
scratch. If you're going to create the remote control for your
plan, what would it be? For these younger consumers who are dealing
with brands like Uber -- you can't separate the app and the Uber
service. The service and the app are the same thing.
What millennials want
WSJ: What do millennials look for in a cellphone carrier, and
how does Verizon figure that out?
MR. SCOTTI: There is this misconception that millennials are
this very homogeneous group. That they all look, feel and act the
same way. I think you can't make that assertion about any
group.
We know this based on analytics and customer data: that there
are plenty of young people out there who want quality. For these
folks, the phone has become an intrinsic part of their lives. They
put their phone in the context of, "My phone is everything to me.
My phone is the remote control for my life. The phone is my life."
And because they are always on, they want to make sure that they
have the best.
These folks say "I want the best. I want the fastest speed, I
want the best video quality and I also want solid customer
service." And I don't mean customer service in the sense of calling
and talking to somebody, but, "I want the support that I need when
I need it."
When you start talking about young consumers, or millennials,
there seems to be this understanding that there's only one way of
addressing the needs of millennials, and that is: Everything is
free, everything is cheap, and everything is a bunch of young folks
jumping around in a commercial with some type of very energetic
music. And that's a gross oversimplification.
In our industry, that has caused a little bit of a race to the
bottom: Let's see how free free can be. Let's not put emphasis on
the quality or the experience, but on how free that experience is.
But if somebody is looking for quality across a lot of aspects of
their lives, then wireless is not different.
Tackling video
WSJ: Your go90 video app is in a totally different position in
the market than Verizon. You've got something that's trying to
appeal to young people and doesn't have much brand identity yet.
How do you approach that?
MR. SCOTTI: You want to create brands that have strong appeal
with consumers. So we do a lot of consumer research, talking a lot
to consumers, and trying to understand the essence of those brands.
So not just put a name on there and then launch it.
But second of all, what does it take to create a brand? I'm not
just talking about putting a lot of advertising dollars to put a
name out there. But especially in this day and age, it's how it's
going to connect with consumers in their lives.
WSJ: So what is the pitch for go90 then, in its essence?
MR. SCOTTI: What go90 is trying to do is to be a distribution
platform for amazing mobile-first content. And that's something
that doesn't really exist in the marketplace. We talked about the
short-form, bite-size content that every millennial loves on
YouTube, for example -- what's the HBO-quality equivalent of that?
That doesn't exist. So a lot of the work that we've been doing is
to say, OK, let's bring that quality and appeal to this new
generation.
WSJ: It doesn't carry the Verizon brand.
MR. SCOTTI: No, because we thought that it was a good way to
create this separate brand that would carry its appeal on its
own.
One stop, not one brand
WSJ: How does it all fit into the bigger challenge? You
mentioned that one of the pressures coming on the
telecommunications industry is the commoditization of it. It's been
something that telecoms have always been struggling with since the
dawn of the iPhone, of not being just a dumb pipe. How does that
influence the broader strategy that you're trying to unveil with
go90 and your Hum technology for drivers and the marketing?
MR. SCOTTI: There is definitely a perspective that says that we
want to be the one-stop shop for our customers across the digital
world. But that doesn't mean you can do it with one brand all the
time in all cases. In this day and age it's not like that.
WSJ: And the logo change was trying to be a friendlier
appearance?
MR. SCOTTI: Friendlier, and also our logo was 15 years old. It
was just looking tired. We had so many different iterations of the
logo that this was a way of appealing to the next generation of
customers. Simplifying. The check mark was signaling this notion of
reliability.
Mr. Knutson is a Wall Street Journal reporter in New York. He
can be reached at ryan.knutson@wsj.com.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 21, 2017 02:48 ET (07:48 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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