Episode 282 / Nick Goodchild / PVH Corp. / Vice President, Global Transformation
The Therapy-at-Work Approach to Marketing Leadership
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As Vice President of Global Transformation at PVH Corp. (VP of EMEA Marketing for Tommy Hilfiger at the time of recording), Nick Goodchild has realised that his role as marketing leader is requiring him to take on “a lot” - on the emotional side, too.
The last few years have been a unique time for brands, especially in fashion, with governments trying to curb consumer spending and create a sense of financial uncertainty. This has led to "teams constantly in chaos, jumping from one idea to the next" as they scramble to adapt. Nick notes that decisions have started to be made erratically, creating a constant state of uncertainty which takes its toll on people.
This made him realise that his role as a leader had to evolve to address the emotional impact on his team - thus adopting a “therapy leadership” approach, which is his shiny new object.
"I go into one to ones, where there's a lot of tears, where people's ideas are the next big thing one day and then completely canned and in the bin the day after. And that creates such uh, turmoil sometimes is that I you find yourself thinking, Well, how am I going to deal with this?"
Nick's solution was to start "probing and asking questions.” This approach, which Nick likens to a "mini therapist," proved to be highly effective. As he recounts, "when we left the room, we hadn't solved any of our problems, but I could tell that we just reset the process and [this] enabled us to go into another round of ambiguity.”
Working to help clear the emotion and its associated blockers from critical situations has become Nick’s new leadership style. Learn more about it and listen to his top marketing tips on the podcast.
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Nick Goodchild 0:00
When we left the room, we hadn't solved any of our problems, but I could tell that we just reset the process. We'd managed to effectively as a group, not just me, but as a group, we had cleared the blockers, behavioral blockers, really, and that we were able to go out and live to fight another day.
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Tom Ollerton 0:56
Hello and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton, I'm the founder of automated creative, and this is a podcast about the future of data driven marketing. Every week or so I have the absolute pleasure and privilege of speaking to one of our industry's leaders, and this week is no different. However, it is a little bit different because I'm at our guest's house and in 265 episodes, that's never happened before. So...
Nick Goodchild 1:23
Welcome.
Tom Ollerton 1:24
Thanks, Nick. I'm here with Nick Goodchild, who is VP of global marketing at Tommy Hilfiger, and we are in an overcast Amsterdam. Nick, thanks for having me over and for the lovely coffee. But for anyone who doesn't know who you are and what you do, could you give us a bit of background?
Nick Goodchild 1:42
Yeah, sure. Thanks for having me on. Obviously, Nick, I started my working career, working for the likes of Big Brother the television programs, working for a company called Endemol, who, ironically, are Dutch, ended up living here a few years later, then moved to start my own content agency in London, sold that in 2013 realized I wasn't a very good leader, joined Amazon to become a good leader, learned how to do things at scale, like genuine, proper scale, and then was asked to go and join PVH to set up their own internal uh, studios in here in Amsterdam. So came over here, set up the client, Tommy Hilfiger, and then the last, uh, yeah, three years, moved in to just support the Tommy Hilfiger marketing organization. And here I am.
Tom Ollerton 2:34
So in that career, what has been the best investment of your own time, energy or money.
Nick Goodchild 2:44
Interesting. First question, I think, well, actually, that's quite an easy answer, just because it's one that took a huge amount of my time. And secondly, because I felt and I still feel, it's an incredibly important subject. It started at Amazon when I first joined there, the then VP of Marketing for Amazon fashion, so we were specifically for Amazon fashion at the time I was running the studio, came to me and said, Listen, we don't like the pictures that your team are producing at the moment. And I obviously asked question. Well, bear in mind, I had a team of about 65-70 people at the time producing photographs and assets day in and day out on basically a production line of a studio. The question was, why don't you like the assets? She turned around, she said to me, Nick, I don't know, they're just a bit blah. And so that was a very difficult message to hear. How the hell was I supposed to sort of improve things, really. So I decided that that I was going to set myself the goal of trying to tackle subjectivity in creative content, in this case, a fashion picture, and it was a huge journey for me at Amazon, one that I continued past Amazon when I joined PVH, and I actually ended up building a system, which I then called Six AV, which was actually a measurement system for measuring the esthetic quality of a fashion image. Everyone thought it was pretty crazy at the time, but it was, yeah, we looked at imagery from the cost of from the perspective, sorry, of post production, styling, hair and makeup, lighting, composition, etc, etc. So we got to a place where I was able to develop a metric around that, believe it or not, and I felt that that was something that I ended up learning so much from, that actually you can measure the subjective quality of other picture. Used arbiters, arbiters in the business, and aggregated a score that people would give to that. So that was for me a very, very important and worthwhile investment of my time. And I wax lyrical about it to this day, to anyone who could me five minutes listen to it. And I think it's Yeah, and I think it challenged a lot of the assumptions that people had of like I will be the sole arbiter of a creative decision, and I don't really need anybody telling me, you know whether I'm right or not, because either A, I'm the Global Brand president, or B, I am the, yeah, the creative director, or whatever so. And obviously Amazon, which is data obsessed, gave me a lot of freedom to look at that.
Tom Ollerton 5:54
This is fascinating. No one's ever said anything like this before the podcast. So so you'd have a range of different scores for an ad. And so someone would present this image for this this ad, and then you'd go through with a, like a tick list going, is the hair and makeup good? Is it like? So it was, it trying to kind of put some rules around subjectivity, but it was still subjective, though, I guess?
Nick Goodchild 6:20
It's a good question. Obviously, it's a bit of IP here, so I can't go into huge amounts of detail, but the reality is this, is that the idea is that if you get multiple arbiters across a business scoring and what they're looking for is a defect or a hit or a miss, effectively, of an image. So what we had was, I built a web based application that took a sample set of all of the images coming out of the studio of a fixed period. So you can either quarterly or you can do it monthly, and then we would do basically an audit of those images. And so there'd be an SQL query that would run or would pull a sample set, but a very random sample set. So remember, this tool is not testing. What do you think of the best work that we do is, what do you think of all the work we do? So it has to be a random sample set. That sample set would then be pumped into a base application and the arbiter. So in this case, when we were at Amazon, it was the person who originally complained about the imagery. Said she was the VP of marketing. It was one of the fashion leaders, one of the buyers on the team. All job it was, is to identify if these pictures were any good or not. And they would then go in and they would say, Hey, here's a hit, here's a miss. And they would score the image with a hit or a miss. That would be whether it be across styling, whether it be across lighting, whether it be across the model, the casting. And if you hit gave a defect, you'd have to give a reason as to why. And when you've done that...
Tom Ollerton 7:59
Was it binary? Was it like, this is good, right? It wasn't a scale. So this was a no, then you'd have to say it's a no, because.
Nick Goodchild 8:06
Yes but what it did, it taught people to not have, like, just wafty opinions about a picture. Like, if you're going to have a problem with an image, then be sure about what your problem is about it, and mark it accordingly. And the dashboard, it kicks out. Was fascinating. So then I would be able to, at the end of every quarter a month, and this was actually done monthly, I would be able to have a dashboard this the application kicked out that showed me right, your pass overall pass rate is like, say, 85% of the 15% that were in inverted commas, defective, or your arbiters decided was defective. That was mainly because of styling, it was mainly because of lighting. It was mainly because of hair and makeup. It was mainly because of retouching or post production. And I could see my areas for improvement for the studio, and I could build continuous improvement around that, which is, of course, what Amazon loves. So it was, yeah, it was a really fascinating journey to go through again, pure blood Amazonians, as I call them, loved it. It was a bit more of a tricky sell when we got to Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, of course, more pure blood fashion. But that's, in essence, what the tool, we call it the six AV, the six aesthetic variables.
Tom Ollerton 9:15
Literally fascinating. And are you now AI-ing that? So you're, you've got a must. You must have a massive data set now, and you must be able to train something to to do a sweep before it even it's the next or do you do it on every single image?
Nick Goodchild 9:31
Now it's the next stage. I think how we, how we put an AI through that is something that we need to to investigate. I'll be honest, it's not I mean, a lot of the input of that process requires on the will and the ability and capability of the arbiters to do it.
Tom Ollerton 9:50
You don't need them anymore. Well, you can just, you can try. Do you know what? I'll choose that as a bit
Nick Goodchild 9:55
of leverage for them.
Tom Ollerton 9:56
Sorry, guys, you can. You don't need to come in tomorrow. No, you just. Train you train your model on their subjectivity, correct?
Nick Goodchild 10:04
Then that's exactly what it is. Is an aggregation in the tool itself, aggregate subjective opinion, whether AI is the only arbiter there or one of some AI and some human arbiters, is a really interesting idea, so I'm going to white label that. Thanks very much. No worries now,
Tom Ollerton 10:22
Right, so we are going to move on to a bit of advice. So what is the best bit of data driven marketing advice that you find yourself sharing most often, or a bit of advice that you heard you thought, yeah?
Nick Goodchild 10:37
That's a good question. And honestly, it plays back this is, this is actually generally not just a nice, interesting link to what I was just been talking about, but it is actually the truth for me, constant balance between gut and science. So someone once said to me the idea of marketing and being that perfect blend between science and art, science being the data bit art being, you know, your ability to be able to adjudicate what is what is not, either a good piece of esthetic image or, you know, a good message or tone of voice or anything. So for me, there's that blend of what is we're told our consumers live, versus what our own instinct is about what will resonate with our brands or for our brand with our consumer. And I've invariably seen, and I still continue to see teams that lean one way or other, or certainly has a penchant for want of a better word, one way or another. For me, you've got to find your middle ground there, and you've got to be aware. Self awareness have EQ enough to be able to say, Hey, I'm going too much down. You know, data says this computer says this, we need to do that versus okay. But is that something that's going to resonate, on the emotional experience of our consumer. And remember, fashion is emotional. It will always be emotional. So I'm talking about it very much from a fashion perspective, so you can't ignore the instincts or the emotional inputs into fashion. So fashion is predicated on, do I like this color? Does that fit me? Is this me? Those are very subjective questions. So the moment we move away from that and just go down to purely a data driven Well, you know, in order to get my consideration, spontaneous awareness up, we need to increase our penetration, or increase our paid search, then you're you're moving away from something, I think has to be a blend of the two. So that's my answer to your interesting question.
Tom Ollerton 12:53
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So we're now going to talk about your shiny new object, which is therapy leadership. Like this was completely brand new to me until about 20 minutes ago. So what? What is therapy leadership and why is it your shiny new object?
Nick Goodchild 13:43
First, to be clear, it's, it's um, it's an idea, something based on my observation. So I'm not therapist or a doctor or anything like that. So it's just something that I think is shown up as a trend enormously, in my in my role, in my VP role. So an executive role for Tommy Hilfiger and PVH, especially over the last two years. It's difficult always to put into words. So I'm going to do my do my best on it, but going back to what I was just talking about, this blend of the subjective versus data every time new leadership occurs, every time a new piece of insight comes in, whether it be from a data perspective, whether it be from a new piece of a marketing workshop we've done with our consumers, whether it be just a new idea that a more junior member of staff has had, it creates waves, ripples of change. And I think as we've been through post COVID In the last couple of years, we've been through quite a unique situation where all governments of the world. Have been trying to stop consumers from spending, to prevent inflation from happening. We've seen interest rates rises. I hear it a lot. Why are we not doing better in business? Well, because governments of the world have tried to stop us from spending. You know, they've tried to make us feel poorer so we don't spend. And guess what? This works. And so now there's this, this huge jump from brands like like ours and our competitor set to drive and grab whatever share of wallet is left with our consumers that has made for very quick decision making and a lot of pivoting, quite honestly, and as somebody who leads a marketing team, it's created quite a unique I find something I have not experienced before, quite a unique set of circumstances where teams are constantly in chaos. For want of a better phrase they could. They're jumping between one idea to the next idea. Suddenly, budgets can't now budgets being invested because they realized that that budget wasn't working. And no, now it's marketing as a percentage of net sales. No, it's not. We need to, when our sales drop, we need to put more money into marketing so teams become right word. Teams become almost, yeah, a catapult from one extreme to the other, and then somebody leaders, and that comes from VP downwards to directors, to managers, to senior managers have to speak to those teams. And what I've realized over the last 12 months, really 12 to 18 months, is that this is sort of magnified and become more accentuated is that I go into one to ones, where there's a lot of tears, where people's ideas are the next big thing one day and then completely canned and in the bin the next, the day after. And that creates such uh, turmoil sometimes is that I you find yourself thinking, Well, how am I going to deal with this? And I realized over time that I began probing and asking questions, that my role as a VP of Marketing, someone from a high volume content production background, that's what my background was, was suddenly asking questions of, how does that make you feel? And, yeah, how are you going to be able to progress in your relationship with that person? Or why do you feel so bitter and annoyed by that? And then there would be a response to that, and I would be able to, I'd sit there and say, Well, okay, and what's the next stage of that? I would probe deeper and deeper. And it still occurs to me one day, having been through my own journey, as many of us have with with a therapist, of thinking I am turning into a bit of a mini therapist here, I'll give you an example. We had a project where we had secured a talent, won't name the talent in this particular instance, and everyone felt good about it. We'd been through a huge process to negotiate with the agent the shoot had happened wearing full Tommy Hilfigeressentials and so on and so forth. And for whatever reason, you know, the arbiter of that decision just turned around said, This is not a good shoot. This is not where this needs to be. The team that I was leading at that time were just ruined by it. I had a girl and colleague in my office feeling completely awash with emotion around the decision that had been made. But we had to go back out there. We had to get that shoot rectified quickly. So we sat down for an hour and we discussed it. We went round the table, and it was like, tell me how you feel, almost like not AA, but an AA kind of meeting where we went around in sort of like that. Okay, let's all talk about how we feel. Hi, my name's I'm not making this name up, but I'm not. My name's Steve, and yeah, I'm upset about this shoot because x and then I went around the table, and then your point of view, and what I noticed was it was the cathartic nature of going around that table, that when we left the room, we hadn't solved any of our problems, but I could tell, and I think they could tell as well. I knew they could tell because they told me afterwards that we just reset the process and enabled us to go into another round of ambiguity, of uncertainty, of what we're going to do, but I we'd managed to effectively as a group, not just me, but as a group. We had cleared the the the emotion from the room, and we had cleared the the the blockers, behavioral block. Us, really, and that we were able to go out and fight and live to fight another day. And because I noticed that that was so successful, I started trying again and again, and it was really where I then coined this idea of therapy leadership, and I do use it sparingly, because it is slightly not a therapist, but I think every leader, and so the higher up you go now has a bit of a mandate, really, to make sure they get to know their bloody people. You know, you've got to get to know them. You have to understand how they tick in order to be able to set them up for for the future.
Tom Ollerton 20:47
So to push back a little bit. So in my experience of therapy, the great thing about it is, is you can just really dump on that person for like an hour, or however long your session is. And in the end you like, see you later, yeah. And, but you can't do that with your friend. You can't do that with your family. You can't do that with your partner in the same way it's, this is, I don't know how suitable for work this is, but there's a certain professional people where you go to them for a physical need, right, okay, correct? And you go and do that thing, and then you leave that Yeah. And I often think therapy is a bit like that. You're just going and just dropping all exactly and and the reason that you can go deep and be emotional and expose yourself is because, you know, there's nothing coming back. You don't have to wake up next to them in bed or, like, you know, do a presentation with them. So I, I'm genuinely inspired by this idea of therapy leadership. But can you actually do it because they're on your team? A true therapist would be completely cut off from any of the day to day. So how do you how do you balance that? Because they're not really dumping on you, you're doing it as a team, correct?
Nick Goodchild 21:56
And it's a really good point. The bottom line is, is that it's effective. I found it effective, but it's exhausting for for honestly, means for me, because I, I end up, I end up, sorry, leaders who follow a same course, they take on a lot, right? It feels like it's another you take on that energy, you take on that ability, but if you don't do it, it's my point, you don't take the time to do it, then it, it builds over and compounds over time to something where burnout becomes an issue, and where people's quite honestly, they're not performing as well as the either A the team needs or B that they are capable of, and that's sad to see. No one wants to get to that stage. No, it's not Tom like a traditional therapy session by any means, but it's creating some space and some time. I use the word therapy because that's the closest similarity that I can see. You said you like the concept of it is because we understand what therapy means. It's not necessarily following the same same course, but it is the same outcome where people feel purged a little bit, or they feel it doesn't not suggesting for a second they leave the office. Fantastic. What a wonderful session we've all just had and now all my problems are solved, personally and in business. But it's, it's, it's that space, and I think it's been we look at it, I say, I say a lot to my, my current boss and our HR business partner, I feel like a therapist. Say, how you doing? I'm just cracking on with it, with the therapy sessions, and that always sounds slightly more negative, but I think it is a genuine help. I'm beginning to think it is a mindset, and it's a growth mindset as well. It's one that's constantly calibrating and understanding how a team is looking and feeling.
Tom Ollerton 23:56
Nick, I'm really sorry, but we're at the end of the podcast, and I kind of feel you're just getting started, and it's a fascinating topic. And thank you for opening my eyes to that. If someone wants to get in touch with you about therapy, leadership, or anything else that we've talked about, where is the best place to do that and what makes a message that you will actually reply to?
Nick Goodchild 24:17
LinkedIn? You mean, you mean actually platform, yeah, LinkedIn and yeah, just say therapy leadership. Note it in the, in the in the intro, and not on the what you're talking about, because I've not spoken about this openly like this. And we can, we can, we can go from there.
Tom Ollerton 24:37
Look, thank you so much for your time
Nick Goodchild 24:38
Pleasure.
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