My Best Marketing Tips #6: Whirlpool / Jon Hall / Brand and Product Marketing Director
Whirlpool Brand and Marketing Director Jon Hall took an unconventional path into marketing. An army veteran, he shifted from platoon leader to communication officer in Iraq and subsequently joined Kraft Foods upon being discharged. He is now not only the architect behind Whirlpool’s high-end Jennair line of products but also a professor of marketing at Notre Dame University and Rice University in the US. His marketing tips are all about experiencing first-hand the marketing process and infusing the customer journey with your brand message.
When Jon thinks of the worst screw-ups of his marketing career, the launch of the now successful Jennair brand for Whirlpool comes to mind. He takes full responsibility for a website that didn’t work as it failed to bring to life the project on paper. But it’s through this experience that he’s learnt the importance of being a practitioner of what he asks his team to do, and this has been at the source of some of his most cherished marketing tips.
What is the best marketing tip you’ve ever received and who was it from?
In my early days at Whirlpool, I was lucky to have an excellent mentor, Bill Beck who is now CMO at Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield. He taught be about archetype mapping: Understand how people draw meaning with each other and purpose. Everyone is drawn to certain archetypes so, as a brand, if you find yours and build your marketing strategy around it, you will always attract the right customers.
How have you put this marketing tip to good use?
When you’re expressing your archetype fully, you’re being the purest form of you. I used this concept when building the brand strategy for Jennair, helping change the way consumers thought about the brand and associate it with high-end, luxury goods, as well as change the target demographic.
I also use the archetypes with my Shiny New Object: mapping marketing activities across the shopper journey. As long as brands start with a clear archetype in mind and a defined brand strategy, they can then have this translated into their internal processes and all their marketing activities.
What marketing tips does the industry need most right now?
As marketers, we need to be practitioners of what we ask our teams to do. This is something I learnt the hard way with the website launch for Whirlpool’s Jennair brand. It took us six months to get it back on track after completely failing at launch, and it taught me that just considering building a website is not enough to get a great finished product.
In fact, I realised that I needed to understand and develop respect for the work that goes into such a product. I developed my own website for a passion project outside of work and discovered all its intricacies and complexities. Today, I have a much sharper critical eye when I look at websites and a deeper appreciation of what it takes to make them succeed. So, my tip is to become a practitioner, so you become a better leader as a marketer.
What is the marketing tip you give most often?
I think a few things: be defiant for good reasons and know your archetype. As a marketer, don’t put your views into the conversation. You’re not the consumer, and you don’t want to land on someone who looks like you! Instead, understand your target demographic.
And finally, I love this quote from Teddy Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” which, paraphrased, goes like this: “t’s better to be in the fight and fail than to be the critic in thew sidelines that doesn’t have the honour to know what it is to fail.” You need to believe in your work and know that your strategy is right and you’re willing to get fired over it.
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