Influential Marketing Blog

How To Manage 1.4 Million People - 5 Questions with YUM! Brands CEO David Novak

No one writes a business book about leadership to help hungry children. Leadership, we usually read, is about having a grand vision. It is about the touchdown pass. No one wants to hear about the months you spent in the summer working out in the weight room. In our quarterly culture, fast results are the only thing that matters, and we expect our CEOs to be larger than life. So when David Novak, the CEO of YUM! Brands -- which owns KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell and employs over 1.4 million people worldwide -- first wrote a leadership book, I expected it to be about having a big vision.

Instead, Novak's newly released book Taking People With You is a surprisingly practical step by step guide on how to be a daily leader instead of an annual visionary. This week I had the chance to speak with him about the book and about why he felt it was so important to share his message with the world. His surprising answer for the first motivation to write his book is that all the proceeds from the book go to the United Nations World Food Programme (a CSR partner of YUM! Brands), so it may hopefully help feed some children. His second reason was because he felt it was time to share lessons from a management training program and philosophy he had already been using for 15 years to train over 4000 restaurant managers with huge success within YUM! Brands.

Here were five questions I asked him and his responses:

Q: How important is social media and digital tools to the way that you communicate and take people with you?

A: Even if you are in a huge company, you have to do everything you can to make the company smaller. I do a blog on my travels in the first person. Tell people what I see in each of our markets. I personalize it. I think relationships and having people feel like you are engaged and care is absolutely critical. If you are an "ivory tower leader" and never get out of your office, then you aren't going to get work environment and culture you need.

Q: In the quick service restaurant industry, there is high turnover. How important is what you do to helping address that issue?

A: Great people leave for two reasons. Money is not one of the reasons. The first real reason why people leave is because they don't get along with their boss. Second reason is where people don't feel appreciated. It may be more true in the services business, but it is true in any business.

Q: How important is likeability to leadership and taking people with you?

A: It is hard to like somebody who doesn't like you. You have to be a person that people want to be around. I don't think people follow people they don't like. They don't buy brands they don't like. But doesn't mean you need to run a popularity contest. Your aim should be to get a point where people want to be around you.

Q: What is the biggest mistake that you see other leaders and CEOs of organizations making?

A: Leaders don't tend to be self aware. They don't know how what people really think of them. Leaders are often in a cocoon, seeing themselves in a way which may not be true.  Also, a lot of times leaders will assume that people will just do their job. People want to be part of something bigger. Just because someone works for you, doesn't mean they will just do what you want them to do. That's niave. The real trick to getting results is involvement.  You need to get your people involved.

Q: One day when you one day retire or leave YUM!, how will you want people to remember you?

A: I would like them to remember me as a leader who believes in them and cared enough to pass on the learnings that I was privileged enough to gain. That I was genuinely a leader.

Disclaimer: Ogilvy, my employer, does some marketing and communications work for YUM! Brands. This interview was not solicited or granted as part of our work for them or compensated in any way. Novak's publisher (Portfolio Penguin) came to me directly to review the book, and I accepted.

5 Ideas From A Global Journey Through Beer Marketing

It is hard not to enjoy beer marketing. Even if you are not a marketer, this industry always offers creative advertising (particularly on TV) that is fun to watch and spends lots of money doing it. Every year at the Super Bowl, a good number of the Top 10 ads come from beer companies. In other venues beyond sports, beer advertising often promises good times, great parties and generally being able to escape from your daily life into a world of fun, travel and festivities.

When it comes to marketing strategy, however, it often seems like beer companies focus on being entertaining at the expense of being strategic. With campaigns that seem to change almost monthly and taglines that rarely last for more than a football season, it is easy to dismiss beer marketing as irresponsible spending to promote a high margin product. Is there more to beer advertising than 30 second eye candy and girls in bikinis? Here are a few popular marketing campaigns for beer - along with their corresponding marketing strategy that may yield some surprising lessons ...

1. Be Unique (Red Stripe Beer)

If you have ever had a Red Stripe beer from Jamaica, you know that it has a very unique bottle shape, shorter and stubbier than most others. The bottle sets the beer apart more than anything else, and this fact is brilliantly parodied in this ad featuring their central spokesperson - the Jamaican guy who loves nothing more than celebrating what beer can do with his trademark expression of Jamaican joy: "Hooray Beer!"

2. Demonstrate Loyalty (Bud Light)

The ad for Bud Light below follows the model this beer company has focused on for nearly every Super Bowl and football season - forget about your product features and focus on the simple message that guys will do almost anything for your beer. The strategy which seems buried in most of their ads is the unwavering loyalty that the guys in their ads have for Bud Light. They will build houses out of it, jump out of planes, and even walk around naked for a day just to get more of it. It is easy to argue that the name of the beer involved is entirely forgettable, but the ads stand out for being entertaining.

3. Create Associations (Estrella Damm)

A popular ad for European beer Estrella Damm - this campaign features a few ads which tell the story where the beer plays a supporting role and one of the tagline reads "Good times never end when you have something to remind you of them." Another ad features a growing relationship between two fellow travellers. While the taglines don't exactly roll off the tongue, the entire campaign creates stories that associate the beer with the common memory of moments like a short term romance on a backpacking trip through Europe that many of their target audience will remember nostalgically, and one that many people won't be able to help sharing.

4. Foster Aspirations (Dos Equis)

Probably the most popular campaign of the list, this inspired marketing from Dos Equis creates a persona for the Most Interesting Man In The World who, by his own admission, "doesn't always drink beer, but when he does he prefers Dos Equis." The image of this man is who every guy wants to grow up to be, and works because it places Dos Equis in a typically uncontested space as the choice for a more mature and refined guy versus an infantile male trying to relive lost days of keg stands and beer pong from college. That and irresistible lines like "he lives vicariously through himself" help position Dos Equis as the more aspirational choice in beers.

5. Reinforce Perceptions (Heineken)

The thing that European beers have always used to promote themselves against other brands is the sense that they are a more upscale and respectable choice when you go to a bar or similarly public place. Heineken's recent campaign takes this message and replays it with the powerful tagline - "give yourself a good name." The ads feature guys making bold decisions (like drinking with the scary bosses' daughter) and congratulating them on their choice. It helps reinforce the message that what beer you choose says something important about who you are, so choose well.