What do hay and millennials have in common?
Both are integral to the integrated marketing strategy that Wells Fargo Chief Marketing Officer Jamie Moldafsky is pursuing with great success.
In a recent interview with AdAge, the top marketer talked about her strategy to reach more customers by developing products, achieving social media consistence and maintaining governance across more than 90 business units. For Moldafsky, it all starts with those adorable horses that pull the brand’s iconic red-and-yellow stagecoaches.
“It’s a great asset … the only other company that has anything like it is Budweiser with the Clydesdales,” she said. There’s even a line item in the marketing budget for hay to feed the horses, which appear in more than 350 parades across the United States annually.
Integrated Marketing Gets a New Definition
Such thinking defines a new way of looking at integrated marketing at the nation’s fourth-largest bank.
“We’re broadening the role of marketing,” Moldafsky said, to include product development and customer experience. “A lot of the product innovation is going to happen in the white space that’s between products or channels, and our corporate marketing group sees all that — we see what our customers want, and we see where there are gaps or space for us to play.”
One such gap, Moldafsky identified, has been millennials — a challenge that many integrated marketers struggle with today.
So the CMO shifted advertising messaging to focus on benefits instead of products. A recent campaign called “Done” showed a younger generation of bank customers how easy it is to manage their financial lives with Wells Fargo’s e-banking options. This generation wants to bank from their smartphones and Wells Fargo is shaping their integrated marketing to show them how their brand fits into their lives.
Social Goes Strategic
Another lesson that integrated marketers could take from Wells Fargo is how to use social media.
To solve this often-thorny issue, Wells Fargo formed a social media steering committee. Moldafsky meets biweekly with representatives from the brand’s corporate communications, legal and executive ranks. Together, they set governance agendas and select tools and technologies. A second working group sets content.
Finally, Wells Fargo has pioneered the successful intersection of customer service with social media. The brand launched a social media command center to “create the same rigor around capturing social media interactions as we do with phone calls and branch visits,” Moldafsky described. “You’ll see that in Atlanta there’s lots of messaging about ATMs so we know very quickly that an ATM in Atlanta is broken.”
