Graham Atkinson joined Walgreens three years ago and took over as CMO in 2012. Job No. 1 was brand building– transforming the Walgreens brand, a 112-year-old household name that had outlived the consumer’s definition of convenience in a wellness-obsessed, digitally empowered world. This is the second video in a two-part series.
orange: What role do the different brand elements play in the transformation process?
This isn’t just going to be a makeover. It’s not a paint job on a store, it’s not a rearrangement of stuff, it’s not a new uniform. We have to reinvent the experience. If you’re a retailer and you’re reinventing the experience, it’s got to include real stuff.
But by the same token, you do need to represent the current and future consumer and the changing trends, and the changing wishes and desires of consumers. The way in which we looked at what we offer, the categories that we offer, and linked that to the direction of the brand, so essentially moving us from a convenience store to a health and daily living store anchored around health and beauty, is a fundamental change for us and that needed to be represented in categories and products as well as in services.
orange: How do you connect your marketing efforts with other departments and internal partners at Walgreens?
At the end of the day I’ve always believed, since I started my time in marketing 20 years ago, that marketing is a service, and being called marketing services I don’t think in any way demeans the skill or the function. But it does have to serve the business and serve the product that you’re offering.
I do see education and being a point of go-to expertise and a business partner as being very important. Now sometimes you have to pull as well as push, but I do think that to be a truly successful marketer, particularly in the changing environment now, you need to understand your internal business constituents as well as understanding your consumers. And you need to be educating one about the other.
As the primary sources of data and knowledge of what is going on in the market, what our competitors are doing, what our customers want and how they’re changing, we have a serious responsibility to make sure that that isn’t just something that flows through the communications strategy.
orange: There’s a lot of talk about the importance of bringing IT and marketing together. How has digital integration impacted the role of a CMO today?
We felt, at Walgreens, the need to know more about our customers and the changing demographics of the country, just made it essential that we embarked on that journey. I know one of my preoccupations in my first 18 months was developing a platform, convincing the board and beginning to build the capability to offer a loyalty program to our customers. That was probably, for me, the light bulb, ah-ha moment of just how the role of the CMO is changing. Because so rapidly it started to bring all the assets of our IT department; we needed to connect 42 systems to actually take our loyalty program live. Everything from the point-of-sale in the store to obviously all the other assets that sit around the company, so doing that was a huge relationship change in the way we worked with IT.
Of course as an adjunct to that you have the whole exploding digital and e-commerce environment going on, which is obviously linked to IT, but very distinct from in terms of being all about front-end, customer value proposition, etcetera. Pulling those pieces together and anchoring it around all this plethora of data that was going to emerge out of this program; in the first year we’ve signed up over 18 million customers with all the data about their relationship with Walgreens. Think data, think IT, think digital—and the CMO role feels pretty different.
I think over the last 10 years CMOs have truly had to fight their way into the boardroom, previously dominated by finance and lawyers, and that just isn’t enough in the modern world.
You have to earn your way into the business, earn your way into the C-suite and earn your way with your customers.
You can check out part 1 of this interview with Walgreens CMO Graham Atkinson about brand building here. To read the full interview with Graham Atkinson request the print edition.