Staying Relevant by Bridging Enterprise Strategy and Niche Execution With Francine Feder

Intro: 00:00  

Welcome back to the Response Drivers podcast, where we feature top marketing minds and dig in to their inspiring stories. Learn how these leaders think and find big ideas to push your results and sales to the next level. Now let’s get started.

Rick Rappe: 00:19  

Hey, I’m Rick Rappe, host of the Response Drivers podcast. Here I dive deep with marketing experts and innovators to learn how they approach targeted marketing and use data driven strategies to acquire and retain customers. We’ll talk about what’s working, what’s changing, and how we can stay ahead in an evolving marketing landscape. 

Response Drivers is brought to you by RPM Direct Marketing. RPM helps companies develop hard hitting, direct mail creative and utilize advanced testing and targeting methodologies to reach customers and prospects.

Our goal is to fully optimize your marketing performance so you can drive more sales and exceed growth expectations. We deliver smarter, more profitable direct mail Solutions, so you can turn your direct mail programs into a predictable, efficient sales channel. Check out rpmdm.com to learn more. 

My guest today is Francine Feder. Francine’s career spans diverse roles within retail, sports, entertainment, fashion, youth culture, automotive and outdoor. 

She spent 20 plus years as a VP of Marketing at Foot Locker in charge of creative and content, digital media, public relations, event marketing, influencer, social media and in-store and helped transform and revitalize the business. For the past two years, she has been consulting and working as a Fractional CMO, most recently at OK4WD, a premier off roading and overlanding retailer. She’s won numerous awards, including a Cannes Silver Lion Sports, Clio and Effie. Thank you so much for joining me today, Francine.

Francine Feder: 01:52  

Thank you. Rick. Nice to be here.

Rick Rappe: 01:54  

Can you walk us through a little bit about your career path and how you transitioned from, or how you got to Foot Locker and how you transitioned from Foot Locker to your current role as a Fractional CMO.

Francine Feder: 02:04  

Sure. Well, I got to Foot Locker a very long time ago. I was in, you know, I started my marketing career. I was an intern there. And then I worked at LVMH back in the day, which was I focused on Givenchy perfume.

So completely different industry. You know, I quickly found out that that wasn’t for me. And, you know, not to totally date myself, but I answered a I think at that point I decided I wanted to go work at an ad agency. So I answered a want ad for, you know, junior account exec executive and interviewed at an agency called Bates, who at the time were Foot Locker’s agency of record with an account director there who said you have client side experience? You shouldn’t work at an agency. 

Like if you can stay in the client side, stay there. My client at Foot Locker is actually looking for a junior marketing person right now. Like she makes a phone call, writes down a name and an address on a piece of paper, and I basically get on the subway, go to Foot Locker, interview there, and got hired like a day later, which is, you know, again, unheard. You know, that was the late 90s. So, you know, I don’t think that happens too much today, but I.

Rick Rappe: 03:35  

Wow. Well that’s great. No.

Francine Feder: 03:36  

Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 03:37  

It might still happen. You never know.

Francine Feder: 03:39  

Yeah. You never know.

Rick Rappe: 03:40  

Hopefully it does happen for young people. I’m not.

Francine Feder: 03:42  

Sure. Yeah. Yeah, it would be nice, but I start. So yeah, I started, you know, low on the low on the totem pole in marketing at Foot Locker. But I really started in what was traditional advertising, you know, TV, print, radio.

You know that was back. Did a lot of print actually then. And I worked across our Foot Locker and Our Lady Foot Locker brands for women and then kids Foot Locker. So it really worked my way up through marketing there through various roles, eventually leading what was called an advertising department. Again, much more traditional, you know, paid media, paid advertising, a lot of television, commercial production, that sort of thing. 

And then once I grew into the VP role, really expanded the purview. It was the beginning of social media, so nobody really knew what to do with it. I thought it was kind of fun and exciting, and it was a jump ball and I grabbed it, you know. And ended up, you know, starting a Facebook page, starting a Twitter account for us. Nobody knew what that was really. 

Just kind of got it off the ground. Next thing you know, we were at, you know, a million followers on Instagram, which was this huge milestone for us. And and it turned out that folks and consumers who liked sneakers or really, really liked showing them off on social media, and it was one of the first industries that really, you know, took off in conversation, you know, from a brand standpoint on social, you know, probably around like 2008, 2010 time frame. So I expanded my role to include social media, then grew into the the VP role of, you know, with PR as part of that and sports marketing, I managed all of our deals with, you know, the NBA. The New York Knicks. 

Wow. A lot of things like that. And then really getting more into digital marketing, which was was run, you know, separately from a separate team at Foot Locker. But we you know, it was one of a good lesson and, you know, matrix organization collaboration and and then, you know, how we we were really able to work together for a common goal as part of that until, you know, I had digital media under my purview a little bit after that and then, you know, worked across all of our operating divisions Foot Locker Lady Foot Locker Kids, Foot Locker, Champs Sports and East Bay. You know, the East Bay catalogs were, you know, here talking about direct response. 

That was obviously our big tool there. And. Then, you know, several different iterations of that VP role and consumer and, you know, a lot of shifts in the business, you know, post Covid and really accelerating our digital marketing then. And, you know, I’ve seen the whole pendulum, the whole brand to performance pendulum swing back and forth. And then at, you know, in early 2023, it was, you know, Foot Locker was definitely going in a different direction than, than I was. 

And it was time to, you know, we parted ways and then, you know, I kind of I’d been in the, in the same company for, you know, 25 years. I wanted to be for it was like, let me, let me take a minute. You know, I thought I would probably just jump into another job right away, but I wasn’t. I wasn’t quite ready to do that. So I started, you know, I kind of took a little bit of fractional work, and I ended up doing a lot of work that I’m still working with them for an agency called Athlete Driven, where, you know, they their specialty is sports sponsorships and how to really help companies, you know, not only maximize the ones that they have. 

So if you have an NBA deal but don’t really know what to do with it, you know, I’ve served as a strategic advisor and come in and say, hey, here’s, you know, here’s an athlete you can work with. Here’s a campaign that would make most sense, you know, with this partnership that you have and then also as well as, you know, bring new ideas and new clients to the table. So it was nice because it still afforded me time to, you know, you know, figure out what else I wanted to do. And then I kind of took some more, you know, fractional projects on for different companies. You know, a lot of some, a lot of retail work. 

And then I ended up taking this role at OK4 Wheel Drive earlier this year, which has been amazing. They’re they’re a small, you know, automotive, you know, off roading and overlanding which, you know, I can’t say overland but I love you haven’t.

Rick Rappe: 09:30  

Okay.

Francine Feder: 09:30  

No I love outdoors. And you know my husband and I actually have classic cars, you know.

Rick Rappe: 09:37  

Okay. Okay.

Francine Feder: 09:39  

We’re gearheads, but we hadn’t actually.

Rick Rappe: 09:42  

Right. So you sort of understand the automotive world a little bit.

Francine Feder: 09:45  

So I understand the world of cars.

Rick Rappe: 09:47  

Yeah. I have a Toyota. I have a Toyota Tacoma. One of my vehicles is a Toyota Tacoma overlanding truck. And I love it. But, you know.

Francine Feder: 09:58

I believe we have. A dealer in in either Washington or Oregon. So we can we can hook you up. We’ll talk to me. Perfect. Yeah, definitely.

Rick Rappe: 10:07  

I need more I need more stuff for my truck. Absolutely.

Francine Feder: 10:12  

Oh. Extra stuff. You can definitely. Hook you up. ok4wd.com And there you go. Perfect. Yeah.

So it’s actually a great example of, you know, a bit they’re such, like, smart and nice people. They’ve a amazing shop in Stewartsville, new Jersey which like their service is next to none but a really growing e-commerce business that they accelerated during Covid. You know, for obvious reasons. It was a a lot of people took up, you know, overlanding and offroading. They accelerated pretty quickly and they knew they were kind of at the next stage of growth.

You know, they they don’t need a full time CMO. The the CFO was kind of acting as the CMO, and, and he was actually the one that recruited me. He knew, you know, they needed some some help.

And yeah. It’s been amazing. You know, just kind of going in, going into a smart business where people know their stuff, but they just really needed help, you know, understanding here’s here’s a marketing theme, here’s a calendar, here’s consistency. This is, you know, you know, and it was simply like coming from all those years at Foot Locker.

Rick Rappe: 11:31  

I’m sure you’ve established, like your, I guess you’d say, really strong guiding principles in terms of what you, what you believe in and what what you know is going to work. You touched so many different media channels and so many different types of campaigns in your career there at Foot Locker. It sounds really like you have just an enormous amount of experience to build off of. So I was going to ask you about your a little bit more about your time at Foot Locker, and you oversaw so many campaigns, I think, during that time. Can you share anything about a campaign that stands out to you as.

Francine Feder: 12:10  

You know, really? I mean, there’s I mean, I’ll go I’m going to go with the with the fun and the famous one just because it was because it was actually very effective too. So we did this campaign every year called the Week of Greatness. And what the week of greatness was. It was the week leading up to Black Friday. So when the rest of the you know, everyone knows retail is insanely promotional before Black Friday.

So the thought process was when everyone zigged we zagged. So everyone was advertising, you know, 50% off this blowout sales in the sneaker Or industry. It is when you know the brands like Nike, Adidas, etc. released the best of their best shoes. So you know, the retro Jordans, the the really hard, you know, the most, the most coveted product was released that weekend. It was what we call heat in the sneaker industry. 

You know, there was just a lot, a lot of heat coming out. So we created an event called like, this is the week of greatness. This is the greatest product from the greatest brands like backed up and, you know, not a way. And it also became known year after year for really having the best marketing campaign attached to it. So the the year it really it really broke out as an event was we decided that like the idea behind the Week of Greatness, and this was in conjunction with our creative agency, BBDO. 

Had come up with this idea of like, because it’s the week of greatness, all is right in the world. You know, everything is perfect. So we went out. What we like to do is go after athletes and celebrities in really fun, almost like self-deprecating ways and like, convince them to like, say, to do crazy things. So in this campaign, it was the idea was all is right with the world. 

So we got, you know, Mike Tyson gave Evander Holyfield a piece of his ear back.

Rick Rappe: 14:30  

I think I saw that, yeah, I think I saw that that was great. That was the most famous one.

Francine Feder: 14:34  

And like in that same spot, we sent Dennis Rodman on a one way flight to North Korea, because that was when that whole controversy was happening.

Rick Rappe: 14:45  

Sure.

Francine Feder: 14:46  

You know, Brett Favre, like with his retire, not retire. Like he said. No more pie. Like he’s like, you gotta know when to walk away. So it was, you know, taking a lot of, you know. Sports.

You know, mainstream sports jokes at the time and that, you know, obviously it’s like on everything from the Today Show to CNN to Good Morning America. I mean, the PR, you know, without hardly spent any paid media on it. And the PR alone was just bananas.

And and the promotion was incredible. I mean, it was literally like the best sales week, you know.

Rick Rappe: 15:27  

Wow. Like, wow.

Francine Feder: 15:28  

Tripled over the prior year. You know, it was you know, all the numbers were great. And so year after year, that really became like the standard of excellence. I think the following year we did something with like when Manny Pacquiao was like, he’s going to fight me. He’s going to fight me.

Like, you know what’s happening during the week of graded, like the greatest thing is happening. And like we showed him. I took her to the Philippines to film that.

Rick Rappe: 15:53  

Wow.

Francine Feder: 15:54  

Yeah. Yeah, there was some pretty cool things. And then we had the one where, you know, people that are challenging greatness. So we had Tom Brady making fun of Deflategate. That was also.

Rick Rappe: 16:07  

Like. Oh, I remember that one too. Yeah, absolutely.

Francine Feder: 16:12  

So I mean to me. Like just from, you know, when you do the like the win back to your career and some of the like the best like those definitely stand out. But I mean there were so many like so many little things I think that.

We did in the trenches, whether it was like just, you know, tweaking a digital campaign or like doing doing some a B testing and discovering like those like the little, the little moments were, you know, equally as rewarding sometimes just because I think I think we knew the big moments were going to be big and going to be amazing.

Rick Rappe: 16:46  

Yeah.

Francine Feder: 16:47  

But sometimes it was. It was sort of those little, little everyday things in everyday adjustments to whether it’s to the marketing mix or to the strategy that I think really, you know, felt felt pretty good as well.

Rick Rappe: 17:01  

Yeah. That leads into my next question perfectly, actually, because I was going to ask you about in today’s data driven marketing landscape, how do you balance creativity with analytics to drive engagement or retention?

Francine Feder: 17:15  

Yeah, they are they are not mutually exclusive things. And I you know, I get I get so like crazy when I, I see all the binary, you know all of the articles and all the like folks talking like they’re, you know, brand marketing and performance marketing are not binary entities. They have to work together. Right? Like, you have to know that you always start with the data. You know, you have to know who your customer is to know how to speak to them properly. So the data is going to tell you a lot. I mean, it’s almost like, you know, you wouldn’t you wouldn’t you wouldn’t drive a car blind with a blindfold on. Right.

Rick Rappe: 18:05  

Right.

Francine Feder: 18:06  

So, you know, to go go to my automotive now. But you know. Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 18:12  

You don’t drive a car, go. Overlanding with a blindfold on.

Francine Feder: 18:14

No, no. You want to see the. You want to know you want to get a map of or GPS or whatever the electronic version of that is of what you’re going to look like.

Francine Feder: 18:25  

Yeah. And the data tells you what the road’s going to look like. The data is telling you or, you know, is my consumer male? Is he 35? Is he, you know, is she where does she fit in? You know, where does is it a teenager. Where who’s the purchaser?

Is it mom, is it cat. Is it them? And and that’s where you get your intelligence and your information, and then you tailor the creativity to that audience, and you use the data to see, you know, if they respond to that level of creativity. You know, and I don’t just mean like a B testing or like, hey, I did a red hat and a blue ad and one of them, you know, does it like better, but but what are the insights? You know, what made sense? 

What drove people to purchase. And then you also need to understand their journey. Most importantly like how did they get there. And that’s one of the hardest. That is harder to figure out than.

Rick Rappe: 19:30  

How did they get to the point of purchase. Like how are they? How did they how did they find you? Yeah. You know. Okay.

Francine Feder: 19:36  

Yes. Are there. Yeah. Are there metrics that say, okay, this purchase was made through direct search. This was made through, you know, meta. This was made through Google ads.

Like, yeah. But all of that is still like last click. Like, what’s the whole you know, it’s really understanding what what the journey is. I mean, if, you know, I look at I think the women’s fashion brands actually do this really well, I say that because that’s, you know, what I get served is, you know, a lot of, you know, some of these, these smaller fashion brands, you know, they see me like they’ll serve me something. And then I keep looking at an item and then I’m deciding. Then they they hit me again and they hit me again.

And they kind of get you a different way in a different spot. And. And it’s understanding, you know, who you are. And then I always, sometimes I just do it on purpose to see when they stop, you know, like because I like to see what other people are doing and like, okay, how long is it going to take them to stop talking to me? Like, what’s the right amount of time? 

Is it a week? Is it two weeks? Is it a month? Like if I, if I was looking at something and I haven’t bought it within a month, like I’m probably not going to buy it.

Rick Rappe: 20:55  

Yeah. Like if you’re being retargeted for something that you’ve looked at. Yeah. At some point.

Francine Feder: 21:00  

And there are. Some, you know, there are some companies that that, you know, hit at it for three months. It’s, you know, so it’s a very and I think learning what that sweet spot is for your target consumer who you’re going after is like, that’s a science. But it’s also an art because it’s, you know, hey, did I try to serve them like a different look or a different, you know, not just a different product, but a different, you know, was I serving them static? And now I want them to see video, like, do they need to experience full lifestyle more and is it an occasion purchaser. You know.

And that’s that’s the whole thing. And every brand’s occasions are so different.

Rick Rappe: 21:51  

Do you think that that relates at all to. More and more digital clutter that’s hard to break through, and that brands have to be more persistent over, over a longer period of time just to kind of get their messages through to consumers. I think it feels to me like we’re getting better and better at filtering out some of the digital messaging, because there’s so much of it.

Francine Feder: 22:16  

Yeah. No. We are. And a lot of I think people are just so used to seeing ads and.

And the noise that you just kind of skip right through it. And I mean, even if you look at okay, fine, even if it’s not just your phone, if you’re watching connected TV at home, I mean, right now, every, you know, every platform has pretty much got an ad based, you know, model, revenue model. And like, yeah, we’re good. Like, you know, we’re cheap. We don’t, you know, we we take the ads and, you know, I mean, granted, I’m an advertising.

I like watching it, but my husband will just he’ll just sit on his phone doing something else while the ads playing on Prime before, you know, before our show comes on. So it’s people are people are very good at at tuning that out. So yeah you have to and that’s where the creativity comes in. That’s where you have to have the right message to, to break through. It can’t just be the same, you know, annoying ad that you see over and over again.

Rick Rappe: 23:22  

Right, right. No, I know, because once you’ve gone through that campaign, I mean, it sort of has a life cycle in advertising for sure. And you can’t just keep using it over and over again. We think a little bit differently. And the direct marketing world where we we establish a control package in direct mail that performs really well, and then we’ll stick with that for most of our campaigns.

Yeah. And and keep using it over and over again because that’s the lower risk sort of proven, you know, proven methodology that’s going to win. And then we sort of also try to carve out this research and development segment, you know, 10 to 20% of a program, sometimes more than that, depending on, you know, what we’re what we’re seeing, but where we’ll do a lot of testing. So that’s where we can be really creative. And, and we try to we try to do testing for tweaking things, like you said, like little improvements, but also like swing for the fences, try to hit some home runs with something that’s totally weird and different, and you can test it in small quantities.

So yeah, a lot of our clients really like that about direct mail. Like, yeah, we can throw out 50,000 pieces or 25,000 pieces of something that’s wacky and different and just see how it does. And then if it works, we roll it out. So.

Francine Feder: 24:36  

Oh yeah, for sure. And then. Yeah. Look, I remember when we used direct mail from time to time, it felt like we had at East Bay, which was the direct marketer. It was a catalog in your home every month, and you know you’re able like you looked and see how it you know, which athlete performed better on which cover. And you basically knew how your business was based on orders that you received. And then and then you could distinguish who, you know, who called from the catalog.

Rick Rappe: 25:11  

Or I imagine the analytics and the data that you can get from a catalog is is pretty amazing.

Francine Feder: 25:16  

It was pretty crazy. And then and look, once the I mean East Bay was printing catalogs until like 2020, 2021. You know, it was pretty late for for a catalog brand.

Rick Rappe: 25:33  

Yeah. You know, well. Many, many, many, many companies are still printing catalogs. Catalogs. And they work in they work in a lot of.

Francine Feder: 25:41 

Think there’s a place in a lot of industries, like. I always say. You know, there’s something like I love getting like the Saks Fifth Avenue catalog. It’s it’s glossy, it’s pretty, you know, it’s on brand. I think there are a lot of companies that it still makes a ton of sense for, like, it’s.

You can’t, you know, what was that saying? You don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater or whatever. I mean, yes, we’re in a digital world, but yeah.

Rick Rappe: 26:13  

We always get a stack of catalogs here for every brand that my wife has purchased, you know? So whatever, whatever. We’ve purchased public rec and Lululemon and, you know, just every kind of clothing brand actually just.

Francine Feder: 26:30  

Got an interesting one of something that I was just looking at on Insta. It was someone who served me an Instagram added, they’re called pistola p I s t o Estella Denim. I actually never heard of this brand, but they look a lot like rails and some of the other, like, brands that I shop. And they they’re hitting me and hitting me on Instagram. I haven’t like, committed to buying yet just because I don’t know how their sizing is or like what will fit me.

I literally just got a 20% off coupon in the mail. Yeah. And I’m kind of like, how did they find me? You know?

Rick Rappe: 27:10  

But. Well, if you if you go to a website and look at the website, we can retarget you with direct mail right away. We can get your address and all your contact information instantly.

Yeah. That’s mildly creepy. And send you a piece. Send you a piece of direct mail. Those are very successful campaigns. Retargeting. And so I would say almost all retail businesses like that are selling online.

They should be doing it. If they should. They’re retargeting on display. You know, online and all those types of things. But they should retarget offline too, because it just it breaks through the digital clutter. It gets right into someone’s hands.

Francine Feder: 27:48  

And it does. I mean, it definitely stood out. I noticed it.

Rick Rappe: 27:50  

Yeah.

Francine Feder: 27:51  

Still not sure how to. Address, but I, I. I, I remember all those in my brain.

Rick Rappe: 27:57  

Yeah, I remember all those companies that had a robust catalog business when the internet became, you know, really popular and they spent millions of dollars to build out their websites. And then they decided like, oh, well, now we don’t have to mail catalogs anymore. And they stopped mailing their catalogs, and several of them almost put themselves out of business by not mailing their catalog anymore.

Francine Feder: 28:19  

I mean, whatever happened to Nordstrom’s or are they still around or. I think so, yeah.

Rick Rappe: 28:25  

I think they’re still around. But yeah, there’s some that have definitely taken a hit.

But yeah, it’s funny. Now the clothing brands, they tend to start with like 1 or 2 like really signature items. Right. Like they’re like a lot of, like I just, I maybe I’m basing this off of men’s clothing. They start with like, hey, we’ve got the best t-shirts ever. And then they start, you know, selling t-shirts.

And then all of a sudden they add polos and they add all these other things to their line, but they, they definitely start as one sort of.

Francine Feder: 28:55  

Yeah.

Rick Rappe: 28:56  

Better than all the rest idea. It has to be like superior.

Francine Feder: 29:00  

Like like untucked that one. Yeah, exactly. I love untucked. Yeah, my husband loves those. And they just they opened a store in Manhattan here.

Rick Rappe: 29:11  

Yeah. I we go to the retail store that’s in Scottsdale, Arizona. They have a nice retail store there too, which is nice. You try things on. But yeah, it’s it. 

Francine Feder: 29:22  

Hey, it’s. The opposite now a lot of a lot of and that that’s kind of going to bring this full circle to the whole brand. You know, your initial question, the whole brand performance piece is a lot of those digital first brands only focused on like ROAS and Bottom of the funnel marketing, and got themselves in a lot of trouble. And a lot of them realized they they needed to open stores and build like a Warby Parker. You know, they needed to open stores and build more of a brand experience in order to, to win some affection for customers beyond just like straight, straight bottom funnel marketing. You know, you can you can definitely run your brand to the ground that way.

Rick Rappe: 30:12  

Yeah. Well, I did a ton of marketing for over ten years for AT&T selling wireless phones. And we also found there was a big group of people that we targeted for direct response and who would call in to the call centers and purchase over the phone. And then we realized that our and so we created predictive models and, you know, targeting that would identify the people that would respond. And then we started looking at the group that wasn’t our responder group and the other group, and we found out that they were going to retail.

They were the retail shoppers. They needed to go in to a store and see and touch and talk to someone in person before they purchased. So all of a sudden, the group that the non Direct Response targeted group became the retail targeted group. And and we built a whole drive to retail program that performed incredibly well. All driven with direct mail from you know for AT&T. 

So it’s kind of interesting. How do you approach developing marketing strategies for niche markets, such as the off roading community with okay, four wheel drive?

Francine Feder: 31:21  

Yeah. Great question. So again, it starts with with the data. And knowing your audience and knowing who the beauty of the overlanding community is, is it’s it’s big but it’s niche. You know, it’s tight knit. Part of my challenge at Oak four wheel drive to.

Is the overland. The the high end overlanders love us. You know. They know our brand. We’re the exclusive retailer for a brand called Alucard, who are based out of South Africa. 

They make the the mod cap tents and the. Like, the campers and and all of those things. And we’re the only ones, I mean, us and our dealers that that sell them in the United States. And in that world, you know, South Africa, Australia are really the leaders in, you know, in the overlanding space. So, you know, having that level of exclusivity gives us an advantage with that customer. But we also have, you know, off roading, we have winch kits, we have bumpers and and, you know, lift kits and all sorts of things for your truck and your vehicle.

And what we hadn’t do done with historically, they hadn’t done a very good job at was broadening that audience. So that’s kind of what I that was kind of what I was brought in to do. And we’ve tried, you know, we’ve kind of consolidated everything to really some marketing themes and some product focus. We’ve started doing brand video again. We’ve built wider audiences for that video. 

Last month we did a promotion around truck caps or they’re called. Some people call them canopies, some people call them truck caps. You have a Tacoma. You know exactly what it is.

Rick Rappe: 33:22  

Yeah.

Francine Feder: 33:23  

And and it was it was a it was the cap and it, it, it is made a lot better than, you know, it’s, it’s got made out of better materials than and like a lot of your standard ones that are sold here in the US. So it was really making this consumer aware of it. But we targeted, you know, we targeted the gladiator groups and the Tacoma groups and, and all the different truck enthusiasts on Meta and on Google.

And folks that have searched for it. And, and I will say is a very, very successful campaign. We we sold a lot of truck caps, more than, than the same time frame last year. So it’s really kind of opening the aperture of, of, you know, who it’s who, who do you have and don’t alienate them and who do you want to have and how do you reach them. And that’s, that’s the combination of of how I’m looking at things for, for.

Okay. And we’ve got a, you know, a small team. But they are look, they didn’t hire me to be the overlanding enthusiast. They hired me to be the strategic marketer. We have, you know, a team of of really, really enthusiastic folks that are very, very passionate about the subject and, you know.

Rick Rappe: 34:44  

Yeah.

Francine Feder: 34:45  

And we also work with the right you know, there is like influencers in the space, you know, yes, there are overlapping influencers.

Rick Rappe: 34:52  

And I know there. Yeah, for sure. There’s influencers for everything. Very famous people on YouTube that just do installations of equipment on their trucks. And I totally have watched those videos. I hate to admit it, but.

Oh yeah, I’m in the target audience for sure.

Francine Feder: 35:10  

Yeah, you. Well, this is well, we are definitely going to have to hook you up, Rick.

Rick Rappe: 35:14  

I know now I gotta go to the to the website and see what I can find, but, well, we’re running short on time, but I do at some point, maybe offline. I want to tell you a little bit about what we’ve been able to do with predictive modeling and predictive targeting, sort of looking for lookalike customers, because I think it would be an interesting way to reach other. Other people that are likely highly likely to be into overlanding, that kind of thing. So. Yeah.

Let’s see. What advice would you give to aspiring marketers who are looking to. Make a significant impact in their career?

Francine Feder: 35:56  

Yeah. It’s a great question. I’d say be genuine. Be. You know, be very genuine about about your personal brands, who you are, what you bring to the table. Don’t pigeonhole yourself young. You know, try try different things, you know, and this is this is coming from someone who stayed at the at the same company. But I it was I was in a very unique situation because we had seven different brands. And then I worked with, you know, the likes of Nike and Adidas and Puma.

You know, between all the footwear brands and all the the different retail chains that I worked on, I do feel like I worked at ten different companies, but I would. So I’m.

Rick Rappe: 36:46  

A lot of variety in your career.

Francine Feder: 36:48  

I got a lot. Of variety in my career, even though I was at the same company. That’s if you’re working on like a singular linear brand, that’s that’s not going to be true. So I would say while you’re young, try different things, you know, see what you like because you will like the further you get in. And that’s what’s been nice about consulting now is as a consultant, like, I don’t know if I could go be, you know, a VP of marketing or a CMO at an, at an automotive company like two years ago right after Foot Locker. I think when you are seeing, you know, when you are that senior, there’s like the the phone calls I get are retail and you know, you know, consumer goods like apparel, footwear, that sort of thing.

It’s it’s good to have a variety of industries under your belt.

Rick Rappe: 37:43  

Yeah. Oh. I love the variety that I get to work on here, depending on.

Francine Feder: 37:49  

Where you want to, you know, depending on what you ultimately want to sit in. And it’s okay to not want to be a CMO. It’s okay to, you know, it’s it all really depends on on your path. And you’re not necessarily going to know that when you’re 23. So I would say just try different things.

I think agencies are to your point, agencies are great starting grounds too, because you get to work on a lot of different clients and figure out, you know, what industries you might like next move to.

Rick Rappe: 38:21  

It’s good to have the experience from both sides of the of the business, I think for sure. Well, that’s super helpful advice for everyone who’s up and coming. Well, this has been really great, and I’m afraid we’re out of time. I feel like.

I can continue talking to you for another hour, and we probably still have more to talk about.

Francine Feder: 38:42  

I’m always happy to come back, Rick.

Rick Rappe: 38:44  

So much to unpack that I may have to invite you back for an episode two. If people want to get Ahold of you, how can they reach you?

Francine Feder: 38:54  

Sure. LinkedIn. Francine Feder.

Rick Rappe: 38:57  

Perfect. Yeah, well, thank you again and have a great rest of your day and we’ll talk to you again soon.

Francine Feder:  39:03  

All right. Thank you. Rick.

Outro: 39:05  

That’s a wrap for this episode of Response Drivers. Thanks for tuning in. If you found today’s insights valuable, make sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And if you’re enjoying the show, we’d love it if you left a review. Got a question or a topic you’d like us to cover?

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