Episode 273 / Caitlin Dodd / Church & Dwight / Director of Marketing, Specialty Hair Care
Bringing Consumer Truths & Stories to Life
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In the latest episode of the Shiny New Object podcast, we sat down with Caitlin Dodd, Director of Marketing in the hair and skin care team at Church & Dwight. Caitlin shared her unique perspective on using data to drive impactful storytelling in marketing campaigns. Her "shiny new object" is what she calls "storytelling with data."
As Caitlin explained, "Storytelling through data… means leveraging the information we have available. So as marketers, we are constantly storytelling. Every asset we touch is going to be part of that consumer decision journey." Rather than relying solely on creative instincts, Caitlin emphasised the power of mining consumer reviews to uncover authentic insights.
"Consumers are telling you how they're using your product. They're telling you how they love your product. And if you can bring that to life, it is so rich." By using tools like Yogi to analyse sentiment, trends, and word clouds in customer feedback, Caitlin and her team have been able to validate creative concepts and ensure their campaigns truly resonate. As she explained, "It's the whole process, right? So as you're casting for commercials, you want to make sure that the actors you're bringing in are representative of the consumers using your product."
By embracing data-driven storytelling, Caitlin and her team are able to create marketing that is authentic and resonant with their target audience: "When the story that a brand is telling is so unique, no one else can tell that same story."
Transcript
The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.
Caitlin Dodd 0:00
Consumers are telling you how they're using your product. They're telling you how they love your product. And if you can bring that to life, it is so rich.
Speaker 0:16
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Tom Ollerton 0:42
Hello and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of automated creative, the creative effectiveness ad tech platform, and it is my joy and massive pleasure to interview some of the most amazing people in our industry, and this week is no different. I'm on a call with Caitlin Dodd, who is director of marketing in the hair and skin care team at Church & Dwight. So Caitlin, for anyone who doesn't know who you are and what you do, could you give them a bit of background?
Caitlin Dodd 1:19
Absolutely, Tom. Great to be here. Thank you so much for the invite. I am the director over our hair care businesses. So I've been at Church and Dwight for nine years, and consumer goods brand management was always a goal of mine. Dialing back to my undergrad university days, I double majored in economics and advertising. I've always had this balance of creativity and analytics right out of school, I spent a lot of my time in consulting, but quickly realized there wasn't enough creative outlet for me in that career, so I decided to pursue my MBA with the specific goal of transitioning into CPG brand management, and I was fortunate enough to be able to do that. I've been at Church and Dwight ever since I graduated McCombs business school, so I've been at Church and Dwight now for nine years. I've worked in fabric care, I've worked in personal care, and now I'm in the beauty space with hair care. It's been an amazing journey, and I am thrilled to lead an amazing team with amazing brands.
Right. I have very high expectations for this podcast now, so thank you for the introduction. So what advice would you give to a student who wanted to follow in your footsteps, they're doing all the sensible things. But what advice would you give someone to get ahead and maybe replicate your path?
I love this question, and I think there's two mantras that I try to follow, that I love to pass on to any you know, young individuals looking to get into this career. And those two things are, you don't ask, you don't get, and just because it's different doesn't mean it's wrong. So some examples of how I've used those in my journey. For you don't ask, you don't get, while I was doing full time recruiting in business school, looking at various jobs, I came across a press release from a company that I admired and I thought what they were doing was so interesting, so I emailed the email address at the bottom of that press release, explained why I thought it was interesting and told them I wanted to work on it. That ultimately led to interviews and a job offer. It's not where I ended up. It wasn't Church and Dwight, but that opportunity never would have presented itself if I didn't reach out and I didn't ask for that opportunity to get involved. My second piece of advice that I mentioned was just because it's different doesn't mean it's wrong. In a career like marketing, you are constantly faced with new things, test and learn is a concept we hear all the time, and I'm going back many, many years now, but when I was going through recruiting processes, you know, over a decade ago, video calls were not a thing, so all interviews were phone calls or in person interviews, right? Technology has changed that, but I wanted to make myself stand out as a candidate, so I recorded a video resume and put it on YouTube with a link in my on my actual resume, so people could see me and hear me I get an impression before I went in. So I just encourage people to find ways, you know, to both stand out, but also be open to change and be willing to try new things.
Tom Ollerton 4:54
I'd probably go even further, certainly in a marketing realm, and say, if it's not different, it's wrong. Yeah, because I think there's too much copying. There's way too much copying in advertising. Everyone's like, hey, let's do what they're doing, because that's best practice. But if everyone copies each other, then no one's marketing, right? And you've said that even in... you know job hunting, right? You know, putting your own video resume on there, or CV, as we call them in the UK, and YouTube's bold man, you're not shy, like just emailing someone out of the blue go and give us a job. That's fantastic.
Caitlin Dodd 5:24
The interesting thing is, it got followed by a video of me on a flying trapeze. So that always led to very interesting questions on the actual interview.
Tom Ollerton 5:33
Right. Brilliant. So unfortunately, I would love to hear more about that. Yeah. Go on. Go. Tell me the trapeze story. What was that like? You have to tell me, I need to hear.
Caitlin Dodd 5:41
Absolutely. I spent three years in my early 20s as a flying trapeze student. It was something I was so passionate about and loved. I did basically recitals, performances. I was never a professional, always just a student. And as I moved around. You know, there are not flying trapezes everywhere. So that was a hobby that I had to give up. But just one month ago, I had an opportunity to take a class again, and I'm thrilled to say that I, uh, I still got it. I was able to do my old tricks. I was pleasantly surprised.
Tom Ollerton 6:16
Describe your best trick.
Caitlin Dodd 6:17
Well, my most consistent trick was doing a back end split. So that is where you are swinging. You kind of turn yourself upside down and backwards with your legs in a split against the bar. And then when you're at the peak of your swing, you let go of the bar and catch the professional on the other side of the trapeze.
Tom Ollerton 6:40
Things I never thought I'd hear on this podcast. There you go. That's there's been a few weird things, but it's definitely up there.
So moving on. What is your ... feels like such a ridiculous question, but what is your best bit of data driven marketing advice you've been in around this a while now, and what, what do you find yourself sharing most often?
Caitlin Dodd 7:05
The number one piece of advice I actually share, especially to entry level marketers, is pay attention in finance class, you know, as a, you know, in the brand management career, we are responsible for the P and L, the top line, the bottom line. I wish I had paid a lot more attention in that class so that I came into career more comfortable with that aspect of the job, because every time I've been promoted, I find myself learning so much more about the finances of my brands and diving into lines of a P and L I never knew existed before.
Tom Ollerton 7:48
So we're now going to talk about your shiny new object, which is storytelling with data. I think I know what that is, but what is your version of that? And why is it your shiny new object?
Caitlin Dodd 8:01
Now, I gave a lot of thought to this Tom, and I wanted to come up with something unique and different, but also something really practical that people could put into into use in their careers or in their experiences and storytelling through data, to me, means leveraging the information we have available. So as marketers, we are constantly storytelling. You know, every asset we touch is going to, you know, be part of that consumer decision journey. But one of the biggest pieces is an ad campaign, right? And so as you are concepting a campaign, what doing that through data would mean, mine your consumer reviews to inspire your story, because consumers are telling you how they're using your product. They're telling you how they love your product. And if you can bring that to life, it is so rich.
Tom Ollerton 9:05
So practically, how do you do that? So you just do a scrape of everything that is being said on on different platforms, and then group it all together. Absolutely. Yeah. So can we give someone a sort of a how to on that?
Speaker 1 9:17
Yep, absolutely. So we've absolutely done this before, and at Church and Dwight, we have a partner. We use a tool called yogi, and they pull all of the consumer reviews together from various different platforms, right? Like Amazon, our websites, retail sites, wherever they exist and and there's so many different ways you can look at it, right, sentiment analysis, trends, word clouds, and finding little nuggets or even piecing nuggets together, can really bring that story to life and and we had done that in my prior role as director on therapy mouthwash. We absolutely did that to inspire some of the ad campaigns. But honestly, it goes beyond. Just concepting, it's the whole process, right? So as you're casting for commercials, you want to make sure that the actors you're bringing in are representative of the consumers using your product, right? So look up your advanced shopper profiles, understand the demographics of who that person is, whether it's race, age, religion, even eating preferences, right? You're telling a whole story here. There's so many different nuances that can come to life. And then as you're planning where you want all your media to be, I think your media mix is a huge part of where data comes into play. So on my team, you know, we have a a partner called theme, which helps us understand the ROI for all of the investments that we're making in all of the different channels, right? So, learning from prior years, where are we spending our money? Where does it make the most sense to continue to pull back to ad optimize every single year.
Tom Ollerton 11:10
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How do you then take it from into a more creative realm? And what I love about your shiny new object is just talking about storytelling, which is a very gooey, fluffy creative discipline, and data which is like, quote, unquote, a bit more hard, bit more scientific. But someone listening to this might still be like, Well, look, how do I actually do that? So you've, you've scraped all your reviews. You know which channels are giving you the best ROI, so you know where it's going to go. You've cast successfully because you've, you've taken into account all of the different measures that you you mentioned. But then when it comes to the idea like the the genesis of the creative, the gooey, hooky, emotional thing. How do you use data to get to that?
Caitlin Dodd 12:30
What I've done in the past is it really ends up coming mostly the data we use is the consumer reviews. That's where it's coming from, and then it is on living and breathing your brand in a way that it becomes a part of you. And saying, you know, I think you can just identify those concepts that align to your your brand and your products promise to their consumers, right, like the and your positioning in the marketplace.
Tom Ollerton 13:01
So you're using that data as a, as a, like a validation for creative concepts. Is that right?
Caitlin Dodd 13:06
Absolutely.
Tom Ollerton 13:07
So the so internal agency or external agency will go, Look, we're launching this new product. This is our creative idea. And then then your chin scratching moment is like, right? Okay, well, we, you know, here's all the reviews you did it, and that becomes a sense check or a guide for the creative idea?
Caitlin Dodd 13:22
100% yes. So there's usually, to your point, a couple of concepts coming in from, you know, the agency, the partner and the gut check that we need. Or the way to elevate it is using those consumer reviews to say, how do we make this real? How do we make this resonate?
Tom Ollerton 13:40
And why have you gone so big on on that particular data point? I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm just just want to get a bit deeper, because, like, you know, social listening, for example, might, for example, might exist in the same way. Or is it a focus group? Is that just not reliable enough, or customer service center, for example? So I'm curious. Like, I love that you're so specific about it, but that's quite rare. Like people, people tend to want a kind of a kind of a basket of data, I've heard it referred to.
Caitlin Dodd 14:06
Yeah, no, that's totally fair. Well, so where we really put this into place was on that Therabreath campaign, and the first version we did of the swishy time campaign, used this, we used true consumer stories to bring to life in our in our advertising. And it worked so well. The results were phenomenal. I mean, the brand just exploded. And so we realized that the truth that was there was just something that couldn't be replicated. You know? Otherwise, it was something really unique, because no other brand in the space can tell the story that's true to Therabreath if the consumers are already saying it's true about you, right? It's not like we talked about earlier. So often copycats and copying happens in marketing. One brand's doing it. Oh, we love that. Let's do that for us. But when, when the story that a brand is telling is so unique, no one else can tell that same story.
Tom Ollerton 14:06
I think what's a refreshing about this view is in contrast to what is happening with the conversation about AI at the minute, and everyone's losing their minds about how AI can save them loads of time and money, I think, which is fine. It's great. Be my guest. Go ahead, do that stuff, but I'm writing a book at the minute about the relationship between data, creativity and advertising. And the thing that really has come through that research over like 40 interviews with senior marketers, is this idea that it's all about being empathetic towards the consumer, like, do you care about them? Have you gone deep with them? Do you understand them? Are you listening to them? Do you see what they see? And then that becomes the foundation for something that's emotional, that actually moves the needle, not plugging in something and just having it whir away in the background and spew out some copy. And I think what, what you've said here is exactly that, right? You're being data centric, really, right?
Caitlin Dodd 16:07
And you're reminding me that another genesis for us is what we call like in the wild. So I was wearing like, you know, a Therabreath sweatshirt on vacation, and someone was like, Oh my gosh, Therabreath, you know, Therabreath and tell me why they love the brand. What was so great about it that happens a lot... one of those occasions helped spur a one of our ad campaigns, right? So a consumer telling me they like to use Therabreath before they give a big speech, because, you know, it helps with dry mouth before public speaking. And now we have an ad campaign with a best man about to go out onto the dance floor to give his best man speech using Therabreath dry mouth.
Tom Ollerton 16:58
Brilliant. So, yeah. So when? So when you say storytelling with data, what you're really it's almost like, sorry to kind of rewrite your your words, but it's finding stories within the data, as opposed to like, right? We've got a script now we must data validate every word in that script. It's not like you're not putting storytelling through a machine. You have a process for finding stories from existing data, either with on online or in the wild. As you say.
Caitlin Dodd 17:23
I think that's fair.
Tom Ollerton 17:24
So if someone wants to get into this, like, so you're in a category where people talk about the product, and people come with you on holiday and accost you and all that kind of stuff. What if you're in a category where that, where that doesn't happen, like a lower interest category where, I don't know, insert whatever low interest category you want for the sake of argument, but they're not going to passionately talk about it in in a review or within a social place. Or have I got that all wrong? Like every brand has some vocal people?
Caitlin Dodd 17:55
Well, I'll ask you this, did you expect people to be passionate about mouthwash?
Tom Ollerton 18:01
Yeah, it's, it's home, it's home of personal care, right? So it's, it's your it's your part. It's part of how people perceive you, right? So that, you know, then or or health is usually like, yeah, it's, it's in your head. So yes, I think people would be very passionate about it, but I don't know, like, car insurance or something else. Like, sorry, sorry, car insurance people, but, yeah, anything to do with the body tends to promote quite strong views though.
Caitlin Dodd 18:26
I have not ever worked in a category where consumers aren't passionate. I've worked in laundry detergent. People are passionate about their laundry detergent. I now work in hair care, right products that support hair thinning, Dry Shampoo to get you in between washes. There's a lot of passion, you know, in all of the spaces that I have worked. So I don't think it's fair for me to shed light on on something that I don't really have experience in.
Tom Ollerton 19:02
And so where do you want to go next with this? So you have this tried and tested technique, what? Where are you like? Maybe we could look at this like...
Caitlin Dodd 19:11
Well, I'll tell you, I just transitioned teams a few months ago, so I'm now on hair care. I'm excited to bring this process to that team and to those businesses for sure, because there's always opportunity to bring those consumer truths and consumer stories to life. And I don't know where it's going to go next. You know, I think consumers need, need to tell us a little bit. I love leveraging, you know, the data and the tools that are available to us. So it's constantly challenging myself, my team, my partners, on making sure is this all right? Is this all true? Is this is. Can we? Can we go back and validate it right? Are we casting the right way, like I mentioned before, are we spending our money in the right places, like, are we reaching the right consumers with this message?
Tom Ollerton 20:13
So unfortunately, we've run out of time now, and I would love to carry on talking about this and trapeze acts, etc, but if someone wants to get in touch with you to discuss anything we've talked about today, where's a good place to get you and what makes a message that you will reply to?
Caitlin Dodd 20:31
LinkedIn is definitely the best place to connect with me. I'm pretty active on there, and I think the best way to reach out is comment on one of my posts before you show up in my inbox. Like, that would be my recommendation.
Tom Ollerton 20:49
I've never had that. That's so good.
Caitlin Dodd 20:52
Yeah right? Like, pay the price of entry.
Tom Ollerton 20:53
Yeah right, yeah. But your comments aren't busy, basically, well, but I'm sure they are, so I'll take that back. Okay, brilliant. That is, that's an excellent bit of advice for people who want to contact you. Caitlin, that was perfect. Thank you so much for your time.
Caitlin Dodd 21:10
Thank you, Tom it's been a pleasure.
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