As executive vice president and chief marketing officer, Becky Saeger is responsible for advertising and brand management of the Charles Schwab Corp. Its recent ad campaign, “Talk to Chuck,” promises new customers investment advice in plain language. Saeger joined Schwab in 2004 after seven years at Visa USA, where she directed the company’s brand strategy. She has more than 20 years’ experience in marketing, having started her career in New York with Ogilvy & Mather before moving to Foote, Cone & Belding in San Francisco. Saeger spoke recently with SportsBusiness Journal New York bureau chief Jerry Kavanagh.
Education: B.A., psychology, Muhlenberg College; MBA, University of Pennsylvania
Favorite piece of music: Miles Davis’ album “Kind of Blue”
Favorite vacation spot: Somewhere I’ve never been before. I just booked a ticket to China for this fall.
Favorite quote: “Give me the freedom of a tightly defined strategy.” I attribute that to Norman Barry, although I’m not sure if he was the originator. He was the creative director at Ogilvy & Mather when I started there in the ’80s.
Greatest extravagance: I spend way too much money on shoes.
Biggest challenge: There is so much to do — and so much you could do — and there are so many ideas, how do you set priorities and stay focused?
Daily rituals: I’m an anti-routine person. I drive to work a different way several times a week.
Business philosophy: Start everything by understanding your consumer and discipline yourself to keep focused on the insights you get from that.
Your Schwab biography refers to your “lifelong fascination with advertising and the power of brands.” Many people have a reflexive aversion to advertising, flipping past ads in magazines and changing the TV channels on commercials.
Saeger: I started my professional career in advertising at Ogilvy & Mather in New York in 1980, and I have always found it to be just the most fascinating combination of understanding human beings and what makes them tick, and being able to create things that are unique. The root of everything we do in marketing is really understanding what makes our consumers tick.
You said, “One of the biggest challenges today is to be seen, to be heard, to be noticed. Your dream is that a consumer wants to watch, to listen to you.” How do you get people interested in financial services?
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Saeger spent on several sports while at Visa,
but Schwab focuses on golf. |
Saeger: That’s a tough one. As marketers, our first objective is to get people engaged with our brands or our products. We’re in a world where consumers decide what they want to see, where they want to see it and how they want to see it. So, engagement is even more important than it has ever been. Sports really helps us with that. It’s hard to imagine a situation where someone is more engaged in a positive way than if they’re a sports fan.
In terms of financial services, it’s a tough category because there’s a little bit of ambivalence. You know you have to deal with it, but at some point you decide you really want to and you really have to deal with it. What we’re all about at Schwab is trying to create an engagement with our brand so that we can develop a relationship with a client or a prospect at the time when they decide they need us. We don’t decide for them; they decide.
Are traditional advertising and marketing still relevant in an ever-changing media world?
Saeger: I’m of the school of thought that says there will always be room for most of our traditional media. You just have to look at the marketing mix differently. And the interaction between pieces of the mix is really key. We spend about 25 percent of our media budget online today. That surprises a lot of people. You still need television, you need reach, you need the impact that our animated campaign can have on TV. And we use outdoor very aggressively and we use print. But what we find is that it’s the mix that matters the most.
You talk about having a strategy built on consumer insight. Is there a danger of an overreliance on the numbers in marketing? Can intuition or instinct ever overrule statistics in marketing decisions?
Saeger: Boy, I hope so. I happen to be a very data-oriented marketer. But I believe that instinct and intuition have to play a 50 percent role in decisions. And I’m lucky enough to work for a guy who feels the same way. If anything, he thinks I’m a little too numbers-heavy. But I do think we run that risk. All the focus on accountability in our lives has been wonderful, but at what point do marketers … feel comfortable just saying, “No, this is a decision we have to make.”
You spent a number of years at Visa. Talk a little about the sports marketing approach and message there.
Saeger: Visa was a phenomenal time for me, and I was really immersed in sports marketing. We sponsored the NFL, NASCAR, the Visa Triple Crown and were a worldwide Olympic sponsor. Sports marketing was essential to our marketing plan. We used it to create relevance and engagement with a mass-market brand. It’s very hard when you’re trying to reach people over 18 with a decent credit score — and that’s a lot of people — and to make your message relevant to them in a way that makes them notice you.
What’s different at Schwab?
Saeger: If you look at our target audience, there are 32 million households in this country with between $50,000 and $2 million to invest. We probably have about 10 percent of them. So, I’m talking to a much smaller, more focused target.
What about the role of sports marketing at Schwab?
Saeger: The role that sports marketing plays is a little different. For instance, we sponsor the PGA Tour. We want the affiliation with the tour and everything that goes along with it, not the least of which is the charitable aspect of it. At the same time, we also manage the tour’s 401(k) plan and help a lot of the players invest. And we create promotions and incentives for people to consolidate their assets with Schwab. That’s done on a much more one-on-one basis, working with our reps. We use it as hospitality much more here than at Visa. What better place to spend some quality time with a client than on the golf course?
If you could step aside for the moment from your current responsibilities, is there a marketing challenge — in any area (sports, business, politics, entertainment) — that you think would be fun to undertake?
Saeger: This is truly a dream, but I would love to have a presidential candidate that I really believe in that I would go and work for on a campaign. I think that would be fascinating.
What are the responsibilities and the role of sports?
Saeger: Who is it that decides that sports heroes need to be role models and uphold some ethical standards? It’s very hard to be objective. We assume a lot about sports heroes, and we forgive a lot in the interests of our affiliations. I think this really gets at bigger societal issues, and I certainly don’t have the answers.
Everyone’s always looking for the next big idea. Where is the next big idea in marketing coming from?
Saeger: One of our biggest challenges in marketing today is that no matter what category you’re in, you’re almost immediately at parity with your competitors. We have the same information. We have technology at our fingertips, so we can respond and execute as quickly as the next guy. Twenty years ago, we talked about how difficult it was to differentiate; today, it’s almost impossible. So, to figure out what it is that’s going to get you ahead of the curve and keep you ahead of your competitors and distinguish you in a consistent way is, to me, the most critical challenge we face today.
