For our 26th episode, President & Chief Strategy Officer Ethan Whitehill chats with Dave VanderWaal— senior marketing consultant at VW Marketing Consultants and former US marketing head at LG and Hisense—about mapping the customer journey, the power of the last three feet, and being Grace VanderWaal’s #1 fan.
Ethan Whitehill: Hello everyone. Welcome to our podcast, “To the Point.” I’m Ethan Whitehill, President and Chief Strategy Officer of Crux, the “un-agency.” We produce this monthly podcast to bring you thought provoking conversations that get to the crux of it and help entrepreneurial brands fuel growth. Our guest for episode 26 is Dave VanderWaal. Dave is an experienced marketer with more than 30 years of career success in consumer brand marketing, shopper marketing and category management. He currently works as senior marketing consultant at VW Marketing Consultants helping companies build brand equity. Dave previously served as CMO at Hisense USA, where he was responsible for all brand marketing activities for consumer electronics and home appliances. Before that, he spent 13 years as SVP of Marketing at LG Electronics, where he led multiple brand and path-to-purchase marketing initiatives developed to engage consumers with LG and its products. His agency experience has included work with household brands like Maytag, Whirlpool, Hallmark, Bosch, Proctor and Gamble, Unilever Craft and General Mills. All of this impressive background has landed him in the Hall of Fame for the P2P Institute, and among Forbes top 50 global CMOs in 2019. Dave, it is an honor to have you on the podcast and welcome back to Kansas City.
Dave VanderWaal: Thank you, Ethan. And Go Chiefs!
Ethan Whitehill: Go Chiefs. Let’s start here. You’ve had a successful career in marketing and brand leadership, but you started your career as an agency owner. Talk to our listeners about why you originally went into business for yourself and how that experience has translated to the client side.
Dave VanderWaal: Sure. Ethan, you know, I’ve basically seen both sides of the desk, so to speak. So, this has provided some unique perspectives, especially with regards to the client side. There’s a lot of cross-matrix relationships that exist within a business that a marketing leader has to negotiate and handle, and that exists to some extent in an agency. But on the client side, it’s much more complex. The relationships between sales, supply, product, financial, marketing, all need to coexist and so on. My story, I started on the client side working at my first job out a college with an incredible company and a brand at that time, the Maytag Company. Funny story, Ethan. This is 1984. So, I go to Maytag and I’m in the advertising department. What do you think my first r and r was? Think 1984.
Ethan Whitehill: Okay. I have a suspicion
Dave VanderWaal: Yellow Pages. Okay. That’s right. And it was a, it was a big job, believe it or not.
Ethan Whitehill: That used to be a really important channel for a lot of people. Yeah,
Dave VanderWaal: It really was. So, but the good thing is I had some exposure early on with one of the great advertising agency giants Leo Burnett out of Chicago, who was Maytag’s agency. They created the iconic lonely repairman campaign, the positioning for really the, the brand and the business. And it gave me a real exposure to how early awareness and early consideration can really drive business results. And after I was in that job for a couple years, I was promoted to run the marketing for one of Maytag’s brands. They had a family of brands, and that was called Genair. Genair at the time, again, at fear of dating myself, owned a patent for indoor grilling, which hit on the consumer trend of barbecue and bringing it inside. So, they were rocking and rolling. But I learned about the power of the last three feet with Gin air because people didn’t really believe that they could grill inside.
So, we had to figure out how to get that point of sale and the demonstration of the product to really happen. A consumer had to see it to believe. So, we spent a lot of effort on creating memorable store experiences that would provide some kind of live or simulated demonstration. And at the same time, we encouraged word of mouth from people who actually had a Genair. So long story short, I kind of had the best training grounds for full-funnel marketing between these Maytag and Genair experiences. Maytag had this awareness branding campaign that was incredibly creative and very much connected to really the main product value proposition. And then Genair who needed to rely on the bottom part of the funnel at store level and building advocacy. And at Genair, I met a guy who had a small Kansas City based agency. At the time, Genair was in Indianapolis.
And that man, and that agency really changed my life. That’s what brought me to Kansas City, actually introduced me to the agency side of the desk and also began my adult love story with the Chiefs and the Royals. So that agency then became my go-to partner for how to build out some of these store experiences and create these store-backed solutions that many agencies aren’t very good at, frankly. And after working with them for three years, I was afforded the opportunity to come to Kansas City and become that agency’s managing partner, which eventually led me into the ownership of the shop. So, long story short, back to your original question, I think you can see the early moves from client to agency. They were shaped by circumstances as much as anything else, but it gave a great learning curve for how people really do buy products.
And once on the agency side, I already had this foundation of how marketing decisions are made within a company and how important it is for the client marketer to understand the external and internal challenges with the business. And that served me really well Later on when I moved back into the client side with LG. In LG, I knew how agencies work, I knew what their motivations were and how to find common win-wins between the agency and the, and the company or the client. There’s a lot of investment of budget and trust that a client puts into an agency partner. But also because of the past experience I had, I realized on the agency side that ideas, strategies and all the magic ingredients that go into the pie are investments from that side, too. So, it’s that blend really between the two entities that gave me the framework for the partners that we work with.
Ethan Whitehill: Yeah, I want to come back to that in a little bit, that, that sort of perspective from both sides, I think that’s important and that that makes for a very successful CMO. We at Crux talk a lot about brand versus demand marketing, and you’ve had a lot of experience with brand building and performance marketing throughout your career. Why is it so important for brands to prioritize both?
Dave VanderWaal: Hmm. Such an interesting and really common question that confronts every marketer today. You know, the massive change that the internet brought about when it comes to marketing is that there became analytics that could directly link an ad of some sort to an internet sale. And for many, this was nirvana. I mean, it satisfied the need for return on marketing investment, especially the financial and sales side owners. However, you know, everything has a flip side. And it became a little bit dangerous because without really a comprehensive, what I’d call a multi-touch attribution study or maybe a marketing mix study, there’s no way to really truly know what all went into the sale. You know, maybe, maybe there were a lot of other things besides the digital ad or the search ad that created the final sale. So, performance marketing became a way to justify the marketing investments.
And since all the online sales were getting the attribution for it all it defacto became more and more prioritized. People said, well, we should put it there. It’s creating sales. However, you know, in today’s marketing, the size of the pie is not going to get any bigger—the marketing budget, so the pizza’s got to be carved up more carefully. And there are a ton of studies, including a couple that I did at LG that have proven how much more efficient performance marketing is when brand is strong. And this is where brand building is so incredibly important. Not just to build equity and awareness, but to make your promotional spend more efficient. I like this analogy. The seeds in the ground are brand building, the fruit on the tree ready to harvest, that’s performance marketing. Both are equally important to the long term survival of the tree.
Ethan Whitehill: I love that. That’s a great example. So much is tied to the almighty algorithm today, but it isn’t just the algorithm. I mean, there’s an entire path to purchase that we have to consider that starts long before even the digital, you know, zero moment as Google says. You know, one of the things that you and I have talked about in previous conversations is the importance of that path and how does that path work? You know, how do people make decisions in your experience from all of those brands that you’ve worked with in the past? You know, that perspective?
Dave VanderWaal: Yeah. In my opinion and the opinion of many marketers, the path to purchase is everything in the way of looking at marketing. And that could be B2C, B2B, a combination of both. Because once that value prop on any brand or product has been established, the very most important thing that has to be done is this complete and comprehensive understanding of the path to purchase. How do consumers really find, discover, consider and ultimately buy the product or the service? What touchpoints are used? How much impact on the heart? How much impact on the head do each of these touchpoints have? One needs to completely chart out the path to purchase every step of the way and understand what marketing lever works best at each of these touchpoints. And really, it doesn’t matter whether it’s a service, a product, a destination, a business, or any other myriad of things that buyers make daily decisions about.
It also really doesn’t matter whether the decision is made daily or weekly, maybe in the CPG world or monthly or even infrequently, like the world I was in the later part of my career with appliances, televisions. You just have to get the understanding of that path to purchase. And we did a lot of that when I was at LG. We learned around the typical purchase journey. In appliances, the typical was 13 weeks—TVs, it was 6 weeks. We learned how many touchpoints were used appliances on average with 13 different touchpoints. Everything from a TV ad to a word-of-mouth conversation with your best friend to reading a product review. And we learned from that really what touchpoint was most effective at generating emotional love, which is kind of that right side of the brain and rational logic, which is where a lot of brands and companies want to go with about their offering. You need both and path to purchase will get you there.
Ethan Whitehill: You know, I think about path to purchase as this sort of horizontal journey that the consumer takes. And you know, I think we know today that it’s actually very cyclical, but there’s also another journey. You know, when you think about marketing and it’s, it’s that top to bottom inside out perspective. So, from the brand at the top of the organization, all the way to the store level and what happens, you know, in the field, so to speak. You talk about inside out marketing and that’s how you define it. Talk a little bit more about that and you know, how you’ve helped facilitate inside out marketing at the companies that you’ve served.
Dave VanderWaal: Yeah, sure. And by the way, I like what you just said. I mean, Google coined the term of “zero moment of truth,” and truly it’s not a linear path anymore. Even though we talk about the funnel, the funnel can all be almost existing at the same moment. You know, you might be out on one day and search the internet, see a TV ad, talk to a friend, go into a store and make a decision all that same day. And so, it is interesting, but there’s still points of time—you know—along that path to purchase. But back to your question, I mean, I didn’t coin the term, but I like the “shelf back” framework. And that simply means the RTB the reason to believe can be clearly and concisely delivered at the last three feet. Whether it’s a store end cap, a dump in, or even the shelf.
And also, I’m talking digital as well. There’s a digital moment of truth, you know, right there in the cart, you know, on the product detail page, it’s, it’s called What is your RTB? Is it simple? Is it easy to understand? Is it concise? Simplicity always wins at retail, but simplicity is the hardest thing for businesses and organizations to get their hands around because they love their product, they love their offering. And oftentimes, you know, it ends up being a brochure. You know that you want to tell everything. I mean, apple has got it nailed. They’re always the example that everyone uses on how to do it. But if you look at their proposition, especially at point of sale, it’s always clean and simple doesn’t mean that out-of-store marketing isn’t important. In fact, it’s really necessary. It’s quite the opposite. The rule of three in marketing is across all categories.
Usually, your consumer’s going to have three brands that they’re going to consider when they’re ready to buy. And if you’re not on that list, it’s going to be really tough to break in it expensive with promotion spend to try to break into that list. So, the store-back clarity though, it’s everything. It’s going to get consistent, connected with the upper and mid funnel communications plan. And that’s, to be honest with you, you know, I’m here with Crux, the “un-agency” expert, and I love that idea. And I like that you are challenging, you know, traditional agency thinking. Because a lot of agencies really get tripped up in that clear communication plan from the store or the shelf all the way back up to the most brand building type of ad on linear television. And sometimes it’s because an agency doesn’t own all those different touch points, which is, you know, fair, but still very hard. And the messaging just gets disjointed.
Ethan Whitehill: You know, and just thinking about that moment, I call it the “first moment of truth at the shelf.” There’s also, you know, the second moment of truth P&G coined, you know, which is the product experience itself. And you have a lot of thoughts on experience. In fact, you know, we’ve heard about share, voice, share of wallet, but I know you’re a fan of share of experience. So how does share of experience build trust with the customer and influence their purchase decision?
Dave VanderWaal: Yeah, share of experience is my personal favorite here over the last part of my career. Traditional ways of measuring, they’re okay, but they work in really separate swim lanes oftentimes, you know, for example, you can have share voice, you can calculate it in terms of, you know, GRPs impressions, et cetera. Digital analytics can give you the CPMs, CPCs, CPEDs, et cetera, click to sales. However, that really isn’t the purchase journey, not at least from the consumer perspective. In that world, there are experiences all along the way and all of them start to build into a final decision. And they’re intertwined in the same day. Like we talked about a little bit ago, you could see a linear ad, you could see a search display ad, you could talk to a friend, you could serve websites and maybe even make a store visit, but which one worked?
That’s the challenge for a marketer. They can’t be measured independently. Because They all work together. It’s the old adage, sum of the parts are greater than the parts of the individual. So the common thing though is that they’re all experiences. Consumers have experiences. They don’t have impressions, you know, and so those experiences are the way to really get to the entire holistic point of view. And each of those can be measured. There’s a couple of different companies that are able to measure the experience, and we did them at LG and without using their name, I’ll just tell you what we used it for and what kind of great results we got as a marketer. We learned that on average in the appliance world, a consumer uses 13 different touchpoints. And with each of those touchpoints, we were able to measure how much impact it had on purchase and how much it impacted the feel for the brand. So you got the right and the left. And then once we measured that, our mix of media spend was much more informed than we ever had. And we learned which touchpoint we should be using at last three feet in a heavy-handed way, and which ones we should be using just to put those seeds in the ground, like we mentioned earlier.
Ethan Whitehill: Well, and that experience isn’t just within physical stores or with physical products sometimes, you know, that experience is with sales, you know, and sales is an important factor in the marketing mix as we, as we think about that partnership within an organization. So how can sales and marketing work together to drive customers from awareness to loyalty? Sometimes they’re almost like opposite camps, and you see a lot of differences of opinion, you know, across the aisle, so to speak, between those two. How do you bring them together? How do, how do you make that work?
Dave VanderWaal: Yeah, the cousins that have joined at the hip, and I’ve lived that for really several of the jobs I’ve been at. And, and in my experience, sales often has the louder voice within a business because really, you know, sales truly are the lifeblood of any business. You know, you have to sell something to survive, but sales needs marketing to happen. And so, what I learned and what I tried to do was to build alliances and consensus with sales teams—easier said than done sometimes. But really show how their sales objectives can be met. And we will do some performance marketing for sure, but at the same time, try to educate the leaders on the sales side of the importance of building the pipeline. You know, again, putting the seeds in the ground, the short-term perspective of a lot of organizations and certainly with sales leads, is what’s going to happen in the quarter.
And so we have to say, “okay, here’s how we’re going to drive some promotion during the quarter, but here’s how we’re going to help get your numbers up for 2026,” for example. It’s not easy to do, but marketing leads, they sometimes they, they kind of want to cloister and not really engage with sales or with the business sometimes. And you got to get there, you got to be visible, you got to be at the table. You have to understand all the business metrics across the organization, but especially sales. And by the way, I’m intrigued by the offering that Crux has actually, with two different divisions within the agency, one that does focus on, you know, marketing slash advertising, but also the other that helps companies, you know, with the sales side of the business, maybe with a fractional sales lead or even some sales strategies that can help the short term cycle of sales. And I think that’s unique that you see both as something that clients need.
Ethan Whitehill: Yeah, it’s definitely an opportunity that we just founded the market as we were doing our job as fractional CMOs, it became apparent that a lot of the opportunity for us to really help our clients was also on the sales side. So, we had to bring those two together.
Dave VanderWaal: Yeah. And so many companies, both even large companies, oftentimes have a lead that is sales and marketing. You know, EVP of sales and marketing and,
Ethan Whitehill: And those chief revenue officers that you’re seeing more and more of.
Dave VanderWaal: Yeah. Almost always, you know, coming out of the sales side of the business. So really what agencies need to do is make as many contacts within the business as possible, but if you have a person who has both roles, sales and marketing, be able to have offerings on both sides of that, you know, balance that we talked about. Between the brand and, you know, the sales side. I mean, it’s really a unique way of positioning crux as a differentiator.
Ethan Whitehill: So that last point, I think, is a really good one, especially as you zoom out a little bit just between the relationship of sales and marketing, you know, being that executive marketer in the room, you have a really important role to play. So, you know, maybe talk a little bit about what that’s meant to you and your career and how you learned to deal with the business leaders that you have.
Dave VanderWaal: Yeah. You, you need to be visible. I would say it’s short and simple like that. You need to be present at as many of the executive leadership meetings as possible, even if marketing isn’t the direct discussion topic in the end, the marketing lead, and we’re using the word CMO, but I mean, even brand managers or even if it’s a smaller company, you know, the one marketing person, they need to be regarded as a business leader whose contributions far exceed just how marketing plans are crafted and funded. And so how do you do that? Well, you got to be there. You got to listen, you got to learn. You got to know what the supply chain concerns are. How are future products being developed? What are the financials? Each month, learn how to read a balance sheet, an income statement. The more you know about the overall business, the more respect you’ll gain and the more say you will have, and the added bonus to all this, Ethan, all that knowledge is going to make you a better marketer as well.
Ethan Whitehill: So that sounds like good advice for up and coming executives and future CMOs. What, what else would you share with them to help them on their career path?
Dave VanderWaal: Well, in the day and age of analytics here, I would say respect and understand analytics, but don’t worship at the altar of numbers, if you will. Use analytics to develop uncovered insights and of course implications. Remember this old adage, “all that can be measured may not matter, and all that matters may not be able to be measured.” And, your role really as a marketing leader in any company is to be the heart and soul, the heart and soul of the company. And I’ve got three pieces of advice for how to do that: leverage the power of brand building, harness the power of storytelling, and become great at the art of the presentation.
Ethan Whitehill: Boy, I can’t underscore that last point. More. It’s like, you could have the best idea in the world, but if you can’t present it, it’s going to die.
Dave VanderWaal: And I’ve seen, you know, really smart people, classically trained marketers, flame out on that and agency too. I mean, really, at the end of the day, we all are selling something. Yeah. But if you can’t put your idea, your strategy, your creative in a way that is received in an enthusiastic way by the audience, you’re dead every time.
Ethan Whitehill: It’s a tough crowd. It can be. Yeah. All right. Well, I just want to shift gears for a minute. You have a wonderful family, and we got to catch up a little bit about all that last night. And fun fact for our listeners, you aren’t the only famous VanderWaal in the world. In fact, your, your daughter Grace is a singer songwriter, an actress who has earned honors from Billboard, MTV, and Forbes among others. What’s that experience been like as her dad and what have you learned about marketing through her experiences?
Dave VanderWaal: Oh, well, thank you for that, Ethan. Grace has been a blessing for us family, but it’s been a journey. It’s been a real journey with ups and downs. In 2016, at the age of 12, grace became the youngest winner ever of America’s Got Talent. Now she’s 21—9 years have passed since then. She’s had two EPS released. She’s opened for the Imagine Dragons—can you imagine that?–On their North American tour, she’s had two different headline tours of her own. She starred in two different Disney movies. She’s had a supporting role in the Francis Ford Coppola movie. She’s got modeling contracts and much, much more. So, I’m her biggest fan and probably her biggest shill. But I will say, you know, you ask about marketing advice for any father out there who also has a career that might help their child in some way, remember that you’re a dad first, because I made a mistake early on where I would go into meetings with maybe the label management or Grace’s manager and or agent. And I, of course would have my marketing hat on, and I heard a lot of things that I thought were wrong. You know, no, that’s not what you should be doing right now. I think they were vetted strong opinions that had some real basis in, you know, experience. But Grace, that was the wrong thing for me to do. What Grace wanted in for me was a dad, not a CMO. And by the time she was around 16, I realized that, and I back completely out of it. And now as a young adult, she makes all her own decisions and it’s forging her own way. And we’ll see what happens over the next, I don’t know, 5, 10 years. She’s making a career. You can check her out. I’ll do a shill thing here. And again, you know, go to Spotify, go to YouTube. She’s got six, six and a half million followers on Instagram about almost 2 million followers on Spotify. She’s got her YouTube channel with almost 2 million subscribers. You know, she’s not Taylor Swift as Simon Cowell predicted way back when she was 12, but she’s certainly on her way to a successful career, I’ll say that. Yeah. And I’m very proud of her.
Ethan Whitehill: Well, we love to watch that and vicariously participate. And, your whole family is just fantastic. And, and you’ve been a wonderful guest. Just shifting gears, because I am going to put you on the spot again with my mystery question. You don’t know what’s coming, but I’ve got my 20-sided die and I, whatever comes up is what I’m going to ask you. All right. I rolled in eight and I have a new set of questions, by the way, I was recycling too many of them. So now we’re episode 26. It’s time for new questions. And question number eight is, if you could travel time, would you go to the past or the future?
Dave VanderWaal: That’s a good one. I’d go to the past. I think where I’d go, there’s so many choices given that the inauguration just happened. It would’ve been fascinating to go back at the birth of our own country here to live through those times. Who could have imagined that this tiny little part of the country was going to turn into what the United States is today. But, you know, heck pick the time! it could have been really amazing to go back in the time of Israel and Jesus and, really would’ve you realized that this is actually, you know, the son of God or would’ve you just thought it’s a really cool preacher walking around saying cool stories? Great question. Be interested to see what some other people have to say about that.
Ethan Whitehill: Dave, how can listeners connect with you?
Dave VanderWaal: Oh, thanks Ethan. And thank you Ethan. And Crux again for the opportunity here to talk a little bit. My LinkedIn is d Vanderwal. Of course, anyone can comment there or, or direct message me if you’d like. IX handle, I can’t get away from Twitter, but, it’s X now is @nyckcdave and traditional email. If someone wants to email me, DVW112057@gmail.com.
Ethan Whitehill: Dave, thanks so much for the conversation.
Dave VanderWaal: It’s been blast. Have fun.