Scotiabank: CMO John Doig

When did you join the bank?

I joined the bank in 1997 or 1998, which was almost 18 years ago. At the time, I was an independent consultant for BMO, and I worked at Rogers as well. Then the opportunity through a couple of contacts got me in front of a senior person at Scotiabank, and 18 years later it's all good.

At the time, why did you join the bank?

At the time, I had some banking exposure through Bank of Montreal and I was part of the M Bank's launch. They were dabbling in online banking and the technology hadn't really caught up to the vision of what they wanted to deliver. But it was an incredible learning experience.

Even more prior to that, my first job out of school was in a management training program at a finance company. I was there for probably five years and in that timeframe I ran the collections department and then a few other projects.

After you joined Scotiabank, you worked there for almost two decades. Why did you stay for so long?

I'm still there and I hope to be there for the rest of my career! Scotiabank is an interesting place for a lot of reasons — interesting in a positive way. I’ve been here for 18 years and probably had 10 different jobs: I’ve run our private client group, our investment counsel firm, our private bank, an international brokerage, and I’ve run 200+ retail branches across the Toronto region.

So it’s a really great role from a people management standpoint, but also from the direct contact with customers. It's fantastic from that perspective. Afterwards, I ran our Canadian marketing operations for almost five years.

And now I'm in my third year as the Chief Marketing Officer which means I have global marketing! So all our marketing heads in each country report to our shop.

What led you to switch between all these departments? How did you find these roles?

I'll say two things: some of the roles found me and some of them weren’t premeditated on my end. Some of it was premeditated by the bank, like “hey we're gonna try him over here to see what kind of skill set that we can deploy.”

I often say to people that the bank has let me work in parts of the organization that my resume wouldn't suggest I knew anything about. When I was running branches, I'd often put people who weren't bankers into the branch management job. You can train someone to be a banker. But it's very difficult to make someone a great people manager. As you know, it's hire the attitude, train the skill.

It is that kind of philosophy that has served me well.

If you didn’t have experience in the field you were managing, how did you succeed when you went into those roles?

It’s a lot of management 101. You do a lot of listening, a lot of studying to figure out what is important, identifying the drivers of the business, determining what success looks like, and then building that vision so that the team around you can line up to it. Like I said, when I managed retail banking, I oversaw 4000 employees. And we had a fantastic run in that shop. The leader needs to set the vision to align folks. But that success wasn’t because of one individual - it is through the team approach.

Do you have any examples of times when you failed or learned a really important lesson through adversity?

I’d say generally, it's a balance of managing risks. You can spend a lot of time making things perfect and then miss the window of opportunity to be successful. And it's something that I've always said: the 70/40 rule. And people always tell me it doesn't add up to 100, but it's not supposed to add to 100.

If you have 40% of the information required to make a decision, don't do it. If you have 70% of the information required to make a decision and there's a sense of urgency around it, make the call. Don't wait for the 95%, because if you wait, you might miss the window of opportunity to get to market faster than the competition or another difference in a particular marketplace.

I’ll use the branch world of Toronto as an example. Toronto is made up of a bunch of different marketplaces, so the components of the branches will look different. Forrest Hill will look different from Rexdale, but both branches are wildly profitable.

So what are you doing? Well you're executing the strategy differently. The tactics are different in those places. If you waited for a perfect articulation for all 200+ branches you'd miss your year. Our CEO now has a line he uses which I love is, which is: don't let perfection get in the way of good enough.

And it's not to say that you should shoot from the hip at 70% every time. But there will be times when you need to make the call.

So you should make an executive decision and go with it.

Yes. And, you know, there will be times when you will be wrong. But it’s about understanding when you're wrong and making the decision to move to the next piece fast as opposed to saying “no, I’m going to stick with this and make it right.” Sometimes you can't make wrong, right.

Flipping it around, how do you determine Scotiabank's marketing strategy? What is the process of creating a strategy that fits 55 different countries?

Each country will present itself with cultural and regional differences that you need to be aware of. There are demographic differences and infrastructure differences in countries; one country may be way ahead on the establishment of mobile devices smartphones and other countries could be behind on the same components.

First, we need to be aware of all that stuff. And then as opposed to letting those facts stuff drive your decision, we use it to informs the tactics we do to move forward. At a higher level what we've learned is through spending time in research to truly understand our consumers.

And what we've learned is that there's a lot more similarities with our consumers than there are differences.

Really?

Yes. We believe that every customer has the right to become better off. Consumers want to be better off regardless of where they start in life. If you start in life with nothing, you want to be better off. If you start in life with a billion dollars, you still want to be better off. It's a perspective difference.Someone may have more access but it doesn't mean that someone can't become better off.

And so when you start to look at it in that perspective, whether I'm in Canada, Peru, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, Panama, or Costa Rica, we’ve found incredible similarities in the mindsets of consumers. The products and services they need may differ, the features and functions on the products and services may differ because of the regional or regulatory differences, but that stuff is all operationally manageable.

What we were able to do is understand and bring everyone together globally from a marketing perspective and a business line perspective to say, hey look what we have here. We have a lot of similarities in how consumers think and what they want. And you know people want to buy houses they want their family to live you know better than they've, than they've had. They want their kids to go to school. They want to buy cars. People want to be people. People want to want things and they know to get those things they do have to be employed and then to you know get a better job maybe you need to be better educated. And so there's so many similarities, doesn't matter what country you're in. When we started to level said that the concepts and the foundational pillars for are for for our messaging became almost universal. The execution and the tactics you know we we have a massive local influence on that, and I'll use an example. “You're richer than you think” is the most recognized tagline in Canada. But it doesn't work in Latin America.

Why not?

It doesn't work because “richer” means something different to people. The concept is there, but you have to change it. You can't you know in you're richer than you think you're actually questioning you know you know from a Latin American standpoint you're questioning someone - you're saying wait, you're smarter than me? Wait, I don't know something about myself? And a cultural difference would say that that won't work. So so so so you know local local - but the concept of you know there's more to life than money, you need to balance life and money, you need to you need to think a little bit about the future as you live for today. You need to set goals and we can help you get there.

All the same things that you originally think embodies, are thoughts and emotions that people have in Latin American countries. But we need to attack it differently.

We pull in the research as the first step. We understand what the consumers are thinking and feeling. And we understand the marketplace with each of the countries and then the strategy builds from there. It's not a central mandate out. I think that would be pretty risky.

It's an engaged process. Folks on the ground in the countries whether it be the president of the country, the marketing heads, or the business line leaders, everyone is engaged in the process and it unfolds as it unfolds. And we're not wed to a particular outcome.

We want to be biased by the facts. We want to be biased by what the consumer is telling us and what the trends are telling us in the in in these countries.

Take Chile for example. In Chile, there is 70% smartphone penetration. And so right away we can determine that we should lead with a mobile first solution here on every front. Because that's what the consumers are signalling. But that’s not true in every country.

When you entered this role, were there any common myths or stereotypes about marketing that you found that weren't true?

For sure! The first one, I'll just kind of invert what I just said to you. When I arrived in the global role, the majority of folks I talked to explained that what works in Mexico can't work in Peru because we're just different.

And the myth that we just dispelled was that there are a lot of similarities. Executional differences, yes, but there's a lot of similarities and those similarities are way more powerful from the engaging of the hearts and minds of consumers than the differences are in dividing the customers.

A great example lies with Canada and hockey. In Canada, we support a lot around hockey. Whether it be the NHL, the teams, and most importantly, the kids who play the game across the country. We support over 8000 minor kids hockey teams. And that ladders up to our NHL sponsorship and when people engage with Canada's favourite pastime they will see us and we'll be part of it.

And you have to work hard because we're a bank. We don't sell hockey sticks. We don't sell skates.

But we're trying to be relevant and engage the consumer in an authentic way that brings hockey to them more often or easier or helps the kids get there faster. Obviously hockey is not going to work in Latin America, but soccer does. Or football, as you call it.

So in Latin America, we have taken virtually everything we've done in Canada on hockey, put a football in front of it, and executed it in Mexico, Chile, and Peru. And we're getting the same benefits in the same list of brand. And I'd argue we're getting it faster than we did in Canada with hockey because not as many companies in Latin America, particularly in the financial services, have have gone forward with focusing on the kids.

Sure, they put their logo on a professional team's jersey. That's great. As we will too. But it's about driving it into the grassroots, it's driving it into the hearts and minds of the consumers when the parents come out to see their son or daughter play and they're in there and Scotiabank helped them get there. Or that Scotiabank has a deal with FC Barcelona that brings the FC Barcelona coaches to the kids teams.

And all of a sudden people look at us as being relevant because we care about something they care about. One, the passion of football and two, their families.

That's so awesome!

And so back to the similarities. We took the model in Canada around hockey and sport and grassroots kids sponsorships, and deployed it in Latin America. And within two years we have had just an incredible lift in brand awareness around those things and and more to come. And I suspect what took us 10 years in Canada, we'll do it half the time in the international space.

Let’s talk about brand awareness. What do you think the impact is on the communities on the ground —do you think 100% of Canada’s population has been impacted in some way by Scotiabank? Because it seems like anytime anyone goes to see a movie, they've been impacted by the bank's decisions.

Yes, you mean the SCENE program in Canada. It is a jewel in our crown.

I say this to anyone who wants to listen to this. Never forget that at this point in time it is one of the most important loyalty programs in the country. It is one of the most powerful tools we have to engage consumers and access new customers and it is a ten year overnight success.

And that's the point. It was 10 years ago we launched SCENE, and we launched the program with 0 members. Today, we have over 8.5 million members. And it took 10 years. People go “oh it's fantastic, it's brilliant.” Yes, and we have stayed true to the original vision for 10 years.

And I'll tell you. The partnership with our friends at Cineplex have been epic. Cineplex is a fantastic partner to deal with, and we’ve just extended our agreement with them for another 15 years.

Can you quickly explain what SCENE is and what its impact is on Canada for anyone who doesn’t know?

For sure. SCENE is a joint venture between Scotiabank and Cineplex, Canada’s largest projection house movie. We own the company 50/50 each, so it's a true joint venture. Dan McGrath, who is who is the chief operating officer over at Cineplex, is the president and I'm the CEO of SCENE. And we’ve been that way for 10 years.

Together, we’ve created a loyalty program that benefits their business by allowing more customers to come back more often in any a free way to their stores. For us, if you purchase a bank account with us and you want a credit card, you can actually get a SCENE card and a SCENE bank account, and every time you use your card you get points for more free things.

It's super simple. It's all online. And so as I said, we grew from 0 to 8.5 million numbers and 70% percent of those members are under the age of 40.

You ran SCENE for 10 years. How did you come up with this idea 10 years ago? How did you think to make a Cineplex/Scotiabank partnership?

So like anything we didn't start saying "hey we're going to do a loyalty program that's good with Cineplex." We were approached by Cineplex, who asked us what we thought about naming rights on theatres. At the time they had a series of theaters called Paramount and their licensing agreement had changed and they were taking the signs down and they said, “well what are we gonna call these theaters?” And someone in their shop had this idea, of, what about a sponsorship naming rights deal with another company. So we literally got approached saying "hey would you like to name a bunch of theaters across the country?”

At first, we were like …. no. However, if we were to name them, it can't just be a name in the side of the building. In any naming rights deal, it has to be more than the name on the side of the building. And that's when the conversation started.

They were looking at ideas around loyalty. And quickly it went from "hey what about the name on the side of the building" to the launch of SCENE. We worked together with their team to create a loyalty program from scratch that would drive consumers in and would benefit the consumers to get more.

We have fantastic satisfaction levels. We’re the #1 satisfaction loyalty program in Canada. One of the fastest growing loyalty programs in Canada. And not big coalition, not 55 different companies in there, just a very small suite of companies that the consumer sees the value in and you can obtain the value without waiting. There's no, I have to go to a Web site and request a coupon and you know in two weeks we get mailed to me - it's on my phone, I can go to my SCENE app, buy a ticket with my scene points, walk into Cineplex and flash my phone, they scan my phone, and you know I walk up to the concession stand, get popcorn and drink, and get more SCENE points for that and I've sitting in the movie theatre and I'm watching the Coming Attractions brought to you by Scotiabank.

Last question: you’re the CMO of Scotiabank and also the CEO of SCENE. How do you balance working with so many projects at the same time?

The CEO of SCENE is a cool title but there's a really solid management program that run the day to day. I’m obviously involved but there is a team that runs the day to day.

And I'll say it again: being the marketing guy at Scotiabank is one of the best jobs in the system. We have a fantastic team. Whether it be the folks who run our Canadian operations, our digital marketing teams, digital factory groups, or the brand team here and around the world.

We've got marketing heads in all of the major countries, who are part of our global marketing council who all contribute on a regular basis to improving the brand and making it more relevant to consumers. So I say to you that every job should be busy because busy is good but when you when you have the fortunate opportunity to assemble a great team some days it doesn't feel like work.