There was a time when Eloi Casali had no love for branding. Now, the Kingfisher head of media tells Tim Healey how he demonstrates the unmistakable impact of brand marketing back to the budget holders at the B&Q, Screwfix and Tradepoint owner.
You’ve been brand manager, a search specialist and then rose through the ranks at Zenith from an account director to global strategy director before moving up through iProspect as a managing partner. Next, you joined Kingfisher, where you’re now head of media. Please walk us through your journey to your current role.
About 20 years ago, as I concluded my degree, my end-of-year dissertation was called ‘The Rise of Internet Advertising’ – because it wasn’t ‘a thing’ yet but Second Life (the early metaverse) was seeing huge investment from brands like IBM. The central point I was making in my dissertation back in the day, was that interaction under any guise or form, whether it be mental or physical, increases retention of the advertising message.
After university, I started working in a very small search agency, where I saw what I had written in my dissertation come to life: people were clicking with immense intent on search results, and then buying a huge amount of products and services from our clients.
That was a big moment for me: I really understood the business impact of advertising immediately. As I continued my career at Publicis, new media channels like Facebook and Twitter appeared. It was all new and we were trying to work out how best to use them. We were the first to bid on audiences on Facebook. Prior to that, you had to send an IO. We did the same on Twitter, running the first Twitter campaign in Europe, where we were bidding ourselves and buying promoted trends, and starting to engineer the organic platform that Twitter then rolled out.
That was a fundamental shift in the agency’s model, which was previously based on pricing and costs-per, metrics we now had directly in our hands, for each segment.
So they had launched their platforms – but you were the ones figuring out how to use it?
They were in the process of making their technology stack open to the public. It was the first time that we had pricing into our hands based on how much we wanted to pay, and the ability size up buyable audiences immediately, which was huge for planning.
I became a spearhead for digital marketing and innovation and all these new technologies. I did a lot of work into modernizing the way agencies were thinking about media and channel selection by being (sometimes too) single-minded on the business outcome we were meant to drive. Up to that point, agencies were still planning their media spend in the old ways. Now ‘digital’ needed to be woven into the planning process.
I worked in the agency world with a lot of traditional marketers who had already been working in the industry for 25 to 30 years. I helped them to innovate their practices, bringing a lot of new media capabilities into the hands of media planners and buyers for brands. We were doing the strategy and the planning across the whole sales funnel.
As I managed digital campaigns, I was invited to inject digital thinking and digital tactics into more traditional environments like TV, branding, the press, and doing things slightly differently, all with the objective of generating impressive results for our brands.
In my role at Kingfisher, we support all of our big businesses to help them do the best they can do with media. Sometimes this is about improving what they do. Sometimes it’s about just showcasing their work through the business because that’s a massive part of the client-side role.
What I didn’t foresee – moving from agency to client – is the constant showcasing you have to do for your own department, within the business, in order for marketing to be a strength in your organization.
Eloi presenting key insights on media effectiveness
At Kingfisher, for the year ending January 24, sales are up; retail profit margins up; cash flow is great. Debt is decreasing: your net debt to EBITDA is looking very manageable indeed. For those that may not be so familiar with Kingfisher, could you tell us about your brand portfolio and then what’s on the agenda for the next 12 months?
Kingfisher is a group of DIY and home improvement retailers operating across Europe. In the UK, our brands are B&Q, Screwfix and Tradepoint. In France, Sapin and Poland we have Castorama and Brico Depo. So we’re very focused on DIY home improvement.
Our mission is to make home improvement accessible to everybody and anybody – whatever your budget, there is always a solution to make your home more livable and more comfortable.
The DIY industry has [some] of the lowest e-commerce participation or penetration. That’s due to the nature of our products. I’ve worked in industries where 90% of the sales are online but we’re closer to 20%. Customers love going into the stores. We use this as a strength rather than seeing e-commerce and retail compete with each other.
What we’ve done in the past four years is massively improve the volume of sales that we’re driving through e-commerce. This has been done incrementally, by increasing the number of products we sell online, launching marketplaces, and unleashing the power of AI. We’ve grown from around 500,000 products to 1.5 million. This, in turn, has hugely improved the size of our product portfolio and helps us to start competing more effectively with Amazon and others pure players.
We’re still a business that is very focused on the stores. To drive growth in the future we are working on connecting what is happening in stores with what is happening online. This happens through loyalty cards, customer understanding, taking a single customer view and activating media against a holistic view of the consumer.
It’s really important we keep everything in balance for us because if we only optimize things for the online world, we’re missing 85% of the picture. This would massively affect our understanding of who our customers are. Our focus is on bringing those two worlds together through the data and through new and existing customer offerings.
Many amateur DIYers (like me) watch tutorials online before undertaking DIY. Are you in the ‘influencer space’?
We do use influencers to amplify our message in in a very authentic way. The thing we love with influencers is that they have their own audiences. We’re not just trying to reach their own audiences with OUR message; we’re trying to reach them through the influencer’s personality to maximize the results achieved.
Authenticity is crucial here. For influencer content to be authentic, the whole point is that the product lives with the influencer, the influencer does whatever they want with the product. We must embrace the wackiness and authenticity that comes with influencer marketing.
I am very impressed with how luxury has managed to leverage influencers, because luxury is a world where the brand guidelines are very strict. And it’s very, very clear what you can and can’t say. For a luxury brand to give their product to an influencer and let them develop their own message has been a stroke of genius.
Back in the DIY world, we use influencers mostly to drive that feeling that your home could be improved and to drive inspiration about DIY as a whole – as opposed to trying to sell a specific product.
Some retailers take their best-selling product, put it in the hands of an influencer and just say, “Market the crap out of this product as much as you want but we’re looking for as many clicks as possible to break even” whereas we try and use influencers to showcase that their dream world – the world that they are selling to their audiences – is a world that their audience can have for a fraction of the price that they thought it might cost.
We believe that influencers are more in ‘the inspiration space’ rather than in ‘the product space.’ Another thing that we’re noticing is that working with a multitude of micro-influencers has more impact than working with one or two macro-influencers. The sum of all the micro-influencer activities that you can do ladders up to a higher interaction and engagement rate than if you had one influencer with a with a mass audience.
Eloi speaking during a panel at The Drum Labs. Watch it here.
I noticed that Kingfisher has made notable progress in its inclusivity goals, announced bold decarbonization targets, and launched a new green star product mark to help shoppers identify products with less environmental impact. It all seems to be headed in the right direction. Does this impact your role at all?
We have a range of products and a range of brands that are very environmentally friendly. They are designed in that way from the outset. We’re able to get customer insights from our business: we can see what customers are buying and also we’re able to ask them questions. And then we rapidly develop products that satisfy customer requests.
Part of that is price. And part of that is the eco credentials – that is the way the product has been built, the way the product uses energy and the amount of energy it save you as a customer, when you use it.
But when you look at the products they buy, the eco-credentials are probably 10-20% of the decision-making factor. I don’t see this as something that helps customers buy that product; I see it as a baseline that customers just want. Your product just needs to be eco-friendly. And then, if you manage to have a good price on top of that, brilliant. That’s what the consumers are going to go for.
A micro trend I see in this space is that eco products that help you save the environment by using less water/electricity are doing really well because the benefit is double for the customer – good for the environment and good for their finances in the long run.
Kingfisher’s brands include B&Q, where the store experience is responsible for the majority of sales.
Tell us about the marketing team. You know, how is it organized and structured, where you work?
The way Kingfisher operates is that we have a team of marketers, e-commerce and analytics leads at Kingfisher who work in a center of excellence. And what we do is we help the businesses – B&Q, Screwfix and Castorama – achieve more with what they have today.
Each brand runs their own marketing and we help them think about the challenges in the next two, three or five years. We support them on their approach to omni-channel and around eco credentials for example. Our marketers are racing to achieve their goals for each of these brands on the day-to-day. Retail is so fast-paced and such a difficult trading environment you don’t always have time to look up. That’s where we help – we apply our analysis of how the industry is going to be shaped in the next five years, what that means for the direction of travel of the business and the marketing choices they are making.
You’re very passionate about data. What are the key metrics that can help marketers get the insight they need?
I do think data is one of the most important things in marketing. We have a world of marketing and advertising that is split between art and science. We have amazing creatives who are busy thinking about what persuades somebody to buy and what drives their emotions.
And on the other side, we analyze how many people are being reached and how; how long does a piece of advertising stay in our audience’s minds? Previously, most of the data we had was about the effectiveness of our media. Now we can look at a more granular level: at a customer and cohort level. We can see what our customers are doing when they interact with our business, as opposed to how they felt 17 seconds after seeing our creative.
We’re moving on from measuring ‘the seen’ to measuring ‘the done’ in terms of what customers are doing after seeing an advertising message. As I mentioned before, there’s a difference between what people say and what people do. When surveyed, if you look at how many people say they buy items from Google ads, that number is decorrelated from the facts, because they don’t always realize it’s an ad. It’s just content for them.
But when you look at what people actually do when presented with a product after they search on Google, a large number go on to purchase. People say they don’t want to believe in advertising, but with data we can show that advertising really works well. This is true across all channels, not just Google. No one likes to admit that advertising works outside our industry.
The data that we’re generating today, from analysis of site engagement to retail media data, really help us to better understand what our customers are doing after seeing advertisements, as opposed to just feeding back metrics on advertising reach and frequency – those are metrics that are not as linked to the business outcomes that marketing should aim to drive.
I’m a big believer that all marketing should be there to drive business outcomes. Whether it’s long-term, short-term or driving brand consideration that impacts sales, it’s 100% our role to prove how media and marketing metrics ladder up into business objectives. And if we do our jobs well, that’s easy to demonstrate.
Kingfisher offices, London
How do you feel about synthetic customer data, where AI models of individuals in your target segments can be asked questions to help build a foundation for your marketing?
My personal belief is that AI is firstly going to impact the science side of marketing before it impacts the creative side. On the numbers side of things, you can come up with a very thought-provoking answer and impressive data sets very fast, and if you feed in the right data, you may be able to plan faster and better. But just like everything AI, it will be based on what has been done in the past rather than what you could do in the future. A bit like econometrics.
I would be very careful with the data itself, mostly because the data is generated from other existing data. As a business, if you’ve put your segmentation data out there because you did a conference or produced a whitepaper, the AI model could just be reiterating to you what you’ve already shared with the internet.
As a result, you’re not getting a true reflection of your customers; you’re getting a reflection of what is already out there in the public domain. Every time you do that cycle, you might lose something – let’s say 100,000 customers’ understanding.
I’m still a big believer of monitoring what customers actually do. For me that has more value than trying to synthesize what other customers have done in the past. Media is an area that is constantly changing. 15 years ago there was no Facebook. Now Facebook is a bigger advertising channel than TV.
The opportunities originally offered by digital advertising could be compared to AI right now. If we explore the sales that we were generating through digital targeting: are we generating sales through digital marketing – or are we just attributing those sales to our marketing?
We have changed our approach over the last 15 years and realized the power of combining brand and performance marketing. I believe there’ll be a moment of reckoning in the near future for AI, where the models will improve and tell us that ‘the model from 10 years ago was not right’.
What have you learned in your career that enables you to get the best out of marketing teams?
The reason I am effective at my level is because I’ve actually managed most of the channels that I brief budgets on in my day-to-day job. This has equipped me with the skills I need to talk to teams: what to ask about, how to talk about different metrics, and how to measure properly without any media owner nonsense.
The metrics you look at when you’re a Facebook or social media specialist, as opposed to being a CMO, are completely different. And I think what my career has enabled me to do is to really understand the granular and translate it at a very high level in terms of what it does for our business as a whole.
Businesses can get lost in those little things and forget about the big picture. I’m able to take very big, broad sets of directions and translate them into very precise marketing objectives and tactics that we want to be achieving in all media activations.
A B&Q Tradepoint, serving building trade customers
As a marketer, we’re faced with a barrage of new tech solutions to solve our marketing challenges. How do you approach this to ensure you make the right choices?
The amount of vendors, solutions, tech providers and startups that we have in the market means that there’s really something of everything. I also think we’re in an industry that lacks standardization in terms of how we measure these products and services which is good for vendors.
It means that everybody is doing their own thing. Display advertising is a great example of this: you can have some amazing things in display, and you can have the worst things on the planet in display. There are thousands of different things that you could do, but only a few will lead to success.
The first thing for an organization to do when making these important decisions is to build their own measurement framework and an understanding of how marketing and media translates into business results. Then anything you do is tested against that framework effectively.
I always place the emphasis on things that are measurable within my system, not the system of the vendor/supplier. There’s been a huge increase in the use of technology in advertising in the past 5-10 years. Some systems are vastly expensive and redundant within years, due to the evolution of both technology and legislation – you must always and often re-evaluate your partners.
I look at vendors, technologies and systems as either a tool or a toy. If it’s a tool, it pays for itself. If it’s a toy, it doesn’t pay for itself. So a hammer is a tool because it costs less than the value of the time you saved not hitting that nail with a branch but if it’s an emerald, AI-enabled hammer, it’s really shiny, but are you getting more nails per hour done? Over what period of time? What about longevity?
How do you go about balancing the need for longer-term brand building and more short-term sales activation lead campaigns?
Some people are focused on a one-year cycle on a spreadsheet and what that cycle is going to deliver. I rarely see a CFO who wants to invest this year for growth in five years – which makes this a very tricky thing to argue but not impossible. It seems there is a general preference for sales coming through this year than theoretical sales in five years and I can understand that from a spreadsheet management perspective.
The way I turned this around is to talk about what you’re going to lose in five years if you don’t pay attention to brand marketing. I flip the question to talk about a potential loss of the baseline income.
I talk about the long-term brand investments as a method of increasing your baseline. At a very basic level, if you’re an online only company I would look at things like people coming onto your site through branded search, and people coming to your website through direct access: those can be basic indicators of brand strength and of how your brand is growing.
If you start to combine that with, for example, a share of search against your competitors, you start getting that same view, but comparative to how your competitors are performing themselves. The aim of the game is to grow faster than the rest of the market. In your role, what we do is to deliver a positive return on financial investment and to grow faster than our competitors. If we can do both of those things. I think everybody in your business and especially in your finance team is happy.
How do you go about ensuring clarity around market orientation: specifically competitor and customer knowledge?
Outside of the sphere of marketing, people usually tend to focus on price as the mechanic to bring people in. That’s the one thing they look at whatever industry you’re in. If you’re somebody who works in sourcing or in finance, the only lever that comes to mind is the price of a product and the concept that lower price equals higher sales. Or perhaps availability.
Which is why we can easily get stuck into the cycle of never-ending promotions, and conditioning your customer to only purchase from you if there are promotions. That is a dangerous place for brands to be because you’re not delivering anything else but ‘low price’ as a value to your customers.
What we try to do with our marketing is talk to the rest of the organization about the value that a strong brand has on the rest of the financials. This shows up in different ways: it can be things like increasing the new customers coming through the door, average order value of baskets or increasing purchase frequency which in our world of DIY is very important. DIY is something that people usually do on average one, two or three times a year, if we can increase the frequency of those DIY occasions, that has huge impact for us. So that’s a very important thing to do.
We also forget to talk to our CFOs about things like ‘price elasticity.’ It’s a fact that a brand that is more loved is able to command a slightly higher price point. And in the same way, if your website is more efficient than your competitor’s website – if it is simpler and easier to use – then you can also command a higher price point.
Bringing all of those things together is so important but they are not really topics that are discussed outside of the marketing and finance areas. That’s why people throughout the business don’t always understand what marketing can bring to the table for any business.
If you could go back in time and give ‘younger you’ at the start of your career some sage advice, what might you say? What should you do more of? And what might you avoid?
Younger me started in search marketing. I was looking at Excel reports and I had no time or love for branding, which I saw as frivolous, expensive and based on belief. From what I could see, it was costing a tonne of money, and on paper, it was hard to prove what it was driving. This made me very skeptical about other communication channels. My discipline was showing tangible results, with proof in the spreadsheets, and I could pretty much immediately affect the numbers if anyone wanted to see proof
I had an amazing epiphany where I saw the massively positive impact of TV advertising on search. I was working on the launch of Comparethemarket.com in France. They are a brand whose media mix was focused on two communication channels: TV and search.
Before the TV campaign launched, I was the little search a guy, placing my bids for £24 here, €12 per click there. I had never seen such high search costs in my search life. It was 11.30pm and I was pulling my hair out: “How should I place my bids? How should I price this? I am not being cost effective and ROI positive!”
The minute the TV ads landed, all of my numbers became so much better. I still have the screenshots on my computer of the TV ad landing.
This was because people had seen the TV ad, and then instantly recognized the brand names. Click through rates increased five-fold and my costs decreased instantly, and results exploded both in volume and effectiveness.
That was the moment I understood the impact that brand has on performance, and how these two tactics need to work together to drive a more efficient return on investment overall.
I love the fact that at one point in your career, you were practically the ‘brand marketing Antichrist’. And then you were ‘born again’.
It is a story I tell younger marketers – especially those in search.
If there’s one thing you’ve learned about marketing it is?
Outside of the industry few people seem to believe that marketing and advertising works. Everybody thinks they are cleverer than the poster or the ad they had to skip before they were allowed to watch the clip they wanted to. There are a lot of negative feelings towards advertising from a consumer perspective. But what I can say is that it works. I’ve seen it, I’ve done it. It works. It’s as simple as that.
You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.
Little Grey Cells is Tim Healey, founder and curator of Little Grey Cells Club, the UK’s premier Senior Marketer meet-up.