At Carpe Diem Partners, we have had the opportunity in 2018 to recruit and assess multiple leaders of direct to consumer digital businesses across several engagements, including global iconic brands, owned by larger global F500 enterprises as well as mid-size pure plays. Meeting with leaders across the industry has lent us insights into what best in class leaders are doing to drive share and bottom line performance for their shareholders.
- Measuring Performance – it’s much easier identifying businesses that have grown top and bottom line results on account of the business strategy designed by their leaders. It does require greater investigation into the validity of how that performance actually occurred.
- Social Media requires a relevant strategy – There’s good conversation for a “cocktail party” regarding social media marketing. However, deeper conversations reveal successful leaders have customized social media strategies and tactics for brand building, demand generation or neither! What’s really cool is understanding how leaders measure social media marketing results. There are nuances by industry, consumer segmentation and marketing channel (offline vs online). Social media is an efficient marketing tool. It enables 1:1 interaction and is a cost-effective way of meeting customers where we evaluate and make product decisions, online. We have found the more successful a DTC company has been, there is typically a well-thought (and continually tweaked) social media strategy behind it. On top of this, businesses which employ an integrated strategy, that is, linking their social media efforts to offline advertising, are the leaders in their categories.
- Customers and Decisions Demand Speed and Agility. Clear and simple, the DTC companies which can respond intelligently and quickly perform better. We employ this strategy in bringing qualified candidates into leadership roles, efficiently. A recent retained search closed in 29 days for a leader of a direct to consumer business in the nutritional space. We were dogged in our engagement delivery but our client (F500) also deserves substantial credit in changing their process. In todays market, firms need to operate as a extremely close extension of a client’s talent acquisition function helping and guiding a client through the process.
- Team Leadership – Some of our CEO candidates are starting to bump into the millennial demographic. They lack long tenures of experience and the accumulated wisdom, but they’re more agile, tolerant to experimentation and more creative in their thinking. Refreshing is how they tend to lead teams, sense of purpose and putting the team above self. When a candidate brings up “building a strong team” as the first unsolicited accomplishment, it does provide a sense of how they think about the value of talent. The stronger leaders understand how to measure the effectiveness of the team and the mix of tools used to design, inspire, and build organizational capability.
As a former CMO and CEO, it’s been incredibly gratifying working with leaders of digitally oriented businesses. At Carpe Diem Partners, we partner with our DTC clients, to understand their business and culture in short order. We learn their challenges and provide creative solutions by delivering world class talent.