An Interview with Zillow and The North Face Leaders
As competition arises in your industry, having a durable yet innovative brand marketing strategy is the best way to stand out. In this Marketer 411 conversation on brand marketing, Bethany Evans, VP of Americas Marketing at The North Face, and Dave Healing, Senior Director, Brand Strategy and Marketing at Zillow, joined host Jennie Stark of Marketers That Matter to explore how brand marketers can stay competitive. They discuss the strategies they use, the importance of integrating brand and performance marketing, the value of staying connected to their brand’s origin stories, and how close collaboration with product teams ensures consistent messaging across all platforms. Want to know more brand marketing strategies in a competitive environment? Keep reading to gain invaluable insights from these two industry leaders.
How Brand Marketing Teams are Structured at The North Face and Zillow
Bethany Evans: The North Face marketing team consists of our global marketing team led by our CMO and a lead marketer for the Americas, APAC (Asia and Pacific), and EMEA (Europe, the Middle East, and Africa). Each regional lead has a team ensuring we are serving the needs of our consumers in-region.
Dave Healing: Our team consists of members specializing in brand strategy, brand marketing strategy, partnerships, and experiential. We’re always thinking about how we can really understand our audiences and then create comprehensive experiences that make a lasting impression.
Brand Marketing Strategies for Staying Competitive
Dave Healing: Two ways that Zillow has been able to have durability and resilience in the face of a constantly changing marketplace and competition over the last 18 years are:
- Operationalizing core values.
One of our core values, which has played a significant role in our success, is prioritizing our customers as our North Star. Many marketers emphasize the idea of being customer-first and customer-centric, and I wholeheartedly agree with that. However, what sets us apart at Zillow is that we have operationalized this value, making it our point of differentiation.
- Solving real customer problems.
We have been able to help the customer in ways that they were not previously advantaged in the housing market. We are equally dedicated to advocating for policies that impact the housing space, which has allowed us to stand strong through these challenging times.
Bethany Evans: Our two core strategies for staying relevant over the last 50 years are:
- Remaining true to our original DNA.
From the very start, our founders, Doug and Susie Tompkins, aimed to not only help people explore wild areas, but also to help conserve them. - Staying connected with our customers and innovating the gear they require.
There is a growing demand for sun protection, for instance, especially given the recent high temperatures in Denver, reaching 90 degrees. This prompted us to introduce a new range of UPF gear this summer called “light range.”
Examples of Using Brand Purpose and Founder Stories in Brand Marketing
Bethany Evans: I absolutely adore our mantra, “Never stop exploring.” As I mentioned earlier, our founder, Doug, was a climber. I believe that the spirit of climbing still shines through as the origin story of the brand.
Two examples of how our origin story is reflected in our brand are:
- Strategic sponsorships.
Many of you might have seen the movie “Free Solo.” It showcased Alex Honnold, who is just one of over 200 athletes that we sponsor globally, including influential figures such as Jimmy Chin, Nina Williams, Emily Harrington, and Nathaniel Coleman, who won a silver medal in the last Olympics.
- Conservation programs.
Through The North Face Renewed program, we address the issue of approximately 85 percent of all textiles produced end up in landfills every year. With that in mind, the renewed program refurbishes clothing that might otherwise be discarded simply because it has become old and worn out.
Dave Healing: As Zillow continues to evolve and enhance what we offer to our customers, we delved into our founding stories to craft a revitalized purpose statement. It was crucial for this statement to embody the historical narrative, align with our vision for the future, and remain relevant to our customers’ needs, desires, and interactions with us.
To achieve this, we dedicated substantial time to actively listening:
- We listened to our founder’s original frustration.
Zillow originated from a shared frustration experienced by our founders, who were both searching for homes. They encountered a common challenge—the inaccessibility of data that was known to some but not to all.
- We listened to what we were becoming known for.
Zillow was established as a solution to illuminate and democratize this data, empowering everyone in their housing journey. By reflecting on this fundamental story and numerous others from our leaders and founders, we realized that we had become known as a place where people could dream, search, and engage in daily reflections about the possibilities.
- We showed our customers what we were hearing.
We strongly believed that a home should not only be a dream, but a reality for more and more individuals. This realization led us to define our purpose as making home ownership a tangible and achievable prospect for everyone.
In our approach to embodying this purpose, we have naturally integrated this narrative into our advertising and marketing efforts. Additionally, we have ‘tagline-ified’ this concept and collaborated with an exceptional agency that has adeptly presented this narrative.
How Brand Marketers Stand Out and Keep the Attention of Customers
Dave Healing: My supervisor, Beverly Jackson, the Vice President of Brand and Product Marketing, often emphasizes the need for us to embody the spirit of a challenger brand while presenting ourselves as leaders. Here are three examples of how we actively strike this balance:
- Storytelling.
This year, we launched a campaign with the goal of meeting customers at their point of need. The focus was on uncovering the uniqueness of individual stories and sharing them so that people from all walks of life could relate and understand our intentions, our emotions, and our support.
- Content.
We provide engaging experiences with meaningful content, emphasizing a social- and digital-first approach while prioritizing experiential engagement.
- Community.
Recently, we hosted a Zoom webinar where we simply opened a call and invited first-time homebuyers to join and ask questions. This allowed us to show up as a challenger brand, acting as though we don’t have a leadership advantage, and get in the trenches with them.
Bethany Evans: I came across a really interesting insight recently, highlighting how much the industry has heavily leaned towards performance marketing over the last decade. As a result, some individuals in Gen-Z haven’t been exposed to a lot of traditional brand marketing like we were growing up.
For The North Face, we constantly consider how to cater to both extremes. On one end, we have incredible athletes and consumers who push our gear to its limits, such as scaling Mount Everest. On the other end, we have gatherings like the Gore-Tex Hoarder meetups in New York, and we provide our support to them as well.
Both represent genuine expressions of our brand, and we strive to engage and support both scenarios. Sometimes, as a brand, it’s easy to fall into the trap of only trying to define yourself to your consumers, but it’s essential to also listen to them to understand how they see you.
Practices for Integrating Brand and Performance Marketing
Bethany Evans: What we strongly believe in at The North Face is the fusion of brand and performance because a great product ad or messaging can also serve as brand messaging and vice versa.
Here’s how we combine Brand and Performance Marketing at The North Face:
- We work with one agency based in New York, which also oversees our paid creative.
- Most of our creative work is done in-house and we do a lot of briefing Within on both the media plan and creative needs.
- The agency utilizes these assets effectively across various formats to achieve our marketing objectives.
This approach feels more integrated, and we hope it resonates with our consumers. We’ve all experienced those ads that seem irrelevant when they appear in our feeds. Our aim is for our content to always be interesting and relevant to those who encounter it.
Dave Healing: Brand and performance is a continuum—there’s no clear separation between the two. For us, it all begins with a clearly defined brand strategy:
- This strategy needs to be actionable, something that our social teams, content teams, and lifecycle teams can readily engage with and execute.
- The purpose and pillars that define how we deliver on our promise to customers are essential components of this strategy, which then permeate throughout our social and performance-centric initiatives.
- Even though our focus is primarily on performance, the brand’s presence is measured against performance metrics due to this integrated approach.
This infusion of brand elements serves to enhance awareness and consideration, which we’ve observed through the feedback we receive from our ongoing marketing efforts.
How to Partner with Product Teams for Consistent Brand Messaging
Dave Healing: Integration is key. About a year and a half ago, our senior Vice President of Marketing, Ravi Kandikonda, recognized the proximity of brand and product marketing but realized they were operating as separate functions. As a product-centered organization, integrating these functions was a strategic move.
This integration is evident in our messaging frameworks that align with the value propositions of our products. The more these reflect the brand strategy, the more seamlessly and consistently we communicate our message across all platforms.
Bethany Evans: Product and marketing need to work closely together to support each other. As a retail brand emerging from the challenges of COVID, it has been incredibly valuable to collaborate closely with our product teams again in Denver.
Our innovation lab is an amazing space where we get to witness firsthand how products are rigorously tested, including their waterproof and sunproof capabilities. Their feedback and input have directly influenced product modifications, even for safety reasons. This continued focus on safety and innovation has been an incredibly rewarding aspect of our transition out of the virtual world.
Top Takeaways for Brand Marketing Leaders
Brand marketing leaders can apply these key insights from The North Face and Zillow by recognizing the importance of staying true to their brand’s core values and founder stories while continuously innovating to meet customer needs. Both companies emphasize the integration of brand and performance marketing, where storytelling, strategic partnerships, and close collaboration with product teams create consistent, impactful messaging that resonates with their audiences. Operationalizing these values and integrating them across all platforms ensures marketing strategies remain relevant and compelling in a competitive landscape.
Meet the Experts
Bethany Evans, VP of Americas Marketing at The North Face
Bethany Evans is VP, Americas Marketing at The North Face. Prior to moving home to Colorado to join TNF, Bethany worked at Southwest Airlines in Dallas. She holds a Bachelor’s from Washington and Lee University and an MBA from Southern Methodist University. In her spare time, she enjoys traveling with her family, reading, and barre fitness.
Dave Healing, Senior Director, Brand Strategy and Marketing at Zillow
Dave Healing is a seasoned leader, thinker, and strategist who brings over two decades of experience in both for-profit and non-profit organizations to his work on brand. Currently, as the Senior Director of Brand at Zillow, Dave is helping drive clarity internally and externally around Zillow’s purpose of making home a reality for more and more people. Prior to this role, Dave led strategy and operations at Brandtrust, an agency based in Chicago, where he helped brands across multiple industries leverage the power of human truth to drive business results. Dave is passionate about understanding how people make meaning of the world, and in his free time, he enjoys spending time with his family and friends, exploring his neighborhood and volunteering.
The Marketer 411 virtual events are conducted in partnership with The Wall Street Journal. Hosted by Jennie Stark, VP of the MTM Program at 24 Seven, these events contain deep insights on various disciplines in marketing.
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