Kevin Miller
101 Great Minds on Music Brands and Behavior
Kevin Miller, Chief Marketing Officer, The Fresh Market
Meet Kevin Miller, the brilliant CMO of The Fresh Market, whose unquenchable desire to combine food and business ignites an incredible journey. Kevin, who is a marketing icon, blended his intrinsic gastronomic affinity with his creativity and innovative skills in a masterful way to revolutionize The Fresh Market's story.
Under his guidance, the Fresh Market has become synonymous with originality and culinary explorations. Miller's innovative marketing techniques increased revenue, and culinary enthusiasts were thankful for Kevin's groundbreaking marketing blueprint.
As his remarkable career path continues, Kevin Miller continues to weave an enticing tapestry of success into his story by fusing business insight, inventiveness, and unbridled passion.
“They call it the ‘theatre of the mind. ‘When you hear a familiar voice you trust, it brings up emotional connections to the brand, and that's very powerful.”
— KEVIN MILLER, CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER, THE FRESH MARKET
Uli Reese: What brand first made an impression on you?
Kevin Miller: McDonald's was a part of our lifestyle growing up. We’d look forward to a Big Mac, fries, and coke as a treat. When they expanded their business to breakfast, I remember the day the sausage and hotcakes came out in the early seventies. I ran there. After four years at West Point [Military Academy], I went into advertising at Leo Burnett. I was fortunate enough to work in McDonald's business and understood the dynamics of how to build a brand, the idea of brand marketing, and retail marketing. They left no stone unturned in terms of touching each community and customer they served. They are the gold standard.
Reese: How important was audio in that end-to-end customer experience?
Miller: Very important. McDonald’s left no stone unturned. They used a pneumonic audio signature that was significant to all their branding and campaigns and also alliterative language like ‘Big Mac attack .'The audio feel of a McDonald's spot was consistent in tone and melody, and working on the advertising side, we used it implicitly to get the message across.
Reese: Audio has become vital for communication, particularly when it comes to showing up on our devices. Care to comment.
Miller: I spent six years as a CMO of ABC Radio Network, which is 100% based on audio.
They call it the ‘theatre of the mind.' When you hear a familiar voice you trust, it brings up emotional connections to the brand, and that's very powerful.
At one point, we did some research around our top urban talent, Tom Joyner and Doug Banks, when we were expanding our multicultural network. I wanted to show the advertisers that those two talents had as much power and influence on the listening audience as major brands like Tiffany and McDonald's. We saw in that research that their ability to influence purchase, trust, and purchase intent was as high as some of the biggest brands in the world.
Reese: Many brands are still a sonic mystery, so as a matter of urgency, we need to talk about a brand’s sonic DNA and audio ownability. If you don’t show up, you are nobody. What are your thoughts?
Miller: For 30 years, The Fresh Market had nothing but success around expansion, but it wasn't a strong brand marketing organization. The company went private when things got more challenging towards the 2015 to 2020 timeframe. They wanted to turn the business around, so we focused on brand marketing. We focussed on the strategy of becoming America's most loved brand and created a campaign called ‘This is the Fresh Market,' which held a mirror to The Fresh Market experience, which was very sensory. What we found is that in the stores, the original founders only played classical music, and the customers hated it when we tried to change it. We focused on the store as part of the rebranding, but we were missing one thing: how to bring all this together and duplicate the unique experience of selling at The Fresh Market on the omnichannel platform. We see the opportunity in sonic branding as the force multiplier. Not only will it bring all these unique experiences that we've created both in-store and online together, but it will cause our customers to connect all those dots, and that impact will be much greater than if we didn't have sonic branding. We bring the magic to the shoppable experience, and it adds the extra dimension in terms of personalization, emotion, and trust that you can't get from any other platform.
Reese: How important is measurement for you?
Miller: We're a 100% data-driven organization and a 100% data-driven marketing department. We track our brand health attributes every day. We have two primary tracking services; one is through SMG, and that's the voice of guests in the stores. They fill out 180,000 surveys a year. We also track our brand health through Morning Consult, one of the leading brand-tracking research companies out of Washington, DC. For example, we focus on our friendliness and found through research with SMG that when an employee greets a customer, the sales go up $4 a basket. And when an employee walks them over to a shelf, it goes up another $5. We’ll be able to tell what impact sonic branding is having on our business; the voice of the customer and the health of the brand will be two key KPIs for our work. Not everybody does that.
Reese: And will the omnichannel metrics – the digital space - also factor into that?
Miller: We found that if a customer watched a shoppable video for our holiday meals, the conversion rate was 300% higher than if the customer hadn’t gone to the website. I'm really championing a new metric, which is immersion - all conversions are not created equal. If you get your customers to the buying platform and they've already spent an extended amount of time on whatever your advertising method is, they're already sold when they get there. That's why TikTok has such great conversion rates because the customer spends a lot of time on that content. The content is highly entertaining and highly informative. So, if you extend the engagement time to the customer and find a way to shorten the purchase path, you're bringing someone immersed in your content to the point of purchase. All you have to do is hit the button, and they buy. So, we'll be able to determine whether or not the audio helps deepen the immersion with the brand. No one looks at that.
Reese: Could you share more with me about this?
Miller: I want the industry to measure immersive conversion because then they'll stop telling you that three seconds on Facebook is an [effective] ad, but this [The Fresh Market] is a live shopping demo. Thousands of people watch us live here and chat and comment while the product card is over here. You're ordering directly from an e-commerce platform, driven by what they're talking about on the show. This is an incredibly immersive experience. These are hour-long live streams, and our customers love them. We also push out the reruns; they get 500,000 to 800,000 views weekly. We've also added an AI assistant chat, so now what happens is that when you go to the rerun, you can now ask to rerun questions, and it's powered by this AI that gives the customers answers to their questions immediately in the voice of The Fresh Market brand. The sonic signature across all these interactions, properly crafted, will make these experiences even more immersive. There have been over 115 million views and a thousand days of watch time in the last year because it's as immersive, and the Consumer Generated Advertising [CGA] is through the roof. It’s not even reaching its full potential yet because it doesn't have our signature sonic branding. These are the experiences that we're delivering for our customers.
Note: The interview took place in North Carolina, USA on the 3th of July 2023.
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