Rafe Offer has led teams and innovation at some of the world's best know brands, he joined us at NMP Live and shared what drove past innovations for some of the biggest names in business and the secret to gaining real customer insight.
Watch the full interview or read the transcript below.
In conversation with Rafe Offer
Can you share an overview of your career and the brands you’ve worked with over the years
My background has been about marketing and innovation. For marketing, taking a product whether something unknown like Sofar Sounds, a business I started a number of years ago, or globally known like Coca-Cola or Disney, and helping take it to the next level.
So, from a marketing point of view it’s coming up with creative ideas to get customers really excited about Coke, Disney, Diageo, the three big brands that I worked for as a marketing director.
And the innovation side, I also worked in those companies coming up with new business ideas and new things that hadn’t been seen in the marketplace before.
What are the topics and themes on which you speak?
I speak about innovation, particularly breakthrough innovation. I speak about marketing and creative use of your brain to reach the customer. I speak about customer insights. I also speak about building a global community, and one that can help build and propel a brand. And I speak about company culture, how to build a company that is really wired for innovation and ideas.
What are the different types of innovation within business?
One type of company is one where innovation runs through the bloodstream of the company. Everybody is just naturally open to thinking of ideas and accepting and trying stuff. Walt Disney would be a great example of that.
So, when myself and my boss came up with the idea to put merchandise in a subtle, classy way on products for adults for the first time, that was just ‘of course, let’s try it’, whereas many companies would have said ‘oh, I don’t know, Disney is about kids.’ And that little idea blossomed in to a billion-dollar business for Walt Disney. So, that’s an example.
On the other end of the spectrum might be Coca-Cola where innovation is hard going because there is so much specialness in the core products – Coke, Diet Coke, Fanta, Sprite and so most of the ideas are about selling the bigger brands. So, a new idea has to often come from the outside.
What does business need for innovation to take place?
A culture that is accepting of it, and a CEO, often, that is driving the agenda. Innovation is so difficult that you need the person at the top saying ‘we are going to put resource aside and we are going to have an attitude that this makes sense.’
Then that has to be distilled throughout the organisation that people are up for it, and rewarded for mistakes, trying stuff. If it doesn’t quite work just say ‘that’s okay, let’s try it again a different way next time’, as opposed to ‘ooh, we tried that, and can’t do that again’.
How do you keep passion alive in order for creativity to flourish?
To keep passion alive, I think it is best that there are a few cheerleaders within the company who are charismatic and pushing the agenda. So, at a big company like Walt Disney, somebody like, for example, Michael Eisner or Jeffrey Katzenberg, we go back a few years, they were championing new ideas.
Secondly, rewarding and making public when someone has a good idea – giving them the credit for it. And it doesn’t always have to do with a financial reward for that person, it’s more about ‘look what such-and-such did, whether they failed or succeeded, at least they tried something’ and making it as public as you can within the company.
Can you give an example of innovation from your time at Coca-Cola?
Not many examples of innovation at Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola is so constricted by the bigness and the focus on the big brands. But an example of innovation in Coca-Cola is more about incremental innovation, that you hear from customers.
So, one of the big ways to move forward is properly listening and then taking a risk to do something that a customer suggests. So, for example, with Coca-Cola customers were adding vanilla to Coke and customers were often adding lemon or lime to Coke.
It took Coke a little bit of time to actually develop products that had those in them, but once Coke truly listened and said ‘hey, customers are doing it, we can too, yeah it’s a bit different, let’s try it, it’s not going to cannibalise the core Coke product’ that became a big success.
How did you innovate during your time at Diageo and Guinness?
Guinness had a problem – for years it was losing market share in its home base of Ireland, and also in other places around the world, because a younger generation was recognizing Guinness as a brand that was for their fathers or grandfathers.
So, how to innovate? Create something that isn’t only about the drink itself, and so gave birth to the Storehouse, which was basically a home for Guinness – an interactive, immersive museum experience. A lot of people love Guinness, but don’t love the product, so it gave them a chance to pay money to go through this museum experience, end up with a t-shirt, a cap, whatever, a product.
That became the number one attraction in Ireland, as a result of focusing on really immersing people in all things Guinness. And it helped get a new generation interested again in a product that was becoming distant from them.
How can companies gain real customer insight?
The first thing about customer insight, it’s not rocket science, it’s really just about listening to customers.
A funny thing happens in a big company, or even a small fast-growing company, you become more focused on your own goals, on your own needs. The business needs to double by Thursday, the business needs to listen to its shareholders, and if it is a public company the city, or Wall Street. You lose sight of the real goal, which is simply making customers feel good.
So, once you come back to that and make that the priority with the company and ignore all the white noise about internal goals, internal politics, it unleashes a chance to innovate and come up with new ideas.
So, for example, I mentioned before about Disney, when we said ‘hang on, adults like to feel young, adults like to be silly, what’s wrong with wearing Goofy on your boxer shorts, what’s wrong with a Mickey Mouse t-shirt, as long as it is subtle and more equipped for a young adult? Nothing!’
Once we launched, for example, that line of products, it inspired a whole generation to kind of wink a little bit at being an adult and being a bit silly, and that was an insight that wasn’t driven by a business need, it was driven by a deep-felt customer need.
What is Sofar Sounds?
Sofar Sounds is an underground network of secret living room gigs that all started through a customer insight, or an insight, that the music going experience isn’t all that good.
I was at a bar with a couple of friends, and half the bar was talking, texting, worrying about drinking, and we said, ‘well this is not okay’. There wasn’t a real respect for the performer. So, the three of us got up and left the bar, literally went to somebody’s house and invited a few friends to listen to music., And we said ‘can you just be quiet, can you just focus on the music?’ and it was so quiet you could hear my friend Dave’s grandfather clock ticking in the background.
That was how Sofar Sounds was born, which then eventually became a global phenomenon of people around the world in more than 150 cities getting together in living rooms and other small spaces to respect, and as we say, bring a bit of magic back to music.
How did Sofar grow so quickly on a global scale?
It happened through two things. One – Social Media/YouTube. So, we started filming things early on and popping them online, and people who watched them around the world said ‘hey, there is a concert where people are actually being quiet, and the music is really good. Can I start that in my city?’ That was the first thing.
The second was just making the experience so good that people were really eager to talk about it, and they told their friends, who then told their friends, and then we had a few well known people show up, like Scarlett Johansson, Jamie Dornan from Fifty Shades of Grey, Robert Pattinson.
That wasn’t intended, they just came because their friends said ‘hey, this is a cool event’, and that helped spread the word a bit faster.
What is company culture?
Company culture. My first day at Disney I was flown down to Disney World and asked to go to a giant room below Disney World and look at a row of costumes as far as the eye could see and suggest who was my childhood favourite, because I was going to dress up as that character. And for me it was Goofy.
So, they size you up, they measure you, they put on your costume, they tell you how the character behaves, they make sure you don’t speak, because if I were to speak as Goofy or Mickey Mouse I wouldn’t sound the same as the real McCoy, and then I wouldn’t be real, and of course the kids believe that you’re real.
So, you dress up, and then you are allowed, after much training, to go into the parks for about 28 minutes. Why 28 minutes? Because it’s really hot in those costumes and you’re going to pass out if you stay any longer.
The magic of it is, you feel what it’s like to connect with hundreds of kids – you’re a rock star! And you really understand what it is to be a Disney character and the impact it has on all these kids. And that says, from day one, that this is a culture about magic, about really understanding how Disney conveys itself to kids around the world. That says that that’s the most precious thing at Disney and that has a massive impact on the culture of that company.
What is the key to great sales, marketing and innovation?
Two things you need to know in sales, marketing and innovation is listen to your customers and make them feel good. So, by listen I mean truly seek to understand them. By make them feel good, do something that brings a smile in the experience or the product itself.
I’m amazed how rare that is, and when you have a success story it is inevitable that people are ticking the box on those two things. And those two things, understanding and delighting, as a cheat sheet for innovation, for me across Coke, Disney, Diageo, watching Amazon, Google, is the difference between success and failure.
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