Thought Leadership for Updating Old Brands | Melanie Huet

---

Using thought leadership to launch new ideas for old brands.

An interview with Melanie Huet about positioning the Simmons brand for Gen-Z consumers.

Today’s guest is Melanie Huet. She is the Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Serta Simmons Bedding.

We discuss with Melanie the process of taking Serta Simmons, a 100-year-old brand and transforming it for modern-day operations.  She explains how she came to understand the culture of the company. Then, Melanie talks about building trust, and what she did to create clear communication between teams. She wanted to ensure everyone understood where the company was heading and what their role was in it.

The Gen Z Market

Melanie reveals how they utilized the Simmons brand and repositioning it to be appealing to the Gen Z market.  Afterward, she speaks about how they took consumer insights to create a hugely successful launch on Tik-Tok with Snoozapalooza.  She shares the task of pitching such a new idea and platform to the board and how she got them on board.

The success of the Tik-Tok launch wouldn’t have been possible without proper research and creativity.  Furthermore, Melanie gives us an overview of the work that went into ensuring marketing used the right message to guarantee the campaign didn’t come off forced or fake.

Finally, we conclude this great interview discussing where thought leadership fits into the Serta Simmons brand. We learn how they find new ideas, and ways you can measure the success of those ideas.

If you are working with a well-established brand that is looking to update itself or find a new audience, get your pen and paper ready because this episode is full of great information!

Three Key Takeaways:

•  If you want your thought leadership to be effective, you’ll need to understand the culture of the brand you are working with.
• Deep research is a must if you want your thought leadership to move your audience to action.
• When developing content, thought leaders should listen to ideas from anywhere, not just from the top of an organization.

---

Join the Organizational Thought Leadership Newsletter to learn more about expanding thought leadership within your organization! This monthly newsletter is full of practical information, advice, and ideas to help you reach your organization’s thought leadership goals.

And if you need help scaling organizational thought leadership, contact Thought Leadership Leverage!

---

Transcript

Bill Sherman Hello, You’re listening to Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m your host, Bill Sherman. Organizations often have a deep history of research and innovation, whether that’s decades or even centuries long. And yet you can’t rely on insights from the past to drive you into the future. Today, I’m pleased to sit down with Mel Hewitt. She’s the executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Serta Simmons Bedding Company. In this episode, I’m eager to talk to Mel Huet about the intersection of thought leadership and the marketing function. We’ll also explore how listening to customers leads to insights and opportunities for thought leadership. Ready? Let’s begin. Welcome to the podcast, Mel.

Melanie Huet Thank you.

Bill Sherman Your with Serta Simmons Bedding Company. And that’s a company that has a really long history going back into the 19th century. If you can talk a little bit about Serta Simmons and the history of innovation. Because I know it prides itself on innovation.

Melanie Huet Yes, this company has such a rich history and innovation, we can probably talk about it for hours. But you know, a few things to point out is that Simmons and Serta have been leaders in the industry since inception, and they have actually delivered some of the biggest innovations we’ve seen in bedding and in sleep. So, for example, moving into an individually wrapped coil where now the bed actually provides what we call the do not disturb. So the fact that you can lay down and the other side of the bed doesn’t move like a trampoline. That was a huge innovation that sort of Simmons brought to market. And since then, the company has continued to bring things to market. So when we think about what we’re good at, really what the company prides itself on is its rich heritage in innovation.

Bill Sherman So you’re serving on the senior leadership team as chief marketing Officer and you’ve been in that role how long ago?

Melanie Huet Two years.

Bill Sherman Bill. Okay. Yeah. So I think you shared with me there’s been a transformation and you’ve shared some of that story. How do you take a company that has been around in various forms for over a century, almost a century and a half now, and start bringing it into new forms of telling stories and engaging with customers and partners in new ways. Talk a little bit about that transformation.

Melanie Huet Yeah, it’s been a tremendous journey and a lot of learnings for myself personally in growth. And when you think about how to drive a transformation, a couple things that I’ve learned in this job is one of the first things you have to do is you have to understand the culture that you’re operating in. So there’s a period of of learning and listening and just understanding where you are. And during that time, it’s really important to build trust. So making sure that the people that you’re working with understand what your motivations are and they feel like they’ve been heard. And once that trust foundation is there, then you can start to bring in all the elements of a transformation. So here’s the place where we’re going to disrupt, here’s how we’re going to act differently, here’s how we’re going to behave. And I have found that specifically at this company, people are really willing to follow. As long as they understand where you’re going. So an important part is to communicate, communicate, communicate, where are we headed? And then help them understand what is their role in delivering the transformation. And then you can actually move pretty quickly.

Bill Sherman Well, and I think this is one of the places where thought leadership connects is there’s a responsibility when you see a vision for the future to share that back and make it accessible first with your own internal team so they understand. Where are you going? How is this changing? But also how does it relate to who we’ve been before? And I want to ask you about an example of that. So I know that one of the projects that you sort of were instrumental in was recognizing there was a need in the market for young buyers looking for their first bed. Talk about that process and that transformation process within the organization and then how that led to product and also telling that story to a new audience.

Melanie Huet Yeah, that was a fun one. So we realized that the Simmons brand was virtually unused. In fact, it was just on some promotional product because we had separated Simmons from Beautyrest several years prior because consumers get confused. Serta, Simmons, Sealy. All right.

Bill Sherman Right.

Melanie Huet And so we said, let’s do the recipe address. And that’s a little bit easier to remember. So Simmons brand is sitting out there and we understood there was an untapped whitespace in the market that nobody was really going after this first purchase, this first baby, the young consumer, entering the marketplace with not a lot of disposable income. And so we said, okay, this is an opportunity for us. So we were the first company to have a variety of Gen Z insights. We took those consumer insights and understood that what they wanted was a hassle free crash pad. So just a place to crash and also a place to surf and watch movies and do the other things that are part of their lifestyle, because most of them either live in some type of bedroom or apartment or small space. And from there, I walked into the boardroom with a lot of men in their 50s to two 70s and said, We’re going to launch Simmons on TikTok’s 150 year old brand. And they’re like, What’s tick tock? And it’s going to be Gen Z and it’s going to be completely different. And I showed them the advertising and the look and feel, and I think they thought it was the craziest thing I’d ever seen. But they trusted me and off we went. And it’s been a huge success.

Bill Sherman So let’s unpack that a little bit further, because this is a wonderful example of not only having to tell a news story within the organization, but then also reach a new audience. So let’s look at them separately. Let’s start with the board. How do you did you prepare and present that in a way that if they’ve not encountered TikTok before, you know how did you make this accessible to them?

Melanie Huet Sure. It was part of my larger overall strategy, which is I had laid out a house of brands and said, Here’s the role of each brand in our house of brands and how we’re going to go attack the marketplace with unique and differentiated products. Because one of our issues was our products had become too similar. So I laid the groundwork of the overall strategy and then showed this this whitespace and our ability to move quickly. And from a business perspective, that was a pretty easy sell in for them. And then they just had to to trust on the creative and that I mean that’s what I do on the right.

Bill Sherman But at the same time, the question of what is tick tock and do people make purchasing decisions based off of it is a hurdle for some people because if they haven’t made purchasing decisions based off of other social media, then you’ve got to leap to tick tock in that format.

Melanie Huet That’s right. Yeah. And so I did explain to them who’s on Tick Tock and what it means and how it’s one of the fastest growing platforms. And they were like, Well, I don’t understand how a bed would integrate into Tick tock. And we had a really great. Advertising agency, the Burns Group, which we are still engaged with on Simmons, and they came up with snooze a palooza.

Bill Sherman So that’s a great phrase.

Melanie Huet It had it was very culturally relevant because all of the concerts have been canceled and basically all of the outings and events that young people do have been canceled. So we said, you know, we know you’re here, has been canceled, but you can join snooze a palooza. And so the idea was you fall down backwards onto your bed and then you make a chick talk about being at a concert or doing something fun. And it generated 5 billion impressions. Now we have some monies for 1 billion. And this thing just exploded.

Bill Sherman Well, and you mentioned doing research and market research on that and looking at that first time consumer for a bed. Talk to me about the research capability that you deployed for that, as well as what sort of questions you went in. How did you identify the market first and then what did you do to investigate?

Melanie Huet We did a consumer segmentation study and then I had the researchers make sure to recruit enough people that were in Gen Z, which was a tougher recruit to make sure that we got a slice of them. So that’s how I knew we were the first one to market with this as it we were quite early on and we really did a lot of work to grab that. So the segmentation work was the first huge body of work that helped us. And then after that, we engaged with some other studies like Y Pulse and a few others that are really tapped into the younger generation. And then from there, we actually took some of our creative and our concepts and just put it in front of focus groups of young people and make sure are we trying too hard? Like, is this actually cool and fun or does it look like we’re trying?

Bill Sherman Is it going to resonate or is it going to look to mom and dad like, Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I think one of the things that stands out from this example is you’ve got to reach your audience where they already consume content rather than where you’re comfortable creating it and delivering it. And sometimes you have to get out of your comfort zone because the audience too, shifted or you’re trying to reach a new audience. Has that been something you’ve seen in the past, or do you have other examples of that that you can share from your career?

Melanie Huet Yes. So that I firmly believe in a couple of things. One of them is that the quality of your creative drives your ROI. So creative effectiveness is most important. So I spend a lot of time with my teams making sure that we hit certain metrics and ad testing, you know, do they remember the brand? Did it break through If it didn’t break through, nobody watched it. So then it doesn’t matter if brand recall is any good. And were they able to take away the key message? So we focused in on those pieces. Then the next thing we take a look at is based on the audience we’re targeting. Where are they? And this is the second thing that’s a big pillar of mine is create advertising that’s culturally relevant and put it in places where your audience is at and it can’t look like you jammed it in there. It actually has to fit with what’s happening. Which is why tick tock and snooze a palooza was perfect, but it took a lot of work to make sure that we were fitting into the right channels.

Bill Sherman And I think one of the things is the ability to morph a conversation. So the conversation that you have, whether with your peers on the senior leadership team or within the organization, the story that you’re telling there needs to be crafted for them. And then you have to craft another story as well. But it has to be built off the same backbone. Right. And so it’s always about connecting with your audience. From common sense.

Bill Sherman If you are enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about the podcast. Please leave a five-star review and share it with your friends. We are available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and all major platforms as well as at LeveragingThoughtLeadership.com.

Bill Sherman Now, you also talked about measurement and measuring success there, and I know you’ve been doing some work there. You want to share a little bit about that as well?

Melanie Huet Yeah. And that going to be hard for marketers in general because sometimes the metrics we use aren’t always recognized as easy to understand when you walk into a board room. So some of your peers have an easier time because the CFO can talk about the we deliver the revenue in the profit or did we not? And it’s pretty clear cut. For marketing people, it’s really important to walk in and have your metrics and have metrics that you can tie back to some type of results. And so we’ve done a lot of work at sort of Simmons betting around strategy deployment. So this year, actually just a couple of weeks ago, we rolled out a new strategy across the whole company and then have had a very focused effort on strategy deployment. And if you study any of the companies that are in the good to great book or other places, a couple of things are always true. They were focused, they had a plan, and then they measured against their plan to make sure they were tracking. So it’s really important. It’s also a discipline that I would say was on the weaker side at sort of Simmons Bedding. So it’s been great to work with our CEO, Dave Swift, who really, really, really believes in this.

Bill Sherman Now, you’ve mentioned that you’re a pretty passionate reader and consumer of information yourself. And so talk to me a little bit about that as to how that fits into your role and what you do for sense making, right? Because you’re often reaching out to looking for information. How do you. Because there’s not a scarcity of information. Where do you go? How do you sort through information? What are you looking for?

Melanie Huet My process has been a lot about what a challenge I’m facing at work this week, this month? This year. And then trying to fill in those educational gaps that I might have. So maybe it’s I need to be more influential. And so then I will I will look for something that would guide me towards how am I more influential in the boardroom? Or lately, we’ve been really focused on metrics that matter. So I’ve been kind of in a wormhole, if you will, to use a younger person, sort of digging through reading books around measurement and how people execute. And, you know, what I find is that often I’ll leave a book with 2 or 3 things that I’m like, Yep, I can absolutely improve my performance and the team’s performance by integrating this into what we do.

Bill Sherman So where does the cause you talked about the research side of sort of Simmons Where does thought leadership and the deployment of thought leadership fit within the organization? How do ideas flourish within the organization as well as then get out? So you talked about the history of innovation. How are those ideas being nurtured and shared?

Melanie Huet Yeah, I mean, on innovation specifically, we have a group of people working on it. But we’re always looking for inspiration internally and externally. So the way that we’re trying to nurture ideas is we’re trying to remove the hierarchical piece there that ideas can come from anyone. And it’s actually something that Dave Swift again had pushed me on as a leader. He said, How are you creating a culture, Melanie, across the entire organization and that anyone can feel free to reach out to you or others with ideas on products. And while I was reading this weekend, I read a story about the man that introduced the flaming hot Cheetos. He was actually the janitor at Frito-Lay.

Bill Sherman Wow.

Melanie Huet Yeah, it’s a it’s a really great story. So he walks into the CEO’s office. He’s a janitor. The CEO was kind enough to listen, and he said, You’re missing a huge addressable market of Hispanics and Latinos by not having a really spicy Cheeto. And he had even made some. And he’s the vice president now. Wow. Hot Cheetos, I believe. And that is the culture we need. So a couple of ways to build that is one for people to realize that you’re going to listen to try to be an accessible leader. And I think that’s something I’ve done pretty well, is be an accessible leader. But now there’s a new frontier in front of us, which is how do we how do we get people thinking about ideas constantly so that more of them bubble up? And that’s something we’re trying to do, especially with our younger people, because I think there’s a lot of great ideas in there, but sometimes they’re a little shy to share with us.

Bill Sherman Well, and one of the things that I’ve seen in the thought leadership function is the desire to curate ideas. Right. And to help nurture them across the organization that great ideas don’t have to come from the top of the house. They don’t have to be done in product research and offsite sometimes. Like the example you gave for Cheetos, someone within the organization could be the janitor quite literally walks in and says, I have an idea. And making the process of owning ideas and getting them to market. Part of everyone’s responsibility, regardless of whether they’re creating it, curating it or deploying it. But how do you take good ideas to market really becomes a new way of thinking about roles within the organization?

Melanie Huet Yes, it does. You know, it actually makes me think we have an innovation that came to market this past year. It’s called the Serta Easy Tote. And Easy Tote is it’s a mattress in a box, but a mattress in a box is usually 48in tall. It’s about four feet. It’s quite tall. The easy tote, same exact mattress is in a box that’s two feet tall. Right. And this offers so many benefits. It’s easy to put in your shopping cart. It’s easier to put in your car. For the retailer, it obviously provides a lot more space on the shelf. They can get more products out there. And this this idea came from engineering. And I saw it and I’m like, my gosh, we need that. We need that right now. The minute I saw it and that was fun. And I think that also kind of helped build this culture we’re talking about is when people. See that an idea can come from anywhere and actually gets executed. It builds a lot more confidence in the fact that you’re going to do something with the idea.

Bill Sherman So how are you finding those ideas within the organization you mentioned? You saw it from engineering, but is that serendipity or is it sort of part of a planned activity that you’re looking across the organization for ideas?

Melanie Huet That one was probably serendipity just because the engineers were, which they’re not in the innovation team at our company. Were they were exposed to something and brought it over. Maybe. Maybe a better example is we’ve had some people outside of marketing, innovation and engineering come forward with different ideas on things we could use. And we haven’t implemented all of those. But I’m trying I’m trying to create a culture where we get a better access to those ideas. So it’s something that we’re going to be looking at as we move into 2021, which is not an idea box, but the idea of something like that, some type of opportunity for people to have a voice.

Bill Sherman So let me tie two topics that we’ve talked about metrics and the flow of ideas. How would you measure that? So you talked about the idea box. How do you measure the flow of ideas across the organization to make sure that the good ones are being captured?

Melanie Huet You know, right now we’re taking a look at our innovation funnel and we look at how many ideas are in the first stage, which we call stage zero. And we measure that every single month to make sure that not only do we have a lot of ideas up at the top of the funnel, but then also we have a good flow through the funnel that we have a good amount of launch as well as you know, at different stages. There’s plenty of product coming in for us to commercialize. But I think the real opportunity is how do we get even more ideas in the funnel up at the top? We did a session last year where we had 60 people in a room and we just gave them a bunch of questions and a piece of white paper and some colored pencils. And I ended up with a stack of 300 new ideas on products we could build. And we actually took a couple of them and moved them forward. But the head of innovation and I were talking yesterday and we said that we’ve got to go through that pile of papers again. I think there’s some great stuff in there, but at the time maybe we weren’t ready for, but now we’re ready.

Bill Sherman Well, and that’s one thing that I see is ideas often sit in an attic and sometimes it’s a physical attic where they’re things that were used before then get put away. But often it’s, like you said, slips of paper or a file on a shared drive that people look out and they go back to you. And it’s useful to revisit those because they may now be relevant, like you said, in a different context. Either the organization is more prepared to work with the idea the market has evolved or there’s a need for solving a new problem, right?

Melanie Huet Yeah, yeah, like Covid. So we’re a couple of weeks into the quarantine. A company we had met with in Europe. Actually, I saw them on LinkedIn and they were talking about an antiviral mask. I was like, my gosh, what would be so amazing if we could make an antiviral mattress? And so we called them up and we established an exclusive partnership with a company called Hycu. And we’re in the process of bringing the first ever antiviral mattress to market in the United States. So it’s on its way right now. And we’re working closely with the EPA. In fact, we’re setting the protocol for the testing that’s required to get the antiviral claim. And so we hope to be in market with this March or April again, with the necessary approvals from the EPA. But it was one of those moments where we saw an unmet consumer need that didn’t exist before. And then we look to capitalize on it.

Bill Sherman Well, and this is a great example. We’ve heard in 2020 the stories of the speed of research that has been done for like a vaccine. But I think, like you mentioned, the antiviral bed, where if you ask people in 2019 if they wanted it, thought it was important or value, it would have been way down on everybody’s list. And they go, why are you even asking the question? Now it’s people have changed perspectives and the speed to market on something like that, that it can be done in a year to make a claim. And are you work or is it FDA that you have to go through for that claim or.

Melanie Huet EPA.

Bill Sherman EPA. Sorry, I. Ms.. Ms.. Yeah. Yeah. It becomes a question of how quickly, when there’s a need, can you bring an idea to market? And is that measured in weeks, months, years? Or as I’ve heard in some organizations. Yeah. Ideas. We’ve got plenty of them. They never go anywhere. They just stagnate. Right. Yeah.

Melanie Huet This has been a fun one. It was exhilarating. It was hair on fire. Figure this out. Get it on these products. How does it work? And it’s been a tremendous opportunity. And specifically because we’re the number one supplier to hospitality. So you’re most likely sleeping on a sort of or Simmons bed when you go to a hotel, at least one of the major chains. And of course, with all of their work around safety and cleanliness, they were very excited. When are you going to have it? What are you going to have it? When can we put this in our rooms? Because, you know, again, it helps re ensure the safety of the individuals that are traveling. And you think about, you know, just the sheer number of people moving through a hotel system and this type of product lasts for three years. So it’s a long time and it’s helping all of us to stay healthier.

Bill Sherman Well, and you and I are both road warriors and have been right. So it’s a case where we’re used to rolling into the hotel and going, okay, I just want a clean bed to sleep on, you know, no noise outside. But knowing that the bed is one of the essential functions of when you’re rolling it to that hotel. Tell me a little bit about that process on collaboration. Did it turning from a could we to, okay, we need to do this, why can’t we get it done? How did the cadence change on development?

Melanie Huet Really the tone we set from day one is we will do this and we will go as fast as we can and this is going to happen. There was no that that was the mindset. That there’s no there’s no failure here. Because if we hit a dead end somewhere, we’re just going to keep working until we figure this out.

Bill Sherman And was that culturally different on product development than the past? And if so, how?

Melanie Huet A couple of things. One is normally we wouldn’t grab an idea and a day later. Right now, the whole company to work on it, which is.

Bill Sherman Almost becoming a moonshot overnight, right? Yeah.

Melanie Huet And so we’ve talked a lot. And you and I can talk about this in a minute, but we’ve talked a lot about how do you keep that that energy and that mindset going post-COVID. But when you literally said, number one, project, stop what you’re doing, we’re doing this one. And so we had everybody switch over to this and there were some technical challenges, but we worked through them pretty quickly because it was in the advantage of ourselves as well as our partner Hycu to get this thing done ASAP. So speed much faster. Speed. We skipped some steps. I think sometimes that’s helpful. And then there was a full new system for some of our suppliers. And so we also had to work with them on speed and agility. We need you to move if you want this significant amount of volume, you got to jump in. All of them jumped.

Bill Sherman So you teed up a question and I will take advantage of it. How do you keep that energy and that sort of dynamic? Got it. Got to get to market fast and the innovation and ideas and problem solving post-COVID.

Melanie Huet That has been the number one thing that I have been reflecting on over this this week off from work is how do we embed that in our culture without being so disruptive that people feel like they’re working in chaos because it’s.

Bill Sherman A bit turbulent.

Melanie Huet Right? Yeah, you do need structure and you do need process and it scares people if they think the next day you’re going to walk in and change everything they’re working on and you can’t do that all the time. But what I think you can do is take this this mindset of when we see a great idea, we are going to prioritize it above other things. And also we had set up what we call the Tiger team. So we didn’t put everybody on the project. We put a small amount of people on the project and then we let them know that they had the full support of the executive leadership team, that basically if you run into some type of hurdle, we’re going to help you jump over it. You just have to raise your hand. And so I think that that’s the piece that I want to keep. And then the it’s back to our earlier part of the conversation. How do you get how do you get those creative ideas coming in from lots of people in the organization now so you can jump on them?

Bill Sherman Well, and this was a case where the need was clear. You encountered the technology and said, we could take this, have a partner and we can create this. Right. And I think one of the challenges post-COVID is we get back to a situation where the opportunities are still many. And you have to do that filtering process on which ones are going to be the ones that need the Tiger team, which ideas really deserve that fast track work where it’s okay to skip a few steps because the idea is so strong.

Melanie Huet That’s right.

Bill Sherman So before we wrap up, any suggestions or recommendations that you have for your peers as they’re working on bringing ideas into the world and to the market?

Melanie Huet Well, I did it. I did an interview slash talk about six months ago, and the theme was rip up the plan.

Bill Sherman And as many people were saying back in spring of 2020. Yeah.

Melanie Huet Yeah. And I would say that that’s still the case. And it’s not so much about ripping it out, but all plans need to be really agile and flexible right now. And so my advice to myself and to others is as you enter the season of 2021, yes, we have goals and plans. But I think this this idea of every month relooking at your plan and trying to make sure you’re still on the right track is really important because consumer behavior is shifting rapidly. We have no idea where that’s headed. We have a guess, but we really know what’s in front of us because it’s a very unpredictable marketplace right now. So that flexibility is going to be key. And it is it is going to separate the winners from the losers.

Bill Sherman I think that’s a critical point. The annual planning or semiannual planning has been put to the side this year and it’s been much more. What do we need to get done right now? And there’s a balance between the two. It’s good to look over the horizon, but it’s also good to say, are we still on course for something that people care about because the sand can shift underneath our feet very quickly?

Melanie Huet Absolutely. Which is it’s fun. Now, if you’re ready for that, it’s not so fun. If the quicksand has sucked you down in there and you’re like, I don’t know.

Bill Sherman Now, Yeah. If you’re buried waist deep, there’s no digging out, right? Yeah. Yeah. Now, thank you very much for joining us today, and best wishes to you in the New Year.

Melanie Huet Thank you. This was so much fun. I appreciate your taking time and allowing me to be on your show. It was great.

Bill Sherman Thank you. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please join our LinkedIn group. Organizational Thought Leadership. It’s a professional community where thought leadership practitioners talk shop about our field. So if you’re someone who creates curates or deploys thought leadership for your organization, then please join the conversation in the Organizational Thought Leadership LinkedIn.