Worth a read if you haven't already seen it:
https://www.zariance.com/reads/interview-with-sam-moore-global-marketing-director-at-lifx/Interview with Sam Moore, Global Marketing Director at LIFX
By
Rhythm Singhal in
Interviews on July 1, 2019
8 min read
Sam is currently Global Marketing Director at LIFX, the smart lighting tech business that recently sold to Buddy Group and is now ASX listed. Previously Head of Marketing at Knog cycling and outdoor products, his marketing experience is global, tech, and growth-focused. But the first decade of his career was majority agency side, in a various suit or consultant roles at branding agencies such as Interbrand, Wolff Olins, Landor, M&C Saatchi (Re) and others. He has a Politics degree from Nottingham University, a copywriting qualification from AdSchool, and can recite every word to the film Point Break (the original, of course).
Your Journey as a Marketing Professional.I come to my current Marketing role via branding consultancies.
But way back when my first marketing job was as a part-time “Student Brand Manager” for a booze brand called After Shock in the UK. Anyone who was between the ages 18-30 in the late ’90s-early ’00s will remember it fondly (or with regret). It was the easiest job in the world – turning up to house parties with bottles of 40% syrupy liquor in return for a few photos to put on After Shock’s website. This was before social media so ‘performance’ was much more about inputs/assets than outputs/results. Regardless, I learned about partnerships, project mgmt, and even made a radio ad. It makes me shudder to remember it but it was fun.
In fact before my first job in branding I did a lot of “promo” work. From dressing as a chef to hand out the cake in front of Sainsburys, to doing a national Branston baked bean blind taste test roadshow, to supervising a team of models to hand out Palmolive shampoo on Coffs Harbour beach. I can’t say it taught me much about marketing strategy, but it did give me exposure to a lot of brands and how much customers really care about them (hint: they often don’t).
After moving from the UK to Sydney in 2006, I got a job for a company called Brandswell, working with a wonderful mentor, Sophie Bartho. This is where I learned about branding and graphic design. From there I went to Landor where I learned about tools to develop brands and position them as assets within organizations. From there, I was hired by M&C Saatchi as one of the three founding members of their new brand agency Re, rebranding first ANZ Bank and then Australia(nation brand, Australia Unlimited).
After that was an exciting period of contracts, mostly due to the fact that I was traveling. Interbrand Sydney – Wolff Olins London – Shelter (Housing & Homelessness) – Interbrand Melbourne. Interbrand was a formative period of time for me, working with the world’s best creative and strategy minds. The creative leaders from Interbrand at that time are now ECDs at R/GA, Wolff Olins and Interbrand in NYC, and Apple. Indeed the exciting work from the Australian offices were outliers to the more conservative Interbrand reputation.
In 2014 after perhaps, looking back, not my first round of burnout, I made the jump client-side with an innovative consumer brand, Knog – they make cycling and outdoor accessories. There I had to teach myself the basics of digital marketing. Because, in truth, the creative agency world is not marketing. It is a function within the marketing ecosystem, but it is not marketing. It’s incredibly specialized and more so that agencies would like to admit. I look back and am embarrassed at the mismatch between how much I thought I knew about my clients’ business, and how much I actually did.
Four and a half years under Hugo Davidson and Mal McKechnie at Knog was a wild ride. I learned a lot about retail, CE, Amazon, the distributor model, CRM, PR, and the power of Kickstarter, where we ran what was the most successful Australian Kickstarter ever, for a short time. We made some great headway and built solid foundations for growth driven by the pursuit of daring creative, coupled with ROI, and I am still close with the team there. Literally – they are 400m from LIFX in Melbourne.
Now I manage Marketing at LIFX alongside eComm and Creative teams. Founded in 2012, since 2014 our growth rate has been about 70% yoy so as you can imagine, speed and expectations are high. Who would want it any other way? it’s incredible to be a part of a business that is on the fringe of becoming a household name. That sounds grandiose but we really have an opportunity to positively affect people’s everyday living with our tech. One of the reasons I was attracted to LIFX is the smarts under the hood. At the moment we sell lightbulbs…but we are absolutely a technology company. It’s an embarrassment of HR riches across our Cloud, Firmware, App and Engineering teams. Not to mention the new data brains we’ve hired into the marketing division. You know they say “if you’re the smartest one in the room, you’re in the wrong room”? Yeah, I’m in the right room.
What are the primary marketing channels you have worked on? What will be your advice to young marketers on each of these channels?The usuals – email, paid and organic Social, Paid Search and SEO, programmatic, PR, etc. I’m not one to advise on media strategy, but I do think that any young marketer should be obsessed with attribution. Not with a view to following it, but challenging it.
In classic paid performance – Social and Search – it’s critical to understand where you are paying for a benign ‘touchpoint’ on the way to a conversion, vs that touchpoint driving a conversion. I don’t know there are any easy answers but assume that if it sounds too good to be true, it may well be.
I’d also recommend looking for where there are easy, powerful wins. For example, if you have a product like ours that requires an email to use, and your opted-in email database outperforms your non-opted-in by an average of $10, that is a low hanging fruit. Maybe reword your opt-in text from the soulless “Opt-in to marketing” to slightly punchier “Send me exclusive deals, tips, and background about the brand”. It’ll probably lift opt-in by 20% and if you’re getting 1m new emails per year, that’s 200,000 customers you couldn’t otherwise communicate to. So with that $10 average value uplift, that’s worth $2m. With zero extra content or segmentation efforts. Your CFO will love you.
What are some of the important marketing software that you have used and found to be really useful for your company?I’m not as close to the tools as I perhaps should be, or would be if I’d come up through the marketing ranks. I’ve used
Klaviyo and
MailChimp for email but heard good things about
Drip,
Emarsys,
Dotmailer. I’ve used
Trello,
Wunderlist,
Jira, etc but am enjoying
Airtable right now. I’ve used
Evernotebut have seen
Notion doing cool things. I’ve used
Typeform,
SurveyGizmo, and
SurveyMonkey but
ResponseSuite sounds interesting. I’ve used
Salesforce but have seen impressive demo’s from
Hubspot. We use
Intercom,
Swrve,
Zendesk – it’s a crazy array of tech but I do feel limited by not being more familiar with the tech stack. The pace of change is so rapid now with new software and process every week it seems, my advice is to seek meaningful partnerships but where the exit plan is never too disruptive. If a partner feels they need to lock you in for an excessive period of cost, that doesn’t bode well for their confidence.
Data is such an asset these days that establishing how your business will use that is key. Explore what a data warehouse or CDP (eg Lexer) might do for you, and how it integrates. Integration is often a sticking point.
Which companies, according to you, are your competitors. How do you differentiate against these?LIFX has some obvious competitors – namely Philips Hue, Sengled and other smart lights. But we are also ‘competing’ – in a way – with the businesses that control the category. Amazon, Google, and Apple have platforms that – they would argue – simplify the smart home. But they can dumb it down. The best reasons to buy LIFX are that we do the basics and we have the magic: our light quality and effects, which you can only get through our app.
As you can imagine, brands in the lightbulb space are not thinking too hard about the brand. We are fortunate in we are young, and the challenger brand. So we’re leaning into that with some experimental creative and a focus on what our consumers are actually asking us for. We have a long way to go but we are confident that late 2019 and 2020 will see us eat further into the category share than we already have. That’s all I can say here, I’m sure you understand.
Your 2 line advice to people entering the marketing domain.People often ask whether you should be a specialist or a generalist. Be both – that’s important. Be a domain expert at one thing (for confidence and stimulation), but make sure you understand where it fits across the business (for relevance and true value). And to this end, I would recommend working in agencies for a short time to get a) exposure to lots of businesses, and b) learn how to negotiate with agencies in the future. Just don’t get stuck there
