How B2B Businesses Can Make Creativity Their Superpower

With Michelle Taite, CMO of Intuit Mailchimp I Article By Lisha Perez , Partnership Lead at The B2B Institute

What happens when a B2B SaaS firm harnesses the power of creativity?

For years our team at The B2B Institute has published research on the power of B2B creativity, and how breakthrough advertising can drive a measurable, consistent competitive edge for B2B businesses. Recently, Intuit Mailchimp’s in-house agency Wink Creative, was named Ad Age’s 2023 In-House Agency of the Year. Michelle Taite is the CMO of Intuit Mailchimp and leads the brand’s team of 40+ all-star creatives and marketers helping to drive the company’s fast-growing user base of 12 million+ businesses.

I sat down with Michelle to talk about the driving principles behind Intuit Mailchimp’s approach to creativity, what it means to aspire to be the Nike of SaaS, and how the brand has mastered the art and science of breakthrough creativity. I hope you find our conversation as inspiring and insightful as I did.

Lisha: Michelle, it is such a treat to speak with you today. Intuit Mailchimp is such a standout brand that is so consistently distinctive. A lot of brands struggle to have a clear, distinctive brand identity. What’s your secret?

Michelle: I think there are a few components that help us stand out: having a clear brand strategy, a clear understanding of who we are as a character and as a brand, and then the creative excellence around the execution around how that comes to life. Let me unpack that a little bit.

Our brand mission is to provide radical momentum for every ambition, so we think about growing small businesses or advanced marketers. It’s to be that force that helps them increase their revenue or 4x their orders. And we do that not just through tools, obviously, but also through inspiration and education, and the platform we have as a brand.

Then we’re really clear about how that comes to life and who we are as a brand character; we’re the expert absurdist. What that means is we’re easy to use, but we’re also fun and witty. We don’t take ourselves too seriously. Hopefully, you’d agree having seen our work in market, but when we touch on craft and tools, it is at the highest standards. That’s the expert component of it. Then, we think about marketing to marketers, and how to set the standard for what best-in-class marketing looks like. So, we differentiate with character and with color. We always say we’re a very bright yellow brand in a sea of blues and greens.

We also think about the quirkiness and tone with which we come to market. That’s where creative executional excellence comes into play, and that is our secret sauce, Wink Creative. Wink is our internal agency. They’re a team of about 40-50 creatives who believe that creativity can change the world, and the world of work specifically. So, they do everything from web design to our campaigns, activations, games you would find in product, and our brand systems. And they have really good knowledge of the business, the platform, and our customers. They’re so dedicated to truly benefiting our customers that they can fuel creativity and consistency over time with the knowledge of the brand. That’s what enables us to have consistency, but also be creative at the same time.

Lisha: That’s awesome. So, you used the phrase, “creative excellence” to describe your approach. In your view, is creativity a superpower or discipline?

Michelle: It’s a superpower because we practice it as a discipline. We market to marketers, and marketers are obsessed with two things. They’re obsessed with better business results, whether that’s revenues or customers, and they’re obsessed with the creative process because they’re constantly striving for breakthrough creativity.

I recently read Adam Alter’s book, “Anatomy of a Breakthrough,” and he talks about how we often see breakthroughs as they happen, but we don’t necessarily see the process behind them, the constant experimentations, and the lengths they go to, trying and failing again and again. We just see this perfect outcome. Our team is obsessed with best-in-class marketing, and we have a hashtag:?#BeatOurBest. The intent is to constantly say, what can we do today that was better than yesterday? And how do we, as marketers, continuously do the best work of our lives? It makes for a fun, dynamic process, and it also makes for great creative.

Lisha: It’s this mindset of continuous improvement coupled with what I might describe as fearlessness. Would you say that’s true?

Michelle: Yeah, I think there are two things there. One is that, because we have an internal agency, we have a lot of trust. We’ve built that trust over time as we’ve gotten to know each other and done work together. Some of the stuff has worked really, really well and was high trust, very bold work, and some of the work has done less well and we’ve just learned a ton from.

The second aspect is that we think about our brand as the Nike of SaaS or that’s where we want to be. We think about our customers as often as our platform, and we want to surround them with inspiration, tools, and experiences they care about. And we know that doesn’t just happen as people are on your platform doing the work.

Lisha: How do you think generative AI and machine learning can help businesses uplevel their creativity?

Michelle: AI will be an unlock for marketers in several ways. One is, as marketers, we've always had to decide which target we're going to go after because we simply can't go after all of them. We don't have the resources or the time to be able to create journeys for those targets. Now, with generative AI and some of the automation that we see, we're able to talk to every target in a very personalized manner, not necessarily scaling the resources linearly. That gives marketers time back to focus on the why and focus on more breakthrough work. At Intuit Mailchimp, we've been using generative AI as a creative tool for groups. We’ve found that when you collaborate with generative AI as a group, you're able to continuously get more and more differentiated creative thinking out of it. So, we'll do a Slack thread on a specific topic that we're trying to unlock, and we'll see a lot of those differences come to life.

Lisha: Why is Intuit Mailchimp investing in brand building, from your perspective?

Marketing is craft in service of connection, meaning that as Intuit Mailchimp we use the best technology, the best audience targeting, the number one email and marketing automations platform in the world. We sit on so much data, send billions of emails, and can service customers’ needs from an automation and marketing perspective better than anyone else. But we know that’s not how people are wired to make decisions.

If you think about Daniel Kahneman’s, “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” we as humans are operating in System 1 thinking– that emotional irrational feeling state where we're subconsciously creating memories– and we're in that system 95% of the time. It's only about 5% of the time that we're in System 2, where we're really weighing the options carefully and thinking very functionally. So, I think of brand building as the connection that transcends both systems. It allows us to create that connection with our customers and meet them along their path wherever they are, not only their work, but also their personal lives, and transcend both systems. And it’s not about email automation tools all the time but building that connection to great marketing and great creative processes in general, so we can show up in different ways.

So last year, we showed up at New York Fashion Week. This year, we’ll show up this fall at the Design Museum in London with an exhibit on email and its cultural relevance. So, one might call it brand building, but it’s in service of connection and ultimately performance.

Lisha: How would you say brand is fueling performance at Intuit Mailchimp? You touched on this; would you mind elaborating?

Michelle: Yeah, we think about brand in service of performance, and performance is data. All our brand activations are in service of 1st party data that allows us to create a more meaningful, more connected, more personalized relationship with our customers, all the way from nurturing them to converting them, and engagement and retention throughout. Then that journey compounds as they get to know us and they get to experience our platform and our brand. Then performance gives us the insights to better service them at any given time.

Lisha: So, it’s this virtuous cycle that starts.

Michelle: Yes, and I think the other thing people don’t necessarily think about is that if you utilize 1st party data from brand activations, it services performance on multiple levels. One, you just have pools of data you can nurture as prospects. Two, you get better pools of lookalikes that you can start to utilize. It’s truly increasing your performance ability and performance metrics so you can target audiences across platforms. People don’t necessarily connect those dots.

Lisha: As the B2B Institute, when we talk to folks across the industry who aren’t invested in brand, one of the things that resonates the most is the impact on lower funnel outcomes. Then there are a lot of B2B marketers who get it, and want to invest in brand, but they can’t convince their internal stakeholders to get on board and fund the investment. What’s your advice to them?

Michelle: I think two things. First, think about brand as a multiplier of performance and utilize 1st party data and the KPIs you’re driving to show better segmentation, better targeting, and ultimately better click through or conversion on creative. Second, think small to drive big results. A lot of marketers think about brand as a TV campaign, and that is really expensive. But often, and to me, the most magical times are the ones where you get really scrappy around an activation that is so targeted that it connects so well with customers.

I’ll give you an example. A year ago, we activated at a HubSpot conference because we’re going up market. We’re trying to talk to mid-market marketers who are thinking about their tools. So, we colored a bus in yellow, and we also wrapped taxis that were going from hotels to the conference and offered free rides. And you would watch a video as you were in the ride, both inspirational and functional. And through that process, we collected email addresses through QR codes. And that, in return, allowed us to curate a list of highly targeted mid-market marketers that we had this connection with and were willing to listen to us. That gave us a great lookalike pool, great visibility, and was very cheap to pull off in comparison to some broader global campaigns. So, I’d say start small, but think big.

Lisha: Amazing. I think having that razor-sharp thinking up front about who you’re trying to reach, and having a memorable experience for them becomes so important for driving the effectiveness of a campaign or activation.

Michelle: Yes, and then data’s king, right?

Lisha: Absolutely. We know that for sure as LinkedIn. Alright, thank you, Michelle, for taking the time to chat with me. It is great to see a B2B brand making a splash with cut-through creativity. Intuit Mailchimp is a case study that marketers can look to understand the impact of thinking differently about creativity and treating it as a discipline, which then ultimately becomes a superpower to drive amazing results in market. Congratulations on the amazing work.

Michelle: Yes, of course. Thank you, and just as a closing thought, our team just believes that in B2B marketing, you're still talking to humans so your advertising shouldn't be boring-to-boring. It should be brilliant-to-brilliant. We’re excited, and we just hope that we can continuously do great work that inspires the marketing community.

About Michelle Taite, CMO, Intuit Mailchimp

Michelle Taite is the CMO of Intuit Mailchimp. She is responsible for the business’s end-to-end brand, acquisition, performance, product, and lifecycle marketing activities globally, as well as overseeing Mailchimp’s in-house creative agency, Wink, who won Ad Age’s In-house Agency of the Year Award in 2023. In this role, Michelle works to bridge marketing performance with the creative and emotional pieces of the Mailchimp brand to help small and mid-market businesses around the world solve their biggest challenges with the right tools, inspiration, and support.?