While at the Experiential Marketing Summit in May, Chief Marketer spoke with Diane Hund, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer at US Foods. Hund discusses the strategic value of events as a marketing channel, the challenges of aligning all stakeholders on event goals and outcomes, the brand’s latest marketing campaigns and more.
Transcript:
Kaylee Hultgren:
Hello everyone. I’m Kaylee Hultgren, content Director for Chief Marketer. We are here at the Experiential Marketing Summit. I’m joined by Diane Hund, SVP and Chief Marketing Officer at US Foods. Welcome, Diane.
Diane Hund:
Thank you. It’s nice to be here.
Kaylee Hultgren:
So, since we’re at EMS, tell me about experiential. You’re also doing a panel, which you did today, I believe, right? So, tell me how experiences factor into your marketing mix and your brand in general.
Diane Hund:
So let me just start with a short introduction to US Foods. Uh, we’re a broadline distribution company in food, that means we buy from hundreds of vendors and then turn around and put those products in our warehouses all across the country, and then sell them to hundreds of thousands of customers. So our customers are chefs, they’re chefs and operators. And to be really compelling with these chefs and operators, we’ve gotta bring them more than just a list of products. They’ve gotta feel it, taste it, experience it, to really want to connect with the food that we’re selling.
Kaylee Hultgren:
So in terms of experiences, you do all kinds of things, right? You do a lot of B2B events. Can you talk a little bit about those?
Diane Hund:
Yeah, actually we do our own food shows. So we partner with our vendors and we create an experience where we bring our operators, our customers, to our event, and our event would have everything that brings our value proposition to life. So it’s really easy to bring quality products to life because people can taste them and experience them. But at US Foods we’re about a lot more than that. We’re also about our tools and technology that make it easy for customers, and then of course about delivery, making sure that the trucks get there on time. So for us, when we have these events, we wanna make sure that we’re gonna bring all those things to life for our customers, not just the food.
Kaylee Hultgren:
So tell me a little bit about the panel that you had today. What was the topic and what are some takeaways?
Diane Hund:
Yeah. So actually we just went through a big kind of reinvention of food shows for US Foods. Probably about 15 years ago, we’re the leader in pioneering a new format for food shows in the industry. And we felt like it was time, time to freshen that up, time to do something different. So we went on this journey about two years ago and really fundamentally to change the way our food shows showed up. And in order to be innovative and think of something different, we partnered with a company who’s here, EA, and they took us to a different industries event. They took us to actually to HubSpot’s event, which is called Inbound. And when we saw that we were hooked, we’re like, this is the breakthrough we need. Yeah. So to go outside your industry, get some experiences from other areas, that was the breakthrough to help us really think about how to be innovative.
Kaylee Hultgren:
So one of the things that you talked about, um, in your, your session today was using an outcome-first design framework. So could you talk a little bit about that, how brands could do that at their events? ’cause everyone’s talking about outcomes lately. You have to do the business outcomes first, right? So how do you do that? How do you set something like that up so that the whole event is, has that in mind in the beginning?
Diane Hund:
Well, I’m sure a lot of people know when you design these events, you are on the hook for a positive ROI on your event. So you can’t help but design it with an outcome in mind. And for us, the outcome is how do we get some of our existing customers to buy more products, sample taste, try something different that they haven’t tried before? Probably more importantly is how do we bring prospects to the event, have them really experience things for the very first time, fall in love with our value proposition, and then leave as a brand new customer. So those are the outcomes we’re looking for from our customers. And we design the event around how they would shop and make sure that we’re providing them with that kind of inspiration and creativity. I mean, at the end of the day, our customers are chefs and they wanna be inspired. So can we inspire them, educate them a little bit on what our value is, what some of the tools are, let ’em have a little bit of fun, but most importantly, just let ’em engage with us and experience our team. And that’s what drives the outcome.
Kaylee Hultgren:
One of the important parts is aligning stakeholders, right? So how do you actually do that? That’s sort of easier said than done. How do you align everyone on the same outcomes framework that you’re talking about?
Diane Hund:
Yeah. So probably the most challenging group to align on this brand new show were our vendors, our suppliers. They had to go on a journey with us and just hope that what we were explaining to ’em was gonna be real, because we had nothing to show them. Nothing tangible yet. We were asking for a lot more money because they are the ones ultimately who help us bring these events to life. So we’re gonna design a trade show that lets us highlight over a hundred different vendors selling their products, asking them to help us with the funding of it, yet they don’t even know what it’s gonna be about.
So that was the biggest challenge. And actually we did it. It was actually, it was kind of fun. So we took the best ones and we brought ’em down to Vegas, about six months before the event and did a little bit of reception, showed them the places we were gonna go, walked them into an empty trade show floor that was 200,000 square feet. And we just said, imagine you filling this space. Anyway, that was really helpful in getting those suppliers and vendors on board and helping them wanna join.
Kaylee Hultgren:
That’s very interesting. The visual, the visualization part. That’s cool. So as a brand-side CMO, you hold the keys to event investment. When you’re evaluating these investments, what are the criteria that you need to make sure you can go forward and invest in something like this?
Diane Hund:
Well as I said, when you look at the investment for events, it’s always about the ROI. So we make it easy to calculate ROI by looking at those key pillars. Do we sell more to the customers who come? Do we convert the customers that come and do the customers that come stay with us longer than customers who don’t attend our events? And as long as we’re meeting our goals in all of those, this is an area we’ll continue to invest in.
Kaylee Hultgren:
Sometimes there is a communication issue between C-suite and the event teams. Do you have any thoughts? What would be your advice to kind of make sure that there’s better communication between the two?
Diane Hund:
I think making sure that your event team is truly part of the team. Sometimes I think events feel like they’re not really part of the company. They’re this separate silo. And they’re not really looking at what’s the company’s strategy, what are the customers really engaging in? And we make it really important that everybody on our events team is actually sitting at the table for all of our marketing discussions, all of our strategy discussions, interacting with our sellers. It’s important to me that they’re out with our sellers visiting customers, not just at the trade show, ’cause that’s one experience, but do you really understand what our customers problems and opportunities are by going and putting yourself in their operation ahead of time? And when you do that, I think the events team builds a certain understanding and probably does their job even better.
Kaylee Hultgren:
So putting experiential aside for a second, what are some marketing channels that are working well for you and why?
Diane Hund:
So our marketing mix is three. So we’re B2B. So our marketing mix is, events are in person; digital, which is of course huge. And then our sellers. So we have over 3000 sellers that are out in the street every day. And actually they’re one of the most vital parts of our whole process. So from my perspective, you kind of have events that build an understanding of value and get the conversation going. Digital is the way that we build frequency of that message in reaching those customers, especially if they’ve come to an event, because now we can make sure we follow them post-event with the right journey and the right message. And then our sellers are there to kind of close the deal, get the extra sale. And the biggest challenge is just making sure you have that one consistent message across all three of those channels.
Kaylee Hultgren:
So let’s talk a little bit about some of the recent marketing campaigns that you’re proud of. What are some of things that you’ve been doing? It doesn’t have to be an event or an experience like, but anything really?
Diane Hund:
Right now our current campaign is called “More.” And it’s really centered on the three pillars of our value. More quality, meaning more products and quality, more delivery, making sure our trucks are out there, we got the right size truck going to the customer at the right time, and then more tools, which is really about the technology. And this has been a super fun campaign. We’ve executed it across all three of our touchpoints, and it’s actually kind of the cornerstone of the event. The event’s actually designed with those three experiences in mind.
Kaylee Hultgren:
That’s great. So let’s talk AI because …. why not? I know everybody is. So how is your marketing team using AI internally?
Diane Hund:
Oh, gosh. How are we not using it at this point? AI’s kind of still this space that everybody is experimenting in, and I’d say we’re definitely experimenting. Our predictive AI is probably ahead of the curve. So we’re using tons of predictive AI right now to really determine like, what are our customers likely to buy? And it used to be that you would build that algorithm based on, where did they go in the digital world? What have they bought before, what did they put in a cart and not buy. Now we actually do it based on things like what’s their web presence look like, what’s their menu? And we can look at what’s their menu and then determine what do we think we should be selling them to help them make that Caesar salad and then hitting ’em with those products. So that’s kind of the predictive. We’ve been doing that for a long time Now. We’re obviously getting into generative AI on the marketing side, using it to create content for photographs, for copy, for videos, kind of just about just about anything.
Kaylee Hultgren:
So, two more questions for you. What are the top marketing treads that you’re keeping an eye out for right now?
Diane Hund:
- But you know, to me, I think we’re getting to this point where everybody’s realizing that that AI is great, it’s great for speed and efficiency and consistency, but it’s lacking that authentic voice. So for us, the real challenge and what we really wanna keep our pulse on is how do we use AI to drive more efficiency, but how do we not lose that unique, wonderful voice we have directly to our customers that AI just can’t reproduce. If you can find that right mix between what AI can do and what you uniquely can do, that’s been it.
Kaylee Hultgren:
Super human.
Diane Hund:
<laugh>.
Kaylee Hultgren:
My last question for you is, in your view, what does it take to be a successful CMO in today’s business climate?
Diane Hund:
Perseverance. No, I think have a couple mantras that are important to me and that I share with my team too. The first is always stay close to the customer, because once you lose sight of what a customer truly needs, I don’t think you can be an effective marketer anymore. So, it sounds simple, but so many people get so caught up in the day to day that they actually don’t have time to really just engage with their customer. And that’s not good.
New Speaker:
And then, probably the second part of this is really about staying true to core marketing principles. I grew up in marketing. I’ve been in marketing for a really long time. Creating a winning value proposition is still the core of what a marketer needs to do. So you take those two traits and then you use that to be a great marketer. Once you get to the CMO level, it becomes a little less about my ability to do that and more about my ability to unlock that and enable that amongst my team.
Kaylee Hultgren:
That’s a great point. The enabler. Excellent. Well, thank you very much, Diane. Really appreciate you chatting with us. I know you’re super busy, so that’s really great.
Diane Hund:
Well, we gotta get back to that floor out there, you know.
Kaylee Hultgren:
Thanks again.
Diane Hund:
Thank you, Kaylee.
