Scratch: CMO Interviews

In the latest episode of Scratch, Alexander Robertson of Jumeirah breaks down why "luxury is madness," and why the brands that win in an AI-saturated market are the ones with the strongest point of view, not the loudest one.

As AI creates a convergence around “average” for everything related to brand-building, Jumeirah's big bet is to lean into creating a brand so distinct, and a guest experience so uniquely consistent across seven thousand touchpoints that “convergence” can't touch it.

The key takeaways:

Average is the enemy, not effort - AI has made "pretty good" accessible to everyone. That flattens the middle of the market. The brands that win won't be the ones using AI the most, they'll be the ones with a distinct enough point of view that AI can't replicate it.

Luxury brands need permission to be irrational - Jumeirah's philosophy of "madness" isn't about excess. It's about giving teams license to design experiences nobody's seen before, then laddering every idea back to a clear brand foundation.

Your brand doesn't rise to your best moment, it falls to your worst - With 7,000 points of guest interaction per stay, Jumeirah's focus isn't chasing peak delight. It's raising the floor so the lowest-quality moment is still exceptional.

GEO is this era's dot-com fluff - Alexander's biggest pet peeve right now is generative engine optimization. His view: LLMs surface brands with real editorial weight built over time, not brands that fiddled with keywords.

Scale is the real test of a challenger brand - Plenty of brands can break in. Few can scale without losing what made them different in the first place. The brands that fail are the ones that scale faster than their standards can keep up.

Scratch is a production of Rival, a marketing innovation consultancy. Hosted by Eric Fulwiler, featuring Alexander Robertson of Jumeirah.

Find Rival: www.wearerival.com

Find Eric: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericfulwiler/

Find Alexander: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderrobertson/

Say hi: media@wearerival.com

Rival is a marketing consultancy for brands that want to challenge convention in their category. We’re on a mission to understand what challenger brands do differently to grow in categories that are being disrupted, and use a challenger playbook to deliver outsized impact through an integrated, tech-enabled approach. Past guests include CMOs from Mastercard, GE, Shell, Hyperloop, Adobe, PepsiCo, and Papa Johns.
If you’re interested in learning more about marketing from successful CMOs, we compiled a list of the top 5 CMO podcasts to listen to in 2024; check it out here 🔗 https://www.wearerival.com/content-hub-articles/cmo-podcasts-you-cannot-afford-to-miss-in-2024

In the latest episode of Scratch, Philip Edsel, VP of Brand & Creative at Ladder, breaks down why most marketing misses the mark and what separates brands that feel cultural from those that feel tone-deaf.

As fitness platforms multiply and algorithms fragment audiences, Ladder's strategy isn't to chase trends. It's to listen obsessively to what members actually want—and let that drive every creative decision.

We get into:

→ Why cultural relevance can't be outsourced (or bought from a report)

→ How to build culture listening into your creative process without overthinking it

→ Why structuring teams around culture matters more than having the right budget

→ The brands that win: Skims, Bandit, Nothing-and why art direction is strategy

→ What happens when you listen to members instead of investors

The key takeaways:

Self-awareness is the number one attribute of great marketing - Most work fails because it lacks it. It's not about being clever. It's about understanding how your brand is actually perceived and what conversations are happening around it.

Culture listening is structural, not magical - Put 30 minutes on your calendar every week. Get obsessed with what your audience actually cares about. Make it non-negotiable. By the time most brands catch on, they're six weeks too late.

Either you have the people or you don't - You can't bottle up cultural taste. Either your team feels the pulse of what's moving culture, or it doesn't. If you don't have those people, recruit differently or organize differently. Yeti structured their entire team around communities. Most brands didn't even think of it.

Listen to what your members want, not what trends are screaming - Ladder runs 45-minute surveys by the thousands. They're drowning in feedback about what members actually want. That drives product and creative not investor mandates.

Simplify your language - Bad copywriting is Philip's biggest pet peeve. If it's a teaser that says "something's coming"—that's meaningless. Use words you'd actually use at dinner.

Momentum is found too late for legacy brands - Challenger brands can move faster because they're willing to take creative risks informed by audience data. The inflection point is real. You have to be willing to swing.

Watch this episode: ▶️ YouTube: https://youtu.be/pYQH4xUeU9o

Scratch is a production of Rival, a marketing innovation consultancy. Hosted by Eric Fulwiler, featuring Philip Edsel of Ladder.

Find Rival: wearerival.com | LinkedIn

Find Eric: LinkedIn

Find Philip: LinkedIn

Find Ladder: joinladder.com

Say hi: media@wearerival.com

 

 

Rival is a marketing consultancy for brands that want to challenge convention in their category. We’re on a mission to understand what challenger brands do differently to grow in categories that are being disrupted, and use a challenger playbook to deliver outsized impact through an integrated, tech-enabled approach. Past guests include CMOs from Mastercard, GE, Shell, Hyperloop, Adobe, PepsiCo, and Papa Johns.
If you’re interested in learning more about marketing from successful CMOs, we compiled a list of the top 5 CMO podcasts to listen to in 2024; check it out here 🔗 https://www.wearerival.com/content-hub-articles/cmo-podcasts-you-cannot-afford-to-miss-in-2024

Rory O'Neill, CMO of Checkout.com, doesn't just solve for payments- he's solving for brand preference in a crowded payments space. And he's doing it by competing on what's different, not what others do better.

That insight changes everything, from how you position payments to how you build a team that can sustain growth as a challenger.

In the latest episode of Scratch, Rory breaks down the playbook that lets Checkout compete with global giants. Brand preference wins 95% of B2B deals before salespeople ever show up- so your marketing owns the invisible 60% of the buyer's journey. Challenger brands win by picking one fight and building culture around it, not chasing everything competitors do. He reveals the three-part formula: focus your core business, build your culture, reinvest profit. Consumer marketing skills-data, insight, action-are B2B's secret superpower. And his rule: if you wouldn't say it at dinner, don't write it in marketing.

The key takeaway:

Brand preference wins deals - 95% of the time, the brands on the day-one top-five list are the ones that win. B2B buyers spend 60% of their journey before contacting a salesperson.

Define your focus as a challenger - Compete on what's different, not on what competitors do better. Checkout only does digital payments to stay focused while competitors spread across multiple business lines.

Three elements beat category norms - Focus on your core business, build the human operating system (culture, people, vision), then reinvest capital in new products.

Consumer marketer skills are powerful in B2B - Data, insight, action, brand building, and performance marketing from the consumer world unlock B2B success.

Understand stakeholder maps - B2B is complex: CTOs influence CFOs, recommenders influence buyers. Map those relationships to win.

Simplify your language - Ditch jargon like "frictionless" and "seamless." Use words you'd use at dinner. Marketing becomes more interesting and understood.

Marketing is logic and magic - Be both data-driven and creative. Avoid letting fiefdoms kill integrated work. Join everything together.

Watch the video version of this podcast on Youtube ▶️: https://youtu.be/chR0mn9Pum0

Scratch is a production of Rival, a marketing innovation consultancy that develops strategies and capabilities that help businesses grow faster. Scratch is hosted by Eric Fulwiler, and he's joined by Rory O'Neill of Checkout.com in this episode.

Find Rival online at www.wearerival.com, LinkedIn 

Find Eric on LinkedIn

Find Rory on LinkedIn 

Say hi at media@wearerival.com, we'd love to hear from you.

Rival is a marketing consultancy for brands that want to challenge convention in their category. We’re on a mission to understand what challenger brands do differently to grow in categories that are being disrupted, and use a challenger playbook to deliver outsized impact through an integrated, tech-enabled approach. Past guests include CMOs from Mastercard, GE, Shell, Hyperloop, Adobe, PepsiCo, and Papa Johns.
If you’re interested in learning more about marketing from successful CMOs, we compiled a list of the top 5 CMO podcasts to listen to in 2024; check it out here 🔗 https://www.wearerival.com/content-hub-articles/cmo-podcasts-you-cannot-afford-to-miss-in-2024

In the latest episode of Scratch, Tracey-Lee gets into what it really takes to build trust in a controversial space, how she sells brand investment to a CFO who only speaks performance, and the Black Friday campaign where Payflex faked a data breach and somehow lived to tell the tale.

The key takeaway: 

1. Radical honesty is not a risk, it's a requirement In a controversial category, you have to be as loud with your rebuttals as your critics are with their attacks. Silence reads as guilt.

2. BNPL customers aren't who the headlines say they are Payflex users are not over-indebted people stretching to survive. They're actualizing. Identity-driven. The emotional need sits at the top of Maslow's hierarchy, not the bottom.

3. The two-year brand cliff is real Cut brand budget today, nothing happens for six months, maybe a year. Then sales tank. And to recover it, you spend two to three times what you cut. The lag is the weapon CMOs need to use in every CFO conversation.

4. Brief writing is a tattoo, not a tick box WATTW. What are we trying to achieve here. If you can't answer that before you brief, you shouldn't be briefing.

5. Marketing is an advocate for the market, not a go-to-market function Marketers need to be in the product room early, sometimes aggressively, because no product strategy survives contact with a customer insight that nobody bothered to bring in.

6. Learn the finances early The biggest unlock in Tracey-Lee's career was understanding what CFOs actually care about: customer equity, market share, lifetime value. Not ROAS.

7. Boldness needs justification, not just instinct The data breach campaign worked because it had a clear strategic logic behind it. Payflex is an innovator and Black Friday demands standout or silence.

Watch the video version of this podcast on Youtube ▶️: https://youtu.be/fPIrrl9Qg3I

Scratch is a production of Rival, a marketing innovation consultancy that develops strategies and capabilities that help businesses grow faster. Scratch is hosted by Viren Samani, and he’s joined by Tracey-Lee Zürcher-Campbell of Payflex in this episode

Find Rival online at www.wearerival.com, LinkedIn

Find Viren on Linkedin

Find Tracey-Lee on Linkedin

Say hi at media@wearerival.com, we’d love to hear from you.

Rival is a marketing consultancy for brands that want to challenge convention in their category. We’re on a mission to understand what challenger brands do differently to grow in categories that are being disrupted, and use a challenger playbook to deliver outsized impact through an integrated, tech-enabled approach. Past guests include CMOs from Mastercard, GE, Shell, Hyperloop, Adobe, PepsiCo, and Papa Johns.
If you’re interested in learning more about marketing from successful CMOs, we compiled a list of the top 5 CMO podcasts to listen to in 2024; check it out here 🔗 https://www.wearerival.com/content-hub-articles/cmo-podcasts-you-cannot-afford-to-miss-in-2024

In this episode of Scratch, Viren sits down with Misbah Uraizee from Nectar Social to dismantle one of marketing's most persistent myths. The truth? Organic and paid media are complementary engines, and brands that still silo them are leaving serious growth on the table.

Misbah breaks down the post-iOS 14 reality and reveals the exact playbooks modern challenger brands are using to scale today.

In this episode, we cover:

The Post-iOS 14 Reality: Why the entire class of brands built on cheap paid ads simply no longer exists.

Year-One CPG Playbooks: What the fastest-growing brands actually do in their first year (hint: it has nothing to do with media spend).

Killing Vanity Metrics: Why follower count is the metric that refuses to die—and what you should be measuring instead.

TikTok Shop’s True Role: How to properly integrate it into your modern marketing mix.

Measuring the Unmeasurable: How to spot the "halo effects" that prove social is working before the revenue data catches up.

The AI Equalizer: Why "taste" is the last true differentiator for marketers in a world where everyone has the same AI tools.

Watch the video version of this podcast on YouTube: https://youtu.be/v5lbv-u9bOk

Links & Resources:

🖊️Mentioned in the show:

MetiCube

Amp By Rival 

The Rival 50: The Best Challenger Brands of 2025 

Find Rival online at www.wearerival.com, LinkedIn

Find Viren on LinkedIn

Find Misbah on Linkedin 

Say hi at media@wearerival.com, we’d love to hear from you.

Scratch is a production of Rival, a marketing innovation consultancy that develops strategies and capabilities that help businesses grow faster. Scratch is hosted by Viren Samani, and he’s joined by Misbah Uraizee  of Nectar Social in this episode

Rival is a marketing consultancy for brands that want to challenge convention in their category. We’re on a mission to understand what challenger brands do differently to grow in categories that are being disrupted, and use a challenger playbook to deliver outsized impact through an integrated, tech-enabled approach. Past guests include CMOs from Mastercard, GE, Shell, Hyperloop, Adobe, PepsiCo, and Papa Johns.
If you’re interested in learning more about marketing from successful CMOs, we compiled a list of the top 5 CMO podcasts to listen to in 2024; check it out here 🔗 https://www.wearerival.com/content-hub-articles/cmo-podcasts-you-cannot-afford-to-miss-in-2024