What can the Queen of England teach us about CX?
When it comes to products being endorsed by celebrities, we don’t often think of tea sets. Pottery as a whole doesn’t tend to get a lot of time in the spotlight. But in the late 1770s, the world was a different place, and Josiah Wedgwood was a household name. His tea sets were so exquisite that Queen Charlotte’s love for them skyrocketed his career. Even today, the influences of his work can be seen in tea sets around the world.
But how does someone like Josiah get recognized by Queen Charlotte? How do we get our products in the hands of the right people to get noticed? Today’s guest, Krishna Subramanian, has the answers. As the Co-Founder and CEO of Captiv8, Krishna knows how to get the right influencers connected to your brand and give your customers an aspirational CX because of it. And fortunately for us, he shares all the tricks of the trade.
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"Every brand that is looking to reach millennials and Gen Z should definitely be working with influencers." - Krishna Subramanian, Co-Founder and CEO of Captiv8
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Time Stamps
* (0:00) Why the Queen of England is the ultimate influencer
* (4:53) What is Captiv8?
* (12:59) Finding the right influencer for your brand
* (17:40) How to figure out if your campaign is successful
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Sponsor
This podcast is presented by Oracle CX.
Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at Oracle.com/cx/perspectives
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Links
Connect with Krishna on LinkedIn
Ian: Fine china cups tinkle delicately as servants lay out the tea service, measuring each piece so that it’s just-so.
The fine china tea cups sat waiting on the table. Tea leaves have already been set to steep. Her Majesty has asked to use the new tea set, and she’s expected to arrive any minute.
Each piece of cream-colored earthenware was embossed with a border of twining leaves. The effect was pure understated elegance. Queen Charlotte had commissioned the potter Josiah Wedgwood to make them for her. She was so pleased with his work that she named him “Potter to Her Majesty.”
Josiah was ecstatic. The potter renamed that style of pottery “Queensware” in her honor. It was a move that would slingshot him into fame and fortune. He advertised his fine pottery in London newspapers as “royal” approved and named specific pieces after members of the noble family. After all, his work was on the table of Buckingham Palace. He was like the Michael Jordan of pottery, and the Queensware pottery was his Jordan I shoe.
By 1775, a decade later, Queensware was being imitated all over Europe. Everyone had to have it, though most had to settle for lookalikes. People dreamed of bringing a piece of aristocracy right into their own homes. Queen Charlotte’s endorsement of Josiah Wedgwood’s pottery put him at the top of his industry and sales skyrocketed. Wedgwood became an aspirational brand. A symbol of wealth and power, fit for royalty.
And Wedgwood pottery is memorable. Those twining grape leaves have become iconic, - almost cliché. That’s the effect of Queen Charlotte’s endorsement. But it also meant that by the time of his death, Wedgwood’s fortune was worth more than 100-million-dollars. He was the 4th richest man in all of England.
But let’s not talk money - according to royal etiquette it’s uncouth. Instead let’s talk about how it’s an early example of celebrity endorsement. And how the Queen was the ultimate influencer.
So tuck your napkin into your collar and stick your pinky up, because today we’re keeping things classy.
Welcome to Often Imitated, a podcast about remarkable experiences from the past, and how they inspire people to create great customer experiences today.
This episode is all about using the power of endorsements to sell your brand. How influencers set the bar for the general public and how CX leaders can leverage that idea to their advantage. In this episode we talk with Krishna Subramanian (SUB-RUH-MAIN-IAN), Co-Founder and CEO of Captiv8, about activating influencers who will have the maximum impact for your brand. But first, a word from our sponsors.
Often Imitated is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at oracle.com/cx.
The approval of the British royal family continues to be highly coveted. Still to this day, Wedgwood is an esteemed brand known for its high quality and value. Since then the Queen has endorsed more than just tea sets. That endorsement is called a Royal Warrant. And it basically means that the good or service is preferred by the royal family. The brand or company is then allowed to display the royal arms on the packaging or in advertisements. The royal family has given the Royal Warrant to everything from apple juice to software. There are more than 800 Royal warrants active right now. And those brands do good business because of it. For example, I know that if I ever want an excellent tomato juice, I can simply go to James white drinks Ltd. - holder or a royal warrant since 2002.
Royal family aside, we’re ushering in a new era of influencers. First there was MySpace, then Facebook, Instagram, SnapChat and TikTok and Clubhouse. And now in this age of social media, influencers abound. And they can get you to buy a new brand of skincare, to wear mom jeans, to eat Del Taco. Why? Because they’re the movers and the shakers and they set the bar.
There’s real power in getting the right influencer to represent your brand. It can have a major impact on brand awareness, reputation, sales and brand longevity. But first you have to find that person, and then you have to get them on board.
We have somebody here that can help. Krishna Subramanian is the Co-Founder and CEO of Captiv8. Which is a marketing platform that pairs brands and agencies with influencers, then measures the effectiveness of ad campaigns.
[00:00:04] Krishna Subramanian: We started Captiv8 about six years ago. The the thought was really, you know, millennials are changing the way they consume content. They're spending a lot less time in front of the, uh, TV and more time in front of platforms. Like, you know, Instagram, Snap. At that time, TikTok didn't even exist. Um, but you know, as they, as millennials are changing the way they consume content, and Gen Z now as well, brands are changing the way they engage with them because they realize, you know, millennials not going to click on a banner ad and buy something, but they're highly influenced by these digital celebrities. You know, coming from a background of digital marketing previously started online advertising company and a mobile advertising company, it was like, well, what's the evolution of digital marketing? And how are brands going to start engaging with the new audience? And that's really how, you know, Captiv8 really came about. It was, it was thinking about how can we help we provide, you know, data and insights to a brand to help them identify, let's say their Oprah effects on, on social. How can they make things go viral?
Ian: Krishna is entering a fairly new space in the marketing world. And it comes with new rising stars who appeal to younger generations.
Krishna: One thing that's really exciting and interesting is every time there's a new social platform that, um, that comes about, there's a new wave of creators or influencers that emerge. Um, you know, you could think about this like TikTok, right? Charlie and Dixie and Addison, they all, you know, they became famous because of TikTok. And they were the first movers there.
I am biased, but I think every brand that is looking to reach millennials and Gen Z, every brand that has a social presence or understand social should definitely be working with influencers. Um, you know, hands down.
Ian: Now Addison is repping Reebok, and sisters Charli and Dixie have a deal with Hollister. They were discovered after their dance videos went viral on TikTok. But there are so many other creators with large followings that don’t have a clear avenue to sponsorship. So Captiv8 is working to provide a solution for that matching process that up to this point has been super labor intensive and time consuming for brands.
Krishna: Before Captiv8 without Captiv8, you know, as a brand
you're looking on the social platforms themselves. You're going to Instagram, you're searching for creators that you might follow. Um, you're going to YouTube. You're going to Google. You're looking at PR lists like top 50 influencers that had some, you know, some blog probably wrote about. And you're just trying to find people that you think fit your brand and fit that demographic you're looking to go after. Um, you know, so it takes a significant amount of time to, to aggregate that initial list. Then you probably have to go manually look at someone's content and start to get a better idea of do they really fit my target demographic?
And you're manually sifting through each individual account and going to photos and reading comments and you're spending hours pouring through that. Once you start to do that, then you're manually going out and you're sending DMs or you're looking for, you're Googling each individual influencer and you're saying, uh, you know, contact info for talent agent for, and you're, you're trying to figure out who represents that individual and as you do that, then you create another list and you're sending out, you know, thousands of emails or DMs on different platforms, hoping for a response, um, and hoping to find the right person that's in touch with them. Sometimes, you know, very often, uh, creators and influencers change their talent agents or change their managers. So you might have old info.
You start to negotiate over email or over DM and just figure out like, what is, what are these costs going to be? So you, you probably have spreadsheets that, or Google docs that just keep growing and growing. You have PowerPoints where you're presenting talent to your team to say, should we go with these five influencers or these 20 influencers? And making our case for them. Um, You know, broken pieces of data that you've gathered. Once you go through that, uh, you know, let's say you, you go through the contracting and negotiation process. You figure out how to pay them. Um, I'll fly in and then you start to deal with measurement and reporting. And that's an extremely painful process because you're going out at that point, manually taking screenshots of people's posts. You're looking at things like just comments and likes. Um, you're taking screenshots of stories and then you're reaching back out to the creator and saying, you know, can you give me any analytics or data behind those posts that you have? And then you start to aggregate a PowerPoint that puts together in a summary of all the reporting that you see. So on a very basic level, it's, it's a super manual process.
Without platforms, it's a full-time job. People are probably spending, let's say 250 hours just getting a campaign, you know, set up. Um, and I think a lot of it comes down to, uh, a lot of manual processing, uh, finding influencers and then getting an understanding of their, their content, um, looking at, you know, historical posts and making sure, you know, if you're a brand, you know, if you, if you want to be brand safe, making sure someone hasn't talked about politics or trying to predict, you know, from a manual standpoint, how do we make sure this person is going to be brand safe for us going, going forward in the future? Um, but it'll easily take two to three weeks to even just start building out a list of talent and then, you know, weeks to go back and forth over email. Um, I think a lot of agencies typically have built out, you know, massive Google spreadsheets and massive PowerPoints, um, on Google docs. And that's, that's really the, the alternative.
Ian: The alternative sounds incredibly tedious. If I’m doing my math right, it would take more than six weeks to set up one campaign. Think about everything else you could accomplish if you were given that time back. It becomes especially difficult if you’re looking for one person under a very specific demographic.
Krishna: if you're, if you are looking for college students that are male that our graphic designers in New York and California that have a high affinity towards Apple, um, you know, on a platform like Captiv8, you can find that in 15 seconds on Google, it's going to take you hours and you might not even get there.
once they find captivate, you know, we like to, we like to say we, we make, um, marketers, um, smarter, faster and better. Um, and you know, so the way we're doing that is we're providing them with just smarter business intelligence. So we're, we're giving them first party creator data, which means, you know, all of these creators that, that have come into the platform, you know, we've asked them a deeper set of data. So we've asked them, you know, are you married? Are you a parent? Do, how old are your kids? Are you vegan? Do you, are you allergic to anything? Uh, because that becomes more relevant to a brand when they're looking to partner with someone. We give them a lot of, we give brands, a lot of insights and predictive analytics in terms of, you know, when a creator should be posting, what hashtags they should be using. Uh, we're looking at things like brand safety, brand affinity, um, you know, things of that sort. Then, you know, in terms of making them faster, uh, a lot of this comes down to streamlining that entire workflow process. So finding influencers, being able to communicate to them directly in the platform. So sending, um, sending mass emails out with the click of a button, you can send emails out to thousands of creators. Um, You know, you can manage the entire campaign workflow. You have a content calendar. If that it's that streamlines when all the posts are, um, you know, need to go live. When people need to get paid, we handle payment within the platform as well, um, in 10 different currencies globally. So if a creator wants to get paid, you know, in pounds on PayPal or, you know, in Turkish Lira, whatever it might be, it happens seamlessly. And then reporting is all streamlined. You don't have to, um, you don't have to take screenshots. It's a real-time reporting dashboard. Um, and we pull in all the analytics from the social platform, APIs. Um, and, and so yeah, you, you essentially have this end to end, um, influencer marketing platform that really just streamlines, um, the entire process of finding influencers, activating them, and then being able to, uh, report on, on measurement and attribution.
It's like once you figure out what that marketing objective is, you start to back out into how you might execute on that. Um, and how you take influencers. And you've got to look at influencers not just within the scope of, um, social, but influencers within, um, you know, as a medium to get to, you know, social, but also display, OTT, you know, print, whatever it might be. Influencers just become this core, um, across the, across the entire board.
Ian: As CX leaders, it can be overwhelming trying to find faces for your brand. Like Krishna says, how do you know they’ll be brand safe? There’s a lot of trust there. But one of the cool things is that there are lot of influencers, and there’s no mold or cookie cutter. They span every demographic, every orientation and every interest. And when you do find the right person, it’s like magic.
Krishna: I think athlete endorsements is just like a, is a perfect way to, to, to think about it. I'm a big fan of, of Jordan, right. And just that, that brand in thinking about, you know, always these are the shoes he's wearing. Right. And just being so enthralled within that and just wanting those just because he was because those were his shoes, right. Regardless of anything. Um, so I feel like you, that emotional connection you have with that specific person continues down the, down the line here. And then I think they've, I think what's evolved is it's not just a traditional celebrity or a traditional athlete, and this is more tied towards, um, anyone that you have an emotional connection with. And I think that's the big difference that we've seen, you know, where the shift has happened.
Ian: There’s something about social media influencers, too, that just seems more attainable. And their frequent posts make them seem more accessible, too, compared to the traditional celebrity or athlete. A modern version of a successful influencer campaign was with Zach King. And that campaign had direct, measurable results. That’s because with current technology, Krishna is able to track tangible metrics like sales to see the success of the campaign.
Krishna: We recently worked on a, um, Zach King campaign with, uh, with Del Taco and Zach King is this amazing, uh, creator. Does a lot of illusions and, you know, with he essentially transformed a living room into, um, into a, a party with his friends. Um, you know, jumps over to the window and, um, opens the window blinds and it ends up being the drive-through for a Del Taco. He gets the order from there, from the window, throws it on the table, spins the, the, it was queso blanco, spins it around. It explodes into this explosion of like nachos that takes up the entire room, uh, is, is, is super exciting content all within 30 seconds. Um, But, you know, what was even more exciting when that was, we were able to measure the offline conversions, um, in incremental lift, uh, Del Taco locations within Southern California. So people that actually saw the video, um, and actually went in then and made purchases and were able to measure that, that specific lift. And so it was pretty exciting to see, you know, amazing content, um, go all the way through
Ian: So there’s the influencer, and then there’s the mega-influencer. This is Queen Charlotte-level status. Like people who have tens or even hundreds of thousands of followers. Often this is someone who became famous for reasons other than just social media - actors, singers, etc. - but not necessarily. Krishna has a great example.
Krishna: you can call it mega influencer, celebrity. Um, you know, I think someone like Mindy Kaling, um, you know, um, we recently worked on a, or not, not so recent, but we worked on a deal with her and, uh, Philadelphia cream cheese. Um, so typically someone at Mindy Kaling's, uh, at that caliber level, she has a talent agent. Um, you are negotiating with the talent agent and, you know, captivates platform helps facilitate that, that conversation between the brand and the talent agent. And so some of the things that you're taking into account are, um, the brand itself, right. Is the brand authentic to the creator. Cause that becomes really important. They don't want to, they don't want to work with a brand just for, you know, money. Right. They, they are really looking at, um, they're, they're looking to make sure that that's a brand that they believe in.
you think about the term, how long is this campaign for? Um, what is the usage? Are you only gonna run it on social? And my, are you going to run paid media behind it, or are you going to take this onto streaming television? All of those components. Um, and then you, you know, um, those are, those are some of the things that come into play when you think about how to price an actual, um, influencer campaign
if you are a larger influencer, you start to look at, you know, different categories that can become really valuable. So you look at, you look at categories, such as, you know, apparel. Um, you know, if you're in the fitness industry, maybe it's like, you're looking at apparel, you're looking at protein, you're looking at, you know, um, shoes, um, you know, things of that sort and. You start to find one brand that's willing to buy out that category across all your channels for the course of the year.
When we think about customer experiences from, from an influencer standpoint, um, I think the, the biggest thing is, is when an influencer really believes in that product, they can like, they believe in not just the product itself, but the brand's values. Um, I think that's something that we've started to see more and more
and do I, as an influencer, relate to those values?
Ian: In case you were wondering what Mindy Kaling’s ad for cream cheese looked like, she makes cheesecake bars. And she manages to put on lipstick while whisking the batter. A true queen. But say Philadelphia wants to measure the effect of Mindy’s ad on their product. That metric is called brand lift. Krishna has mentioned brand lift before. It’s one way of measuring a campaign’s success - It’s basically a measure of how an ad influences the perception of your brand. It’s just one way Captiv8 tracks progress.
Krishna: For us, what we're really trying to do is make it as simple as possible for a brand to activate, um, activate influencers. So reducing the friction in terms of, you know, finding influencers, making it really easy. So as opposed to a brand manager going out and identifying influencers, we're looking at, um, we're looking at influencers, um, we're looking at brands and, and saying, um, you know, can we predict influencers that are going to have the most impact for you, right? Can we predict the content that's going to have the best impact for you?
that's our approach to it is, is really making it more data-driven and predicting, um, outcomes.
metrics that are, that are, you know, really important is, is from a brand perspective, things like brand lift, purchase intent, brand sentiment, um, I think for more direct response customers, it is going to be, you know, the cost of a new user purchases, you know, sales and conversion data.
You know, what was the conversation about that specific brand before the influencer campaign and what was it after? Right. And when people are talking about the brand, are they talking about the brand in a positive way? What is ad recall? Um, you know, all of those sorts of metrics and, um, you know, I think those, those are, those are things that we think about.
I think ultimately if you can help them find that success and make it easier to, to judge success on your platform, they, they just lean into that. And I think that's one of the things that we've started to see the most is start to bubble up features and functionality that are driving, um, you know, the, the most success for a brand. So if they're looking at purchases, if they're looking for, you know, you know, brand lift and brand sentiment, bringing that to the forefront so that they are, so it's easier for them to show impact, um, on their dollars.
Ian: Because brands and influencers are aligned not just on finances but on philosophy, the sponsor relationship is usually a lasting one.
Krishna: No one's looking for a one night stand. Brands are really looking to get married with creators or creators are looking to get married with brands. Um, and I think if you're able to do that from a brand perspective, think about it being like an always on program that truly builds that authenticity. You know that product, um, or the brand that you're, that you're integrating in is really tying this back into a longer program. And so, um, you know, I think we, we typically are looking for more of those on always on ongoing programs. So, you know, not just a one single post, but you know, something that's happening over, you know, at the minimum three to six months.
Ian: And so that relationship is really valuable. The influencers become ambassadors of that brand, not just selling the message but actually believing in it too. And the role of the influencer in the marketing world is evolving.
Krishna: I think influencers are, are obviously here to stay. Um, I think figuring out that the strategy today, um, can really help you just, you know, structure your, your marketing objectives and marketing plans, um, effectively, and I think influencers, you should think about them, not just within the social setting, but within, um, your entire marketing stack.
Ian: Activating influencers who embody your brand is powerful. They create content that balances between relatable and aspirational. Engaging with them can unlock a new audience, drive sales and measurably improve perception of your brand. It’s another aspect of customer experience. Influencers paint a picture of how people interact with your brand and use your product. They can make customers imagine themselves in your brand.
So consider teaming up with an influencer or two. It’s a lasting relationship and an effective marketing strategy that gets results. And hey, if you play your cards right, you might even earn yourself a Royal Warrant from the Queen influencer herself.
This podcast is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at oracle.com/cx.
This is your host, Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios. Thank you for listening to another episode of Often Imitated. If you like what you’re hearing, tell one friend. This podcast was narrated by me, Ian Faison, written by Meredith O’Neil and produced by Mackey Wilson, Ezra Bakker Trupiano, and Ben Wilson. You can learn more about our team at CaspianStudios.com