GoPro Marketing SVP: Storytelling Key To Higher Brand Promise

It’s also “one of the most important things that will define whether a company has the ability to extend itself and become bigger than it currently is,” says Bryan Johnston, who oversees marketing at the action-camera maker.

I had the good fortune to have Bryan Johnston, SVP of marketing at action-camera maker GoPro, on a Silicon Valley Executive Network CMO panel I recently led. I invited Johnston to share more about his story of building immersive, integrated lifestyle brands with consumers at some of the best sports and entertainment brands in the world.

The results of our conversation follow.

CMO.com: You’ve had a storied sports and entertainment marketing career working on iconic lifestyle brands, including Nike, Ultimate Fighting Championship, Burton Snowboards, and adidas-Salomon. What are the big lessons you learned at these brands to score with consumers that you’ve brought to GoPro?

Johnston: Over the course of my 20-year sports and entertainment marketing career, what I’ve learned and brought to GoPro is that you need to connect with your consumer beyond price and value and become fully immersed and integrated into their life. If you look at what we did at UFC, we took a sports pay-per-view TV property and then opened gyms, created apparel, and built a 360 experience that people could integrate into their lives. With Burton, we did the same thing. We started with a product that was originally positioned for a 19-year-boy who snowboarded and evolved the brand over a three-year time period into something that was meaningful for the entire family during all four seasons.

The brands I’ve worked with are more than what most people would describe as “lifestyle brands.” The management teams at these brands looked at the business differently and found ways to be fully immersive and integrated into people’s lives in a very meaningful way. At GoPro, we are always thinking about how to get two and three steps deeper into someone’s life, and this takes a lot of work.

CMO.com: What is the purpose and passion of GoPro? What is the company’s North Star?

Johnston: I’ve had the good fortune to work side by side with several company founders at Burton and the UFC, and now I’m working with GoPro’s founder and CEO, Nick Woodman. When you work around founders, there is something special about them. Part of what defines GoPro’s culture is the sense that there is nothing that we can’t accomplish; this is the attitude that Nick brings that to the office every single day.

The passion of the company is driven by a very simple notion: How do we help people easily capture and share the parts of their lives that they are most passionate about? Our North Star has us focused on enabling this in a way that delivers a seamless, end-to-end experience for a consumer to capture, edit, and share their content. The GoPro Quik app represents a major piece of that experience. Quik is product-agnostic, so it works with any capture device. More than 75% of Quik users don’t own a GoPro yet. That presents a tremendous opportunity for GoPro. Quik introduces people into the GoPro pipeline.

CMO.com: GoPro was the original innovator in the sports and personal lifestyle self-documentation video space. The category has been flooded with new entrants, with much price competition in the past two years since GoPro’s IPO. How is GoPro dealing with this category congestion?

Johnston: We take any new competitor seriously. If you look at marketplace tracking sources, competitors haven’t gotten to any trackable retail-metric critical mass. It doesn’t mean they aren’t building good product. But if you look at the end-to-end content capture experience and every single detail about the consumer experience to enable and empower them, we believe this is what makes GoPro different, better, and special.

The thing I love about GoPro is that when I got here, nothing was broken. It has all been about evolving and elevating the brand. Everyone at GoPro is focused on and understands the consumer user experience. That is rare at many technology companies.

CMO.com: Given your current role and the brands you’ve led, I imagine that you believe in brand storytelling. Why is brand storytelling important and what are the big lessons you’ve learned about doing it right?

Johnston: I learned a big lesson during my time at Burton. We started with the concept of how the snowboarding experience for a 19-year-old guy is one of the first sensations of freedom. We then took the concept of the freedom snowboarding delivers and extended that to a 9-year-old, a 35-year-old, or a Dad. What I learned through this process was how to create a mindset on how to take a brand’s position on storytelling–in this case, “Burton is the ultimate expression of freedom”–and then how that enables your brand to create a very powerful movement. We are doing this at GoPro.

From my experience, marketing is a dedicated science that gets you to a highly enlightened decision-making process. From this, you find out what your storytelling position is that connects to a wider audience, find the high-order human truth so you can talk more about that versus the product and price value. For example, at UFC we discovered that “There is a fighter in all of us.” We discovered through data that this is in many people’s DNA, not just 19-year-old males. There are as many women at a UFC fight as there are guys.

This is the secret to GoPro. We talk about the higher brand promise. We capture humanity. We don’t talk about price value as the leading edge of our communications. If you find the higher purpose beyond product, your brand will have sustainability. If you are just focused on your value proposition, you are in a dead-end situation. In all of my jobs, I always tell the team that it is our job to define the field of play. Don’t ever let your competitor do that.

CMO.com: How does GoPro use social media and enable its community with social media platforms?

Johnston: This is a big focus of our team. I have a large, world-class social and digital team that focuses on @GoPro, YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, and Instagram. At GoPro, we talk about our “virtuous cycle.” We intentionally install this mindset. So when someone buys a GoPro … we make it easy for them to edit and upload content to their favorite social media platform. The minute they do that, they get positive affirmation from the people they care about the most, which then inspires them to create more content. This then inspires people around them to buy a GoPro. This is a very simplistic yet effective way we grow GoPro. The easier we make this process for people, the more this virtuous process helps us grow the brand organically. In October 2015, we launched GoPro Awards to inspire our consumers, where we pay people to submit videos on a theme or genre.

CMO.com: GoPro just launched a trio of immersive 360-degree virtual-reality (VR) products that will enable content producers in new ways. What excites you the most about VR opportunities for individuals and professionals?

Johnston: Our mission is to remove the pain points associated with capturing and producing 360-degree and spherical content that blows viewers away. … The opportunity here is for brands to enhance their storytelling. For example, imagine if a teen buys a new athlete-inspired product, and when he opens the box there is an inexpensive viewer with content that takes the teen into a VR or AR video of the athlete explaining how he worked with the designer, what inspired them, and then he virtually walks the teen through the factory to show him how that product was made. This is the level of detail that brands will be able to do, and we are starting to work with brands on this right now.

CMO.com: What are your top marketing principles that you think other CMOs and the C-suite should also believe in and practice?

Johnston: First, and I’ve used this on every brand I’ve worked on, is whatever you do, do not think small. Do not think in a minimalizing way. Unfortunately, most C-suites talk about totally addressable markets and look at what their competitors are selling, and the conversations end up being about incrementalism. The CMO’s job is to be the person in the room who says, “I get it, that is useful info, but it is ridiculous. You’ve built a box around the brand that is self-imposed.”

My No. 2 guiding principle is to stand up for what marketing does. Marketing is not ‘I like, I feel, I believe.” Marketing is a practiced science as intense and filled with the same amount of intellect and education as engineering or any other discipline within the company.

My No. 3 guiding principle is that as you are learning about what is meaningful to your consumer, go several layers deep. The answer you are looking for is probably four or five levels deep. Understanding this is critical to developing your brand narrative.

Finally, if you are at a company where the product has an opportunity to become a brand, you need to own the art and science of storytelling. As CMO, you need to help your C-suite peers and everyone on the team understand that storytelling is part of and probably one of the most important things that will define whether a company has the ability to extend itself and become bigger than it currently is. This is the CMO’s job.