Binatone Hubble’s Frank Durden: We Must Be A Leader, Not A Follower

The CMO of the global IoT services provider and manufacturer of consumer electronics wants to bring new products to market rather than just put them on a shelf.

Binatone Hubble Group is a global IoT services provider and manufacturer of consumer lifestyle, baby, pet, and home electronics. It is also the primary licensee for Motorola and has revenues between $300 million and $400 million annually. Now almost 60 years old, the company has evolved through multiple ages of technology development. Like its competitors large and small, it is getting to grips with the implications of the widespread consumer adoption of connected devices and what that means from a business and marketing perspective.

CMO Frank Durden joined the company at the end of 2015, making the leap from agency side to client side having worked as a global planning director at Ogilvy & Mather on accounts including Motorola. In conversation with CMO.com we began by asking him about the business and marketing challenges …

Durden: For many years, we had a fast-follower mentality. We would look at what’s on the shelf at a consumer electronics retailer and see how we could do that 10% better, or for 10% less money. In many ways, the products would sell themselves, so we were fast-followers rather than great innovators. It meant that the expertise in our company was around supply chain management, and getting to market very quickly at multiple price points, and being very fleet of foot.

That’s actually driven a lot of success in several of our markets, but the challenge now is that, because we’ve been so successful, we are expected to lead rather than follow, and that means bringing new innovation, and new ideas, and new products to market rather than simply putting them on a shelf. We actually have to create demand and act like a leader, rather than a follower.

CMO.com: As a consumer electronics business, your target groups are both retail customers and the end-consumer. How are these groups shifting?

Durden: As a manufacturing company, large retail websites and retailers are where our money comes from—they are our customers—and having a very good understanding of what they want and need is a vital part of our success. We’ve traditionally been very good at customer marketing. If you don’t pay close attention and understand what makes them tick, you’re not going to get very far.

At the same time, one of the things we’ve been lacking is consumer understanding and consumer marketing, and that’s a big part of my remit, and my role, and my team’s role to balance those two things.

In the past, the company would have relied heavily on our retail partners to do a lot of the demand generation for us. But there are opportunities for us in that we have around 1.2 million registered users of our devices. Seven hundred thousand more will join in the next 12 months. About three quarters of them are active and, on average, are interacting with us between five and 10 times a day via their device. That, in itself, is an amazing communication opportunity.

That means the service in itself is a great piece of marketing. If you can surprise and delight people with the nature of the experience and utility you provide them with, they will love you forever. But give them something that’s clunky and breaks down, or doesn’t recognise who they are as individuals, and you will start to annoy them very quickly. Our existing users are a very powerful tool to acquire new ones. They’re a high potential market for upselling and cross-selling new devices.

The core business fundamentals of how consumer electronics work are changing dramatically, moving towards a subscription model where people get the device at a reduced price or even for free. What they’re doing then is paying for a service rather than paying for a piece of hardware. That puts even greater weight on to making the service great, rather than just making the hardware great.

Historically, we go to market in different consumer tech sectors. We’re the largest baby monitor company in the world, and the people who buy that are expectant mothers and expectant parents. Secondly, we’re in the home security market, where we’re largely talking to homeowners who have an interest in either mechanising or securing their home. And, then, we have a pet tech business, so we’re talking to dog and cat owners. We also have an audio video business with high-end headphones, high-end streaming video cameras, and so on. Those markets are quite distinct and meet different needs. But what is changing in consumer tech generally, and certainly in our company, is that more and more consumer tech products, ours included, are connected. Rather than just sitting at home looking at a control unit, you can now be out at work or away on business, and still control and monitor what is happening at home, with your children, or with your pets through an app or smart device.

We’ve traditionally thought about those things as being separate, discrete markets. But that expectant parent is also a homeowner, is also a pet owner, quite possibly, is also likely to be interested in getting fit or staying fit.

Going forward, we have to think about how we engage with people across their entire digital life rather than just in little bits of it. That’s a big, meaty challenge that not just us, but even the tech giants like Apple, and Samsung, and Google, are all trying to wrestle.

That’s the issue that we have to deal with. Thinking about people more holistically is going to be a big and a bigger challenge for us as we go forward and grow and expand our business.

CMO.com: What have you had to do internally to adapt to this new state of play for consumer electronics companies?

Durden: One of the biggest challenges for any business is making sure it has an organisational structure that’s fit for the future rather than built for the past. Looking at our business, we’ve built much of our past success on being a product-out company. We’ve seen demand for a product on the shelf and we’ve built it cheaper or because we can.

That’s now changing. As the pace of convergence inexorably grows, and we take a leadership stance within the industry, we need to get the balance right between consumer insight and understanding our products and service capability.

That means changing how we actually go about running our company and how we develop products and services. We need to find new and different ways of getting our engineers excited about solving consumer problems rather than purely solving engineering challenges.

CMO.com: What’s the role of marketing in driving that cultural and mindset change within the organisation?

Durden: If all marketers think about is our role as communicators, then our role is going to be increasingly marginalised. Regardless of whether you work in tech or any other industry, I think our future is really bright because we have a better understanding and own the data on consumers. As marketers, we have a greater potential to capture and distill what the consumer insights and demands are that are going to lead not just to better communications, but actually to better and more relevant products and services.

We also have a critical role in determining what kind of structure is going to achieve that. We represent the voice of the consumer in the company better than anybody else. If you don’t have a consumer within your company, I really think it’s unlikely you’ll get very far.

As marketers, we also have two great responsibilities. Firstly, to the brand we work for to ensure that the services, experiences, and utilities we provide are the right ones and are of sufficient quality.

But we have a responsibility to our consumers as well. Consumers are entrusting us with enormous amounts of data about them and about their lives. We get millions of hours of footage of people’s most precious things – their children, their homes, and their pets. All the things that really matter to them are actually entrusted to us to make sure we keep them secure. We have to recognise that.

Access to that data is what puts us in such a strong position, but we have to use it in the right way—not a data breach as such, but using that data for marketing purposes in ways that are either unethical at worst, or actually just destroy people’s confidence and trust in us as being responsible companies and responsible people.