Royal Caribbean’s CIO Empowers Marketing With The Right Data
“When it works perfectly, leadership—CMO, CIO, CTO, however many Cs you have—are all working together on an integrated strategy to leverage the technology platforms,” says Mike Giresi.
As the chief information officer of Royal Caribbean Cruises, Mike Giresi gets to affect the customer’s journey—all facets of the journey—in many ways. What he finds interesting about his business is that the ships “are basically floating cities, and we have a customer who is immersed in our brand … for an extended period of time. There aren’t a lot of markets where that’s the case.”
This, to Giresi, is both an opportunity and a responsibility. He also is able to help coordinate the strategy and organization of the enterprise to make it all happen. Said Giresi: “When it works perfectly, leadership—CMO, CIO, CTO, however many Cs you have—are all working together on an integrated strategy to leverage the technology platforms.” This, he explains, provides clear visibility and accountability as to who is bringing what to the table.
CMO.com was lucky enough to find Giresi on land, and we sat down and had a wide-ranging discussion about technology, marketing, and the kind of culture that enables the true experience business. Read on for these insights and more.
CMO.com: What’s your background, Mike, and what was your path to Royal Caribbean in the CIO slot?
CMO.com: Can you give us an idea of how your role as the CIO intersects with the marketing strategy at Royal Caribbean?
Giresi: As a business, our goal is to provide a personalized and frictionless experience for our guests–not just while on the ship, but throughout the buyer journey. And a big part of that is the data that enables that. We have to be in synch.
It’s important that marketing and IT are connecting. And that my team understands the big picture of the business from a strategic standpoint. Each team brings their own set of expertise that relies on the other for success. My team needs to bring technology that drives the business–not technology for technology’s sake. And sometimes that means leveraging what we have, and modifying it in a way that keeps pace with quickly changing consumer expectations.
What’s more, a significant part of business comes from the trades channel, so travel agents play a huge role. It’s important that anyone who encounters our brand receives a consistent message and experience. We want our guests to be able to navigate our world in a way that provides a frictionless experience from start to finish, regardless of what method they’re using, or where they are on their journey as a consumer.
A big part of my job is to make sure that marketing is empowered with the right data, in a way that they can interpret and act upon it in a nimble way. We in IT must enable processes that can quickly scale to ensure that we can deliver against this brand proposition of “frictionless vacations.” IT needs to work through the lens of the business and provide technology that enables that.
CMO.com: We’ve been very interested here at CMO.com in what Adobe is calling the “experience business,” and I think, in many ways, this is what you’re talking about in terms of that frictionless kind of connection to the consumer. What is your view from your vantage point at Royal Caribbean as to what this experience business looks like in terms of strategy?
Giresi: From a strategy perspective, we need to be capable of sending curated information to our guests that is relevant, accurate, and actionable to them. We want it to mean something, to be genuine.
One of the things at Tory [Burch] that we did–which I thought was really effective–was to personalize the brand to many different people by tapping into things that were super meaningful for them. We did this by harmonizing unstructured and structured data and coming up with the likelihood of someone liking and/or being attracted to something that would drive further traction and, hopefully, gain higher rates of conversion.
CMO.com: So how is Royal and the cruise business, in general, different from some of the other places you’ve been?
Giresi: This business is so interesting because the ships are basically floating cities, and we have a customer who is immersed in our brand and only our brand for an extended period of time. There aren’t a lot of markets where that’s the case. It’s both a big opportunity and a big responsibility at the same time. There’s practically nothing we can’t offer on these ships, but guests have different interests. In the beginning, we tend to over-communicate the options, which I think actually drives down conversion because the choices can be overwhelming. It either puts too much on the guest and they get frustrated or they default to a travel agent who then decides for them.
Luckily, we have enough information on the majority of people so that when someone connects with us, we can present something that is authentic. If they like kayaking, for example, we can present a kayaking experience that would capture their interest. If we aren’t aware of their interests, however, and we present a bicycling activity or something else of little interest to them, they may just move on without even knowing that we actually have something that they’d really enjoy— all because we didn’t position it properly.
This is key. People’s time is their most valuable resource. We want our guests to have as much of their time to themselves as possible. We need to offer a product that they can procure in an easy manner and ensure that when they’re acutally “in” our product, that they have time to enjoy themselves—we haven’t forced them to jump through hoops to determine their itinerary.
CMO.com: You have to figure out a way to provide that personalized experience, right?
Giresi: Exactly. And this is not a perfect science, by the way. I think the majority of companies are challenged by this. You really have to be able to synthesize who that person is and draw out the information that they’re not necessarily going to offer you. Sometimes, you have to go find it. You need people who are interested. Most times, people will start by seeing a theme that they like and will work to figure the rest out. Very rarely does it ever work out where someone sees something and thinks, “Hey, this is exactly what I like, so please give this to me.”
CMO.com: Do you think you have a better view of that because you’re not so traditionally tied to the on-brand message and pushing the marketing idea? Is that something that the CIO can bring to this relationship, this different lens you’re looking through?
Giresi: I think so. I’ll give you an example from a past life that is especially relevant. When I was at Godiva, we established a loyalty pprogram called the Chocolate Rewards Club. The only times Godiva was ever a destination location was during key holidays, like Valentine’s Day for instance. Other than that, it was: “Oh. Godiva. Yeah, I’ll go there. Right.” We were trying to get people to come purposely to visit the brand on an ordinary day and our greatest asset was the chocolate.
So what we basically said was, “Let’s create a program where if someone signs up, every month they get a free piece of chocolate.” We can change the promotion so that they can try different things. They don’t have to buy anything. If they can’t get to a store, then we’ll come up with a digital program that enables similar incentives, such as free shipping, whatever it may be, so that we would be able to get people to participate with the product.
They still have that program today, by the way. That program was brilliant in its simplicity. The role that I played in that—besides making sure the technology worked—was to, quite frankly, be a customer. I said, “Look, we can overcomplicate this, but all people want is our product. If we give them a reason to be excited about that, it’s highly likely that they will continue to participate to a greater extent.”
CMO.com: How did it work out, in the end?
Giresi: Sure enough, that program was really successful in terms of incrementality in terms of add-on purchases when people came in to buy a piece of chocolate. They’d at least buy another piece, and some a lot more. With Royal, we’re such a diverse product that has so many different SKUs, it’s almost impossible to work that way. So we have to curate this. We have to help our gurests understand it. If we do that, that’s going to lead people to a much higher rate of conversion and yield a better experience for them.
CMO.com: What does the internal organization look like when this kind of partnership or strategy is in place between the CIO and CMO?
Giresi: When it works perfectly, that leadership—CMO, CIO, CTO, however many Cs you have—they’re working together on an integrated strategy to leverage the technology platforms, so there is clear visibility and accountability as to who is providing what aspect of that. But overall, the outcome is not a technical one. The outcome is business-related: What is the KPI we are targeting, and did we or did we not achieve that? That’s when it’s super healthy because you have good friction, you have good debate, people are in their best sweet spot, but the team is working cross-functionally with the overall business goal in mind.
I don’t think this can be something that gets looked at once every other week. You have to have tech people, marketing people, and other business folks. They all have to work together on a day-to-day basis. They have to consistently drive and try to understand what’s working, what’s not, why didn’t this work, why this did work, so forth.
That’s the only way that it really works. This cannot be a siloed function or activity. I don’t think it’s possible because there are too many iterative learnings of spontaneous creativity that come about by having those right people working together on this common objective, and it’s complicated, quite frankly. I don’t think it’s easy to do, which is why most organizations have a hard time doing this successfully.
CMO.com: I would think you are probably one of the big omnichannel operations, in that the offline must be as important to you as the online. How do you look at that from your vantage point on the IT side? I imagine marketing and technology are all throughout the ships as well, right?
Giresi: Yes, absolutely. We drive a tremendous amount of revenue during the actual vacation itself. I would call that onboard revenue. Now, again, from my perspective, I think hospitality businesses did not grow up as retail businesses and, as such, don’t really think like retailers from a merchandising and commercialization perspective. I think the IT function absolutely didn’t.
My role is to inject this thinking: That IT matters a whole lot as a key driver of the business. That data matters, and how we think about architecture matters, and the way we look at building capabilities versus buying them, and how we’re going to make sure data flows through the organization. All of this really matters and impacts the business overall. And if you don’t think it does, then look at the companies which are successful versus the ones that aren’t, and think about how their ecosystem works.
I shifted our thinking as a technology team to guest/crew inward versus the shoreside outward. I understand enabling reservations are very important. I get it. But taking a reservation isn’t the end-game. That’s like step five. Once someone is committed to the brand, have we created an environment that allows them to more or less dictate and editorialize what they want to do so that they can have the best possible experience for them?
As the marketing team also shifted its focus, including more attention to the direct-to-consumer channel, the technology team likewise went through a pretty significant change. And now we’re coming out of this in a way where we have an organization model that really puts data at the heart and the customer at the heart, which will enable us to be a much more effective direct-to-consumer business.
CMO.com: Are you finding that the titles or the types of people that you and the marketing side are hiring have changed over the past three to five years?
Giresi: Oh, for sure. In IT, titles don’t change as dramatically as they do in marketing. But I would say the type of person we’re bringing in is different, with regard to their experience, their skillsets, and their mindsets. At one time, the company would only hire people who had been in hospitality. I was not in hospitality before I took this job. So I didn’t come in with this perspective that I knew everything. I came in with the perspective that I think we’re not really customer-focused, and we need to be a whole lot better than we are.
Our best option was to start shifting our thinking toward what really drives revenue, and that’s the ship. On the ship are the crew and guests, and that’s what matters. Nobody cares about the reservation system, really. They expect it to work. What they do care about is when I get on that ship, am I able to maximize my time? As a technology function, are we enabling that? And then while they’re traversing that vacation, are we capturing information that matters to our business partners that helps us drive a more effective revenue stream and overall productivity?
CMO.com: You’ve been at retail and other industries and now are in hospitality. Anything that you’ve learned over the years, in terms of advice for our readers?
Giresi: Sure. The only way you’re going to be successful with how the world is evolving is to be very good at directly talking to your customer in a way that truly resonates with them. You can’t do that from afar. I would say you have to be in touch and listening in an ongoing, iterative, and in a high-quality way, if that makes sense.
A lot of hospitality businesses for a long time didn’t have to worry about that because they had the benefit of getting their supply someplace else. Think about what the airlines had to go through, and hotels, and cruises. One thing about successful retailers is they create an experience around the brand in a way that the consumer expects. Nothing happens by chance. How you intersect with and traverse that product has been thought about from every possible way in most cases. That’s what hospitality has to do.
The pace of change will continue to accelerate as technology advances. So if your organization can’t change on literally a moment’s notice because of whatever infrastructure or politics or bureaucracy you’ve created, that’s a problem. I think this is at the root of some retailers who are not doing as well, not adapting as well, and faltering. It’s the bureaucracy. It’s the culture.
Tradtitional retail culture doesn’t enable agility. Which gives opportunity for disruptive, iterative companies. The ones who have figured it out are actually more successful because they’re not caught up in that. Hospitality has a huge opportunity there, because I don’t think they’ve had to change anywhere near as quickly as other industries have. I’m hoping that by bringing the right people in, we get much better at that than we were when I started.
CMO.com: It seems to me that the marketing technology world is beginning to seep into the whole enterprise, that it’s not this siloed technology anymore. Do you think this is so?
Giresi: Absolutely. I think companies that are successful have a leadership team that understands how to utilize technology across the business, not just in one group, not just in one function. And they provide a culture that enables a collaborative, innovative environment. And I think that the role of CIO has become the integrator. I’m the one who has to weave this all together. If I don’t, then it falls on its face.
The role of the CIO has dramatically changed. Technology is no longer about “I wish we had better tech.” You have to have great technology to be successful, but how it’s approached as central to strategic businesss and executed has changed dramatically. If you’re not keeping pace with that, approaching your decisions from the outside in, and thinking about your organization as one fully integrated, holistic organism, you’re just not going to be successful. I don’t care who you are.