Tech-EM Interviews Keith Pigues

Keith Pigues, cmo and senior vp, Ply Gem

Vital Statistics

Age: 45

Lives in: Raleigh, North Carolina

Office based in: Cary, North Carolina

Tenure at Ply Gem: Six months

Size of marketing team: 27 people

How has your marketing portfolio evolved in the six months since you joined Ply Gem?

Ply Gem was formerly structured as a holding company—seven autonomous and independent companies, each with its own marketing organization. One of my initial areas of focus has been helping the company transform to a single operating company model. As a part of this change, the marketing portfolio has changed significantly. We now have a corporate brand, Ply Gem, to promote—as well as the individual product brands. We have a major brand launch campaign underway as we speak.

Now that you’re working on behalf of the entire brand, is that changing the types of media you’re using or how you allocate budget to the various media?

We’re not changing our mix of media, but we are increasing our focus on the audiences that are potentially interested in the corporate brand. For example, we’re increasing our spend on the major home-builder audience and our major distributor customers. These audiences will benefit from the corporate Ply Gem value proposition that we bring as a single operating company. At the same time, we continue to focus on the individual product brand messaging and media spend that is product related—such as that targeted at our entire base of distribution customers.

Overall, do you think the role of the cmo is changing?

Yes. I would say broadly that the role of the cmo in business-to-business companies is definitely changing. Most companies in b-to-b marketing today still use a model that is really a marketing services provider model—where the primary function of the marketing organization is communication and sales support. The model that we’re using at Ply Gem is what I consider to be a more contemporary model. In this model marketing plays a central role in setting the strategic agenda for the company and developing marketing strategies and plans to support the company growth objectives—focused on strategic planning, market development, product development, research and analysis, talent management, as well as the more traditional areas such as branding, marketing communications, PR and sales support. 

What is your definition of experiential marketing?

I think experiential marketing begins with spending time walking in the customer’s shoes and getting a real life, current understanding of how your products or services are used by the customer; as well as how your products and services create value for your customers. This insight into the customer’s experience is used appropriately position current products and services, as well as to develop new ones to meet customer’s needs.

So how does event marketing play into your overall program?

It’s certainly becoming more important in our mix because it truly is an effective way of reaching decision makers and influencers in the construction and building indistry. We’ve found it to be very economical—because we’ve been able to close the loop on the back end. Our process begins with tracking the money we spend to attract people to an event, to the marketing execution during the event, to lead development and management and tracking the results of those leads—we close the loop and measure ROI. I suspect many companies don’t truly close the loop.

What sort of events are you currently doing, and what areas are you looking at expanding?

Our primary event focus is trade shows because the nature of our business lends itself to them. Our customer base consists of hundreds of distributors and homebuilders—so it’s very difficult for our sales force to make regular contact with the large number of customers and prospects. Trade shows are very good venues for us to attract lots of decision makers and influencers in a relatively short period of time, and deliver a very effective message. It also allows customers to see product demonstrations; enabling them to touch and feel the products. We have meaningful conversations about immediate and longer term projects, and carry those conversations pretty far down the sales cycle right on the tradeshow floor. So you might say I’m bullish on trade shows! The other types of events that we are looking at are events where we assemble senior executives from within our customer organizations. The purpose is to talk about the state of the industry, better understand their growth strategies – which helps us continue to evolve our strategies and our offerings to meet their current and future needs.

You talked about having transitioned to an operating company model from a holding company model—what are the marketing challenges in doing that and establishing the parent brand?

I think there are a number of challenges and opportunities. The biggest challenge we face—which could also be considered an opportunity—is that we have a number of very strong product brands that have been very successful and which deliver a lot of value to our customers. There’s an opportunity there to build those product brands into a brand portfolio for the company that makes not only each brand more valuable but also makes Ply Gem as an entity more valuable. So it’s really about brand portfolio management. Another opportunity for us is new product development. Now that we are able to raise our thinking up a level and look at segments of customers that may have been served independently with a brand or a group of products, we’re able to take a step back and look at that segment of customers and ask the bigger question of “What will their unmet needs be going forward?” And now we have more resources as we pool the entirety of the companies together into a single operating company—so we are able to deliver new products and services that meet the needs of these segments. We have greater resources and greater scale to address customer needs in a bigger way. The other opportunity which I think is huge is cross-selling. Each of our individual companies were selling a limited product portfolio to the same customers. Now we have the opportunity to provide greater value to these customers. For example, to sell windows to distribution customers who were previously only buying our siding product, but buying windows from a competitor. And vice-versa.

Any final insights you’d like to share?

I continue to think that the most significant opportunity and the most significant change is moving the marketing function to more of a strategic function—that’s truly a peer function with the general managers or division presidents—and delivering measurable contributions to profitable top-line growth. I think the marketing services model is ineffective, and it’s one of the reasons that a number of marketing organizations tend to ebb and flow in terms of resourcing with the state of the business. It’s because at many of those companies marketing isn’t taking a strategic role or delivering measurable financial value.