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"There was no document that showed the process of how a product came to market..."

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The place was siloed and factionalized and different departments had developed their own shorthand jargon. There was no document that showed the entire process of how a product came to market; only the bits and pieces that each team or department was responsible for. Only a few long-time employees – and a few C-level execs – carried around the whole picture in their heads. But because they were the axles around which the entire place spun, they were far too busy to document it; they were keeping everything running.

 

So we mapped out a step by step process flow for how just the packaging was made... it was a process that my department could completely control and spanned the entire product development and retail cycle since it was the first articulation of product positioning and the last to leave the retail theater. Since there was no standard strategic approach for positioning a new product, I rolled out the Matli Group Methodology, which I'd used for years with entertainment brands, as LeapFrog's new standardized positioning framework. The flow was the company's first attempt to define how many rounds of review and approval were acceptable and needed – and who was the approver of each review. I shopped it around to every middle manager and executive who’d been in a meeting about a package to find out what they believed their role in the process was. We created LeapFrog's first RACI chart, assigning specific roles to each person at each step of the entire process for each type of package we made (LeapFrog produced several hundred packaged products each year when all international translations were included).

 

Within the first year of its implementation, packaging costs dropped by 56% (despite a 33% increase in work volume)...

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And then we presented it to the company with the CMOs support - this would be the agreed-upon process for positioning a new product and making packaging at LeapFrog. Within the first year of its implementation, packaging costs dropped by 56% (despite a 33% increase in work volume) as freelance overtime, rework costs, scrapped prints, cancelled print runs and stickers applied to products on shelf all but disappeared. With an agreed-upon process, the employees were empowered to escalate requests that fell outside of the process and our PM team could push even the most senior executives to make decisions because they could plot out how a delay in a decision today could impact an on-shelf delivery date 3 months in the future… after all, we’d gantt-charted every package based on the process so that deadlines could now be predicted and delays projected in real-time rather than the previous process where products would miss their deadlines and the company would throw money at the problem to not lose a slot at retail. Air shipments nearly disappeared by year two and required a C-level sign-off to proceed. 

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We repeated the same process for website changes, landing pages and campaigns (we produced over 540 digital campaigns per year…. some of them major product launches with landing page, videos, social campaigns, print, in-store and digital campaign components). And then for In-store POP, videos and commercials as well.

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With empowerment, predictability and a clear process where every employee working on a marketing/creative project could see how their work fit within a larger end goal for the company, the next employee survey saw job satisfaction scores jump by 13% for my department... Over 3x that of any other group of employees. 

 

We produced more work, at higher quality, with better user engagement and improved brand recall for 40% less budget YOY. And we were just getting started.

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By year two, my responsibilities had expanded to include shared management over all marketing strategy and sole authority over all marketing and creative execution. With solid processes and a more engaged team, I focused on pushing up our brand relevance with Millennial moms, who would be the future of LeapFrog. Working closely with our Consumer Insights team, we created key brand metrics KPIs to tie all creative work to and started to rigorously require business cases from brand managers in their campaign and work briefs. With even more focus, clear goals flowed down to each employee and common success KPIs for the team, we pushed hard for a change in how LeapFrog was positioned in the market. We created what I call The Wake-Up Call Deck (above) pushing for a shift to a masterbrand strategy where each piece of marketing would not only market the individual product, but act as an investment into building brand recognition and relevance with moms and dads. And we pushed for an agency review. The presentation threw down the gauntlet to all marketing leadership and management showing clearly the brand’s decline, the increased competition, the inevitable impact of continuing our unaligned strategy... And it presented the upside of investing in a new approach to marketing that was less salesy, transactional and product-focused; a brand approach that would be more about how each product could deliver on an overarching brand promise of helping a parent get their child excited about learning. A return to the brand's core DNA and original brand promise.

 

The call went out to three agencies – and the results, from incumbent agency Occam – who hadn’t received a brief like this since the first years of LeapFrog’s existence – were exciting and revolutionary. The LeapFrog Ahead campaign tied every marketing piece together into a unified brand promise – tied directly to our brand name. We incorporated it to everything; created new, more human-centric testimonials, product videos, commercials and landing pages. 

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At the end of year two, LeapFrog had risen in relevance among Millennial moms from number 7 to number 2 “most trusted” toy brands according to a report by PiperJaffray. 

 

The LeapFrog Ahead campaign was produced for half of what the previous years commercials had been produced for. The entire spend for the rest of the creative marketing across all channels was reduced by an additional 30%. LeapFrog’s top competitor in the electronics aisle, Nabi, lost marketshare quickly. The new LeapFrog Epic outsold every other kids tablet in the electronics aisle by it’s 3rd week in stores. Long-time competitor in the toy aisle, Vtech, exited the kid tablet business after disappointing sales compared to the LeapFrog Platinum, Glo and LeapPad 3 products.