July 6, 2015

In-depth: Jerome Hiquet, CMO at Tough Mudder

Jerome Hiquet is CMO at Tough Mudder, a global event series where participants take on military-style obstacles courses designed by British Special Forces. Before that he was Vice President of Marketing, North America, at Club Med. He tells us about camaraderie, community and content.

tough mudder images2

© Kirsten Holst

What does your role as Chief Marketing Officer at Tough Mudder involve?

As CMO, I place most of my focus on three key priorities. First, to continue to develop our existing brands (Tough Mudder, Mudderella, Fruit Shoot Mini Mudder, and World’s Toughest Mudder) through brand differentiation, and to use customer insights to develop potential additional brands like Urban Mudder. Also, to continually improve our sales strategy through our ecommerce platform, and develop new levers of revenue like corporate sales. Finally, to evaluate and improve all the touchpoints of the customer journey in terms of customer marketing strategy but also in terms of product innovations. In each of these areas, I bring my experience from bigger corporations [Club Med and Accor]—and the knowledge, expertise, and processes that I learned in these environments—and leverage the best practices that complement the strong dynamism and agile mindset at Tough Mudder.

What was your first role in the marketing industry and how have things changed since then?

I started my career as product manager for loyalty programs at the hotel group Accor. Since the beginning of my career, I’ve built my marketing and sales mindset through data, with a customer-centric approach. In my view, a strong marketing leader of today should have a wide-ranging set of skills. Of course, this should include the knowledge of the classical components of marketing, but also the ability to be at ease with tech and analytics, and the leadership acumen to drive the customer and digital transformation of your company. Overall, I like to say that they should be 30 per cent marketer, 30 per cent techie, 30 per cent data analyst and 10 per cent politician.

Looking back over your career, is there any one project or campaign that you’re particularly proud of?

If I had to pick one project, I’m very proud to have been part of a partnership with Cirque du Soleil, during which we created a new concept for children’s activities [a circus-inspired playground idea called Creactive] in the Club Med resorts. The launch happened very recently in Punta Cana, culminating in a two-year project. Although I’m no longer at Club Med, it’s been very powerful to transform a partnership and see that what was once only an idea is now an experience for thousands and thousands of people.

If I had to choose one campaign from my time at Tough Mudder, it’d be our new (joke) concept, Baby Mudder, we created for April Fools’ Day this year. The video went viral, with more than two million views in a few days, and thousands of positive comments. It was a great example of the DNA of Tough Mudder: engaging, unexpected and irreverent.

Where do you find inspiration or insight in the field of digital media/marketing? Are there any writers, speakers or thinkers you particularly admire?

The digital world is full of new things coming up every day. Some will change the world, some may not even change your day. I’m always very cautious about shiny new trends, and I always try to understand first how they could be integrated into real projects or reinforce my strategy efficiently.

Many speakers and writers have fueled me through the content of their books or speeches, but three books in particular have helped me structure my way of thinking in the last 10 to 15 years: Scoring Points, the book by Terry Hunt explaining how Tesco became a customer-centric company;Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos; and, more recently, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel. I find it helpful to revisit them from time to time because it helps me to keep my focus on the basics.

Tough Mudder’s marketing is all about highlighting the spirit of camaraderie and triumph that comes with the challenge. How has digital helped you convey this?

In the digital age we are able to target audiences across screens from nearly any device or channel, which really unifies the customer experience from any touchpoint. Our focus is on ensuring that we’re sending a coordinated message across channels, while at the same time tailoring communications to play to the strengths of each channel.

Highlighting the spirit of camaraderie and triumph at our events is a large part of what we do, and it’s interesting to see how this plays out across channels. We’ve seen a lot of success with short videos on YouTube and Facebook—this is our highest-performing type of content and is effective at capturing the spirit of our events, as well as the inspiring stories of our participants.

Across other channels, the focus is more on compelling photographs—our events are incredibly visual—or creating engaging copy with strong calls-to-action that convey the benefits of conquering the Tough Mudder challenge. No matter what the channel, the key is conveying the message that Tough Mudder is more than an athletic challenge—it’s a lifestyle.

Specifically in the UK, digital media has helped us build an incredibly strong community, with almost 600 thousand followers on Facebook, and high engagement levels. It enables us to give them relevant content but also allows them to ask each other questions, form teams and share their own content.

tough mudder images

© Kirsten Holst

As well as taking part in the Tough Mudder challenge, participants can also camp out and attend after-parties. What’s the idea behind these added extras?

Experiences have become the new luxury good, but when you add in the ability to have shared experiences, instead of solitary ones, the value is much higher. Giving participants the option to make Tough Mudder an all-day or a weekend event, shared with friends and family, makes the experience much more memorable and valuable to participants.

Overall, we’re aiming to create a festival-like experience so participants and spectators can enjoy the venue and celebrate together, even after they’ve crossed the finish line. The camping experience, combined with our Après Mud after party at UK events, allows participants to run and then celebrate together in a fantastic environment.

How do you target people for whom the event wouldn’t be an immediately obvious choice?

An important component of our marketing strategy is to break down some of the barriers that might deter new participants from signing up. For example, people often feel they need to be an elite athlete to run a Tough Mudder, but we really believe that, with the right training and a supportive team, anyone can complete the event. To overcome this, we’ve created an easy-to-follow 28-day official training guide that offers the right exercises, tips and tricks to prepare for your first event.

We also partnered with Virgin Active in the UK and Australia, and they have developed a class specifically for Mudders in training: the Mudder Maker. This class is a key part of our strategy to give people the belief that they can complete a Tough Mudder by improving their fitness levels step-by-step in a class that captures the team spirit of one of our events. Meeting people going on the same journey as them, or who have completed a Tough Mudder before, increases confidence that they can do it themselves.

People who have completed the challenge are eager to share that fact, posting photos and videos across social media. Does this user-generated content have a place in your overall strategy?

We are lucky to have a brand that inspires so much user-generated content, and it absolutely has a place in our overall strategy. Properly leveraging this can be a great tactic in terms of creating brand ambassadors and promoting authentic, genuine content that resonates with our audience.

We incorporate user-generated content into our communications in an ongoing fashion, through traditions like ‘Headband Mondays,’ where we encourage participants from that weekend’s events to post pictures of themselves wearing their headbands to work the next Monday. We also look to user-generated content for more targeted, timely campaigns. For instance, after a large storm hit the northeast US this winter, we launched #SnowMudder, asking users to submit videos of themselves working out in the snow. We received quick results with highly engaging submissions that performed well across our channels.

You’ve managed to create a sort of exclusive group—the Mudders—across Facebook and Twitter, for people who have taken the challenge or are getting ready to. How important is this sense of shared achievement?

Teamwork and camaraderie are paramount at our events, before finisher times or anything else (our events are not timed for this very reason). Tough Mudder is about working together to complete an intense obstacle course challenge unlike anything else. It’s not a solitary event, such as a marathon, so there’s an intrinsic value to making the events team-based.

When our participants tell stories about their Tough Mudder experience, we hear that they could not have done it without the support of other participants along the way. That’s something you don’t often hear at similar events, and we think the value in that is incredibly unique.

This atmosphere on the site translates to a strong feeling of connection between participants and an incredible sense of community amongst finishers. This is one of the defining traits of Tough Mudder that sets it apart from all other events—when you run a Tough Mudder, you become part of a global community of Mudders who share your values of courage, personal accomplishment and teamwork.

We’ve also got a group we call our Mudderators—these are a group of hardcore Mudders who run nearly every event in the UK (often multiple laps over a weekend) but are also a very important part of the online community, answering people’s questions and providing a vital link from TMHQ to the Mudders themselves.

What’s the next digital step for Tough Mudder?

We’re continuing to explore new channels and new digital means for communicating with current and future customers. We’re always looking at new ways to reach customers on social media with engaging content, and we often use company and community milestones as ‘tent pole moments’ to engage our network across channels. For Tough Mudder’s fifth anniversary celebration, we offered special discounts for all events and communicated these through social, email and other digital channels. We also shared videos of participants throughout the years, and asked participants to share their favorite memories.

We are also looking to make sure we’re communicating with our Mudders wherever they are in the digital space, which means looking at different platforms outside of our traditional strongholds of Facebook and YouTube, but also making sure everything we do is mobile-optimised as more people are now interacting with us through their phones than through any other device.

Interview by Estelle Hakner