Passion Meets Profits – Fantastic Female Fridays with Heidi Browning, CMO, National Hockey League

 

I first met Heidi Browning when kindly invited to interview her on stage for the Sports Technology conference in Dublin. She was a highly accomplished woman, at the pinnacle of her marketing career and invested immense effort and passion into the roles she had before the National Hockey League in the US. However, when I met her, I could see that she was very insightful, had lots of opinions about very relevant themes, and has such a super personality. As I thought about who I would love to bring to Fantastic Female Fridays to get the new quarter off to a great start, she was my first choice.

Heidi’s career has brought her through many big technological, commercial, and social revolutions. She mentions how social media changed everything because, in that change, the user generated the content. She said while today social media interaction is in every marketer’s toolkit, back then there were big questions about how do you engage with that as a brand? This was a transformational moment in marketing. “The dynamic was changed forever as the social contract changed forever as the consumer now had a voice and was expecting to be listened to too”.

If you’re going to be the first to do something, you need to have the stomach to do so. If you’re the first to do something that fails, you have to be the first to fail.

Heidi goes on to talk about the excitement of new developments. She talks about the emergence of “one to one marketing”, “one to many marketing”, apps, and new marketing tools but she also cautions that if you’re going to be the first to do something, you need to have the stomach to do so. Of course, it’s great to look in the rearview mirror and have predicted the past, but if you’re sitting in the driving seat, you have to decide which direction you’re going to go.

I made the connection in the interview that, as investors, we find ourselves in a similar situation. We can take a very well-worn path and simply track the index to get the returns available from the market. We can pursue a specific strategy that has a great track record e.g. focusing on high dividend yields or using a combination of market timing with high value, safety, and growth stocks. Alternatively, of course, we can try to get ahead of the trend. We can try to spot the stocks that are going to take off as they’re early, successful adopters of a global trend.

The VectorVest color guard offers both types of investors the opportunity to do that. If you want to let the market make its mind up more fully about whether it’s bullish or bearish, you can use the Market Timing Indicator or Confirmed Call. On the other hand, I could use the Green Light Buyer instead to help me get into the market earlier. As Heidi says, if I do so, I have to have the stomach to be wrong and make a decision quickly.

In order to help our VectorVest community who prefer this shorter-term mentor, the VectorVest Green Light Buyer/Relative Timing Kicker signal adds another layer of criteria.

  1. A green light must take place in the Price column of the Color Guard (per the HomePage).
    The 5-Day Simple Moving Average (SMA) on Relative Timing (RT) must have crossed above the 20-Day SMA on RT.

 

Data and personalization

In Heidi’s case, she spoke about all of the data that underlies our digital interactions enabling companies to serve their customers in a tailored way. The devices people use, the gender split of the audience, and the timing of their usage helped bring a whole set of knowledge to the big brands Heidi has been leading with her colleagues. There are huge opportunities for marketers today to observe what their users or customers want from the organizations they give their time, money, or attention to, and of course, those savvy enough to watch can also discern the changes along the way. From the day I began at VectorVest (and in fact, even before it), I could see that VectorVest was already well ahead of that trend.

One of the best things about the program is that you can totally tailor it to your own preferences. If you want to use Unisearch to find stocks that have a dividend yield of over 3%, a PE ratio below 34 and has an above-average ability to withstand several and/or lengthy price declines (aka Comfort Index >1), you can easily do it. If you want to set up a template for your graphs where you always look at Earnings per Share, Relative Safety (a stock’s consistency and predictability of financial performance), and with VectorVest’s proprietary stop loss, you can do so in a couple of clicks. If you want to create a personal watchlist for you to keep an eye on some stocks that are making the news, you can do so quickly. You can do all of this without affecting anybody else’s usage of the program and given that VectorVest updates the data for you, the program will update for you automatically.

Therefore, there are many parallels between how marketing uses data to make decisions as well as how investors do.

Check out the full episode at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQzGTXAYvzY