with Bob Neville
Global Head of Retail at Pentland Brands
Our MB Talks series sees Global Head of Retail of Pentland Brands, and former Clarks UK & Ire Managing Director, Under Armour Global VP of Retail, New Balance Global Retail Creative Director, and adidas Global Retail Director, Bob Neville, sit down with MacGregor Black to talk evolution over revolution, disrupting markets, and building truly global brands.
Bob Neville:
“A key thing for me, is that with hindsight, I’ve never joined a business at a high point. I don’t know whether that’s stupidity on my part or what, but I tend to join brands when they’re at a point of inflection.
That could be a smaller brand that needs to make their next steps or a brand with substantial history, and a longevity in terms of how long they’ve been around. Quite often, there’s a lot of cyclical things happening. There’s stalling and a need to sort of regroup, relook at it, and relaunch.
I firmly believe that highly profitable retail success stems from the integration of brand, business, and consumer needs and this is at the core of my approach.
Throughout my career I’ve emphasized that great retail is built not on one thing but on the formula of process/operational efficiency + emotional engagement = sustainable commercial and brand growth.
This holistic approach, underpinned by both operational acumen and a deep understanding of consumer behaviour, has driven significant growth for the brands I’ve worked with.
As an active runner and triathlete, I absolutely love sport. So, when I had the opportunity to join adidas in Asia Pacific, I was like, wow, why wouldn’t I do it?
What I didn’t realize at the time, there was only four of us looking after the entire Asia Pacific market, with no budgets and no real tangible resources.
And with that, it just became a real adventure.
Bob Neville, Vietnam 1995
At that point in the mid-late nineties, nobody was interested in Asia. The business in China hadn’t been established and in Japan it was all about re-establishing. So, it was quite mind blowing actually. The Greenfield space that we had.
The only way that we could get things going was by opening up our own retail and rolling out the adidas business first-hand.
“Bob’s expertise, creativity, passion and drive were phenomenal and it always showed in his teams work. He broke new ground for adidas retail in his time bringing fresh ideas to life and professionalizing the brands own retail presentation regionally and globally.”
PAUL FRANCES SELINE
adidas, Global Brand Strategy
If you like, to illustrate to both consumers and future partners, what the brand could be and what the opportunity was. My role and responsibility in that, was working with country management on everything from retail to local marketing events.
It was… incredible.
From putting a football pitch on the great wall of China, to photo shoots with the Chinese national football team, and the Olympic games. It was a real spectrum and it began because of the resources. We just had to get stuck into it.
It was just awesome fun. Like the Wild West.”
MacGregor Black:
Moving to New Balance, what was that experience like?
Bob Neville:
“At New Balance, there was some ex-adidas guys there and they first approached me about doing some consultancy work with the brand.
Both of my boys at the time were like “Oh, dad, old man shoes”.
I was like, yeah, but that’s what I do. My job is to make brands relevant again. To get to the essence of a brand, build process operational efficiency, and develop an emotional engagement with people.
And so joining New Balance, they’d gone through quite a rapid growth cycle with the 574 shoes. But it really just sold so many 574’s that when that dropped off, they were a little bit flat footed.
I joined in the Asia Pacific office and they were doing some positive things there with regards to trying to get the brand moving.
But, in essence, I would say that we were trying too much to be like other popular sports brands.
And so, I ran an exercise where I photographed probably about seven different sports brands, all with red logos, but blurring each of the logos as I went.
I said to the people I was working with at New Balance, tell me who’s who.
And you couldn’t tell the difference. All these various brands, they all looked the same, using the same wall colours, logo colours, etc.
So, it was really important to get to the core and the essence of what the brand is about.
What’s your point of difference? What’s your story?
What I then discovered, was that New Balance was founded by an Irish immigrant, William Riley. Riley travelled from Ireland to Boston and noticed how chickens walked with perfect balance using their three toes. That observation inspired him to create arch supports.
Back in 1906, when Riley created New Balance, people walked a lot. There were horse and carriage, but the everyday man walked. Therefore, if your shoes fitted poorly, you really noticed. And so, he created leather arch supports. At the time, they basically cost the same as a pair of leather shoes, which is a significant investment. But it helped people move better. That’s how the incredible story of New Balance started. As the supplier of arch supports.
William Riley then approached the Brownbag Harriers, which is a running team in the Boston area. And he said to them, look, I’ll make you some running shoes. If they don’t improve your performance, you won’t have to pay for them. But if they improve your performance, then you pay for them. And that’s how he got into performance footwear, specifically in the athletic area.
So, New Balance has been about performance, human enhancing performance products, since 1906.
“The vision that Bob led, was the primary driver of New Balance growing from $1.5B USD in 2009 to nearly $4.3B USD in 2019.”
ROB De MARTINI
President & CEO, New Balance Athletic Shoes 2007 – 2018
And so, we got back to that story. We talked about considering the past, to see the future. Which is what the Chinese philosopher, Confucius, said.
Instead of us trying to be like our competitors, we should be true to who we are and tell our story. Something that no brand can compete with.
At the start, we had a location in Qianmen Avenue, just off Tiananmen square in Beijing.
A lot of that location is where the Emperor of China would walk.
He would leave the forbidden city and walk down Qianmen Avenue.
Nobody could walk higher than the Emperor. And so, Qianmen Avenue was built with this curve in the middle, where the Emperor would be in the centre and everyone else to the side of the road was lower.
A lot of the architecture in that part of Beijing was created by American architects in the early 1900’s. So, a lot of these buildings look like American bank buildings. The building we had was grey, which was a very important colour for Jim Davis and New Balance.
We looked at it and decided, what we need to do is be true to who we are.
New Balance, Qianmen Avenue, Beijing
So, we incorporated red brick, which is from the Lawrence factories out in Massachusetts and we made it look like an old Bostonian store.
It really took off!
In the first four weeks, it generated over 200 million global PR impressions and a media & PR value of $2 million, which rose to $5 million within four months of our launch. Suddenly, instead of everybody thinking New Balance was a local Chinese brand, they actually understood what the brand was about and what it stood for.
“Bob was exceptional at articulating the New Balance brand vision across multiple consumer touch points both on and off line. He is incredibly strategic, innovative and creative while extremely cost conscious and operationally savvy. He always maintained strict adherence to budgets and timelines.”
JONATHAN RAM
Former Executive Vice President North America, New Balance Athletic Shoes
The bodies of work that I led, then formed the foundation for the success New Balance has had and continues to have. But again, it’s about telling that story and having that point of difference, as well as making sure you’ve got the right products, process, and operations.
So, it depends on where a brand is that you’d need to dial up one aspect or another, it’s like being a conductor of an orchestra.”
MacGregor Black:
So, could you say there is essentially a basic framework that you can successfully apply to most brands?
Bob Neville:
“It’s not about reinventing. Evolution is more cost efficient than revolution. So, when I go into a business, the approach I have is that you have to take a 360 view of retail. And when I say retail, you could say direct to consumer, omni channel.
There are lots of different ways that people describe it. But in essence, the consumer has to be at the centre of everything you do. You have to make sure that you’re present in the right place, at the right time, in the right way, and with the products that make sense for that consumer.
And we have to also make sure that we understand that that consumer journey is not linear.
It’s very convoluting.
Therefore, you need to think about online and offline. Purchasing decisions can happen at various points along there.
Really, you’ve got to look at it almost like an orchestra and say, right. What are the core retail KPIs present per transaction, as well as taking care of the emotional component. Why should people come and spend their hard-earned money with us?
Under Armour, Physical Retail Platform
A retail development and research centre bringing digital and physical together.
How do we relate to that? How do we get that bond with human beings? And I think that’s the most important part.
You see businesses out there, they either put themselves in the market in a siloed way, based around how they run their business, which is wrong, or they lose total sight of the fact that they’re about making money.
At the end of it, you’ve got to make money. That’s why we’re in business. But you’ve got to look at the various aspects, with a 360 degree view. I would summarize by saying process/operational efficiency + emotional engagement = equals sustainable commercial and brand growth.
Do we have right SKU productivity, staffing ratios, and are our costs controlled? Do we have products delivered at the right times? Right through to emotional engagement.
I would also say bad retail is very much dead.
There’s a lot of commodity based retail. If you don’t have a story, all you can do is talk about price. You’re going to go somewhere because, “Hey, come get a discount”. And human beings post COVID, well we’ve all learned that we want to have human interaction, we want to be told stories, we want to have experiences.
I’ve written quite a bit about hating the word ‘retail’. It originated in France in the 14th century, meaning “to shape by cutting”, and later evolved in the 15th century into “selling by the piece”, an English reference with suspected Italian influence. And so, retail means to take something large and to cut it up into smaller pieces to be sold. In essence, that is what we do. But it has to involve an emotional engagement.
For me, we need to focus on old school service. Where walking in they know your name, but in a modern context.
It should be formulaic to a point but making sure that you dial up and dial down, listening to your retail organisation and using the analogy again of an orchestra, understanding, maybe the trumpets aren’t quite what they should be and require attention.
Then we focus on playing the trumpets for a while. Get those back up to speed and have another listen. Like fine tuning an engine. There are so many different aspects of it.”
MacGregor Black:
In your opinion, do you see many businesses perfecting that connection with their audience and building long-term relationships?
Bob Neville:
“There are quite a lot of brands out there that I think do things in a multi dimensioned way.
They create very interesting businesses and break out from the traditional mould. Whether that’s like Tesla, selling a car in a very different way and blurring the lines between modern retail and the old school car yard.
Or looking at Dyson or Nespresso, you think about how we as English would have bought teas and coffees in the past, how we would have bought vacuum cleaners. It’s quite mind blowing how they’re disrupting their category.
You can visit some retailers and be underwhelmed, then you go into a Dyson location and you’re buying a thing of beauty that has a function and a story. And the same with Nespresso, it’s a place of beauty. So, bad retail is dead, but experiential retail with high service and high emotional connection is the future.”
New Balance, Boston Flagship
MacGregor Black:
Like a pair of shoes, for example.
That extra added value, the retail experience, the marketing, and the little details that elevate it. Bringing in that emotional connection turns it from a product you need, into one you want. Creating something that you desire, rather than require and will simply do that thing that you need it to do.
Bob Neville:
“And I think it’s really important.
As well, you can’t be complacent. Something I believe very strongly in is that you have to always have an entrepreneurial mindset. Perhaps controversially, I like to think of it as guerrilla warfare.
You need to turn up in unexpected ways. You need to use your budgets and resources very frugally and very efficiently, getting maximum impact because too many brands become complacent.
We see such strong market leaders and suddenly a challenger comes along and it’s just like, how could these guys suddenly gain so much market share in a category that has such large dominant players?
Castore, Gymshark, On. There’s so many of them now that you wouldn’t have necessarily even known of or talked about a handful of years ago.
So, how could those startups get the market share they’ve got and almost start to intimidate those established brands that have been around for years.
You’ve got to continually think about your consumer and continually reinvent yourself, based on market, consumer, and commercial data, through a lens of your core brand truths.”
MacGregor Black:
During the Covid eCommerce boom, we saw businesses recording double- and triple-digit growth. Now we’re two years moved on and few businesses truly understood and got under the skin of the new customers they acquired.
I believe it’s so important to follow the logic behind what business leaders do and if that aligns with their customers, the category they’re in, and the market, rather than purely a numerical approach.
What is their decision making underpinned by, what are their priorities, and does that allow them to be agile and adapt?
In my opinion, there very much has to be a hybrid of the two and a foot in both camps.
Bob Neville:
“You’ve got to continually look at your model. You can see brands now that are heading down that negative journey.
It illustrates that you can’t be complacent with market leadership at any one point, you’ve got to be continually evolving.
It’s cost efficient not to evolve, but sometimes you have to revolutionize and jump again. That’s where, I think a guerrilla warfare attitude is 100 percent right.
You’ve got to be unexpected and unconventional, and then you can be doing things in different ways, turning up in different ways and providing happiness to your consumers through the value and the products you offer.
There’s no room for complacency because everything is cyclical. It doesn’t matter the category, you’ll see people come and go. And that’s the need for reinvention.
We can look at a number incredible brands out there. In the automotive space, you have Rolls Royce and Ford reinventing themselves, and in amongst all that, Tesla, not to mention a number of Chinese brands.
There’s a continually evolving dynamic and it’s true, I think, across all categories.”
New Balance, Roppongi – Japan
MacGregor Black:
How would you say you approach the people side of business.
Do you look for others to already have the same ethos as yourself?
Do you find yourself instilling it in them?
Bob Neville:
“The parts I believe are really, really important is that when you’re doing something global, you really have to understand the difference between global, regional, and national.
A global brand is not the same thing in every single market around the world.
You have to understand that to be a truly global brand, you need to allow for flex and the nuancing of a brand, at a regional and national level, understanding law, religion, culture, and superstitious differences.
If you’re sitting in a head office, wherever in the world and thinking… I understand global without actually being out in market and spending time with people, you will never have a truly commercially successful global brand.
So, something I look for and my approach to leadership is a servant leadership approach.
I’m here to get the best out of people and to hire the best people I can for the budget I have available. I look for people that are hungry, that are interested in questioning the world and asking why. That for me is really important.
All of the teams I’ve had will be made up of a range of nationalities. At Under Armour, we had about 22 people in the global team, around 70% female, and around 11 different nationalities. We had Russians, Ukrainians, Americans, English, South Africans, and we were based in Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Amsterdam, New York, and Baltimore.
Under Armour, Brand House Prototype
And what that meant is that when people talk about global, it’s about having people in those regions that understand them. It also meant that when we were working, we could be doing bodies of work out in Asia, then come night time in Asia, that work could be handed over to the North American team. So you can be working 24 hours of the day.
So again, for me you’ve got to have a group of people that are agile in their thinking, that aren’t siloed, and look at it from the perspective of how do you get the best out of the people and situation around you. How can you be the best possible teammate.
There’s no space for egos.
Giving people the space to express views and opinions is how you get that breakthrough.
You often get egos in founders, and quite rightly, because they’ve created these incredible brands.
But there’s a point where you need to have longevity and start to build the future. And for that you need a range of views and opinions. You need to bring together various people from different types of experience and backgrounds.
So, for me servant leadership is incredibly important. Enabling and facilitating is what I believe is really important from a leader.
And that’s not to say you don’t make hard decisions. You do and that can be quite unpleasant at times, but that’s what you get paid for.
But for me, I’m there to facilitate. I’m there to get the best out of people and I’m there to always ask why. And that’s what I expect from the people around me. We don’t accept the status quo.”
MacGregor Black:
To touch on your last point, who have been the most influential people in your career?
People that you’ve worked with and potentially people you’ve admired for the way they think?
Bob Neville:
“I take inspiration from people at various walks of life, and for me I don’t have a mindset that one particular business leader is inspirational.
I find inspiration from the caretaker, the security guards on the gate. Inspiration and great people are found at all points and all walks of life, and I think it’s really important to make sure you have that openness.
Often people that set themselves up as great, or that the media portray as great, are a little bit like the wizard of oz when you see behind the screen. You understand people aren’t as great as they’re perceived to be and therefore you can learn so much by having an open mind and being generally receptive to humans.
Greatness is around us all and it’s not restricted or limited to people that are higher up in organizations.
I think we can learn a lot by having that open minded approach.”
