Ask a CMO: Bill Tine of King Arthur Baking Company

For our latest edition of our Ask a CMO series, we had the pleasure of chatting with Bill Tine, the long-time CMO of King Arthur Baking Company.

How do you define the role of a CMO?

As a CMO, you can make a much more significant impact if you’re general management oriented, you help the company define itself, and your focus is on growth. I think defining your marketing team’s success based on growth versus spending is important. Fortunately, at King Arthur, my team has a lot of great experience. I think this shows up in budget season. We never say “we need to spend more” or “we need to add this function” without demonstrating what the new investment will do. Also, I look at my role as ensuring that our team has the right balance of creative, analytical, and financial expertise.  Marketing requires all of those skills to be successful.

You talk about cultural strategy being an effective way to build a brand. What do you mean by this?

This is something that I hadn’t focused on until a handful of years ago when we worked with an agency, DCX Growth Accelerator. Their head, Doug Cameron, wrote a book on cultural strategies. That is where we homed in on the idea. Now, cultural strategy is at the core of what we do. From my lens, cultural strategy is about enabling a company to make meaningful connections with its customers, through the context of something that’s happening culturally.

Imagine creating a campaign this year. There will be a lot of divisiveness and challenging conversations because it is an election year. So, with this happening, where does your brand fit? It could be that it fits smack dab in the middle of the conversation, which is the cultural connection you want your company to make. Or it could be refreshing not to be a part of that. We’ve often leaned into the fact that baking is a great way to bring people together. In moments when the world feels very divisive, baking allows you to find common ground, no matter who you are.

You’ve said, “It’s not worth doing if it can’t scale.” How does your team do content marketing at scale?

You can’t just create content; you also have to market it. You have to think about creating an audience and how to use content to engage with that audience. King Arthur’s progression over the last few years is an excellent example of how to think about content marketing. We’ve always had content at our core. We had recipes on our website 25 years ago. We’ve had a free baker’s hotline where people can speak to professional bakers. We’ve had a baking school. So, we’ve always had the content side. About six years ago, we turned our focus to growing our content strategy at scale. There are about 135 million households in the U.S. At the time, we estimated there were 85 million households that bake. We determined we wanted 40 or 50 million to be within our content audience, defined as website visitors and social followers. So, we went after them with our marketing dollars. We still measured engagement heavily, but scale was where we focused.

We now get almost 50 million unique views on our website in any given year. Our social audience is in the tens of millions. Now that we’ve scaled and built critical mass, we’ve shifted our focus to converting those people into customers. We’re being more direct, with calls to action. Whenever we put something out there, we’re trying to make our audience change their behavior: bake something, buy something, or think differently about their brand and baking choices.

“Paid marketing” typically means buying Google ads, Instagram ads, etc. However, you’ve turned the definition on its head and get paid for your marketing. Could you explain how this works?

One of the things we can do, because we’re in an enthusiast category, is build revenue streams from our marketing. Sometimes, we’re making a profit and sometimes, it’s simply offsetting a portion of the cost. For example, we recognized that cookbooks are one of the areas of book publishing that is still growing significantly. So, we create one cookbook a year. We make money off the cookbook and also consider the value of having our cookbook in our customers’ kitchens. So, it benefits us in terms of stretching our content dollars.

Another example we have is our baking school which we’ve had here in Vermont and outside of Seattle for a long time. It’s a business, but it’s also marketing. You’re getting people to come to your school, and you can imagine if people exchange money with you, they are more likely to believe in you. The school has been very successful, but it’s in person, so we’re somewhat limited geographically. So, to extend our reach, we’ve launched an on-demand baking school. Now, we can reach the entire U.S. We’re thinking of it both ways: as a business and investing in customer acquisition.

Lastly, we are content creators. We have a revenue share agreement with YouTube. At this point, it helps to offset our YouTube content creation costs, but it could be a positive revenue-generator at some point.

King Arthur is a Certified Benefit Corporation. How does this inform your corporate culture?

Our corporate culture has two main drivers. The first is our values that align with our B Corp status. Our values are our foundational DNA. The second is that we’re 100% employee owned. This ownership mentality carries through all of the decisions we make and brings a lot of accountability throughout the organization

For example, one of the initiatives we’ve focused on for the last few years is making our agricultural footprint more sustainable. As we’ve pushed regenerative agriculture and organic practices, it wasn’t hard for the internal team to buy in. It also wasn’t hard for our customers to buy in because they know us for our values. There might be challenges as we scale up – finding partners to work with might be more complex – but the bigger we get, the bigger our impact.

Switching gears to hiring marketing talent, what’s your go-to question when interviewing a candidate?

The questions I ask during an interview depend on the role. But the first questions I ask are why King Arthur, why this role, why now? These questions are intended to create a conversation. It also reveals if the candidate has done their research on King Arthur. If it hasn’t come up, I ask about baking. I don’t think everybody on our team needs to be an exceptional baker, although you’d be amazed at how many great bakers we have. I do think everybody needs to appreciate great baking. They need to appreciate premium ingredients. As a marketer, you have to believe in the product. You also have to understand your buyer.

What would be your dream job if you weren’t a marketing leader?

I love my job – it is a dream job. I come to work every day excited about doing what I do. I love working for a company that is committed to innovation. I love hiring people who want to do things differently.

If you need assistance filling any HR or Marketing gaps, contact our team today to begin finding the perfect talent to fit your needs.