JBL’s Chris Epple on how he gets the best out of his marketing teams

When I was 15, I used to mow the lawn of a very senior marketing executive at Perrier. While working there, I would see her on her way to or coming home from work with point of sale and design materials and all this cool swag.

One day, I stopped the lawnmower and asked what she did for a living. We had this conversation, and at age 15, I knew I was going to be in marketing. As she was my next-door neighbor, we would chat from time to time. I’d see her when I was home from college and I said, ”I’d love to intern for you.”

During the summer between Junior and Senior year of college, I interned there. I loved it. At the time – and this is going back a bit to the days when you had to wear a suit to a job – it was their corporate policy to only hire marketers with an MBA. So she suggested that I join their sales program. I was too infatuated with marketing, so I chose a different route.

After graduating, I found a job at Nine West Group doing sales support but focused more on marketing for our customers. I was building the marketing plans for products being sold at Macy’s, Dillards and Bloomingdale’s while studying for my MBA.

At that time, a buddy asked me if I wanted to coach a youth baseball team. His dad was a very senior executive at Nabisco. I was coaching third base when a foul ball went by and as I went to grab the ball, I saw him there and said, ”Mr Klein, I just got into grad school. I want to come intern for you one day.” He said, ”Set up time to talk.”

After that conversation and several interviews, I ended up being an MBA intern at Nabisco. On the very last day of my internship, the whole company assembled in the big town hall for an important announcement. Of course, I was curious about why we had been brought together.

The company-wide announcement was that Nabisco had been bought by Kraft. So, my internship began with Nabisco, but when it concluded, I was delighted to be offered a full-time job and because of the acquisition the offer came on Kraft letterhead.

I was at Kraft for four years. Kraft was the leader across so many of the categories it competed in. When you are in that position, the primary goals are centered around not losing share and maintaining that position. It almost becomes more defensive than offensive.

If you look at the narrative of my resumé, while my employers mostly look like established, big global brands, they’re actually mostly all challenger brands. I find my core strength is driving challenger brands: to instigate the category, to drive market share and to change consumers perception. I see it as the hard road, the challenging road but also the fun road.

At Kraft, I was developing invaluable skills, which proved to be the baseline of my marketing toolkit, but I was more motivated to help challenger brands win. A colleague left Kraft and went to PepsiCo and she said, ”I feel like Pepsi is doing all the stuff that you love doing. And it is a fighter.” And so I went there and had nine incredibly rewarding years. I worked on some incredible projects and had fantastic experiences while at Pepsi. Pepsi is rotational, so marketers are changing roles every 18-24 months and being exposed to many different aspects of the business.

I started in Innovation. My first boss there got promoted to the VP of the Pepsi brand and he called me and said, ”I need you to come back and work for me. There’s this new thing called Facebook. I have no idea what it is, but I think we’re supposed to be doing it.” This was way back at the dawn of social media.

It was 2004. We met with new companies like YouTube and learned about AOL and Yahoo launches. It was like the wild west. It was the most exciting time to be working on these new media channels. Next, I was invited to run a new department for Pepsi called Pepsi Entertainment, which was the branded entertainment arm of PepsiCo.

Brands were just starting to integrate into digital content, and I was head of branded entertainment for Pepsi. It was there that I fell in love with media. In time, that led to a role at A+E Networks on the US History Channel, which was perfect for me. I was working in media. I was immersed in the world of TV and content development. I moved from head of US History Channel consumer marketing to head of international consumer marketing, working across all of A+E’s networks.

Following that, a former manager from Pepsi had since moved to become the CMO at Harman and he invited me to join him there. And that’s where I’ve been for the last seven years and I haven’t looked back. I get to work in a dynamic industry that constantly evolves around new technology and changing consumer demand. It’s a category where the right cultural connection points are critical, so it is blending technology and culture.

The key takeaway from my career journey is that I haven’t relied on recruiters or online job boards – I have built valuable relationships and delivered results for impressive executives, which have propelled my career. It has also provided a network of people to learn from and aspire to one day become leaders like them.

As part of JBL Fest, The Empire State building was light up ‘JBL orange’.

Harman was acquired by Samsung in 2017. Can you walk us through the different areas that Harman specializes in?

Harman International develops innovative solutions across three business units: lifestyle, automotive and DTS (digital transformation solutions) to provide consumers with smart experiences that make their daily lives easier. We often refer to Harman as a House of Brands as we have multiple brands that we manage across these business units.

In many ways we are a competitor with existing Samsung brands. We both make sound bars, headphones, speakers. There’s limited sharing of information, which is by design. Samsung wants two incredible brands: Samsung and Harman.

The JBL Partybox family.

I was just looking at some of your financial reporting: $8.8bn revenue in the last year. In these unpredictable economic times, what does 2025 look for you in terms of growing the Harman brand and increasing sales?

Our CEO has given us extremely clear short- and long-term revenue and Ebit goals, so all business units are running at one flag. They are challenging goals, but we believe that we have the resources to achieve them.

From a business point of view, in the consumer space, we see great opportunity increasing our market share in the headphone category. There are one or two competitor brands that are synonymous with the true wireless category and we’re looking to disrupt that.

As a category leader in portable Bluetooth speakers, we’ve got to keep that going. We launched the party box category in the last five years and it’s just been a rocket ship. We have to make sure we’re not complacent about our success. It’s great that we have a dominant share of that category, but how do we fuel even more growth? How do we innovate? We need to continually ask, “What’s next?”

The Harman ‘House of Iconic Brands’

Tell us about your marketing team. How is it organized and structured?

We have a hybrid global/regional structure. We set global strategies and plans from the center then cascade and regionalize as appropriate. We build global campaigns and then we execute regionally because there is nuance in different territories, whether it be language or whether it be the tonality. The technology, the spirit and the strategy of the campaign will be consistent, but the execution will vary by region.

We divide our marketing team into product marketing, go-to-market and communications. In consumer electronics, the product team is looking at multi-year development timelines, especially if it’s a new technology. Typically, they will be working between one and three years ahead of delivery depending on the level of complexity of the technology.

In contrast, our go-to-market team is focused on one year out from launch and then post-launch of a product. Working this far in advance can make product marketing complex and tough: first, there are all the elements that go into ensuring that we launch a product on time and we have to predict customer appetite for those products. The go-to-market team works with the communications team to build consumer- and customer-centric plans and make sure the world hears about the product launches.

How important is empowering your team and giving them autonomy at Harman? And what else might you have learned in your career journey that enables you to get the best out of marketing teams?

My advice to any marketing manager would be to hire people who are smarter than you and know the space better than you.

I consciously look to hire and empower people who are different than me. I don’t need a clone of myself. And that also goes for our agencies as well. You don’t need people that have the same strengths as you.

For example, if we’re looking at a music ambassador, I have someone who’s our head of music and knows 50 times more about music and culture than I do. They’re completely across how to negotiate and what deals with artists look like. I have a team member who’s the head of content. They know Gen Z and their cultural touch-points so much better than I do.

My job is to remove roadblocks for my team and let them drive through. And then when – for example – a deal is not getting done, I ask ‘What can I do to help you reach the top of the hill?’

The JBL Earbuds campaign.

How important is brand voice when maximizing your customers’ engagement with a campaign?

I look at business and brand as if they’re on a seesaw. If you lean in all the way on business and forget about brand, you’ll have a commodity that will have a great year and then, in two years, will never be heard of again. If you lean 100% on brand and 0% on business, you’ll have the strongest brand that nobody buys. We take a balanced approach where that seesaw is sitting level and flat.

Our job as marketers is to build brands and drive businesses with no compromise on either. Even though I think that we as marketers tend to over-index on brand building – because that keeps you top of mind for consumers in a sea of 50 to 60 brands in your category – you have to make sure that you have the budget, the discipline and the structure to drive the business forward and hit your target number because, if you don’t, you’re not going to get the budget to build your brand.

On the brand side, Harman has 10+ brands in our portfolio and within them there is prioritization, but they all need our support. I’m most frequently asked about JBL. Harman, which is the name on the door, is a great brand in its own right and yet you can’t go to a store and buy ‘a Harman,’ but it is the sum of its parts – all the businesses that make up our house of brands.

Still image from the JBL Authentics Campaign

Can you tell us about JBL Fest?

So, JBL Fest is one of the most immersive, amazing, unbelievable experiences. It’s like nothing I’ve ever worked on in my career. It is a multi-day global event. It spans all of our business units.

The challenge is to create an event that all groups can leverage and benefit from. It allows us to bring in the biggest talent, use the biggest venues and create the biggest spectacle because we’re harnessing the power of all of our businesses.

JBL Fest is both a B2B and B2C event. Not only are we promoting the event itself to consumers, we are also running promotions around our products to win a trip to JBL Fest. Then our sales reps are invited based on their performance. As a result you have this incredible array of people of all ages, of all walks of life, celebrating music, sports, gaming and culture at the event.

This year, we brought it to New York City. We lit up the Empire State Building in ‘JBL Orange.’ It was a two-and-a-half-day event. We had our ambassadors there. We took over an entire block in Manhattan outside our store. We had artist performances, graffiti artists, DJs and breakdancing. We had a concert at Radio City with our ambassador Madison Beer and model Chrissy Teegan helped light the Empire State Building with our CEO and celebrated with us that night.

Music and dancing in the streets at JBLfest, New York.

With such a plethora of choices and an ever-changing landscape, how do you surf the tsunami of new marketing technology solutions?

It’s a combination of having test partners, deciding where you’re going to place significant bets and also where you are going to leverage what you’re good at.

We keep some funds available for tests to help figure out those future partners. We’ve definitely tested and gone ‘all-in’ with some partnerships and their technologies. In contrast, there are times when we have said, “You know what? We don’t know enough yet. Let’s sit on the sidelines for this one.”

One of our more successful experiments was podcasts. A few years back, when the medium was on its ascendant, we went all in with a media partner and did a robust partnership. It was a show centered around the JBL Audience. We had a curated host, and they brought in all of our ambassadors. It really worked. That was an ‘all-in’ moment.

At the same time, when you look at some things like AI or creator tools around AI, we’re running experiments, but it’s like when you walk down the stairs of a pool versus jumping into the pool. With AI, we’re walking down the stairs of the pool right now.

Are you using synthetic data?

Often, with my team, I’ll challenge them to a piece of data they may be using to substantiate their point. I’ll also ask: “Did you find a piece of data to refute your point? Because I guarantee you, it’s out there. You might have statistics that show an initiative increased love for the brand, but did you look at any counter-arguments?”

As marketers, we need to be available and to be honest with ourselves. We have to find all the points and counterpoints. There’s so much information out there: you can support almost any argument or point of view. There’s a danger that we write the narrative that we want and don’t consider the pros and cons.

We mustn’t be afraid of discovering that our answer is wrong. None of us are ‘all-knowing’. If you use AI as a buffer of data it can get really interesting. One can use Synthetic data (and other information sources) to find a counterpoint to your hypothesis and challenge yourself. If you do that, you can create your own amazing information ecosystem.

JBL partybox campaign in Times Square, New York.

How do you go about ensuring clarity with your market orientation? How do you make sure you’ve got all the knowledge you need on your competitors and your customers to make the best and most informed decisions?

Being humble and admitting that you don’t know everything forces you to create a better strategy, as opposed to creating a strategy based on what you believe you know or have read that the competition is doing. Your first order of business should be asking what your consumer needs.

During the pandemic, we discovered unrealized consumer needs. For example, during the pandemic, you needed headphones. Why? If you lived in an apartment and had two kids and they both needed to have different online classes at the same time, then they both needed their own headphones.

Consumers needed a soundbar for their TV/home entertainment setup because, for a time, it looked like you were never going to go to a movie ever again. Likewise, in lockdown, you needed a portable Bluetooth speaker to workout with because you may have assumed that you were never going to the gym ever again.

Up until that point, our products were often seen as ‘wants’ rather than ‘needs.’ But during the pandemic, many of our products became a need rather than a want. If you understand your consumer needs states, then from there, if your competitors are there, you can identify the differentiated value that your product can provide.

Start with the consumer because they are the purchaser of your product. The competition is a second priority.

Madison Beer and the JBL Partybox at JBL Fest.

I’m wondering what advice you might have for younger marketers reading this interview. Imagine you’re speaking to a younger Chris as he starts his career in marketing. What advice might you give him? What should he do more of? And what should he avoid?

I’ll give you three. One is to be extremely curious. You don’t always know the answer. You could be the CMO of the biggest corporation in the world but you don’t always know the mind of your consumer. So be really curious, ask questions. Be honest and humble about what you do know what you don’t know.

The second is that networking is something that you need to do every minute of every day. I was once given tremendous advice. Back in the ‘five-days-a-week-in-the-office’ times, one of my colleagues said: “I block off every Friday just for coffee. I just walk around the building and check in with people I feel like I haven’t spoken to in a while or need to catch up with. And I just network.”

Now, extend that outside of your company and extend that outside of your industry. Really make sure that you’re building yourself the biggest toolkit of colleagues. Obviously, there are platforms like LinkedIn – but LinkedIn will never replace a catch-up coffee where you get to ask: “What’s going on? What’s scaring you these days?” and having those kind of deeper conversations.

Thirdly, that same person also gave me this advice, which I would like to pass on. “If you shoot for a cloud and hit a tree top, that’s still pretty damn good.” So I would say, and I tell this to my team a lot, never start from an easy place. Always start from a really scary idea and then ratchet it down. It’s much easier to ratchet an idea down than it is to ratchet it up. So start with a really lofty goal, start really big, and then if you hit a tree top, you’ve done a great job.

If there’s one thing you’ve learned about marketing, it is?

You don’t know the answers. You don’t know what’s coming. You have to be prepared for everything and be fluid enough so that you can pivot on a dime. You can have all the data in the world, but even so, you can’t be right 100% of the time.

You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about.

Little Grey Cells is Tim Healey, founder and curator of Little Grey Cells Club, the UK’s premier senior marketer meet-up.