Gail Galuppo, Western Union

Gail Galuppo is responsible for directing Western Union's global branding, marketing strategy, sales management and product development. Galuppo, who joined Western Union in September 2007, formerly was the chief marketing and customer officer for Standard Chartered Bank. She has 19 years of marketing, brand strategy and customer relationship management experience and has worked in senior-level positions with Sears Holdings Corp., GE Capital Card Services, Discover Card Financial Services and the Illinois CPA Society. Galuppo holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Western Illinois University.

What brought you to work for Western Union?

Really, what sold me to come to work for Western Union is its core customer group. At Western Union, our core target customer is the international migrants around the world who are sending money home to loved ones. Very few companies can say that the international migrant is their core target. Ethnic marketing is not just a side department at Western Union. It’s the core of what we do here. I am responsible for providing insights on consumers, on the market and on the industry to all of our country managers and regional leaders. The global nature of the business is extremely interesting and rewarding. Every day I'm learning something new about our consumers. Western Union does business in over 200 countries and territories around the world, and there aren't that many CMO jobs that allow you the opportunity to work with so many cultures and ethnicities.

What types of challenges do you encounter in such a global role?

It can be extremely challenging to get alignment and a consistent message and agreement across 200 countries. It’s very important in this role that my team and I really understand consumer behavior, what motivates these customers, and how we can make their lives easier. The challenge is really to get everybody on the same page by providing consumer insights to our marketing team around the world.

What new initiatives or programs have you put in place during your time at Western Union?

We just launched a new global brand strategy at Western Union. We needed something to galvanize our 379,000 agents around the world, who represent the face of Western Union, helping our customers send and receive money. And we wanted to relate to our customers on a whole different level. We did extensive research to really understand the voice of the customer, what motivates them, what inspires them, and what their aspirational dreams and goals are. We developed the first-ever global brand campaign (the "Yes!" campaign) for the company, which launched in early February. We are marketing to consumers on a very local level—on what we would call a corridor basis. For example, in the U.K., we're marketing to Kenyans. We were able to really instill an excitement and a sense of positivity among our employees, our agents, and our customers. It really was about all of the local marketing leaders, who were able to interpret and execute in their countries. The brand campaign was translated into 22 languages in 200 countries.

What motivated the new brand strategy?

We needed something to galvanize the organization and convey an updated image of our brand. Through our research, we’ve found that our consumers—whether they are Chinese in Africa, Indians in the UAE or Mexicans in the U.S.—had very similar needs, wants, and aspirations. So we built that into our brand strategy, using it to define the company's conviction and brand purpose, and then we communicated it globally.

As a very global company, have you changed how you engage consumers as a result of the economic crisis?

We’re getting more analytical in terms of our marketing programs and budgets. We're really defining what is spent on brand – building brand awareness and familiarity, driving the usage of our products and services, and promotions to drive customers to return time and again and transact with us. We are looking at our budgets carefully, and doing tests in certain markets so we can truly measure our return on investment and reallocate our marketing funds where we know we'll get the best results for our investment.

The CMO Council recently released a report looking at how marketers can help safeguard their brands from being compromised by counterfeiting, piracy and other fraudulent scams. Have you had experience with this issue at Western Union?

We take this issue very seriously because we have found that occasionally fraudsters will encourage consumers to send them money through Western Union. We have a dedicated consumer fraud unit within our organization, and I work very closely with that group as well as our corporate communications team, which helps protect our brand and reputation. We have done a number of educational campaigns for the general consumer to watch for these scams. We've also worked very closely with our agents to help mitigate fraud by having them ask several questions when someone is sending money, such as "Do you know the receiver?" And, we are partnering with other companies and organizations (such as eBay and the AARP) to better educate consumers on identifying scams.

Looking towards the future for the next year or two, what are your goals?

The first is around improving our data warehousing infrastructure, analytic capabilities, and providing customer strategic thought leadership to our local marketing teams. We just brought our data warehouse in-house, and we now have history for senders and receivers of money transfers for all 200 countries. This has really enabled us to marry our research efforts in consumer insights with the behavioral data and raise the bar around understanding of our consumers around the world. We want everyone at Western Union to keep the customer’s needs front and center and use that reasoning to inform every decision.

The second agenda item is around launching new and innovative ways for our customers to send and receive money. For example, we are piloting a service that allows them to receive money on their mobile phones. We are looking at how these new channels play a role in our marketing mix, from an online as well as a mobile perspective. We’re also getting more involved in social networking—we've been spending a lot of time understanding how we can learn from our customers.

Has Western Union been engaging consumers through social networks?

Yes! With the launch of the "Yes!" campaign, we created a site called "The Yes! Effect" (www.wuyeseffect.com). It was a microsite tied in with our corporate Foundation (Our World, Our Family). We find that one of the top reasons consumers send money home is to pay for school fees, so on the site, we invited consumers to share their positive stories about when someone said ‘yes’ to them in terms of education and what kind of positive impact it had. For every story submitted, we donated $1 to one of three non-governmental organizations that provide education to developing nations. It was a way to use our customers' aspirations and inspirational stories to create a positive effect on the world.

Influence, Money & Changing Behavior: How the Social Psychology of Influence Affects Marketing Performance

By Stephen Denny of DennyMarketing

It’s counter-intuitive, but money rarely changes anything. Certainly not behavior. Look at lottery winners. Or Scarface. Martina Navratilova is quoted as saying, “money can’t buy happiness, but it sure makes misery much more tolerable.” Money changes very little in the way of behavior.

This is why using financial incentives as sales rewards so often fails. An over-reliance on financial incentives often masks a simple lack of imagination; we’re too busy to think through the complex issues of motivation or understand the difference between ideas that stimulate us to act versus those that don’t. Your sales team may tell you they just want the money, but they rarely sell more as a result of getting it. There are many ways to process this, but here are a few to consider:

Loss-based framing Much like Thucydides’ commentary on the Athenians, when it comes to money, “we possess a thing as soon as we conceive of it, so soon does action follow thought.” If Greek history doesn’t resonate with you, look to Who Wants to be a Millionaire to teach us the same lesson – people are willing to risk more money than they’ve ever seen in their lives, until the banker lowers the offered amount. We feel losses more acutely than we do gains. Once we offer money, it’s assumed that the money is already paid. Behavior doesn’t change – only the intended target’s psychological set point.

Rewards are bribes, but gifts are welcome There’s a very openly acknowledged social contract being sealed when you accept rewards. The social principle of reciprocity says that if you receive, you must repay, and sometimes when we see it coming we resist it to avoid being in someone else’s debt. When we dangle rewards in front of our targets, they know there’s a catch and their defenses come up. Even when it involves money. A gift, however, is a different thing altogether. By its very nature, a gift is unexpected. If it’s the right gift, it’s highly relevant to the receiver, too. The psychological response to receiving a gift is to repay the favor, often far out of proportion to the size of the gift received. This shows the principle of reciprocity: we feel strong social pressures to give back to those to have given to us.

Conversions happen privately We all have egos. We don’t want somebody telling us we’re too dumb to know what’s best for us, even if they happen to be right. We all feel pressure to behave in a manner consistent with our previous actions, even if circumstances have materially changed. Why? Tell me what you call someone who changes their mind. They’re flaky. They’re wishy-washy. We may be reluctant to be sold, but we’re always willing to acknowledge how a new idea supports a previously stated position we’ve taken. We like making up our own minds, so if a request can logically connect to our previously stated positions - however tenuously – we are temporarily open to suggestion.

We struggled with this issue a few years ago with one of our large channel partners when they requested a spiff for one of their sales groups. Having recently been introduced to the social psychology of persuasion based on the research pioneered by Dr. Robert Cialdini at Arizona State University, we recast the idea from “give me the money” to “let’s give you the tools you need to succeed and let you spread the word.” The partner was happy – they interpreted this approach as a spiff with a quiz – but to us, the spiff was a moot point because we had their permission to hyper-train their salespeople.

We launched a web-based portal with knowledge, competitive facts, and a quiz. We gave them a free sample of our product so they could experience it first-hand. We gave them a behind the scenes look at our largest competitor, even translating their chairman’s message to shareholders that explicitly said his intermediate term vision was to cut out channel partners (like them) and sell to their customers directly. Then we strayed into the area of commitment:

1. “Congratulations on completing your quiz! How many presentations do you think you can give this month?”
2. “Of those, how many do you think will be successful?”
3. “How many units do you think you will successfully sell as a result?”

If you’ve run a spiff program before, you know that typical programs net a few points of incremental unit sales growth followed by a return to normalcy when the program ends. In our case, we saw an ROI of 500% within 90 days – followed by no drop-off whatsoever after the program ended. They just kept selling. Their behavior had changed. They knew more than they had before. They cared more about it than they had before. They could speak with deep first-hand knowledge about the product and how it helped them do their jobs. And they knew their management not only supported the program, but was watching them.

This is the consistency principle in the language of persuasion. We have a strong need to be consistent with our previously stated positions: how many I said I was going to sell, how confident I was when I made the statement, how completely I will stand behind my assumption when my boss asks me about it, etc. And the more public these commitments are, the stronger the social pressure to perform.

We re-launched the program two more times after this first outing. In our next iteration, we saw a 1,000% ROI. In our third, we saw a 1,500% return. And we never saw our channel partners return to pre-program sales volume numbers. They hit new plateaus and stayed there.

Changing behavior isn’t a question of money. It’s a question of internal changes, of conversions that happen privately. Are your budgets where they were six months ago? No worries. You don’t need more money – you just need to change the right behaviors.